This paper studies the contextual factors that influence whether invention occurs during work time or leisure time. Leisure time invention, a potentially important but thus far largely unexplored source of employee creativity, refers to invention where the main underlying idea occurs while the employee is away from the workplace. We build on existing theory in the fields of organizational creativity and knowledge recombination, especially work relating context to creativity. The paper’s main theoretical contribution is to extend our understanding of the boundaries of employee creativity by adding to the discussion of how access to and exploitation of different types of resources—during work hours or during leisure time—may affect creativity. Based on survey data from more than 3,000 inventions from German employee inventors, we find that leisure time inventions are more frequently observed for conceptually based problems, in cases where interactions with people outside the organization are important for making the invention, and for smaller research and development projects. Our findings also suggest that employee inventions during work time may become more “embedded” in an environment of path-dependent resources than those made during leisure time.
Few developments are more significant in transitional economics than the development of organized commodity and financial markets. Working from a transaction costs framework, this paper analyses a set of these markets, the Russian commodity exchanges, and their attempts to order trade in commodities in the period 1990-96. These exchanges have incurred high transaction costs both in defining the property rights involved in trading and in overcoming the problems of agent search and 'immediacy'. Parallels between Russian commodity exchanges and other organized markets in Eastern Europe are drawn and remedies for the problems encountered are suggested. Copyright The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, 1998.
We look at the soft budget constraint literature in the context of the state-led restructuring of state-owned enterprises (SOE) in which institutions are both regulators charged with constraining SOE restructuring outcomes and part owners of the SOEs concerned. Such institutional agents constitute a set of what we term “owner—regulators (OR)”. These economic agents may have political problems as regulators — as suggested by the Chicago School approach to economic regulation. They can also have ownership problems — here defined by literature on the theory of the firm and on vertical structure. In this light the incentives associated with the imposition of hard budget constraints may be by themselves insufficient to radically change owner—regulator behaviour. If the implementation of such constraints does not take into account the factors highlighted by this paper, hard budget constraints are likely to be either counterproductive or irrelevant.
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