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In this study, the impact of owner-operator and non-owner operator rice mills on productive efficiency is investigated.

Primary data collected from a survey of 111 rice mills in the Mwea region of Kenya are used. A metafrontier approach is employed to measure overall technical efficiency which is decomposed into managerial and organisational efficiency.

The results reveal no significant difference in overall technical and managerial efficiency between owner and non-owner operated mills. However, a significant difference exists in organisational efficiency of mills: non-owner operated mills were found to be performing significantly better than owner-operated.

The authors provide supporting evidence to the study and discuss some of the significant policy implications stemming from the study.

It is recognised that for owners to take the risk of divesting control to a hired manager rather than manage the firm themselves can have major strategic, financial and often emotional consequences. However, there is little empirical evidence on how production efficiency will develop as a result of hiring a manager with the underlying economic theory providing ambiguous guidance. Standard economic theory assumes that firms behave as profit maximisers, which can be achieved by operating efficiently. However, this may not always be the case and as the literature indicates, this may especially be so for small businesses in low- and middle-income countries.

The purpose of this study is to examine whether or not gender‐related differences affect the likelihood of promotion.

The research is done on a unique dataset on the Swedish audit industry, an industry with a well‐defined and well‐known career ladder. We apply an ordered probit model to take all steps in the career ladder into consideration simultaneously.

Females are on average less likely to be promoted. Separate regressions for males and females identified that the estimated promotion probability increases for males as an effect of having a child, but decreases more for males than females if males are highly involve in the care of these children. Thus, females who are involved in childcare are penalised by lower probability of promotion; however, males who are highly involved in childcare have much more to lose in terms of promotion than females do. For a family, this becomes a question of how to lose the least.

Having access to unique data, from a policy perspective our study gives some new insight into the uneven distribution between genders of career interruptions related to childcare.

One of the most successful labour market programmes in Sweden is a start‐up subsidy programme for job seekers registered at the public employment service. The purpose of this paper is to examine if there are gender differences in outcomes of this programme.

The analysis compares the outcome for female participants of the start‐up programme with that of four other matched groups: male and female non‐participants, male non‐participants, female non‐participants, and male participants.

The authors' results indicate that females entering the programme have a higher success rate than both female and male non‐participants; however, the impact is less in comparison with male than with female non‐participants. Compared to a matched sample of males in the start‐up scheme, female participants are less successful.

The paper concludes is that it is essential to find evidence regarding which programmes work for which target groups and to find out why effects differ by categories. Such knowledge could be used for fine‐tuning labour market policy programmes.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the state funded business counselling on firm growth.

A quasi-experimental difference-in-difference estimation of treatment effects, using a matched sample of comparable untreated firms.

Firms that have been granted counselling vouchers have a higher growth in value added than comparable untreated firms. This effect is mainly due to increased use of labour and capital, rather than increased efficiency. Results are upwardly biased due to sample selection among treated firms.

An improved strategy for identifying potential comparison firms from the pool of all firms may be necessary for further impact evaluations on business development programmes.

Policy makers may have to reconsider the programme design, since the programme currently suffer from a large potential for crowding-out, and low additional value of business counselling.

The paper uses a matching procedure in order to infer causal effects of business counselling and compares the effect of, respectively, contamination and selection on estimated impact on firm growth and survival. The data used are an original, rich micro-level data set on state investment support to businesses.

Authenticity has been studied from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, leading to a rich but confused literature. This study, a review, aims to compare the psychology and sociology/tourism definitions of authenticity to clarify the concept. From a psychological perspective, authenticity is a mental appraisal of an object or experience as valued leading to feelings and summative judgements (such as satisfaction or perceived value). In objective authenticity, a person values the object due to belief in an expert’s opinion, constructive authenticity relies on socially constructed values, while existential authenticity is based on one’s self-identity. The resultant achievement of a valued goal, such as seeing a valued object, leads to feelings of pleasure. Sociological definitions are similar but based on different theoretical antecedent causes of constructed and existential authenticity. The paper further discusses the use of theory in tourism and the project to develop tourism as a discipline. This project is considered unlikely to be successful and in turn, as argued, it is more useful to apply theory from other disciplines in a multidisciplinary manner. The results emphasise that it is necessary for tourism researchers to understand the origins and development of the concepts they use and their various definitions.