land tenure investment incentives and the choice of techniques evidence from nicaragua the choice of cultivation techniques is a key determinant of agricultural productivity and has important consequences for income growth and poverty reduction in developing countries household data from nicaragua are used to show that the choice of cultivation technique depends on farmers tenure status even when techniques are observable and contractible in particular tree crops are less likely to be grown on rented than on owner cultivated plots further evidence indicates that the result follows from landlords inability or unwillingness to commit to long term tenancy contracts rather than from agency costs due to risk aversion or limited liability

organizational change and hysteresis in british manufacturing industry a perspective from the donovan commission report labor productivity in british manufacturing industry rose significantly during the severe recession of the early 1980s contrary to historical and international parallels furthermore labor productivity continued to rise during the rest of the decade despite the return of output to its pre 1980 level the author explains these stylized facts by analyzing wage work rule negotiations as a three person noncooperative bargaining game in which workers with different skills negotiate independently this model attempts to capture the insights of a royal commission on industrial relations the author also argues that this explanation of the stylized facts is consistent with the available evidence copyright 1995 by the london school of economics and political science

longevity risk subjective survival expectations and individual saving behavior abstract we provide evidence of individuals awareness of longevity risk the uncertainty about future survival probabilities based on subjective survival expectations elicited in the survey of health ageing and retirement in europe share and matching data on longevity risk from the human mortality database we find a positive relationship between the forecast dispersion in subjective survival estimates and longevity risk which indicates that individuals are to some extent aware of longevity risk our analysis of savings behavior shows that the dispersion in survival estimates is primarily explained by individuals disagreeing on the survival probability and not by their true awareness of the underlying uncertainty individuals do not save more on average when faced with longevity risk although theory suggests they should

union effects on municipal employment and wages a longitudinal approach this article examines municipal union employment and wage effects in a sample of police fire sanitation streets and highways and finance and control departments from approximately 900 u s cities during 1977 80 cross section results for 1980 suggest positive union contract effects on fire fighter and sanitation employment and wages consistent with demand shifts due to union political influence in municipal bargaining i then model potential omitted variables as nonstationary fixed effects and apply longitudinal models to estimation of employment and wage changes between 1977 and 1980 the longitudinal results provide little support for the demand shift hypothesis

limited liability moral hazard and share tenancy abstract this paper contributes to the literature on share tenancy by reexamining a framework developed in basu 1992 it is shown that limited liability and moral hazard in effort provides a richer theory of share contracts when the tenant also has discretion in the choice of projects

assessing the functioning of land rental markets in ethiopia although a large theoretical literature discusses the possible inefficiency of sharecropping contracts the empirical evidence on this phenomenon has been ambiguous at best household level fixed effect estimates from about 8 500 plots operated by households that own and sharecrop land in the ethiopian highlands provide support for the hypothesis of marshallian inefficiency at the same time a factor adjustment model suggests that the extent to which rental markets allow households to attain their desired operational holding size is extremely limited our analysis points towards factor market imperfections no rental for oxen lack of alternative employment opportunities and tenure insecurity as possible reasons underlying such behavior suggesting that rather than worrying almost exclusively about marshallian inefficiency it is equally warranted to give due attention to the policy framework within which land rental markets operate

pollution claim settlements reconsidered hidden information and bounded payments abstract a principal s production decision imposes a negative externality on an agent the principal may be a pollution generating firm the agent may be a nearby town the principal offers a contract to the agent who has the right to be free of pollution then the agent privately learns the disutility of pollution finally a production level and a transfer payment are implemented suppose there is an upper bound possibly zero on payments that the agent can make to the principal in the second best solution there is underproduction for low cost types while there is overproduction for high cost types in contrast to standard adverse selection models of pollution claim settlements there may thus be too much pollution compared to the first best solution

wages and employment under trade unionism microeconomic models and macroeconomic applications the first part of this paper is a critical survey of microeconomic research into behavioural models of trade unionism although certain formulations of union objectives and models of wage and employment determination in unionized markets have found favor with economists unfortunately only a little is known about their empirical relevance the second part of this paper deals with the daunting problems of applying these models at the macroeconomic level one such model is estimated with data from sweden s mining and manufacturing sector from 1968 to 1982

macroeconomics financial variables and computable general equilibrium models abstract this paper surveys micro macro computable general equilibrium cge models that incorporate asset markets and product and factor markets recent models are designed to analyze the impact on economic performance and the distribution of income in developing economies of structural adjustment and stabilization programs implemented in response to macro shocks these financial cge models add a loanable funds market incorporating a variety of assets to a cge model that already incorporates flow equilibria in product and factor markets these financial models start from tradefocused cge models and also draw on earlier work with micro and macrostructuralist models in specifying the interactions between financial variables and the real side of the economy the paper also compares these models to dynamic macro models both short run adaptive models with lagged adjustment mechanisms and longer run forward looking models the paper discusses the theoretical problems such models face in reconciling micro focused cge models with macro models incorporating dynamic behavior

