Using a two-sector model of production with potentially different capital shares in each sector, I show that the evolution of the skill premium from 1970 to 2005 is consistent with skill-neutrality and even a mild unskill-bias of technological change for plausible values of capital shares. The main channel of adjustment to changes in labor supply is instead via the reallocation of capital. New investment occurs predominantly in the skilled sector, to the detriment of the unskilled sector of the economy. This result is shown both theoretically in a simple model and in a quantitative exercise using data on the US economy. Repeating the exercise with industry level data for the US reveals that there has indeed been skill-biased technological change in a number of industries (such as Business Activities and Health), while others have experienced skill neutral and unskill-biased technological change (e.g. Agriculture). This difference in results across industries is largely due to very different capital shares. Finally, I look at the impact of the increasing importance of information and communication technology (ICT) on the production function and the skill premium in each industry. I estimate a translog price function with skilled and unskilled labor, ICT capital and non-ICT capital as factors of production and find that most industries exhibit ICT capital-skill complementarity. For most industries, technological progress has led to an increased use of both types of capital, but the results on skill-biased technological change are as mixed as in chapter two. ICT has affected the skill premium negatively in nearly two thirds of the industries studied.

This thesis analyses the impact of globalisation on the boundary of the firm and, in turn, how outsourcing policies have shaped the reallocation of labour across sectors. The first chapter ("Outsourcing and the Rise in Services") investigates the impact of out sourcing on sectoral reallocation in the U.S. over the period 1947-2007. Roughly 40% of the growth of the service sector comes from professional and business services, an industry highly specialized in the production of intermediates and where most of the service outsourcing activity is concentrated. As a result, business services have experienced an almost fourfold increase in their forward linkage, the largest change among all industries. I find that the overall change in input-output structure of the economy accounts for 33% of the increase in service employment, and business services outsourcing contributes almost half of that amount. The second chapter ("Exporting, Coordination Complexity, and Service Outsourcing") investigates the determinants of service outsourcing, and professional and business services in particular. Drawing on the insights of a model of the boundary of the firm based on adaptation costs and diminishing return to management, I argue that an increase in coordination complexity (e.g.: more inputs in the production process) leads firms to outsource a higher share of their total costs and to focus on their core competences. Since country-specific inputs are needed to export to a particular country (e.g.: a specific advertisement campaign), I proxy coordination complexity with the number of export destination markets and I find support for the theory using an extensive dataset of French firms. Over time, firms that export to more countries increase the amount of purchased business services; the finding is very strong and robust to size and many other determinants of outsourcing proposed in the literature. The firm-level evidence also contributes to opening the black box of fixed export costs and to establishing a new causal link between globalization and structural transformation exploiting plausibly exogenous demand shifters The third chapter ("Variety Growth, Welfare Gains and the Fall of the Iron Curtain") analyses two key issues in the literature of international trade: the welfare gains from trade and the estimation of the elasticity of substitution across goods. In particular I investigate the welfare gains coming from the increase in the number of varieties in the U.K. I find that the fall of the Iron Curtain and the expansion of trade with the countries of the former Soviet contribute for roughly 10% of the total gains. China, in comparison, accounts for 5% of the gains. The methodology is an improved version of the one proposed by Broda and Weinstein (2006) and Feenstra (1994), which is more robust to the definition of goods and to the classification used.

European labour markets are increasingly divided between insiders in full-time permanent employment and outsiders in precarious work or unemployment. Using quantitative as well as qualitative methods, this thesis investigates the determinants and consequences of labour market policies that target these outsiders in three separate papers. The first paper looks at Active Labour Market Policies (ALMPs) that target the unemployed. It shows that left and right-wing parties choose different types of ALMPs depending on the policy and the welfare regime in which the party is located. These findings reconcile the conflicting theoretical expectations from the Power Resource approach and the insider-outsider theory. The second paper considers the regulation and protection of the temporary work sector. It solves the puzzle of temporary re-regulation in France, which contrasts with most other European countries that have deregulated temporary work. Permanent workers are adversely affected by the expansion of temporary work in France because of general skills and low wage coordination. The interests of temporary and permanent workers for re-regulation therefore overlap in France and left governments have an incentive to re-regulate the sector. The third paper then investigates what determines inequality between median and bottom income workers. It shows that non-inclusive economic coordination increases inequality in the absence of compensating institutions such as minimum wage regulation. The deregulation of temporary work as well as spending on employment incentives and rehabilitation also has adverse effects on inequality. Thus, policies that target outsiders have important economic effects on the rest of the workforce. Three broader contributions can be identified. First, welfare state policies may not always be in the interests of labour, so left parties may not always promote them. Second, the interests of insiders and outsiders are not necessarily at odds. Third, economic coordination may not be conducive to egalitarianism where it is not inclusive.

