Thesis (Ph. D.)--Oregon State University, 1986. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 166-178). Also available on the World Wide Web.

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Modern corporate governance is most characterized by management, board of directors, shareholders’ meeting, and supervision committee board. However, by investigating functions of the Party Committee, a dominant corporate governance power over modern corporate governance in Chinese central state-owned business groups (CSOBGs) , this thesis explains how Chinese CSOBGs are governed and intervened by Chinese central government and CPC at micro-level, and to what extent and under what situations political events and cadre bureaucratic system intensify the misalignment of interests between agents and principals, and how such corporate governance structure affects SOEs’ investment decisions and investment efficiency. I find that the Party Committee embeds Chinese CSOBGs’ leading executives in Chinese cadre bureaucratic system. Executives’ intention to advancement within the cadre bureaucratic system motivates the political-driven out-bound mergers and acquisitions by Chinese CSOBGs especially during critical political periods around NCCPC . I document a strong positive correlation between the promotion of leading executives of Chinese CSOBGs and the incidence of out-bound mergers and acquisitions during their tenure, and a significant negative 1-year post-acquisition performance. Furthermore, such corporate governance practice exacerbates the misalignment of the interests between non-listed Chinese CSOBGs and their listed subsidiaries, resulting in high leveraged parent tunneling from their listed subsidiaries. I report a statistically significant negative cumulative abnormal return of CSOBGs’ subsidiaries responding to these politically motivated transactions. The negative cumulative abnormal return of listed group affiliates is elucidated by critical political period, subsidiaries’ separation of ownership and control, liquidity, and parent’s leverage. I present that when CSOBGs first declare their proposals of their out-bound mergers and acquisitions, market only responds positively to their subsidiaries that are enjoying greater separation. However, the critical political periods, sensitive investment timing related to executives’ political promotion, wipes the positive influence out. With the worry of group’s tunneling, for subsidiaries with strong liquidity but a highly leveraged parent, the short-term event-driven stock performance is significantly negative. Last, consistent with previous literature, this study provides the evidence that during hot political periods, SOEs and politicians suppress negative information and disclose after the hot political periods. A significant relation between the count of news articles 3 months ahead the announcement and the short-term stock market return of out-bound mergers and acquisitions by CSOBGs is reported. Further more, stock market reactions to these news articles diverse to different political periods. I find the stock return within the event windows is negatively correlated to the news’ sentiment during the hot political periods. It indicates that the market discounts the news’ sentiment even takes them in the opposite way during the hot political periods.

The present thesis explores the internationalisation of firms in relation to regionsector characteristics. We focus on outward investment by German firms and classify the heterogeneity across firms, regions and sectors, as well as foreign destinations. The thesis is structured in 5 chapters: a general introduction, followed by 3 empirical chapters and a final conclusion. In the introductory chapter we provide a general conceptual framework and selective review of the literature. Our starting point is that internationalisation is heterogenous across firms as it requires ownership advantages. However, the source of these is less explored and we discuss how regional factors such as the proximity to MNEs can influence foreign expansions. Conceptually we rely on spillover and competition effects and put forward that MNEs can act as catalysts for internationalising domestic firms. Chapter 2 analyses the propensity of German firms to be active as outward investors, exploring and qualifying the heterogeneity across firms, regions and sectors. We find that different forms of proximity matter for the intensive and extensive margins of outward investment by German firms. First, region-sector co-location with MNEs is more important than regional co-location. This lends support to the notion of technological proximity as a facilitator of spillovers. Second, the association between region-sector proximity and the propensity of firms to invest abroad is larger at finer spatial scales. This hints to the tacitness of some knowledge and information about internationalisation processes, as these types of effects and externalities mainly arise between spatially proximate firms. Third, region-sector proximity is shown to matter most when the firm and the proximate MNE are both German-owned. It highlights a potential role of cultural proximity and regional embeddedness for positive externalities or feedback loops to occur. Chapter 3 enquires how destination-specific ties available in the home region in Germany can be leveraged by the internationalising firm when making location decisions abroad. We provide empirical evidence on this by using data on inward and outward investment linkages and migrant networks between a German region and foreign destination. Our findings also reveal that those matter more for likely first-time investors, while within business group experience is not shown to play a role. Using a mixed logit model we further highlight significant heterogeneity across firms in their directionality of outward investments. Larger firms are found to be able to expand to more distant foreign destinations while smaller firms mainly choose European locations. Chapter 4 turns our focus to whole sectors and compares their domestic and global geography. To do so we use detailed geocoded data on the global locations of German manufacturing firms. We reveal that also at the global level there is considerable heterogeneity in the spatial pattern across sectors. The concentration ’intensity’ is also generally higher than at the domestic level and the level of technology in a sector plays a key role for its pattern. While at the domestic level high-tech sectors are found to be the most concentrated, at the global level it is rather low and medium-low tech sectors. At the same time, firms in medium-high tech sectors are the least concentrated in both. As they are often referred to as the ’backbone’ of the German economy, we see potential implications for territorial cohesion and regional disparities.