the effect of minimum salaries on employment of teachers a test of the monopsony model author affiliation william m boal college of business and public administration drake university des moines iowa 50311 usa e mail william boal drake edu acknowledgment this paper has benefited from helpful comments on earlier drafts by david harrington and ronald oaxaca by seminar participants at drake university and iowa state university and by anonymous referees 1 introductionthe market for schoolteachers has long been cited as an example of labor monopsony where employers that is school districts enjoy market power ehrenberg and smith 2000 hyclak johnes and thornton 2005 the reasons offered are plausible by definition school districts enjoy exclusive territories teachers have specialized training that might not be interesting to nearby nonschool employers many teachers are second earners in their families and might be unwilling to relocate in response to distant job offers there is some evidence that teachers have strong personal geographic preferences boyd et al 2005 it would appear that the set of potential employers available to a certified teacher is limited to the set of school districts within commuting distance of current residence for these reasons it is often argued that the greatest monopsony power is probably held by rural school districts because of their large geographic size an empirical literature dating back to landon and baird 1971 has tried to document monopsony in this market by regressing teacher salaries on measures of geographic concentration of school districts these studies often appear to find a negative effect of geographic concentration on teacher salaries see luizer and thornton 1986 for a survey a major difficulty with the salary concentration research strategy is that concentration is inversely related to urbanization because urban areas tend to have many school districts in close proximity and salaries for all workers tend to be higher in urban areas the apparent negative estimated effect of concentration may disappear when sufficient measures of urbanization are included ransom boal and beck 1998 moreover the urban rural difference in teacher salaries appears similar to the urban rural difference for other professionals hirsch and nottage 1998 1a second difficulty with the salary concentration research strategy is the increasing presence of teachers unions 2 a monopsonist faces or at least perceives an upward sloping supply of labor this upward slope raises marginal labor cost above the current wage causing the monopsonist to reduce employment equilibrium occurs on the labor supply curve but below the monopsonist s labor demand curve by contrast a union tries to raise the wage by moving the equilibrium above the supply curve estimates based on 1970s data show that unionized teachers enjoyed an average wage differential of roughly 10 3 in some cases a union might even move the equilibrium above the demand curve this is the prediction of the so called contract curve model for which eberts and stone 1984 1986 found some evidence among new york state school districts any test for monopsony ought to exclude unionized districts from the sample or control for unionism in some way this has not generally been done 4a recent seemingly unrelated literature has investigated the effects of legal minimum wages on employment in fast food restaurants katz and krueger 1992 card and krueger 1994 this literature has apparently documented slight increases in employment following increases in minimum wages the authors note that this result is incompatible with competitive labor markets and may be evidence for employer monopsony a modest increase in a minimum wage may increase employment in a monopsonized market because it flattens the employer s perceived labor supply curve and thereby lowers the employer s marginal labor cost curve

inequality control rights and rent seeking sugar cooperatives in maharashtra this paper presents a theory of rent seeking within farmer cooperatives in which inequality of asset ownership affects relative control rights of different groups of members the two key assumptions are constraints on lump sum transfers from poorer members and disproportionate control rights wielded by wealthier members transfers of rents to the latter are achieved by depressing prices paid for inputs supplied by members and diverting resulting retained earnings the theory predicts that increased heterogeneity of landholdings in the local area causes increased inefficiency by inducing a lower input price and a lower level of installed crushing capacity predictions concerning the effect of the distribution of local landownership on sugarcane price capacity levels and participation rates of different classes of farmers are confirmed by data from nearly 100 sugar cooperatives in the indian state of maharashtra over the period 1971 93

layoffs with payoffs a bargaining model of union wage and severance pay determination popular characterizations of union preferences assume that the income of laid off union members is exogenous there is evidence however of intra union distribution schemes such as severance payments unemployment insurance retraining arrangements and early retirement schemes this paper develops a model of wage and severance pay determination by a trade union and a firm bargaining in a right to manage framework the important point differentiating the model in this paper from the orthodox union model is that it is efficiency improving in the sense that it makes full insurance possible and marginal productivity is equal to the opportunity cost of labour moreover with redundancy pay on the bargaining agenda both the right to manage and the efficient bargaining union models are characterized by the same efficiency conditions this has implications for empirical research which attempts to distinguish between these two models since the outcome of both models is the same finally the union firm bargaining model can also be compared with the outcome of the implicit contract model with redundancy pay there is an important difference between the two approaches however while the result in this paper derives from an imperfectly competitive labour market where unions and firms bargain over wages and redundancy pay the implicit contract result derives from a perfectly competitive labour market in which competitive forces lead to an efficient outcome

