competition and social influence the diffusion of the sixth generation processor in the global computer industry1 when is a social actor most strongly influenced by its peers this article addresses this question by clarifying when computer firms were most strongly affected by the choices of their structurally equivalent rivals to adopt a well known technology intel s sixth generation processor the core hypothesis is that the effect of adoptions by structurally equivalent firms increases with the competitive pressure that a focal firm faces in its market position the results show that a chosen firm is most strongly influenced by comparable others when it faces scale based competition and is diversified the implications of this study are twofold a social actor s sensitivity to the conduct of others may depend not only on its place in a hierarchy but also on the nature of its ties to an external audience and a contingent theory of social influence may be necessary to characterize diffusion processes correctly particularly when external and time varying nonnetwork factors have significant effects

the impact of immigrant concentration in schools on grade retention in spain a difference in differences approach abstractsince the late 1990s spain has played host to a sizeable flow of immigrants who have been absorbed into the compulsory stage of the education system in this article our aim is to assess the impact of that exogenous increase in the number of immigrant students from 2003 to 2009 on grade retention using spanish data from pisa 2003 and 2009 for this purpose we use the difference in differences method as a dose treatment capable of detecting whether the immigrant concentration has had a significant effect on student performance our results evidenced that their arrival does not on average decrease school promotion rates with respect to 2003 and is even beneficial to native students however although the concentration of immigrant students at the same school does have a negative impact on immigrant students generating more grade retention native students are unaffected until concentrations of immigrant students is above 15

the effect of financial education training on the financial literacy of spanish students in pisa the aim of this paper is to analyze the effect of financial education training on spanish secondary students to do this we rely on data from pisa 2012 this included an assessment of students fi

using maimonides rule to estimate the effect of class size on scholastic achievement the twelfth century rabbinic scholar maimonides proposed a maximum class size of 40 this same maximum induces a nonlinear and nonmonotonic relationship between grade enrollment and class size in israeli public schools today maimonides rule of 40 is used here to construct instrumental variables estimates of effects of class size on test scores the resulting identiecation strategy can be viewed as an application of donald campbell s regression discontinuity design to the class size question the estimates show that reducing class size induces a signiecant and substantial increase in test scores for fourth and efth graders although not for third graders when asked about their views on class size in surveys parents and teachers generally report that they prefer smaller classes this may be because those involved with teaching believe that smaller classes promote student learning or simply because smaller classes offer a more pleasant environment for the pupils and teachers who are in them mueller chase and walden 1988 social scientists and school administrators also have a longstanding interest in the class size question class size is often thought to be easier to manipulate than other school inputs and it is a variable at the heart of policy debates on school quality and the allocation of school resources in many countries see e g robinson 1990 for the united states ofsted 1995 for the united kingdom and moshel ravid 1995 for israel this broad interest in the consequences of changing class size

team theory garbage cans and real organizations some history and prospects of economic research on decision making in organizations this essay attempts to articulate and advance a long term agenda for organizational economics the essay begins with a general discussion of four specific items on this agenda and then moves to a more specific discussion of decision making in organizations beginning with two polar opposite conceptions team theory and garbage cans and then describing several recent economic models part of the rationale for writing this essay is that this agenda has both substantive and methodological commonalities with the work of james march copyright 2003 oxford university press

transaction cost economics the natural progression abstract this manuscript provides the nobel laureate s reflections on transaction cost economics the overview section frames governance as the overarching concept and transaction cost economics as the means by which to breathe operational content into governance and organization the vertical integration section identifies efficiency factors associated with determining when a firm produces a good or service to its own needs rather than outsource a discussion of the rudiments of transaction cost analysis is subsequently provided puzzles and challenges that require pushing the logic of efficient governance to completion are examined and followed by concluding remarks

transaction cost economics past present and future oliver williamson is the founder and chief developer of transaction cost economics tce in this brief essay on the occasion of his nobel memorial prize i offer a partial discussion of williamson s contributions by first summarizing some of the accomplishments of tce past and then sketching some of the opportunities for tce future most of the topics in both sections tce past and tce future start with a quotation from williamson s early work that i think still speaks volumes today that is while fellow travelers and successors have acted on one set of williamson s insights helping to produce the accomplishments of tce past another collection of williamson s insights has gone relatively unremarked creating some of the opportunities for tce future

