the impact on economic performance of a transformation in workplace relations this study examines how a transformation in patterns of conflict and cooperation affected economic performance in 25 work areas of a large unionized manufacturing facility in the period 1984 87 unlike most studies of industrial relations and economic performance this study clearly distinguishes conflict from cooperation but evaluates the two together rather than focusing on only one an analysis of data collected from union and employer records and interviews strongly suggests that work areas with traditional labor management relations rooted in adversarial assumptions had higher costs more scrap lower productivity and a lower return to direct labor hours worked than work areas with transformational relations characterized by increased cooperation and improved dispute resolution

inflation and uncertainty tests for temporal ordering for the postwar united states increases in the rate of inflation tend to precede increases in the level of inflation uncertainty the finding suggests that higher inflation uncertainty is part of the welfare cost of inflation possible explanations are 1 a high rate of inflation increases uncertainty about future monetary policy and 2 there is uncertainty about the persistence of inflation copyright 1995 by ohio state university press

skill demands and mismatch in u s manufacturing recent economic events have sparked debates over the degree of structural mismatch in the u s economy one of the most frequent claims is that workers lack the skills that employers demand the existing literature however analyzes this potential mismatch at a high level of aggregation with abstract indices and noisy proxies that obscure the underlying mechanisms the authors address these issues by presenting and analyzing results from a survey of u s manufacturing establishments the survey is the first to their knowledge to directly measure concrete employer skill demands and hiring experiences in a nationally representative survey at the industry level the findings indicate that demand for higher level skills is generally modest and that three quarters of manufacturing establishments do not show signs of hiring difficulties among the remainder demands for higher level math and reading skills are significant predictors of long term vacancies but demands for computer skills and other critical

industrial relations performance economic performance and qwl programs an interplant analysis this study analyzes the relationship among plant level measures of industrial relations performance economic performance and quality of working life programs the analysis employs pooled time series and cross section data from 18 plants within a division of general motors for the years 1970 79 the empirical results show strong associations between industrial relations and economic performance measures and limited support for the hypothesis that quality of working life efforts improve both kinds of performance

a theory of ambiguity credibility and inflation under discretion and asymmetric information this paper develops a positive theory of credibility ambiguity and inflation under discretion and asymmetric information the monetary policymaker maximizes his own politically motivated objective function that is positively related to economic stimulation through monetary surprises and negatively related to monetary growth the relative importance he assigns to each target shifts stochastically through time his current preference trade off is known to him but not to the public when choosing the state contingent path of money growth for the present and the future the policymaker compares the benefits from current stimulation with the costs associated with higher future inflation expectations current monetary growth conveys information to the public about future money growth because there is persistence in the policymaker s objectives although expectations are rational information is imperfect because monetary control procedures are imprecise as a result the public cannot correctly distinguish persistent changes of emphasis on different policy objectives from transitory monetary control errors the public becomes aware of changes gradually by observing past monetary growth credibility is defined in terms of the speed with which the public recognizes changes in the objectives of the policymaker credibility is lower the noisier monetary control and the more stable the objectives of the policymaker looser monetary control and a higher degree of time preference on the part of the policymaker induce him to produce higher and more variable monetary growth when the policymaker is free to determine the accuracy of monetary control he does not always choose the most effective control available in spite of the fact that monetary surprises always have an expected value of zero the reason is that ambiguous control procedures enable the policymaker to generate positive surprises when he cares more than on average about economic stimulation he leaves the inevitable negative surprises for periods in which he cares more about inflation prevention this result provides an explanation for the fed s preference for ambiguity recently documented by goodfriend 1986 the policymaker is more likely to pick more ambiguous control procedures the more uncertain his objectives and the higher his time preference the paper also provides a theoretical underpinning for the well documented crosscountry positive correlation between the level and the variability of inflation

the euro and inflation uncertainty in the european monetary union in this paper we investigate empirically the relationship between inflation and inflation uncertainty in twelve emu countries we estimate a time varying parameter model with a garch specification for the conditional volatility of inflation in order to distinguish between short run structural and impulse and steady state uncertainty we then introduce a dummy variable to model the policy regime shift which occurred in 1999 with the introduction of the euro and its effects on the links between inflation and inflation uncertainty we find that steady state inflation has generally remained stable with the important exception of germany where the trend has become positive steady state inflation uncertainty and inflation persistence have both increased and the relationship between inflation and inflation uncertainty has broken down in many countries these findings cast doubt on the optimistic view taken by the ecb concerning its success in controlling inflation and suggest the need for improvements in its analytical framework