profit shares bargaining and unemployment i introduction weitzman 1987 has argued that in an economy with long term unemployment due to extra competitive wages profit sharing can eliminate this unemployment by lowering the marginal cost of labor jackman 1988 provides additional microfoundations for this claim by modeling long term unemployment as arising from an externality in decentralized wage setting in that model a mandated profit share lowers wages and raises net profits thereby inducing the entry of firms into the market unambiguously lowering unemployment and leaving the real wage unchanged in general equilibrium the generality of this result is put into question by holmlund 1990 who considers a similar case but with the capital stock fixed economy wide and shows that profit sharing may raise or lower unemployment depending on standard properties of the production function in that short run model firms implicitly operate on downward sloping labor demand curves so profit sharing expands employment only to the degree that it reduces wages in general equilibrium if the labor demand elasticity is great enough the general equilibrium effect of profit sharing is to raise wages and lower employment holmlund also shows that his result is independent of whether the profit share is bargained over or mandated in models with variable capital the question of the effect of profit sharing on employment does not reduce to the question of its effect on wages the introduction of profit sharing also affects net profitability and so may lead to an inflow or withdrawal of capital in the market in the long run further influencing employment in jackman s model employment unambiguously increases however jackman only considers a mandated profit share under monopoly union wage setting leaving the impact of bargaining over profit shares and wages unresolved further substantial structural differences in the models of jackman and holmlund make direct comparisons of these models difficult in the present paper i present a model in the spirit of holmlund s but with free entry of firms subject to overhead costs and show that under nash wage bargains the effect of profit sharing on both employment and compensation depends on whether the profit share is bargained over or mandated as well as on the profit accounting used to determine share payments of particular interest is the possibility that profit sharing may reduce both aggregate employment and total compensation per worker due to general equilibrium effects no such possibility exists in the models of jackman and holmlund profit sharing employment and bargaining as is well known if nash bargaining is over both wages and employment then profit sharing leaves microeconomic employment and incomes unchanged further under unilateral employment setting by firms nash union wage and profit share bargains emulate nash bargains over wages and employment pohjola 1987 anderson and devereux 1989 johnson 1990 in partial equilibrium the ability to bargain over either profit shares or employment in addition to wages raises employment and is pareto improving in general equilibrium however reservation utilities may rise enough to cause wages to rise and employment to fall this is shown by layard and nickell 1990 for bargaining over employment and by holmlund 1990 for bargaining over profit shares both models are short run models in which the capital stocks are fixed economy wide holmlund goes further to show that the same mechanism also operates for mandated profit shares in the long run model presented here holmlund s result for bargained profit shares continue to hold as does layard and nickell s for bargained employment though for different reasons the introduction of profit sharing does not produce upward wage pressure since free entry eliminates profits and thus any direct effect of profit sharing on reservation utilities rather employment is reduced if it reduces profitability and so yields exit of capital sufficient to offset the positive effect of reduced wages on employment

wage and employment determination in a unionized industry the iwa and the british columbia wood products industry two non nested models of union wage and employment determination are estimated using data on the international woodworkers of america iwa and the british columbia wood products industry one model predicts wage and employment outcomes on the labordemand function while the other predicts efficient outcomes on the contract curve the models provide empirical estimates of the union s preferences the production technology and the comparative statics of the models an attempt is made to choose the true model for this industry unfortunately non nested hypothesis tests and other criteria for model discrimination cannot reject one model in favor of the other

a theory of sharecropping the role of price behavior and imperfect competition this paper proposes a theory of sharecropping on the basis of price behavior in agriculture and imperfectly competitive nature of rural product markets we consider a contractual setting between one landlord and one tenant with seasonal variation of price where the tenant receives a low price for his output while the landlord can sell his output at a higher price by incurring a cost of storage we consider two different classes of contracts i tenancy contracts and ii crop buying contracts it is shown that sharecropping is the optimal form within tenancy contracts and it also dominates crop buying contracts provided the price variation is not too large then we consider interlinked contracts that have both tenancy and crop buying elements and show that there are multiple optimal interlinked contracts finally proposing an equilibrium refinement that incorporates imperfect competition in the rural product market it is shown that the unique contract that is robust to this refinement results in sharecropping

wages productivity and work intensity in the great depression we show that u s manufacturing wages during the great depression were importantly determined by forces on firms intensive margins short run changes in work intensity and the longer term influence of potential productivity combined to influence real wage growth by contrast the external effects of unemployment and replacement rates had much less impact empirical work is undertaken against the background of a simple efficient bargaining model that embraces earnings employment hours of work and work intensity

limited liability and the existence of share tenancy abstract the paper considers the problem confronting an absentee landlord who can lease out his land on a fixed rent contract share rent contract or a mixture of the two it is argued that in poor areas it is natural to have each contract underwritten by an implicit limited liability clause which allows a person to forego paying rent under extreme crop failures in the presence of such an implicit clause a certain tension appears between a tenant and a landlord with the former preferring risky projects and the latter preferring safe ones it is shown that in such a case share tenancy turns out to be the dominant system from among the class mentioned above because it minimises the tension between the landlord and the tenant the result is then used to discuss conditions under which share tenancy will tend to wither away

union work rules and efficiency in the building trades this paper estimates the effect of union work rules in the building trades on employment and costs by comparing factor demand elasticities for union and nonunion contractors and subcontractors over micro data from two different types of construction the results show that the elasticities of substitution between labor and nonlabor inputs and own price elasticities for nonlabor inputs are about the same for union and nonunion contractors in contrast the elasticities of substitution among different skill categories of labor and the own price elasticities for each category are much lower under unionism

