IE University

About: IE University is a education organization based out in Segovia, Castilla y León, Spain. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Corporate governance & Context (language use). The organization has 527 authors who have published 1709 publications receiving 64682 citations.

Toward a Product System Modularity Construct: Literature Review and Reconceptualization

Abstract: Product modularity has been discussed in engineering and management literature for over forty years. During this time span, definitions and views on the meaning of product modularity proliferated to the extent that it is difficult to understand the essential traits of the concept. While definitional ambiguity is often a byproduct of academic debate, it hinders the advancement of scientific knowledge as well. This paper aims to move a step forward toward a more precise definition of product modularity, by articulating a product system modularity construct in the domain of tangible, assembled artifacts. More precisely, the paper constitutively defines product modularity in terms of component separability and component combinability. An indirect operational definition for product modularity is then proposed by operationalizing component separability and component combinability. The proposed definition is finally related to other definitional perspectives synthesized by a literature review: component commonality, function binding, interface standardization, and loose coupling. In this way, the nomological network of the product modularity construct is laid out. Construct validation activities are left to further research

Firm Size Distortions and the Productivity Distribution: Evidence from France

Abstract: We show how size-contingent laws can be used to identify the equilibrium and welfare effects of labor regulation. Our framework incorporates such regulations into the Lucas (1978) model and applies this to France where many labor laws start to bind on firms with exactly 50 or more employees. Using data on the population of firms between 2002 and 2007 period, we structurally estimate the key parameters of our model to construct counterfactual size, productivity and welfare distributions. With flexible wages, the deadweight loss of the regulation is below 1% of GDP, but when wages are downwardly rigid welfare losses exceed 5%. We also show, regardless of wage flexibility, that the main losers from the regulation are workers (and to a lesser extent large firms) and the main winners are small firms.

When Necessity Becomes a Virtue: The Effect of Product Market Competition on Corporate Social Responsibility

Abstract: We test whether Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is driven by strategic considerations by empirically studying the link between competition and firms' social performance. We find that firms in more competitive industries have better social ratings. In particular, we show that (i) different market concentration proxies are negatively related to widely used CSR measures; (ii) that an increase in competition due to higher import penetration leads to superior CSR performance; (iii) that firms in more competitive environments have a superior environmental performance, measured by firm pollution levels; and (iv) that more product competition is associated to a larger within-industry CSR variance. We interpret these results as evidence that CSR is strategically chosen.

Consilience of genetics and archaeobotany in the entangled history of rice

Abstract: Major leaps forward in understanding rice both in genetics and archaeology have taken place in the past decade or so—with the publication of full draft genomes for indica and japonica rice, on the one hand, and with the spread of systematic flotation and increased recovery of archaeological spikelet bases and other rice remains on early sites in China, India and Southeast Asia. This paper will sketch a framework that coherently integrates the evidence from these burgeoning fields. This framework implies a reticulate framework in the phylogeny of early cultivated rice, with multiple starts of cultivation (two is perhaps not enough) but with the key consolidations of adaptations that must have been spread through hybridisation and therefore long-distance cultural contacts. Archaeobotanical evidence allows us to document the gradual evolutionary process of domestication through rice spikelet bases and grain size change. Separate trends in grain size change can be identified in India and China. The earliest centre of rice domestication was in the Yangtze basin of China, but a largely separate trajectory into rice cultivation can be traced in the Ganges plains of India. Intriguingly, contact-induced hybridisation is indicated for the early development of indica in northern India, ca. 2000 BC. An updated synthesis of the interwoven patterns of the spread of various rice varieties throughout Asia and to Madagascar can be suggested in which rice reached most of its historical range of important cultivation by the Iron Age.