This article examines how globalization shaped work and employment in the German shipbuilding industry in the second half of the twentieth century. Official documents show that, as a response to global competition, originally large and labor-intensive shipyards in the northwest of Germany evolved into lean and nimble high-technology companies across four decades. Oral history interviews with former migrant and nonmigrant staff of two leading shipyards reveal that this large-scale industry transformation is a hitherto hidden history of labor mobility, migration, and evolving dimensions of diversity in the workplace. Migration is a lens through which to understand how corporate responses to global developments led to persistent patterns of social exclusion and inequality between and within groups of workers with and without migrant backgrounds that have not been documented before, namely: social divisions, unequal access to vocational training and retraining programs, unequal career opportunities, unfair redundancies, and unequal impact of precarious work.

What has been called the war for talent in companies has become a key element in organizations that want to be competitive. Talent management has already been studied and verified in terms of its impact on performance and productivity, and this has led to more and more research generating a professional and scientific interest with other variables, such as ethical behavior. In the present study it is verified, through a model of structural equations, that the organizations that apply strategies of talent management have more ethical behaviors and intention to stay. Talent management and ethical behavior would reinforce work environments, by restoring confidence in the organization. Likewise, talent management implies greater loyalty of talent, that is an antecedent of the intention to stay in the organization.

Following the seminal work of Lévi-Strauss, developed by Baker and Nelson and Duymedjian and Rüling, this paper analyzes the role that entrepreneurial bricolage played as an innovation tool in the origins and growth of four important Spanish tourism companies: Meliá, Barceló, Iberostar, and Riu. Their development has been deeply embedded in the island of Majorca (Spain), whose historical market conditions shaped and drove the companies’ bricolage actions. Entrepreneurial bricolage has generally been studied from a short-term perspective; however, this work adopts a dynamic approach that, instead of focusing on the concept of bricolage, aims to explain its evolution over time. To this end, four historical and qualitative case studies are used. The main contribution made by this paper is that the four companies did not limit their bricolage actions to contexts of scarcity but made this type of entrepreneurship a regular mechanism in their business practices, as the island’s tourism context thrived. However, the resulting innovations, as well as their main drivers, did indeed change over time.

This is the first comprehensive study of the distribution of voting rights to shareholders. Only individuals owning stock on a record date may vote. Firms, however, reveal record dates after the fact 91% of the time. With controversial votes, firms are more likely to do the opposite, and this tendency is associated with a lower passage rate for shareholder-initiated proposals. The New York Stock Exchange sells nonpublic record-date information to select investors. When stocks go ex vote, prices decline and trading volume surges, suggesting that activist investors are buying marginal votes. These trends are most pronounced with controversial votes.

We document a strong positive initial market reaction to merger announcements from bidders with either large earnings growth or significant earnings decline, relative to those with neutral earnings change, reflecting a U-shaped pattern between bidders’ earnings growth and announcement returns. However, the higher initial returns for bidders with earnings decline subsequently reverse, whereas the higher returns for bidders with high growth do not. We further show that the return patterns are driven by a tendency for retail investors to gamble that merger and acquisition deals initiated by poorly performing bidders will generate high synergies.

This article provides new evidence on how access to finance affects technological innovation and establishes the role of labor practices in shaping this relation. We exploit a unique setting, pre-Civil War America, where staggered adoption of free banking laws across states encouraged bank entry, and variation in the use of exploited workers in agriculture generated differences in producers’ demands for labor-saving technologies. Results show that access to finance spurred innovation; the positive effect on agricultural innovation diminished with labor exploitation. We establish the causal role of labor exploitation using the 1850s cholera pandemic and the influx of Irish immigrants.

We study how the market return depends on the time of the day using E-mini S&P 500 futures actively traded around the clock. Strikingly, 4 hours around European open account for the entire average market return. This period’s returns have a 1.6 Sharpe ratio and remain high after transaction costs. Average returns are a noisy zero during the remaining 20 hours. High returns are consistent with European investors processing information accumulated overnight and thus resolving uncertainty. Indeed, uncertainty reflected by VIX futures prices rises overnight and falls around European open. The results are stronger during the 2020 COVID crisis.