market structure and the demand for unionized labor frequently the separate branches of economics grow up with far too little cross fertilization as a consequence research and results taken for granted in one field are all too frequently ignored in another such is the case with the three decades of work done on pricing behavior within a vertical stream of production the general conclusion of this work is that input monopolies will not alter their price in response to alterations in downstream market structure it is surprising that this work carried out in industrial organization has not received more attention from those studying union wage behavior this is especially so given that several of the more popular models of union behavior are similar to those we impute to the neoclassical monopoly the failure to draw on this work has resulted in several confusions in the contemporary study of unions this paper builds from the work on input pricing to demonstrate that in a very wide variety of cases the elasticity of derived demand for labor is completely invariant to product market structure in addition the specific conditions sufficient for this invariance to hold true are identified such a demonstration is important for discriminating between models of union behavior which assume bargaining along the labor demand curve and models which assume bargaining off the demand curve indeed the demonstration reveals the likely inadequacy of the labor demand curve model the logic for this conclusion is three tiered first demand curve models predict that wages will depend crucially on the elasticity of labor demand second measures of industrial concentration are usually significant in wage equations a result thought in harmony with the elasticity emphasis of demand curve models but third as will be shown market structure will typically not affect the labor demand elasticity this suggests that the conventional interpretation of the second point is wrong and casts doubt on the explanatory power of demand curve models in general while a variety of specific models of union behavior share the characteristic of bargaining along the demand curve these models are tied together by the assumption that unions choose the wage and firms respond with the employment level thus whether one assumes that unions maximize the wage bill collective rents or some explicit objective function of wage and employment

share tenancy as strategic delegation abstract the paper develops a new explanation of sharecropping based on the idea of an incentive equilibrium it considers a set up in which a few landlords in a village confront the choice of cultivating their farms by adopting different tenurial arrangements ranging from owner operation through the fixed rental system to sharecropping these landlords are the only sources of employment in the village and compete in the wages they pay to their workers in such an environment sharecropping is explained as a form of strategic delegation where a landlord gets extra benefit by having a share tenant and giving him suitable incentives

good principals or good peers parental valuation of school characteristics tiebout equilibrium and the incentive effects of competition among jurisdictions good principals or good peers parental valuation of school characteristics tiebout equilibrium and the incentive effects of competition among jurisdictions by j esse m r othstein school choice policies may by aligning admin istrators incentives with parental demand yield improved efficiency in educational production milton friedman 1962 john e chubb and terry m moe 1990 but eric a hanushek 1981 cautions if the efficiency of our school systems is due to poor incentives for teachers and admin istrators coupled with poor decision making by consumers it would be unwise to expect much from programs that seek to strengthen market forces in the selection of schools p 35 empha sis added poor decision making is not required parents may rationally choose schools with pleasant surroundings athletic facilities cultural advantages ibid p 34 over those that most efficiently pursue academic performance they may prefer poorly run schools with good peer groups over those that are more effective but en roll worse students j douglas willms and frank h echols 1992 1993 or they may simply be unable to identify effective schools thomas j kane and douglas o staiger 2002 any factor that leads parents to choose any but the most effective available schools will tend to dilute the incentives for efficient management that choice might otherwise create this study examines the distribution of stu dent outcomes across schools within metropol itan housing markets for evidence on parental demand economists have long noted that par ents choices among residential locations are potentially informative about how more com plete choice systems may operate charles m tiebout 1956 melvin v borland and roy m howsen 1992 caroline m hoxby 2000 rothstein 2005 1 i ask whether school effec tiveness plays a sufficiently important role in these decisions to create meaningful incentives for more productive school management i adopt a specific understanding of effective ness appropriate to the question at hand a substantial portion of between school differ ences in student performance can be attributed to differences in student body composition this portion includes the effects of individual stu dent characteristics on their own test scores any direct peer group effects and any indirect ef fects of a school s composition on the quality of its instruction if wealthy schools attract better teachers joseph r antos and sherwin rosen 1975 or more parental involvement this is for my purposes a peer effect it depends on the quality of the school s administration only via school composition a school administrator cannot attract demand by offering a school with wealthy students as these can be offered only if wealthy families demand the school in the first place only the remaining portion of a school s contribution to test scores is effectiveness 2 department of economics and woodrow wilson school princeton university wallace hall 3 rd floor princeton nj 08544 e mail jrothst princeton edu i thank alan auerbach tom davidoff caroline hoxby jus tin mccrary rob mcmillan john quigley cecilia rouse emmanuel saez till von wachter four anonymous refer ees editor robert moffitt seminar participants at several institutions and especially david card for helpful sugges tions i am grateful to the college board for essential data and to a national science foundation graduate research fellowship and the fisher center for real estate and urban economics at uc berkeley for funding see cecilia elena rouse 1998 julie b cullen et al 2005 william g howell et al 2002 and alan b krueger and pei zhu 2004 for analyses of several existing nonresidential choice programs though none focuses on the particular issue studied here this definition avoids the need to find observable de terminants of effectiveness which have proved elusive hanushek 1986 my definition however ignores a school s contribution to nontest outcomes e g sports or music if such outcomes motivate parental choices i will conclude that parents do not demand effective schools of

