Talent management in a context: four empirical essays

Doctoral thesis (2022)

Recent research has determined that talent management is a highly context-sensitive phenomenon. Indeed, the way talent is defined and managed varies from one context to another. Although talent management ... [more ▼]

Recent research has determined that talent management is a highly context-sensitive phenomenon. Indeed, the way talent is defined and managed varies from one context to another. Although talent management has been studied for the last two decades, the majority of scientific works still focus on the context of large multinational corporations with a prevalence of managerial views. Therefore, this thesis aims to contribute to the literature by challenging the dominant understandings of talent management through examining the phenomenon in the contexts that are less explored. To that end, four empirical studies were conducted constituting this thesis. The first study explores how talent is defined and managed in the not-for-profit sector. Based on the interviews with 34 leaders of 34 mission-driven organizations, it offers a unique definition of a talent and an understanding of how TM is implemented in this sector. The second study analytically contextualizes talent management in micro-, small- and medium-sized enterprises. Based on 31 interviews with TM leaders of 27 aerospace companies, this research proposes three types of TM in this context, namely “strategic”, “entrepreneurial” and “ad hoc”. The third study, in the context of the high technology industry, explores understanding of talent management not only from the perspective of managers but also that of talent. It is based on the discussions with 20 managers and 20 talents from the aerospace industry and identifies three views on TM: talents’, managers’ and shared. Finally, the fourth study explores gender differences in quitting intentions of talent in the knowledge-based field. Drawing on the survey responses from 119 talented individuals, it shows that gender moderates relationships between talent intention to quit and its main antecedents. This thesis provides an important theoretical contribution to the talent management literature and offers useful practical implications for organizational leaders, managers, talented individuals and policy-makers. [less ▲]

Essays on the Economics of International Migration

Doctoral thesis (2022)

Decision Making in Supply Chains with Waste Considerations

Doctoral thesis (2022)

As global population and income levels have increased, so has the waste generated as a byproduct of our production and consumption processes. Approximately two billion tons of municipal solid waste are ... [more ▼]

As global population and income levels have increased, so has the waste generated as a byproduct of our production and consumption processes. Approximately two billion tons of municipal solid waste are generated globally every year – that is, more than half a kilogram per person each day. This waste, which is generated at various stages of the supply chain, has negative environmental effects and often represents an inefficient use or allocation of limited resources. With the growing concern about waste, many governments are implementing regulations to reduce waste. Waste is a often consequence of the inventory decisions of different players in a supply chain. As such, these regulations aim to reduce waste by influencing inventory decisions. However, determining the inventory decisions of players in a supply chain is not trivial. Modern supply chains often consist of numerous players, who may each differ in their objectives and in the factors they consider when making decisions such as how much product to buy and when. While each player makes unilateral inventory decisions, these decisions may also affect the decisions of other players. This complexity makes it difficult to predict how a policy will affect profit and waste outcomes for individual players and the supply chain as a whole. This dissertation studies the inventory decisions of players in a supply chain when faced with policy interventions to reduce waste. In particular, the focus is on food supply chains, where food waste and packaging waste are the largest waste components. Chapter 2 studies a two-period inventory game between a seller (e.g., a wholesaler) and a buyer (e.g., a retailer) in a supply chain for a perishable food product with uncertain demand from a downstream market. The buyer can differ in whether he considers factors affecting future periods or the seller’s supply availability in his period purchase decisions – that is, in his degree of strategic behavior. The focus is on understanding how the buyer’s degree of strategic behavior affects inventory outcomes. Chapter 3 builds on this understanding by investigating waste outcomes and how policies that penalize waste affect individual and supply chain profits and waste. Chapter 4 studies the setting of a restaurant that uses reusable containers instead of single-use ones to serve its delivery and take-away orders. With policy-makers discouraging the use of single-use containers through surcharges or bans, reusable containers have emerged as an alternative. Managing inventories of reusable containers is challenging for a restaurant as both demand and returns of containers are uncertain and the restaurant faces various customers types. This chapter investigates how the proportion of each customer type affects the restaurant’s inventory decisions and costs. [less ▲]

Essays on Market Microstructure and Financial Markets Stability

Doctoral thesis (2022)

The present doctoral thesis consists of three main chapters. The chapters of the thesis can be considered independently. Each of the three chapters raises a research question, reviews the related ... [more ▼]