macroeconomic uncertainty and performance in the european union abstract we use a very general bivariate garch m model and monthly data on eu countries covering the 1962 2003 period to test for the impact of real output growth and nominal inflation macroeconomic uncertainty on inflation and output growth our evidence supports a number of important conclusions first in the majority of countries uncertainty regarding the output growth rate is related to the average growth rate and the effect in several countries is negative second in half of the cases there is no significant relationship between inflation uncertainty and output growth performance third inflation and output uncertainty have a mixed effect on inflation nevertheless considerable evidence for the cukierman meltzer hypothesis is obtained our conclusions are based on adopting both a structural and a reduced form bivariate garch model finally we also find statistically significant evidence of regime switching for both inflation and output growth volatility throughout the sample

re examining inflation and inflation uncertainty in developed and emerging countries abstract this paper examines the relationship between inflation and inflation uncertainty for both developed and emerging countries we find new evidence that suggests positive inflationary shocks have stronger impacts on inflation uncertainty for mainly latin american countries

university research intellectual property rights and european innovation systems this paper surveys the literature on university patenting from the point of view of the economic theory of patents it is argued that patenting knowledge developed by university researchers is paradoxical patents are normally intended to stimulate knowledge development by providing property rights but universities operate also under a different incentive scheme i e they receive public funds to perform socially useful knowledge in the debate surrounding the so called bayh dole act in the usa it has however been argued that patents on university inventions may be necessary to stimulate technology transfer from universities to private firms the first part of the paper addresses two major questions first what is the economic logic of bayh dole and second what were the effects on universities and the knowledge they develop in the second part the paper addresses the issue of whether bayh dole like legislation would be beneficial for european countries in a number of european countries a suggestion has been made that this could enhance knowledge transfer from the public to the private sector using a new database resulting from a survey among patent inventors in six european countries an assessment is given of the degree of university patenting in europe because university researchers are often involved in patented inventions without the university being listed as a patent applicant statistics based on the patent office databases alone often underestimate university patenting in europe the paper ends with a discussion of how this european practice of university patenting affects public private knowledge transfer in europe and how this compares to the effects of the bayh dole act in the usa

carrots and sticks pay supervision and turnover the efficiency wage model ewm has been advanced as an explanation for large and persistent wage differentials the shirking version of the ewm assumes a trade off between self supervision and external supervision the turnover version assumes turnover is costly to the firm variation across firms in the cost of monitoring shirking or turnover then is hypothesized to account for wage variations across firms for homogeneous workers using a new sample of firm data this paper presents empirical evidence of the trade off of wage premiums for supervisory intensity and turnover little evidence is found to support either version of the ewm

the asymmetric effects of uncertainty on inflation and output growth we study the effects of growth volatility and inflation volatility on average rates of output growth and inflation for post war us data our results suggest that increased growth uncertainty is associated with significantly lower average growth while higher inflation uncertainty is significantly negatively correlated with lower output growth and lower average inflation both inflation and growth display evidence of significant asymmetric response to positive and negative shocks of equal magnitude copyright 2004 john wiley sons ltd

employee voice human resource practices and quit rates evidence from the telecommunications industry the authors draw on strategic human resource and industrial relations theories to identify the sets of employee voice mechanisms and human resource practices that are likely to predict firm level quit rates then empirically evaluate the predictive power of these variables using data from a 1998 establishmentlevel survey in the telecommunications industry with respect to alternative voice mechanisms they find that union representation predicts lower quit rates even after they control for compensation and a wide range of other human resource practices that may be affected by collective bargaining also predicting lower quit rates is employee participation in offline problem solving groups and in self directed teams no apparent association is found between quit rates and the availability of nonunion dispute resolution procedures regarding human resource practices higher relative wages and internal promotion policies predict lower quit rates and contingent staffing electronic monitoring and variable pay predict higher rates