to be unionized or not to be a case for cost raising strategies under cournot oligopoly abstract this paper analyses the decision by firms under cournot oligopoly as to recognize unions in order to gain market power despite higher costs considering classical models of union firm bargaining namely right to manage rtm and efficient bargaining eb we show that for a sufficiently low level of union power eb firms might adopt cost raising strategies this theoretical prediction is compatible with some empirical evidence in favour of eb and adds to the theoretical finding that eb might dominate rtm under unionized cournot nash oligopoly it also suggests closer antitrust scrutiny as whether unions can provide cartel like services to oligopoly firms allowing them to distort product market competition at the expense of consumers

contractual structure and wealth accumulation can historical wealth distributions affect long run output and inequality despite rational saving convex technology and no externalities we consider a model of equilibrium short period financial contracts where poor agents face credit constraints owing to moral hazard and limited liability if agents have no bargaining power poor agents have no incentive to save poverty traps emerge and agents are polarized into two classes with no interclass mobility if instead agents have all the bargaining power strong saving incentives are generated the wealth of poor and rich agents alike drift upward indefinitely and history does not matter eventually d31 d91 i32 o17 q15

work rules featherbedding and pareto optimal union management bargaining this article examines a model of semiefficient bargaining in which the union and the firm bargain over wages and various types of work rules the results are compared to the outcomes that are associated with fully efficient bargaining i e over wages and the level of employment and bargaining solely over wages

monopoly power and distribution in fragmented markets the case of groundwater using data from pakistan s punjab the authors examine monopoly power in the market for groundwater irrigation water extracted using private tubewells a market characterized by barriers to entry and spatial fragmentation simple theory predicts that tubewell owners should price discriminate in favor of their own share tenants and this analysis of individual groundwater transactions over an 18 month period confirms such price discrimination and among those studied tubewell owners and their tenants use considerably more groundwater on their plots than do other farmers the authors also provide evidence that monopoly pricing of groundwater leads to compensating albeit small reallocations of canal water which farmers exchange in a separate informal market despite the substantial misallocation of groundwater a welfare analysis show that monopoly pricing has limited effects on equity and efficiency in the long run a policy aimed at eliminating monopoly pricing would do little to help the poorest farmers

the economics of schooling production and efficiency in public schools n recent years public and professional interest in schools has been heightened by a spate of reports many of them critical of current school policy these policy documents have added to persistent and long standing concerns about the cost effectiveness and fairness of the current school structure and have made schooling once again a serious public issue as in the past however any renewed interest in education is likely to be short lived doomed to dissipate as frustration over the inability of policy to improve school practice sets in this frustration about school policy relates directly to knowledge about the educational production process and in turn to underlying research on schools although the educational process has been extensively researched clear policy prescriptions flowing from this research have been difficult to derive 2 there exists however a consistency to the research findings that does have an immediate application to school policy schools differ dramatically in quality

wages and employment in public sector unions i introduction standard economic theory states that a union which raises wages above the competitive level will reduce employment empirical evidence reviewed by lewis 1986 indeed shows that unions raise wages and that unionized establishments in the private sector show slower employment growth than comparable nonunionized establishments 1 studies in the public sector also find that unions raise wages see freeman 1986 and lewis 1988 for reviews but by less than in the private sector unionization in the public sector however often increases employment 2 in a study of 5 144 city and county governments zax 1989 finds that unionized departments increase employment by 3 1 over nonunionized departments we propose an explanation that exploits a key difference between public and private sector employers the quantity of public services provided is determined by a political process in which union members and their supporters have a voice this voice is important when shifts from a decisive voter with a lower income to one with a higher income increase the expressed demand for public services this increase implies the possibility that wages for public sector workers can increase when employment increases this possibility becomes more likely the greater is the difference in income between the previous and current decisive voter public sector workers would therefore use their electoral influence to ensure that the decisive voter is one with as high an income as possible in other words workers in the public sector gain leverage from the elasticity of demand for public sector services with respect to changes in income associated with changes of the identity of the decisive voter most importantly we show that higher employment may result even when union supporters are a small minority of the electorate though this political consideration has been suggested by others including freeman 1986 zax 1989 and zax and ichniowski 1988 it has not been explicitly modeled or explored the essential idea is expressed in the following newspaper story the port authority pat drivers union is working against county commission candidate dan fleck because he has urged pat to appeal a court ruling that ordered discontinuation of a monroeville minibus service run by a private company larry klos president of local 85 of the amalgamated transit union said yesterday we have 2 700 members and they all have relatives and friends we will target mr fleck meaning union members will vote against the thornburg republican pittsburgh post gazette 26 september 1991 p 5 not surprisingly mr fleck lost the election our analysis rests on an important debate begun by dunlop 1944 and ross 1948 concerning union objectives which asks whether unions maximize a well defined objective function such as the wage bill the union s objective has been modeled as reflecting the preferences of the median voter in the union 3 for example suppose workers care only about wages and their own employment that jobs are allocated to the most senior workers and that wage employment bargains must lie on the labor demand curve the union as farber 1986 shows would then set the wage so that the median worker is just retained such a wage policy however would make the union shrink over time researchers extended this median worker model to consider workers with foresight or uncertainty about labor demand and find that union employment shrinks less than suggested by static models or that it need not shrink at all 4 these models however cannot explain the empirical finding that public sector unionization is associated with increased employment an explanation for how unions raise both wages and employment is offered by the efficient bargains or contract curve model which supposes that unions care about both wages and employment and that unions bargain with management over both issues