The present doctoral thesis consists of three main chapters. The chapters of the thesis can be considered independently. Each of the three chapters raises a research question, reviews the related literature, proposes a method for the analysis, and, finally, reports results and conclusions. Chapter 1 is entitled Dark Trading and Financial Markets Stability and it is based on a working paper co-authored with Prof. Dr. Jorge Goncalves and Prof. Dr. Roman Kraussl. This paper examines how the implementation of a new dark order -- Midpoint Extended Life Order (M-ELO) on Nasdaq -- impacts financial markets stability in terms of occurrences of mini-flash crashes in individual securities. We use high-frequency order book data and apply panel regression analysis to estimate the effect of dark order trading activity on market stability and liquidity provision. The results suggest a predominance of a speed bump effect of M-ELO rather than a darkness effect. We find that the introduction of M-ELO increases market stability by reducing the average number of mini-flash crashes, but its impact on market quality is mixed. Chapter 2 is entitled Dark Pools and Price Discovery in Limit Order Markets and it is a single-authored work. This paper examines how the introduction of a dark pool impacts price discovery, market quality, and aggregate welfare of traders. I use a four-period model where rational and risk-neutral agents choose the order type and the venue and obtain the equilibrium numerically. The comparative statics on the order submission probability suggests a U-shaped order migration to the dark pool. The overall effect of dark trading on market quality and aggregate welfare was found to be positive but limited in size and depended on market conditions. I find mixed results for the process of price discovery. Depending on the immediacy need of traders, price discovery may change due to the presence of the dark venue. Chapter 3 is entitled Machine Learning and Market Microstructure Predictability and it is another single-authored piece of work. This paper illustrates the application of machine learning to market microstructure research. I outline the most insightful microstructure measures, that possess the highest predictive power and are useful for the out-of-sample predictions of such features of the market as liquidity volatility and general market stability. By comparing the models' performance during the normal time versus the crisis time, I come to the conclusion that financial markets remain efficient during both periods. Additionally, I find that high-frequency traders activity is not able to forecast accurately neither of the market features. [less ▲]

Economics of Migration, Inequalities, and Culture

Doctoral thesis (2022)

The present doctoral thesis consists of three chapters of self-contained works about the economics of migration, inequalities, and culture. In the first chapter, I introduce the thesis outline and discuss ... [more ▼]

The present doctoral thesis consists of three chapters of self-contained works about the economics of migration, inequalities, and culture. In the first chapter, I introduce the thesis outline and discuss each chapter's research questions. The second chapter explores the effects of mass migration on individual attitudes towards migrants. Using several data sources for the mass migration of Ukrainians in Poland between 2014-2016, this chapter is focused on how a massive exogenous increase in the stock of migrant residents and migrant co-workers affects the perception of migrants. Using both an IV methodology and a difference-in-difference analysis, I test two hypotheses: the labor market competition and contact theory and find some evidence favoring the second. First, difference-in-difference analysis shows that Poles become more welcoming to migrants in regions with more job opportunities for migrants. Second, I find that an increase in the size of the migrant group affects attitudes towards migrants positively, inside a group of natives with similar demographic and job skills characteristics. The third chapter explores how poverty can be explained by marital status and gender, using the RLMS-HSE household survey. This research shows that divorced women exhibit lower poverty levels than divorced men by employing longitudinal data from the Russian National Survey (RLMS-HSE) from 2004 to 2019. The result remains qualitatively invariant when considering a theoretical probability to divorce for married couples that take into account the age of the partners, labor force participation, and education. A higher probability to divorce impacts positively only men's poverty level. Investigating an inter-related dynamic model of poverty and labor market participation, we find that divorced women work more than divorced men, which is why divorce hits harder on husbands than on wives. In the fourth chapter of the thesis, we study the effect of past exposure to communist indoctrination during early age (9-14 years) on a set of crucial attitudes in the communist ideology aiming to create the \emph{new communist man/woman}. We focus on the indoctrination received by children during their pioneering years. School pupils automatically became pioneers when they reached 3rd or 4th grade. The purpose of the pioneer years was to educate soviet children to be loyal to the ideals of communism and the Party. We use a regression discontinuity design exploiting the discontinuity in the exposure to pioneering years due to the fall of the USSR in 1991, implying a strong association that hints to causality. We find robust evidence that has been a pioneer has long-lasting effects on interpersonal trust, life satisfaction, fertility, income, and perception of own economic rank. Overall, these results suggest that past pioneers show a higher level of optimism than non-pioneers. Finally, we look for gender differences because various forms of emulation campaigns were used to promote the desired virtues of the new communist woman. However, we find no evidence of the effect of exposure to communism on women. The indoctrination seems to have had more substantial effects on men. [less ▲]

Three Essays in Narrative Risk Disclosure Tone, Meta-analysis and Cost Asymmetry

Doctoral thesis (2022)

