Prior research has debated the relative importance of such factors as human capital, political capital and region in determining workers' earnings in reform-era urban China. This article argues that a main agent of social stratification in contemporary China continues to be the danwei, the work unit. Using data from a 1999 survey we conducted in three large Chinese cities, Wuhan, Shanghai and X...

Many businesses still put too much focus on manufacturing, marketing and sales without considering the inter-linkages amongst these elements. This paper shows the importance of including packaging logistics and supply chain management in strategic planning. By integrating these aspects, retailers and suppliers may reduce costs, environmental impact and increase profits. A case study at IKEA is ...

OBJECTIVE To examine whether the nationwide smoking ban, imposed in 2007, had an impact on the profitability of Belgian restaurants. DATA AND METHODS Objective financial reporting data on 1613 restaurants were analysed with return on assets as the outcome measure. The data were collected from the Belfirst database and cover the period 2004-2009. To assess the impact of the smoking ban, a diff...

the purpose of this study was to evaluate the profitability of hatchery litter recycling into poultry feedstuff supplement. the data were collected in 2011 in 4 provinces, by direct interviewing of all hatcheries which used the hatchery litter drying machine. net present value (npv), benefit-cost ratio (bcr), and internal rate of return (irr) methods were applied for this analysis. in the studi...

Funding combination is the most important issue for the companies while they know the amount of required capital. Companies should be careful regarding the appliance of financial providing methods compatible with the investment strategy of company and profitability. This study seeks to examine the relationship between the capital structure and the profitability of pharmaceutical companies in Ir...

Purpose – This paper aims to assess the usefulness of cost-to-serve for customer profitability management through literature review and a case study in a food-industry company. Design/methodology/approach – The research is based on a case study. The study presents the state-of-the-art of the literature review related to cost-to-serve measurement and customer profitability analysis and a case st...

A recent study shows that industry-specific analysis has no incremental advantage over economy-wide analysis in forecasting firm profitability. This result seems puzzling because some earlier studies have documented the importance of industry effects in explaining firm profitability. We reconcile the apparent inconsistency by showing that industry effects on profitability forecasting exist at t...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether neural networks and, especially the Kohonen’s self-organizing map network, can be used in profitability analysis in distribution. We focus on the physical distribution part of the supply chain and build a neural network model a profitability map using shipment data from a large company. We show how the profitability map can be used in an effic...