market evidence of misperceived mortality risk we construct and implement a test of rational consumer behavior in a high stakes financial market in particular we test whether consumers make systematic mistakes in perceiving their mortality risks we implement this test using data from secondary life insurance markets where consumers with a life threatening illness sell their life insurance policies to firms in return for an up front payment we compare predictions from two models one with consumers who correctly perceive their mortality risk and one with consumers who are misguided about their life expectancy and find that our data are most consistent with the predictions made by the second model

modeling government behavior in collective bargaining a test for self interested bureaucrats this paper tests for self interested behavior by local government bureaucrats engaged in collective bargaining with public employee unions a theoretical model is developed that shows the effect of niskanen style bureaucratic self interest in the two standard bargaining models the demand constrained model and the efficient bargain model these predictions are then tested using national cross section data on unionized police fire and sanitation workers

productivity effects of land rental market operation in ethiopia evidence from a matched tenant landlord sample as countries increasingly strive to transform their economies from agriculture based into a diversified one land rental will become of greater importance it will thus be critical to complement research on the efficiency of specific land rental arrangements such as sharecropping with an inquiry into the broader productivity impacts of the land rental market plot level data for a matched landlord tenant sample in an environment where sharecropping dominates allow us to explore both issues the author fined that pure output sharing leads to significantly lower levels of efficiency that can be attenuated by monitoring while the inefficiency disappears if inputs are shared as well rentals transfer land to more productive producers but realization of this productivity advantage is prevented by the inefficiency of contractual arrangements suggesting changes that would prompt adoption of different contractual arrangements could have significant benefits

testing between competing models of sharecropping the marshallian approach assumes a prohibitively high cost of monitoring the sharecropper s activities while the monitoring approach argues that landlords stipulate and effectively monitor sharecroppers activities i present new evidence using detailed data collected from eight indian villages most tenants own some land of their own this provides a controlled environment in studying the impact of contractual arrangements the differences in input and output intensities on owned minus sharecropped land of the same household are found to be sizable and significant suggesting a rejection of the monitoring approach and supporting the notion of the marshallian productive inefficiency of sharecropping

public sector unions and municipal employment using 1980 data for a large sample of u s cities the author reexamines recent empirical findings of a positive association between public sector unionization and municipal employment several researchers have interpreted this correlation as evidence that public employee unions successfully exert political pressure to raise the demand for municipal services structural estimates of labor demand and the determinants of police and fire unionization reveal however that economies of scale in union formation are at least partly responsible for any positive association between public sector unionization and municipal employment the author concludes that previous studies overstate the amount of political clout wielded by municipal labor unions

state contingent rent reduction and tenancy contract choice abstract this study introduces a fixed rent contract with a state contingent rent reduction widely adopted in japan in the early 20th century which a fixed rent was temporary reduced in case of poor harvest the economic implications of this contract are analyzed with a principal agent model it is shown that if the tenant is not too risk averse and or the variability of the yield is not too high then this contract is preferable for the landlord to a fixed rent contract or a share tenancy preliminary tests on the risk sharing implication of a share contract are also provided using the historical data for japan and korea

price uncertainty and trader farmer linkage abstract we show that the pareto superiority of loan repayment in kind within a tied credit arrangement to a cash for cash scheme under uncertain output price depends crucially on the farmer loan demand elasticity and his risk aversion for the risk neutral trader the cash for cash scheme is shown to be pareto dominated by credit tying and the price premium he offers depends on farmer loan demand elasticity

contract duration and investment incentives evidence from land tenancy agreements this paper analyzes the empirical determinants of contract length a key and yet neglected dimension of contractual structure i estimate contract length and contract type jointly using original data on tenancy agreements signed between 1870 and 1880 in the district of siracusa italy the findings indicate that the choice of contract length is driven by the need to provide incentives for nonobservable investment taking into account transaction costs and imperfections in the credit markets that make incentive provision costly the results also illustrate that because both length and the compensation scheme are used to provide incentives within the same contract joint analysis is important for a correct interpretation of the evidence jel d82 o12 q15

moral hazard experimental evidence from tenancy contracts agricultural productivity is particularly low in developing countries output sharing rules that make farmers less than full residual claimants are seen as a potentially important driver of low agr

concentration in the labor market for public school teachers recent studies that have investigated the relationship between the monopsony power of school districts and teachers salaries have reached conflicting conclusions the authors of this paper argue that the discrepancies among previous studies may be due to the arbitrary demarcation of the boundaries of teacher labor markets and the use of faulty measures of monopsony using a new procedure for defining teacher labor market boundaries and several alternative indices of concentration this study finds evidence of monopsonistic activity in local teacher labor markets in pennsylvania the monopsony wage effects are small however and are present mainly at the mid to upper ranges of the bachelor s degree salary scale