The thesis is divided in the following three chapters: Chapter 1 analyzes firms’ tone in risk disclosure using a sample of listed firms in the European Economic Area from 2002 to 2016. Firstly, findings ... [more ▼]

The thesis is divided in the following three chapters: Chapter 1 analyzes firms’ tone in risk disclosure using a sample of listed firms in the European Economic Area from 2002 to 2016. Firstly, findings show that firms, on average, use more negative than positive words in risk disclosure. This linguistic negativity bias has increased over time, suggesting that efforts to discourage companies’ propensity for overly positive risk disclosure had been potentially effective. Secondly, this negativity bias in tone increases more when receiving bad news than it decreases when receiving good news. Chapter refers to this phenomenon as ‘conditional risk disclosure tone conservatism’. Thirdly, we show that risk tone conservatism and stock price crash risk are negatively associated within a certain range of accounting conservatism. Chapter 2 aims to advance the understanding of the generic firm characteristics and to provide a meta-analysis of the relationship between generic firm characteristics and stock price crash risk. It analyzes the existing findings of the relationship between firm size, investor heterogeneity, growth, leverage, financial performance, volatility, earnings management and crash risk across 99 prior empirical studies. In addition, it investigates the potential covariates that moderate the variation in the results. Meta-analysis is used to investigate and aggregate the association between generic firm characteristics and stock price crash risk. Meta-regression analyses are conducted to examine whether potential moderators affect this association. Findings indicate that firm size, investor heterogeneity, and growth opportunities have a significant positive association with crash risk. However, leverage has a negative significant relationship with crash risk. Meta-regression results show that the variation in the firm characteristics and crash risk relationship is moderated by the measurement of generic determinants, publication status, citations, journal ranking, countries, financial sector and crisis period inclusion in the sample of studies, author’s country, position, and gender. Chapter 3 shows that Communist Party Committee (CPC) involvement in corporate governance is a determinant of the asymmetric behavior of selling, general, and administrative (SG&A) costs in Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs). SOEs having CPC direct control show a higher level of asymmetric cost behavior. In addition, the moderating effect of regional institutional quality on the relationship between CPC involvement and cost asymmetry is examined. Results indicate that firms located in regions with strong market-based institutions exhibit a stronger association between CPC direct control and cost asymmetry, thus the CPC counteracts pressure from markets to cut costs. This chapter contributes to the cost asymmetry literature by introducing a new political determinant that is specific to the growing Chinese market, CPC direct control. [less ▲]

Essays on the Economics of Migration, Inequalities, and Culture

Doctoral thesis (2022)

The present doctoral thesis consists of three chapters of self-contained works about the economics of migration, inequalities, and culture. In the first chapter, I introduce the thesis outline and discuss ... [more ▼]

The present doctoral thesis consists of three chapters of self-contained works about the economics of migration, inequalities, and culture. In the first chapter, I introduce the thesis outline and discuss each chapter's research questions. The second chapter explores the effects of mass migration on individual attitudes towards migrants. Using several data sources for the mass migration of Ukrainians in Poland between 2014-2016, this chapter is focused on how a massive exogenous increase in the stock of migrant residents and migrant co-workers affects the perception of migrants. Using both an IV methodology and a difference-in-difference analysis, I test two hypotheses: the labor market competition and contact theory, and find some evidence favoring the second. First, difference-in-difference analysis shows that Poles become more welcoming to migrants in regions with more job opportunities for migrants. Second, I find that an increase in the size of the migrant group affects attitudes towards migrants positively, inside a group of natives with similar demographic and job skills characteristics. The third chapter explores how poverty can be explained by marital status and gender, using the RLMS-HSE household survey. This research shows that divorced women exhibit lower poverty levels than divorced men by employing longitudinal data from the Russian National Survey (RLMS-HSE) from 2004 to 2019. The result remains qualitatively invariant when considering a theoretical probability to divorce for married couples that take into account the age of the partners, labor force participation, and education. A higher probability to divorce impacts positively only men's poverty level. Investigating an inter-related dynamic model of poverty and labor market participation, we find that divorced women work more than divorced men, which is why divorce hits harder on husbands than on wives. In the fourth chapter of the thesis, we study the effect of past exposure to communist indoctrination during early age (9-14 years) on a set of crucial attitudes in the communist ideology aiming to create the \emph{new communist man/woman}. We focus on the indoctrination received by children during their pioneering years. School pupils automatically became pioneers when they reached 3rd or 4th grade. The purpose of the pioneer years was to educate soviet children to be loyal to the ideals of communism and the Party. We use a regression discontinuity design exploiting the discontinuity in the exposure to pioneering years due to the fall of the USSR in 1991, implying a strong association that hints to causality. We find robust evidence that has been a pioneer has long-lasting effects on interpersonal trust, life satisfaction, fertility, income, and perception of own economic rank. Overall, these results suggest that past pioneers show a higher level of optimism than non-pioneers. Finally, we look for gender differences because various forms of emulation campaigns were used to promote the desired virtues of the new communist woman. However, we find no evidence of the effect of exposure to communism on women. The indoctrination seems to have left more substantial effects on men. [less ▲]