The 2030 global development agenda represents a renewed commitment to gender equality and an explicit call for business contribution. Even though during the last 15 years the gender gap has narrowed, women continue to lag behind men in the economic opportunities available to them. Feminist economists have largely acknowledged that many gender inequalities happen in organisations and, therefore, business organisations have much to contribute. In this respect, one of the most significant shifts of the post-2015 agenda has been the explicit call for a more proactive role of the private sector. Responsible business practices or Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) represent an opportunity for the effective incorporation of gender issues into the business strategy. However, the actual integration of gender issues in the CSR agenda has been limited, CSR has been frequently studied at one level at a time (macro, organisational or individual), research has been primarily carried out in developed regions such as Europe and North America, and the practice of CSR has been characterised by a more external focus on philanthropic environmental and community activities. Considering this context, the main purposes of this thesis is twofold. On the one hand, it seeks to contribute to strengthening the theoretical links between CSR and gender equality at work by developing an integrated multilevel framework. This framework takes a CSR perspective and it is based on the capability approach for human development proposed by the Nobel Prize Laureate in Economics Amartya Sen. Besides this central theoretical background, levels are built from a multidisciplinary standpoint including literature from public policy, development studies, management, organisation studies and social and organisational psychology. On the other hand, this thesis pursues a better empirical understanding of CSR and gender equality in developing countries by implementing the proposed framework in Latin America. By focusing on global and national governance institutions in studies one and two, organisational strategies in study three, and employees’ attitudes and perceptions in study four; this research collects and analyses quantitative and qualitative data under a mixed method research design. The first two studies use a qualitative approach based on the analysis of documents and interviews. The last two studies take a quantitative approach by collecting and analysing data from an online survey. Findings emphasise the need of a better integration of gender issues within the CSR agenda at all levels but particularly for public governance at the national level. Global governance institutions have been effective at enacting legally binding measures and reporting country progress in terms of gender equality across the region. However, there is still a lack of policy instruments based on economic incentives and public-private partnerships aimed at engaging the private sector in gender issues. On the other hand, the level of integration of gender issues was found to be stronger at the organisational level. Particularly, companies that have aligned their strategies to international responsibility standards tend to also include policy initiatives aimed at reducing gender inequalities. Similarly, companies that are perceived as being responsible by their employees generate favourable attitudes towards the implementation of these gender initiatives at work. However, these gender initiatives have been found to have almost no impact on the actual advancement of female workers. These results are discussed from an integrative perspective and implications for public policy and business organisations are proposed. Limitations and avenues for future research are also identified with focus placed on the possible developments of the proposed framework considering these findings.

This research examines how farmers working medium-sized farms in Mexico have adopted and enacted Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), and how these ICTs have impacted work practices. The effects of ICTs on farmers’ economic relations are explored from a business process perspective using a framework that combines Transaction Cost (TCT) and Social Embeddedness theories. A single case study in Mexico with two embedded units of analysis from different crop sectors, a cluster of banana producers from Tabasco and an organic rice grower from Campeche, provide an in-depth understanding of the adoption of ICTs and their impact. We examine issues of learning and co-operation, and how ICTs have affected production and distribution and the positioning of farmers in the context of their work practices and economic relations. The thesis discusses the ICTs used in the business process cycle of farming and their impact on business development and economic exchange. The research elaborates on and confirms the existence of network forms of organisation that operate in the farmers’ communities and analyses their social embeddedness. The findings show that information technologies bring improvements to the agricultural business process, facilitating not only the collection, collation and analysis of data to support informed decisions, but also innovative farming and business practices through learning and co-operation. We find that ICTs complement and support social relationships, both preexisting (traditional community connections and business links) and novel (virtual contacts and social media) to stimulate business development. The significance of social context is corroborated and should help inform development policy.