tenancy and family resources a model and some empirical analysis abstract in this paper we discuss with the help of a simple model the role of family resource endowments in determining the extent of land leased in or leased out by a household this becomes important when the market for some of these resources is either not functioning at all or is functioning imperfectly we focus on three such resources which have some relevance in indian agriculture these are 1 the family s managerial skill 2 its endowment of human labour and 3 its endowment of draft animal labour household level data from six villages of maharashtra and andhra pradesh are also utilized to test some of the hypotheses

economic reform and labor unions a general equilibrium analysis applied to bangladesh and indonesia noting the trend toward more independent trade unions in developing countries this article examines whether the presence of unions strengthens or weakens the benefits to be gained from economic policy reform we show that the presence of passive unions ones that choose their wage employment contract given the firm s cost minimizing strategy increases the welfare gains from trade liberalization because trade reform lowers the wage premium enjoyed by the unionized sector reducing a distortion in the labor market these gains are amplified when the unions are active namely when they negotiate a contract with the firm that is off its labor demand curve such a contract results in featherbedding paying workers more than their marginal product and trade reform reduces the amount of featherbedding the policy implication for bangladesh a country with strong trade unions and a protected unionized sector is that the benefits of further trade liberalization may be greater than otherwise predicted in indonesia where both unionization and import tariffs are low allowing greater independence to unions may preserve flexibility and reward workers better than the current minimum wage policy

does sharecropping affect long term investment evidence from west bengal s tenancy reforms in india land reform has been high on the political agenda since independence in 1947 and early efforts at abolishing intermediaries are widely credited with having brought about significant social benefits the most prominent type is tenancy reform as it does not extinguish landlords ownership rights tenants who may have benefited from rent ceilings and cannot be evicted still have to pay annual share rent this weakness of rights may fail to create the incentives for effort supply and long term investment that have underpinned the success of land reforms elsewhere effectively adding a dynamic inefficiency to the disincentives created by the marshallian inefficiency of sharecropping this could imply that despite the high political price of implementing land reform in india the schemes so far have failed to reach their productivity and poverty reduction potential

enforcement of implicit employment contracts through unionization in a world in which employment contracts are incomplete it is costly for a firm to establish credibility for honoring implicit terms of employment agreements by monitoring the employment relationships between the firm and its workers the labor union may provide the workforce with valuable information regarding the firm s adherence to these implicit agreements thus the union provides a signaling mechanism that allows workers to coordinate their actions in order to discipline the firm for a breach of the implicit contract this mechanism enhances the firm s credibility when forming employment contracts and facilitates increased employment levels

do unions contract for added employment the efficient contract model predicts unions will contract for added employment that is a level of employment higher than would be predicted by the demand curve for labor using three data sets on canadian industries in 1971 81 u s industries in 1972 and u s construction projects in 1973 74 and several estimation techniques the author estimates and compares labor demand equations for both union and nonunion firms some regressions that control for few variables support the added employment hypothesis but those with more complete specifications reject it

competition and teacher pay i introduction recent policy initiatives are increasing the degree of competition in primary and secondary education the number of charter schools is growing at an astounding rate vouchers are available to eligible children in florida utah and a number of cities including washington d c kafer 2005 school districts throughout the country are experimenting with subcontracting campuses to private firms the increasing popularity of policies that foster school competition dovetails with a burgeoning literature on the effects of educational competition researchers have examined the effects of educational competition on academic outcomes average public school spending and school district efficiency l this research has largely ignored the effects of increased competition on teacher pay yet reductions in the market power of school districts could have a significant impact on teacher earnings if school districts behave as typical monopsonists or oligopsonists when hiring then a lack of competition suppresses wages and policies that are designed to enhance competition among schools could lead to higher teacher salaries ceteris paribus 2 alternatively if a school district s position as a monopolistic provider of education services generates economic rents there are few parties to whom those rents might be dissipated besides school district personnel if teachers have been able to appropriate a share of the economic rents generated by the market power of school districts then increased competition could lower teacher salaries 3 this study uses individual data on more than 335 000 teachers from 670 texas school districts to explore the empirical relationship between competition and teacher pay the analysis suggests that a lack of competition in the public school system has led to significant market power for texas school districts resulting in lower wages for most texas teachers but higher wages for teachers in relatively concentrated markets ii theoretical models the elementary and secondary education industry in the united states is often highly concentrated more than 30 of u s educational markets are served by a single public school district and there are many more that are served by only a handful of educational providers 4 the concentrated nature of education markets suggests two alternative models of teacher wage determination the first is a classic oligopsony model and the second is a rent sharing model an oligopsony model of teacher wage determination boal and ransom 1997 lay out a classic cournot model of oligopsony that can be directly applied to the educational labor market 5 firms school districts choose an employment level l sub i to maximize the firm s revenue function r sub i given the employment level of all other firms in the market l sub i 1 r sub i l sub i w l sub i l sub i l sub i the market wage is determined by the total employment of all firms the first order condition for each firm implies that it chooses l sub i such that 2 mrp sub i w w l sub i l epsilon sup 1 in this model the gap between the marginal revenue product of firm i mrp sub i and the wage rate w depends on the firm s employment share l sub i l and the inverse wage elasticity of labor supply for the market epsilon sup 1 6 assuming that firms have different marginal revenue products the employment weighted average across all the firms in the market is 3 summation over i mrp sub i w l sub i wl epsilon sup 1 summation over i l sub i l sup 2 the last term on the right hand side is the familiar herfindahl index of market concentration thus wages are a function of market concentration h the employment weighted average marginal revenue profit per worker bar