The organizational literature concerning status has focused on its consequences more than its antecedents; moreover, the research that has addressed status origins has drawn its evidence from traditional face-to-face organizations, featuring task-focused and/or enduring groups. The present research addresses both of these literature gaps by examining how individuals in global, distributed, electronic networks of practice allocate status in a legitimate hierarchy. Taking as its context one of the first of these organizations – the SAP Community Network – this dissertation employed the DELPHI Method, AllOurIdeas.org, and panel data to leverage a research design that kept distinct status antecedents and outcomes, and yielded five distinct contributions to knowledge. First, it identified an unambiguous, unified structure of status – providing powerful clarification against its cognate constructs. Second, it challenged the attenuation principle of Status Characteristics Theory by suggesting that additional, similar status information does not contribute less to status allocation. Third, it indicated that the factors which effect status allocation differ depending on the level of status being determined; moreover, status establishment might function differently than either status maintenance or status enhancement. Fourth, the present research revealed that to the extent that status characteristics affect status allocation, they do so through the mechanism of performance; in other words, organizational culture can downgrade ascription and engage performance during status allocation. Fifth, the present findings challenge the argument for perpetual returns to initial high status – i.e., the Mertonian Matthew Effect – but do support Merton’s Phenomenon of the 41st Chair. Managerial practice must now recognize how organizational structure and culture can influence status allocation, which has implications for the strategic use of multiple routes to status in the achievement of organizational goals. Through focusing on a new, yet prevalent organizational form, the present research significantly advanced status theory in organizations.

The growth in the global call centre industry over the last twenty years has been huge. The main motivating factor for businesses to introduce call centres as their main vehicle for handling customer contacts has been that call centres are inherently efficient. Since the mid-1980's, UK businesses have sought to establish competitive advantage by using call centres to reduce the cost of managing their customer contacts. Over the last decade or so, however, an alternative strategy has emerged based not on cost-reduction and efficiency, but on revenue generation and service quality. This new strategy places high value on customer and staff retention. This thesis is concerned with the operations management task of employee rostering. We argue that traditional models for producing rosters for call centre employees are designed to support the older efficiency-based culture, and are inappropriate for call centres adopting the more recent quality-based culture. We show how the use of methods and models drawn from conflicting management philosophies contributes to the high level of employee turnover, and inhibits the drive for service quality. Our primary contributions are to identify a set of rostering goals which reflect the interests of the employees, and to quantitatively represent these goals in a system of mathematical rostering models designed to support the revenue generation strategy. Our models are implemented using the robust Mixed Integer Programming methodology. In addition, we adapt our model to address the related problem of nurse rostering, and solve two benchmark problems to optimality. We demonstrate that our model generates rosters of a higher quality than the alternatives, at no additional cost.

This study asks: how do members of high identity demand organizations perform identity work relating to their organization membership? Using social identity theory, Kreiner, Hollensbe and Sheep (2006a) defined high identity demand vocations as imposing significant forces on members towards integration with a role. Through an inductive empirical study I respond to their call for studies taking the organization, rather than role, as the referent for identity work. Taking large professional service firms (PSF) as high identity demand organizations, this study explores: how identity work on the social identity is conducted from within multiple identity positions; how identity work responses are combined to address the challenges within multiple identity positions; how the identity work setting influences the performance of identity work; how the concurrent performance of identity work by others supports an individual’s identity work; and the types of events creating difficult identity work for PSF partners. Finally I combine these in considering the reversal of spirals of de-identification.

Organisational routines i.e. firms specific, path dependent, repeated patterns of collective behaviour are at the heart of the capabilities-based perspective of building competitive advantage. It is therefore not surprising to see a large body of scholarly work on the impact of organisational routines on performance of firms. However, in contrast to the number of studies on the impact of organisational routines, there are far fewer studies on the mechanisms by which organisations filter through alternates before adopting routines. The three essays in this dissertation contribute to our understanding of what influences organisational choices in adopting routines i.e. how to choose what to do? Building on the concepts in evolutionary economics, behavioural theory of the firm, and attention-based theory of strategic decision making, we argue that performance is not just a function of availability of resources and capabilities, but it is also guided by structural constraints that act as attention-focusing mechanism and influence choices in allocating limited resources. We propose that these mechanisms operate across macro- and micro-levels and that the observed behaviour of the macro-system is the aggregated result of the heterogeneous choices made by agents at the micro-level under these attention-focusing mechanisms. The three essays in the dissertation contribute to our understanding of how three different attention focusing mechanism namely organisational mandates, competitive pressure under constraints, and multipoint competition focus the attention of decision makers on some opportunities more than others. These attention-focusing mechanisms help decision makers to filter though alternatives and make micro-level choices to adopt or not to adopt routines that influence innovation performance at a macro-level.