assessing the effect of educational programs on public schools performance this paper provides evidence on the effectiveness in the implementation of an educational program which offered public schools in catalonia spain the opportunity to improve the quality of educati

causal inference on education policies a survey of empirical studies using pisa timss and pirls the identification of the causal effects of educational policies is the top priority in recent education economics literature as a result a shift can be observed in the strategies of empirical studies they have moved from the use of standard multivariate statistical methods which identify correlations or associations between variables only to more complex econometric strategies which can help to identify causal relationships however exogenous variations in databases have to be identified in order to apply causal inference techniques this is a far from straightforward task for this reason this paper provides an extensive and comprehensive overview of the literature using quasi experimental techniques applied to three well known international large scale comparative assessments such as pisa pirls or timss over the period 2004 2016 in particular we review empirical studies employing instrumental variables regression discontinuity designs difference in differences and propensity score matching to the above databases additionally we provide a detailed summary of estimation strategies issues treated and profitability in terms of the quality of publications to encourage further potential evaluations the paper concludes with some operational recommendations for prospective researchers in the field

transaction costs and contractual incompleteness the case of electricite de france abstract this paper explores the incompleteness of inter firm contracts through the lens of recent developments in transaction cost economics we built a non truncated contract database representing all the relationships of electricite de france edf with its coal carriers over the period 1977 1997 we tested and corroborated most propositions derived from transaction cost theory relating contractual incompleteness to transaction characteristics even when we considered the complete set of the theory s propositions by endogeneizing the asset specificity at stake in transactions to our knowledge this kind of test has never been conducted before

causal effects in education abstract in recent years a wave of new studies on the effects of educational interventions on student performance has emerged the realization that inputs in the education process are endogenous is important for the validity of traditional findings because of ignoring endogeneity bias all traditional estimates might be wrong recent studies exploit exogenous variation in interventions in education produced by controlled or natural experiments results generated by this methodological innovation differ substantially from the traditional findings this article reviews this new literature illustrates new methods for identifying causal effects of interventions in education and compares the findings with the traditional literature

impacts of official development assistance on agricultural growth savings and agricultural imports abstract this paper explores the links between development assistance agricultural output growth and imports in 56 developing economies over the period 1974 1990 the empirical model treats agricultural growth and imports savings and aid as endogenous the analysis also accounts for differences in macroeconomic policies the results show that aid had a positive impact on agricultural growth a robust relationship exits between aid and agricultural imports consistent with the argument that aid helps industrialized countries through market expansion and strengthened trade ties

the impact of foreign assistance on agricultural growth foreign development assistance aid takes many forms financial technical food the rationale for aid rests on humanitarian political and economic grounds the effectiveness of aid to agriculture is empirically assessed using a production function approach with cross sectional time series data for 98 countries results indicate that aid to agriculture has had a positive and significant impact in asia and sub saharan africa but little effect in the middle east and latin america debt problems may be influencing the effectiveness of aid in latin america aid effects did not differ across countries by income level or by importance of the agricultural sector this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

does grade retention affect students achievement some evidence from spain grade retention practices are at the forefront of the educational debate in this article we measure the effect of grade retention on spanish students achievement by using data from programme for international student assessment pisa we find that grade retention has a negative impact on educational outcomes but we confirm the importance of endogenous selection which makes observed differences between repeaters and nonrepeaters appear about 14 lower than they actually are the effect on scores of repeating is much smaller 10 of nonrepeaters average than the counterfactual reduction that nonrepeaters would suffer had they been retained as repeaters 24 of their average furthermore those who repeated a grade during primary education suffered more than those who repeated a grade in secondary school although the effect of repeating at both times is as expected larger

alternative approaches to evaluation in empirical microeconomics four alternative but related approaches to empirical evaluation of policy interventions are studied social experiments natural experiments matching methods and instrumental variables in each case the necessary assumptions and the data requirements are considered for estimation of a number of key parameters of interest these key parameters include the average treatment effect the treatment on the treated and the local average treatment effect some issues of implementation and interpretation are discussed drawing on the labour market programme evaluation literature