Financial retirement risk is one of the biggest dilemmas faced by individuals and societies in late modernity. It is an unintended consequence of over fifty years of social, scientific and economic development. These have produced ageing citizens, who spend too much and save too little. In response, economists argue that more of the State's pension risk must be transferred to the individual. To achieve this, the UK Government introduced auto-enrolment workplace pension policy to 'nudge' spenders into becoming savers. In this thesis, I use this change in legislation to explore what happens when the libertarian paternalism, implicit in behavioural economic theory, enters the real world. Adopting a sociological approach through critical discourse analysis, I explore the different interpretations of financial risk constituted by the State, media, employers and employees. The study traces how the State has attempted to transfer financial risks onto individuals through a process labelled the risk game. This involves constructing and legitimising discourses of winners versus losers, spenders versus savers and experts versus lay people. However, the risk game is not straightforward. Other participants, such as the press, employees and employers, play with the discourses government set in motion and through their discursive reinterpretations, they attempt to transfer the risk onto the other players, including the government. The discursive strategies adopted include: the passive matching effect, used by employees to pass the responsibility to the employer; and the avoidance effect, where employees return the risk to the State in a new form. Other employees actively choose to play by different rules, using the operative visualization of risk, through discourses of long-term vision and self-reflexive action. Understood as the risk game, this thesis reveals flaws in the implementation of the government's auto-enrolment pension policy. Informed by Beck’s theories, the thesis concludes that rather than nudging individuals, the State can only transfer responsibility for risk through coercion or with the recipient’s understanding and active engagement. This has implications for pension policy and the pensions industry and casts doubt on the prevailing economic theory that spenders can be nudged into becoming savers.

The Caribbean is an understudied region in terms of gender wage gaps and this research adds new insights into the sparse economics literature on this topic for the region, and in particular, for the two-island state of Trinidad and Tobago. Economic inequality between men and women is a pertinent problem deserving of in-depth study because it has far-reaching inter-generational consequences. Furthermore, gender inequalities in the labour market are considered as indicators that considerably restrain economic growth. Trinidad and Tobago’s economy has undergone tremendous strides in terms of economic growth over the past 20 years, and this study provides a deeper understanding of how the gender pay gap evolved over that time period. The present analysis of the gender wage gap has allowed us to ascertain if working women in Trinidad and Tobago were able to benefit from the country’s improved economic prosperity. The present study employs 2012 Continuous Sample Survey of the Population (CSSP) data for Trinidad and Tobago to investigate the causes of gender income differentials. The CSSP is used to generate labour force statistics for Trinidad and Tobago, and provides a wide range of information, including data on wages, gender, employment, unemployment, hours of work, industry, occupation, and level of education. The CSSP has two main advantages that make it a good source of data for analysing labour market issues in Trinidad and Tobago. Firstly, it is a nationally representative population survey, and secondly, it is the most detailed population survey for the country. The Blinder-Oaxaca and Neumark methods of decomposition were used to portion the wage gap into “explained” and “unexplained” components. The findings suggest that the differential is not well explained by differences in the levels of human capital (“explained” component) and indeed gender bias in favour of male workers seems to be prevalent (“unexplained” component). The raw wage gap in 2012 measured 11.4 per cent, and in the absence of gender discrimination women’s wages could increase by as much as 26 per cent. In addition to decomposing the gender wage gap at the mean level of wages, the research also investigated the causes of gender income differentials along the entire distribution of wages. Two recent quantile decomposition techniques – developed by the Machado and Mata (2005)/Melly (2006), and Firpo, Fortin and Lemieux (2009) were used to portion the gap into “explained” and “unexplained” components. Similar to the findings from the Blinder-Oaxaca methodology, the results for this portion of the research suggest that the differential in wages is not well explained by differences in the levels of human capital and substantial gender bias in favour of male workers. Quantile decompositions allow us to ascertain if there is a “glass ceiling” or a “sticky floor” in the labour market. Glass ceilings are said to exist when there is a larger unexplained gender wage gap at the top of the wage distribution, whereas sticky floors exist when there is a larger unexplained wage gap at the lower end of the wage distribution. The results suggest that female workers in Trinidad and Tobago face sticky floors rather than a glass ceiling. Lastly, the well-known Heckman two-step procedure (sometimes referred to as the limited information maximum likelihood (LIML) estimator) was employed to test for the presence of sample selection. The test for selectivity was carried out for both men and women separately. The results indicated no evidence of sample selection in any of the model specifications, including Mincerian-type wage regressions with additional controls for occupation, industry, and sector of employment (public vs. private). However, the sample selection model did not consider any exclusion restrictions due to data limitations, and consequently the model proved to be weakly identified. The chapter concluded that the “uncorrected” OLS subsample is the more appropriate model to be used for analysis given that these estimates are more robust compared to a sample selection model without exclusion restrictions.

