There is no doubt that management practices are linked to the productivity and performance of a company. However, research findings are mixed. This paper provides a multi-disciplinary review of the current evidence of such a relationship and offers suggestions for further exploration. We provide...

This paper proposes a new memetic evolutionary algorithm to achieve explicit learning in rule-based nurse rostering, which involves applying a set of heuristic rules for each nurse's assignment. The main framework of the algorithm is an estimation of distribution algorithm, in which an ant-miner...

The search for patterns or motifs in data represents a problem area of key interest to finance and economic researchers. In this paper we introduce the Motif Tracking Algorithm, a novel immune inspired pattern identification tool that is able to identify unknown motifs of a non specified length...

This paper proposes a new memetic evolutionary algorithm to achieve explicit learning in rule-based nurse rostering, which involves applying a set of heuristic rules for each nurse's assignment. The main framework of the algorithm is an estimation of distribution algorithm, in which an ant-miner...

This paper realizes the Melitz-Pareto model using firm-level data from 40 Chinese manufacturing industries from 1998 and 2007. Under the hypothesis that the productivity of firms in each industry follows a Pareto distribution, we show that the domestic sales of non-exporters and the foreign...

We show in the Chinese Annual Survey of Industrial Firms that size distributions of non-exporters and exporters have different shapes, which can only be explained by assuming that their productivity distributions have different shapes. Empirical estimations verify this assumption. This paper...

When the Melitz model is implemented in practice, the industrial productivity distribution is often assumed to be of Pareto form. In this case, a fundamental relationship $\kappa\sigma-1$ must hold to guarantee the convergence of the industrial average productivity, where $\kappa$ is the...

The paper proposes a model to investigate the influences of agglomeration on heterogeneous firms' exporting behaviors. Competition and thus selection effect caused by agglomeration forces less productive firms to exit the market while agglomeration externalities increase firms' productivity and...