Despite the major cultural and political differences between the United States and China, in both countries access to jobs is supposed to be guided by fair and equitable procedures. In the US, there is a presumption of an open labor market in which potential employees compete on the basis of their qualifications, where the fairness of decisions is guided by anti-discrimination laws and normative organizational policies. In China, although there is a history of close relationships that guide the exchange of favors, following the 1949 revolution, Communist Party leaders were given the authority to allocate positions in ways that were supposed to eliminate special privileges of class and background. Yet recent research has suggested that social connections are an important part of getting a job in both the US and China for two-thirds to three-quarters of job seekers. In the US context, such connections are described as social capital. In the Chinese context, connections are defined as guanxi. In this article, we review research on labor market processes in both the US and China to address three important questions: (a) How can we understand the similar functioning of labor markets in such distinct cultural and political systems as the US and China? (b) What are the mechanisms or processes by which people find jobs in the US and China, and how are people able to access these mechanisms or processes in the context of constraining social structures and legal environments? and (c) What are the theoretical implications of the ‘generalized particularism’ that seems to shape labor markets in both the US and China.

Using unique U.S. Census data sets, we analyze how entrepreneurial firms’ product market characteristics affect their choice between going public, being acquired, or remaining private. Size, total factor productivity (TFP), sales growth, capital expenditure, market share, access to private funding, and human capital intensiveness significantly increase a private firm’s likelihood of an initial public offering (IPO) relative to an acquisition. Firms in industries with less information asymmetry and higher stock liquidity are more likely to choose an IPO over an acquisition. While TFP peaks around either form of exit, the rate of increase in TFP prior to acquisitions and the subsequent decrease is smaller than that around IPOs.

IBM has been the subject of considerable study by historians, economists, business management professors, and journalists. This essay surveys the various writings on the company, placing their contributions in a roughly chronological account of the company's history, from its early days in tabulating through to its dominance of global markets in computing. The essay includes well-known studies of IBM in addition to more obscure accounts. It emphasizes the need to consider the company's culture along with its technological and managerial changes in order to grasp the reasons for its longevity.

Turnover intention is a negative outcome for an organization. The purpose of this article is to examine the relationships among work passion, subjective well-being, career adaptability, and turnover intention for Chinese government employees. The article consists of an empirical study with a sample of 472 government employees in Shandong Province, China. Participants completed a series of questionnaires in three waves. The results indicate that harmonious passion is negatively related to turnover intention and that obsessive passion is positively related to turnover intention. Additionally, the relationship between harmonious/obsessive passion and turnover is mediated by subjective well-being, and career adaptability moderates the relationship between harmonious/obsessive passion and subjective well-being. Implications are discussed.

Advances in theoretical and computable general equilibrium modeling brought their conceptual foundations more in line with standard microeconomic constructs. This reduced the theoretical gap between welfare measurements using a partial or a general equilibrium approach. However, the separation of the partial and general equilibrium literatures lingers in many applications that this manuscript seeks to bridge. The now shared conceptual foundations, the importance of functional specification, the role of common price movements and closure rules are discussed. The continuing stricture in U.S. Government guidelines against including secondary effects in welfare measures is questioned.

Although benefit-cost analysis (BCA) can be traced back to European thinkers, its first practical applications were in the United States. Recent years have witnessed a growing demand for economic appraisals of policies in different sectors in Europe, but the implementation rate is still low compared to that in the United States. This article introduces a symposium that includes four articles that present current examples of how BCA is being applied in different sectors and in different institutional settings in Europe. They deal with environmental valuation in the United Kingdom, economic analysis for investment in Sweden’s transport sector, economic versus financial returns in European Union investment project appraisal, and BCA in EU chemicals legislation. The goal is to stimulate continuing discussion on the implementation of BCA, not only in Europe but also worldwide.

Beginning as a planning tool within Sweden’s national road administration some 50 years ago, benefit-cost analysis (BCA) has come to be a pillar of the national transport policy because of subsequent strategic choices made by the national parliament. These choices made it necessary to widen the analysis of costs to include also externalities and a foregone conclusion was that efficient investment priorities should be made based on BCA. But no one asked whether the political decision makers or the BCA models were up to that task. This paper reviews the institutional framework and practice of BCA in Sweden for transport infrastructure investment, and considers design issues that have been and still are debated, such as whether the discount rate should include a risk term and how to account for the marginal cost of public funds. A main concern with BCA results is the underestimation of construction costs, making transport sector projects look better than they are. Several ex post analyses have established that a higher NPV ratio increases the probability of being included in the investment program proposal prepared by the agency. The requirement to let projects undergo BCA seems to make planners “trim” project proposals by trying to reduce investment costs without significantly reducing benefits. This relationship is weaker among profitable projects. Moreover, there is no correlation between rate of return and the probability of being included in the final program, which is established on political grounds.