every catholic child in a catholic school historical resistance to state schooling contemporary private competition and student achievement across countries nineteenth century catholic doctrine strongly opposed state schooling we show that countries with larger shares of catholics in 1900 but without a catholic state religion tend to have larger shares of privately operated schools even today we use this historical pattern as a natural experiment to estimate the causal effect of contemporary private competition on student achievement in cross country student level analyses our results show that larger shares of privately operated schools lead to better student achievement in mathematics science and reading and to lower total education spending even after controlling for current catholic shares

the persistence of early childhood maturity international evidence of long run age effects a continuum of ages exists within each starting class due to the use of a single school cut off date making the oldest children approximately twenty percent older than the youngest children at school entry we provide substantial evidence that these initial maturity differences have long lasting effects on student performance across oecd countries in particular the youngest members of each cohort score 4 12 percentiles lower than the oldest members in grade four and 2 9 percentiles lower in grade eight depending upon the country in fact data from canada and the united states shows that the youngest members of a cohort are even less likely to enroll in pre university academic track courses and high end academic universities taken together these findings point to important early relative maturity effects that propagate themselves into adulthood through the structure of education systems

the theory of the firm as governance structure from choice to contract the propositions that organization matters and that it is susceptible to analysis were long greeted by skepticism by economists one reason why this message took a long time to register is that it is much easier to say that organization matters than it is to show how and why the prevalence of the science of choice approach to economics has also been an obstacle as developed herein the lessons of organization theory for economics are both different and more consequential when examined through the lens of contract this paper examines economic organization from a science of contract perspective with special emphasis on the theory of the firm

markets and hierarchies and mathematical economic theory over the past decade transaction cost economics has been partially translated in the more mathematical language of game theory and understanding of the costs of transactions has been deepened refined and extended but the translation is incomplete a great deal of human behaviour is missed and doing game theory with more life like models of individuals will bring theory closer to phenomena transaction cost economics particularly the economics of relational contracts provides a major arena for these developments since the important issues of bounded rationality and individual behavior are central to the topic copyright 1996 by oxford university press

does preschool education attendance matter evidence from a natural experiment in spain the non compulsory and non free of charge character of preschool education level before 3 years old in spain raises some doubts about the exogenous nature of this variable this article provides new evidence about the impact of preschool years on educational outcomes by exploiting a peculiar spanish database that supplies information on two classrooms at fourth grade in primary schools where students were randomly allocated into each group using an identification strategy that reproduces a natural experiment we find that belonging to the group with more average years of preschool education significantly and positively impacts on fourthgrade students average outcomes particularly an increase of one standard deviation in the difference in years of preschool attendance results in an increase of 0 16 0 13 standard deviations in the group achievement for mathematics reading in view of the importance of preschool education and considering that preschool attendance before 3 years old is related with socio economic variables we conclude that extending free preschool education to the 2 year old age group in spain should be considered especially for students in families with less favourable backgrounds

looking for a theory of the firm future challenges in this paper we present the main developments of the theories of the firm rooted in coase s coase r h 1937 the nature of the firm economica new series 4 386 405 seminal article we show that the two important topics of the nature and boundaries of the firm as well as the internal organization of the firm give place to essential contributions we present those contributions and their limits and then their possible developments finally we introduce the papers of this issue

the road taken origins and evolution of employment systems in emerging companies excerpt drawing on a unique archive of qualitative and quantitative data describing 100 bay area high technology firms within their first decade this paper examines the models of employment relations espoused by company founders and bow those models shaped the evolution of human resource management within their organizations information gleaned from interviews suggests that founders and others involved in designing and launching these companies had blueprints for the employment relation that varied along three key dimensions the primary basis of employee attachment and motivation the primary means for controlling and coordinating work and the primary criterion emphasized in selection based on combinations of these three dimensions firms in our sample cluster fall into one of four distinct types which we label the star factory engineering and commitment models multivariate statistical analyses document how the founder s employment model shaped the subsequent adoption and timing of various human resource policies and documents over these companies early histories as well as the speed with which the first full time human resource manager was appointed the findings are strongly suggestive of complementarities and a tendency toward internal consistency among dimensions of human resource management and of strong path dependence in the evolution of employment systems in organizations some implications of these findings for transactions cost perspectives on the employment relationship are discussed