This thesis contains three studies. They are connected by the idea that "no man is an island": each individual contributes to shaping, and is constrained by, the social and economic structures of the organization or the society that the individual is embedded in. The first study, Chapter 2, examines optimal networks with weighted and directed links under complementarities. A group of agents take actions that are endogenously determined by which network the planner implements. Complementarities mean that the best-response action of each agent is increasing in the actions of those who have a link with positive weight pointing to the agent (representing the direction and intensity of influence). Optimal networks are those maximizing the planner's objective function which is an increasing function in the effort of each agent, subject to the constraint that the total weight of the links of the network does not exceed a certain level. The agents' best-response function and the planner's objective function can be convex or concave. We show that every optimal network exhibits dramatic concentration of influence so that a very small number of agents impose significant impact on the productivity of the whole organization. The second study, Chapter 3, investigates how cooperative norms emerge and evolve over time. I construct a stochastic dynamic model based on the idea that cooperation in one-shot interactions is sustained by endogenous social norms. The model shows how cooperation and punishment of defectors co-evolve. It reveals the conditions under which cooperation emerges and persists in the long run. In particular, recent empirical studies find that cooperation in one-shot interactions is positively correlated with law enforcement across societies, and that cooperation is higher in large, modern societies with higher degrees of market integration compared to small-scale societies. I extend the model to explain these regularities. I show that the ability to “vote with feet” is the key to understanding the difference in cooperation between small-scale societies and large, modern societies. The third study, Chapter 4, is an experimental project, a joint work with Lucas Molleman and Dennie van Dolder. Previous studies suggest that whether individuals perceive a behavior as fair depends on its frequency in the population. Using a prisoner's dilemma game, we test experimentally whether informing individuals of a higher proportion of cooperators in the population affects the fairness perception about free riding and changes individuals' punishment of free riders. Different from previous studies, we use the strategy method to obtain each participant's complete punishment strategy. We find a remarkable heterogeneity among participants: some participants increase punishment of free riders as the proportion of cooperators increases, suggesting that they consider free riding to be more unfair when more cooperators are around; yet, many others punish independently of the proportion of cooperators. We show that the heterogeneity cannot be captured by any single existing theory.

Organisations today are investing significant amounts of time, money, and resources on workplace self-paced e-learning, yet employees seem to be having problems even getting these e-learning courses completed, bringing into question the true value of workplace self-paced e-learning. In an attempt to improve understanding of factors contributing to success in workplace self-paced e-learning, this study investigated how employee learners’ motivation, self-regulated learning, and organisational contextual factors affected outcomes in workplace self-paced e-learning. A quantitative study was conducted to investigate the research questions. Participants of the study were 119 employees enrolled in workplace self-paced e-learning courses provided by Hong Kong organisations. Data were collected using online questionnaires and analysed using the partial least squares structural equation modelling technique. Findings revealed significant relationships between learners’ motivation, self-regulated learning, organisational contextual factors, and training outcomes in workplace self-paced e-learning. Motivation to learn, time management, metacognitive self-regulation, perceived choice, workload, and organisational support were found to positively correlate with training outcomes as expressed in terms of course completion rate, learner satisfaction, and perceived learning performance in workplace self-paced e-learning. Findings also revealed learners’ autonomy in learning participation, level of workload (negative), and supervisor support (negative) moderate the relationship between learners’ time management strategy use and completion rate of workplace self-paced e-learning courses. Unfortunately, the results failed to support the expected relationship between supervisor support and training outcomes. The significance of the findings is discussed, along with implications for researchers and practitioners, limitations of the current study, and opportunities for future research.