Using data collected by the World Bank, we empirically investigate the relationship between Chinese manufacturers' supply chain attributes, raw material and finished goods inventory turnover, and return on sales. Our findings indicate that location proximity, relationship continuity, and the...

I report the results of observations of management practices in 20 Russian manufacturing subsidiaries of Western multinational corporations (MNCs). I argue that to counterbalance the higher country-specific risks associated with investing in Russia, MNCs impose on their Russian subsidiaries high...

In this era of globalization the traditional Ricardian theory of trade in products governed by comparative advantages is replaced by a modern theory of trade in tasks. Tasks are outsourced to those places in the world where the lower production costs outweigh the additional transaction costs...

Based on three case studies, a new Lean financial model is developed. This new model improves the organization by increasing Lean goal congruent behavior. The new financial (costing) model uses the waste categories known from Lean in order to create decision information for Lean decisions such...

This paper explores the pattern and determinants of the servicification of Korean manufacturing over the period 2006-2018. We first compute the net contribution of in-house provision of services to manufacturing value added, using data from an employee-level labour survey. We compare this result...

Recent theoretical models have shown that when demand is slack, firms tend to introduce new management practices and/or reorganize their production methods; however, few micro econometric studies deal directly with the relationship between organizational change and economic crises. In this...

We provide a novel, supply network-based perspective on inventory productivity and incentives for its improvement. Using data from 2003 to 2019, we find that inventory productivity reduces materially and statistically significantly for firms located upstream in the supply network, and increases...

China is the world's largest user of industrial robots. In 2016, sales of industrial robots in China reached 87,000 units, accounting for around 30 percent of the global market. To put this number in perspective, robot sales in all of Europe and the Americas in 2016 reached 97,300 units...

Investment in ICT infrastructure development is crucial to international trade through its provision of reliable interconnectedness via communication. This can be augmented via institutional intervention, which addresses opportunistic or rent-seeking behaviours of ICT infrastructure providers...

In the early 1990's, the Argentine government promoted a framework for productivity-based negotiations between firms and unions at low levels of organization. The policy weakened the industry-wide collective bargaining system, which sets working conditions for all firms in an industry. This...