ESSAYS ON THE ECONOMICS OF INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION

Doctoral thesis (2021)

The present dissertation consists of three main chapters of self-contained works about international human migration and migrant's integration in the host society. The first chapter introduces the general ... [more ▼]

The present dissertation consists of three main chapters of self-contained works about international human migration and migrant's integration in the host society. The first chapter introduces the general outline of the dissertation and briefly explains the research questions explored in each chapter. The second chapter studies the effect of migration networks and long-term cultural distance on migration flows. The main research question is whether the diaspora effect on migration flows is larger when the cultural distance between the country of origin and destination is large. We use an unbalanced panel database of bilateral migration flows data from 1960 to 2009 for about 175 sending countries to 32 destination countries. We proxy long-term cultural distance using ancestral distance, also called genetic distance. Based on the micro-founded gravity model for migration, we estimate the interaction between the diaspora size and ancestral distance using the Poisson Pseudo Maximum Likelihood (Santos Silva \& Tenreyro, 2006). We find evidence of a positive and significant interaction effect between the network effect and ancestral distance on international migration flows, however, this effect is small once we control for omitted unobserved determinants of migration flows. The third chapter studies the educational performance of the children of migrants in the United States of America. It pushes forward the hypothesis that misalignment between expectations and aspirations crucially affects the educational outcomes of immigrant young adults. It shows that the difference in school performance between migrant children and natives lies within the aspirations and expectations that migrant children form. This chapter uses the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health), a longitudinal database representative of American high schools that surveys adolescents between the grades 7-12 collected by the Carolina Population Center. The chapter shows that a positive difference between aspirations and expectations is a driving force for higher effort and better education outcomes of immigrant teenagers. This force resolves the well-known immigrant paradox. This result is specific to migrant children and does not hold for second-generation migrant pupils who appear quite acculturated to the USA context. In the fourth chapter, the relationship between financial aid and foreign education at the postgraduate level is evaluated. I use a sample of Colombian graduates who applied to a financial aid program that sponsors the completion of master's degrees abroad. It studies the case of a Scholarship-Loan program provided by the Colfuturo Foundation and the Administrative Department of Science, Technology, and Innovation (Colciencias). Students with an undergraduate degree can apply to receipt a fund of 50000 dollars to finance their post-graduate studies in any country in the world, with the condition to come back to Columbia. The characteristics of the selection process of the program allow the implementation of a Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) to estimate the causal effect of the scholarship-loan program on the probability of completing studies abroad. Given Colfuturo’s selection process, the assignment of the fund is expected to be distributed quasi-randomly for the applicants around the vicinity of a cut-off point. This methodology allows for the estimation of the local average treatment effect (LATE) of the program. I employ the administrative records from the scholarship provider combined with internet sources. The results show that the scholarship-loan program is an effective tool to increase the probability of completing studies abroad by approximately 30 percentage points. The results are extremely robust across estimation methods. [less ▲]

Three Essays on the Role of Institutions in Labor Market Polarization

Doctoral thesis (2021)

This dissertation examines the impact of institutions on the distribution of jobs and wages, with a special focus on European countries. We are more specifically interested in labor market polarization, a ... [more ▼]