the relationship between inflation and inflation uncertainty in the uk 1885 1998 abstract using a long series of uk inflation data i have provided strong evidence in favour of the hypothesis that inflationary periods are associated with high inflation uncertainty this result supports the friedman ball hypothesis and has important implications for the inflation output relationship provided that more inflation uncertainty leads to lower output

union wage practices and wage dispersion within establishments this study analyzes establishment level data primarily to examine the effect of unionism on the wage structure within establishments the major finding is that within establishment dispersion of wages is significantly narrower in unionized than in nonunionized establishments a pattern the author attributes in large part to unions wage practices such as single rate or automatic progression modes of wage payment as opposed to merit reviews and individual wage determination the data also show that dispersion in average wages is narrower among organized plants but by more modest amounts than the within establishment differential overall the evidence suggests a major role for explicit union wage policies in explaining the dispersion of wages within firms and in the economy as a whole

australian evidence on the exit voice model of the labor market two predictions of the exit voice model of union activity that have been confirmed by empirical research in the united states are that union workers will have longer tenures and lower quit rates th

the effects of grievance activity on productivity this study develops and tests a production function that includes a plant s grievance filing rate as a determinant of productivity application of that function to data on nine unionized paper mill

inflation and inflation uncertainty in argentina 1810 2005 abstract unit root tests results suggest that inflation in argentina for the period 1810 2005 is a stationary series when account is taken of structural breaks that coincide with bouts of hyperinflation a garch 1 1 model of annual inflation suggests a positive short run relation between the mean and variance of inflation supporting friedman s hypothesis that high inflation is associated with more variable inflation

on inflation and inflation uncertainty in the g7 countries abstract the relationship between inflation and inflation uncertainty is investigated in the g7 countries from 1948 to 1993 garch models are used to generate a measure of inflation uncertainty and then granger methods are employed to test the causality between average inflation and inflation uncertainty in all g7 countries inflation significantly raises inflation uncertainty as predicted by friedman and ball weaker evidence is found that inflation uncertainty granger causes inflation in three countries us uk and germany increased inflation uncertainty lowers inflation while in two countries japan and france increased inflation uncertainty raises inflation

nominal uncertainty and inflation the role of european union membership abstract we provide evidence that higher inflation uncertainty leads to higher inflation in the new european union eu member states and candidate countries only prior to eu accession during eu accession and entry inflation uncertainty has no effect on mean inflation

a test of an efficiency model of grievance activity copyright by cornell university this is the publisher s version also available electronically from http ilr sagepub com content 45 1 3 refs

growing apart the changing firm size wage premium and its inequality consequences wage inequality in the united states has risen dramatically over the past few decades prompting scholars to develop a number of theoretical accounts for the upward trend this study argues that large firms have been a prominent labor market institution that mitigates inequality by compensating their low and middle wage employees with a greater premium than their higher wage counterparts large u s firms reduced overall wage dispersion yet broader changes to employment relations associated with the demise of internal labor markets and the emergence of alternative employment arrangements have undermined large firms role as an equalizing institution using data from the current population survey and the survey of income and program participation we find that in 1989 although all private sector workers benefited from a firm size wage premium the premium was significantly higher for individuals at the lower end and middle of the wage distribution compared to those at the higher end between 1989 and

changes in university patent quality after the bayh dole act a re examination abstract the bayh dole act of 1980 facilitated the retention by universities of patent rights resulting from government funded academic research thus encouraging university entry into patenting and licensing though the act is widely recognized to be a major change in federal policy towards academic research surprisingly little empirical analysis has been directed at assessing its impacts on the academy and on university industry research relationships an important exception is the work of henderson et al rev econ stat 80 1998 119 127 which examined the impact of bayh dole on the quality of university patents as measured by the number of times they are cited in subsequent patents the authors found that the quality of academic patents declined dramatically after bayh dole a finding that has potentially important policy implications in this paper we revisit this influential finding by using a longer stream of patent citations data we show that the results of the henderson et al study reflect changes in the intertemporal distribution of citations to university patents rather than a significant change in the total number of citations these patents eventually receive this has important implications not only for the evaluation of bayh dole but also for future research using patent citations as economic indicators