Francisco Lima

External recruitments and firm performance

In the context of tournament theory, and drawing on a panel data set of several firms and their employees, evidence is presented of a negative relationship between the share of external recruitments for top management positions and firm productivity.

Entrepreneurial Skills and Workers' Wages in Small Firms

This paper contributes to the understanding of how small firms are organized and managed. It tests an entrepreneur-worker matching model in small entrepreneurial firms. The model contemplates the existence of complementarities between workers’ and entrepreneur’s skills. Using a Portuguese longitudinal matched employer–employee dataset for the period 1995–2003, the empirical analysis provides descriptive results consistent with the matching model: skill stratification—entrepreneurs are more skilled than workers; scale effects—more skilled entrepreneurs run larger firms, though limited by the restriction on firm size; and positive sorting—more skilled entrepreneurs matched with more skilled workers. The estimation of wage regressions shows that the higher the level of education and experience of the entrepreneur, the higher the wage premium for workers. Results suggest that workers’ wages reflect the value of the match with entrepreneur’s skills. Thus, entrepreneurial skills have an impact not only on job creation, but also on the quality of jobs created.

The Careers of Top Managers and Firm Openness: Internal versus External Labour Markets

This paper studies the careers of top managers using a large panel of firms. The main objective is to empirically evaluate the role of learning and human capital acquisition in promotion dynamics along with variables capturing the formation of internal labour market (ILM) practices. We find that promotion is negatively correlated with tenure, but that there is a non-linear negative duration dependence with elapsed time since the last promotion event. Firms showing a weaker degree of ILM are less prone to promote insiders. We next take the managers career inside a firm as a sequence of promotion decisions, and use a nested structure of the promotion decision modelled as a nested logit model. Results show that the top managers progression nest into four types: loser, early starter, late beginner, and champion, and that the degree of ILM as a signigicant impact on the process of learning inside the firm.

Football players’ career and wage profiles

ABSTRACT The objective of this article is to look over football players’ career path, from lower leagues to the first league, and the associated wage profile. The information comes from a Portuguese longitudinal matched employer–employee data set defining several career events according to players’ movement across football clubs and across professional and semi-professional leagues. Our identifying strategy relies on coach changes to reduce the potential bias resulting from players’ moves between clubs. The estimated first-difference wage equations indicate that players can expect a wage premium when they get transferred to new clubs in higher leagues or a wage penalty when moving to lower leagues. Players who stay in the same club after the club being relegated can also expect a wage penalty.

A Business Simulation with an Agent-Based Deliberative Model of Consumer Behaviour

Agent-based modelling, a way to simulate complex systems comprised of autonomous and interacting agents, is perhaps one of the most promising developments in experiential learning. In this paper we present a business simulation where the marketplace is modelled as an evolving system of deliberative (consumer) agents acting as utility maximizers. Concretely, we describe the deliberative-based architecture of our consumer agents and its unique properties. Additionally, we present our preliminary results which suggest participants are better able to understand the simulation when provided with the unique information of the agent-based approach.