This dissertation examines the impact of institutions on the distribution of jobs and wages, with a special focus on European countries. We are more specifically interested in labor market polarization, a phenomenon which has notably been observed in the US between the 1980s and the 2010s. While wage polarization describes an increase in wages at both ends of the distribution relative to the middle, job polarization refers to an increase in the employment share of both low- and high-skill jobs relative to middle-skill jobs. A now standard explanation of this phenomenon is routine-biased technical change (RBTC). According to this approach, technical progress favors the substitution of machines --- and, indirectly, of high-skill workers --- for middle-skill labor, which leads in fine to the polarization of the distribution of earnings and jobs. While labor market polarization has also been observed in Europe, the intensity of this phenomenon depends on the country considered. Since developed economies have a similar access to technology, other determinants of the distribution of jobs and wages have to be considered to explain these cross-country differences. This dissertation considers institutions and demonstrates that a highly institutionalized labor market mitigates the twofold phenomenon of polarization. Institutions --- which are typically country-specific --- can thus partially explain cross-country differences in labor market polarization. This dissertation consists of three essays. In the first essay, we implement decomposition methods to show the impact of institutions on the wage structure. Our strategy makes use of the difference between the public and the private sector in terms of institutionalization of the wage-setting process. Decomposing the change in wage quantiles for both sectors and operating a between-sector comparison of the results for a set of European countries, we reach the conclusion that institutions are able to mitigate the RBTC-induced polarization of the wage structure. In the second essay, we develop a theoretical model based on the Acemoglu and Autor (2011) task-based framework. We contribute to this framework by including, in a Ricardian model of the labor market à la Acemoglu and Autor, an institutional device which mitigates wage polarization, based on the results of the first essay of this dissertation. While this device can be thought as unions operating in a centralized and coordinated bargaining regime, it is not restricted to this interpretation. Our model predicts that the institutions we consider, by mitigating wage polarization, have an anti-polarizing impact on the change in employment: while job polarization still follows skill-biased technical change, it is less pronounced in a highly institutionalized labor market. In the third and last essay, we test the predictions of the model presented in the second essay by empirically assessing the impact of institutions on job polarization. For each country studied in the first essay and for each year of the period 1992-2017, we build a measure of job polarization, based on the employment levels observed in selected, ranked and aggregated occupational categories. We then build a composite index of institutionalization and use panel cointegration techniques to estimate the long-run relationship between this index and each component of job polarization. Finally, we take into account both the reverse-causality problem implied by such a study and the potential delayed response of the variables by resorting on panel vector autoregressive models and structural impulse response analysis. Our results indicate that de-institutionalization fosters both components of job polarization, confirming the structural interpretation of the model introduced in the second essay. By combining different approaches and methods, this dissertation thus shows that the impact of technical change on the wage and occupational structure is mediated by country-specific institutional settings. Institutions do have an impact on labor market polarization, and can clearly be used to foster or inhibit this phenomenon. [less ▲]

Efficient Estimation with Non-Standard Sampling or Missing Endogenous Variables, and Conditional Density Modelling with Unobserved Copula-Connected Shocks

Doctoral thesis (2021)

In Chapter 1, it is shown how to use a smoothed empirical likelihood approach to conduct efficient semi-parametric inference in models characterised as conditional moment equalities when data are ... [more ▼]

In Chapter 1, it is shown how to use a smoothed empirical likelihood approach to conduct efficient semi-parametric inference in models characterised as conditional moment equalities when data are collected by variable probability sampling. Results from a simulation experiment suggest that the smoothed-empirical-likelihood-based estimator can estimate the model parameters very well in small to moderately sized stratified samples. In Chapter 2, a novel univariate conditional density model is proposed to decompose asset returns into a sum of copula-connected unobserved ‘good’ and ‘bad’ shocks. The novelty of this approach comes from two factors: correlation between unobserved shocks is modelled explicitly, and the presence of copula-connected discrete jumps is allowed for. The proposed framework is very flexible and subsumes other models, such as ‘bad environments, good environments’. The proposed model shows certain hidden characteristics of returns, explains investors’ behaviour in greater detail, and yields better forecasts of risk measures. The in-sample and out-of-sample performance of the proposed model is better than that of 40 popular GARCH variants. A Monte Carlo simulation shows that the proposed model recovers the structural parameters of the unobserved dynamics. This model is estimated on S&P 500 data, and time-dependent non-negative covariance between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ shocks with a leverage-like effect is found to be an essential component of the total variance. Asymmetric reaction to shocks is present almost in all characteristics of returns. The conditional distribution of returns seems to be very time-dependent with skewness both in the centre and tails. Continuous shocks are more important than discrete jumps for return modelling, at least at the daily frequency. In Chapter 3, the semi-parametric efficiency bound is derived for estimating finite-dimensional parameters identified via a system of conditional moment equalities when at least one of the endogenous variables (which can either be endogenous outcomes, or endogenous explanatory variables, or both) is missing for some individuals in the sample. An interesting result is obtained that if there are no endogenous variables that are not missing, i.e. all the endogenous variables in the model are missing, then estimation using only the validation subsample (the sub-sample of observations for which the endogenous variables are non-missing) is asymptotically efficient. An estimator based on the full sample is proposed, and it is shown that it achieves the semi-parametric efficiency bound. A simulation study reveals that the proposed estimator can work well in medium-sized samples and that the resulting efficiency gains (measured as the ratio of the variance of an efficient estimator based on the validation sample and the variance of our estimator) are comparable with the maximum gain the simulation design can deliver. [less ▲]