Managers frequently deal with risk by considering uncertainty as an element of the decision problem over which they can exert control — for example, lobbyists trying to exert influence over regulators or managers trying to mitigate Operational Risks related to human processes. This perspective that the probabilities of uncertain events are at times ‘mutable’ — i.e. subject to one’s influence — has an important and previously under-appreciated role in decision-making under risk. The present research, structured as a series of three papers, addresses this gap between theory and practice on the topic of ‘control’ from a descriptive, theoretical and prescriptive perspective. The descriptive paper discusses a novel empirical test of the behavioural effect of ‘control’ on risk taking. The key finding that control does not always enhance risk taking but, instead, has a moderating effect on attitudes to risk, extends insights from related research. Strong preference for exerting control to eliminate uncertainty is also revealed. Affective and cognitive interpretations of the findings are offered and their correspondence with managerial attitudes to risk taking is discussed. The theoretical paper builds on methods in Decision Analysis and Philosophy, and develops a new probability revision rule for modelling control as interventions on uncertainties. This rule is shown to dramatically alleviate the judgmental burden of analysing multiple interventions. Foundational properties for probability revision rules for interventions, similar to the coherence criterion for Bayes rule, are also constructed and a proof that the proposed rule satisfies these properties is offered. In the prescriptive paper, a real world application of the probability revision rule is illustrated in the context of Operational Risk assessment, where several uncertainties are controllable (e.g. staff strikes). It is shown how this rule can be integrated with Operational Risk calculations to explicitly incorporate the effect of managerial mitigations on loss events, thus making a useful contribution to the field. In summary, this research explores the concept of ‘probability control’ as a way to manage risks in the context of Decision Sciences. It furthers our behavioural understanding of risk attitudes to better resonate with managerial perspectives on risk taking and extends the relevance of Decision Analysis methods to corporate risk management.

This research examines the rationale of geographic co-location of entrepreneurs who do business on internet platforms. Prior research has shown that entrepreneurs gain valuable synergy benefits from being embedded in industrial networks. Nevertheless, the advantages of geographic clustering when business is conducted via the internet are still to be understood. This research aims to understand how internet-based economic activity interacts with local social relations and structures, thus seeking to explain the phenomenon of industrial clustering of internet-enabled entrepreneurial activity. Guided by theories of relational and institutional embeddedness, we examine the way social relations are formed online, trace the rationale of local social relations while business is conducted online, and study the role of major institutional actors that support the economic activities of the entrepreneurs. Empirically, this thesis examines two regional clusters of Chinese microentrepreneurs who conduct their business on an e-commerce platform and form dynamic interpersonal ties with business partners and customers both online and offline. The method of ethnographic case study is adopted to gain in depth understanding of the ways various internet networking tools have been appropriated in business practice in these two cases and the ways local microentrepreneurs build up collaborative networks in geographic place as well as cyberspace. The study of Chinese micro-entrepreneurs reveals and substantiates the formation of a hybrid sociality, whereby economic exchange via the internet and business conducted by electronic tools are complemented by local social relations and actively supported by local government and the IT service corporation. This research also contributes to development policy considerations; it shows that regions that are usually unattractive to capital and knowledge/talent flows can gain economic development momentum by entangling the conduct of business on web platforms with local social institutions.

This thesis is composed of three stand-alone essays interlinked within the context of banking markets in sub-Saharan Africa. This research is motivated by the lack of comparative research on North-South and South-South foreign direct investment (FDI), especially on the service sector and on the African context, despite the rapid expansion of multinationals from developing and emerging countries over the last two decades. Theoretically, this thesis builds on strategy, corporate finance and organizational economics theories. The first chapter compares the financial performance of the foreign affiliates of global banks to that of regional African banks in sub-Saharan Africa over a 10-year period. The results suggest that affiliates of regional African banks are significantly less profitable (lower return on equity and higher cost income ratio) than those of global banks. Furthermore, the performance differentials are not strongly related to the quality and sectoral allocation of banks’ loan portfolio but to differences in their access to funding. The second chapter examines the benefits and drawbacks of being part of a large banking group by analyzing the flows of internal capital between foreign affiliates located in an emerging economy, South Africa, and their global headquarters. It provides evidence for a support motive to internal funding, as foreign affiliates receive on average more internal group funding when their solvency ratio declines. However, using the event of the East Asian Crisis, I show that foreign affiliates’ balance sheet are not immune to “reversal of fortune” when other members of their banking group need large amounts of internal capital to cushion capital losses, leading to abrupt reallocation of internal capital. Finally, using an instrument variable technique I find a positive impact of the volume of internal funding received by a foreign affiliate on its credit supply in the mortgage market. In the third chapter I examine how environmental and firm factors influence the organizational structure of multinational banks relying on survey data on commercial banks located in 14 sub-Saharan African countries. I find evidence of a positive and significant association between several indicators of environmental distance between host and home countries (institutional, economic and cultural distance) and centralization of operational processes inside multinationals. In addition, I find that lower quantity of “hard” information available on borrowers in the host markets and higher reliance on qualitative or “soft” information by bank managers is negatively and significantly associated with centralization.