credit layering in informal financial markets abstract informal lenders with access to markets or capital often find it attractive to delegate loan provision to downstream lenders who have an information or enforcement advantage in dealing with particular borrowers in this paper we examine the conditions under which such an arrangement is preferred by two informal lenders a landlord and a merchant who compete in loan provision to tenant farmers differentiated by wealth we show that credit layering is preferred only when tenants are sufficiently poor in this case the trader lends to tenant farmers via a contract with their landlord otherwise only the trader lends as a consequence a pattern of borrowing emerges in which relatively wealthy tenants borrow from merchants while poor tenants borrow mainly from their landlords interlinkage between land and credit thus arises only for a subset of tenants and purely as a consequence of credit layering this pattern is shown to be supported empirically

contract choice in agriculture with joint moral hazard in effort and risk we analyze optimal contract choice in agriculture when there is joint moral hazard on the part of the farmer in the supply of effort and the riskiness of the technique of cultivation in the presence of limited liability high powered incentive contracts such as fixed rental contracts will induce the farmer to adopt techniques of cultivation that are too risky from the point of view of the landlord on the other hand low powered incentive contracts such as fixed wage contracts will induce the farmer to supply too little effort we show that sharecropping contracts emerge as a natural solution to balance these two conflicting considerations

bargaining power fear of disagreement and wage settlements theory and evidence from u s industry the paper develops and estimates a theoretical model of wage determination and union nonunion wage differentials in order to overcome the institutional ctiticisms of the formal bargaining literature the paper generalizes the nash zeuthen harsanyi model by linking the solution to the institutional concepts of bargaining power and fear or cost of disagreement and by making the outcome depend not only on endogenous but also on exogenous factors an operational specification of bargaining power and fear of disagreement allows the model to be estimated with data covering twelve companies and trade unions during the period from mid 1950 s to the late 1970 s while giving limited support to the nashzeuthen harsanyi solution the empirical analysis indicates that the bargaining outcome usually deviates from the nash zeuthen harsanyi point and in accordance with the institutionalist claim that it varies significantly with exogenous factors contrary to the traditional labor economics view the results do not support the general conclusion that the bargaining solution lies on the marginal revenue product curve of labor instead the relevant coefficients suggest that for many firms and unions the outcome might be better characterized by the efficient contract vertical contract curve

unionization and cost of production compensation productivity and factor use effects unionization affects cost of production through compensation premia technology shifts and deviations from the least cost combination of inputs the first two are familiar but the last is not this article distinguishes the three effects illustrates the factor use effect and suggests that it may resolve several apparent inconsistencies union induced cost effects appear larger than those implied by union compensation and productivity differentials union compensation and productivity differentials suggest a larger effect on labor intensity of output than is observed and employers complain that union work rules reduce productivity when there is little evidence that this is so

effects of technology on incentive design of share contracts do observed contracts have the properties predicted by the principal agent model with moral hazard in contract theory this paper tests the predictions of such an agency model in the context of sharecropping in north india the most well known explanation for sharecropping is based on the principal agent model with a trade off between risk and incentives even though sharecropping contracts are quite prevalent in rural areas of developing countries there is very little evidence on factors determining the instruments used to provide incentives in such contracts using information in the data giving rise to exogenous variation in technology across regions this paper tests for the effect of cultivation technology on the incentive structure of share contracts as predicted by the agency model existing empirical evidence on sharecropping seems to indicate that yield on sharecropped plots is lower than on owner operated plots i e there is an incentive problem or moral hazard radwan a shaban 1987 jean jacques laffont and mohamed s matoussi 1995 there is some informal evidence that landowners use various mechanisms to improve efficiency in sharecropping by participating in cost sharing and by repeating contracts robert m townsend and rolf a mueller 1994 examine the nature of these mechanisms in detail but their data do not permit econometric tests more generally though the principal agent model has been widely studied there is little existing empirical evidence for it michael c jensen and kevin j murphy 1990 find that executive compensation is only weakly sensitive to firm performance in recent work rajesh k aggarwal and andrew a samwick 1999 find that executive s pay performance sensitivity is decreasing in the volatility of firm s performance however their results are sensitive to the inclusion of other characteristics of the firms in the regressions as pierre a chiappori and bernard salanie 2003 note in a recent survey empirical work on contract theory using nonexperimental data needs to be careful in adequately correcting for underlying heterogeneity across agents otherwise the parameters of interest would be hard to interpret if such heterogeneity affects contract choice for example douglas w allen and dean lueck 1995 find no role for risk in the choice between share contract and fixed rent contracts but they do not take the heterogeneity across agents into account in a recent paper addressing the issue of heterogeneity across agents ackerberg and botticini 2002 find a significant role for risk in the choice between share contract and fixed rent contract after correcting for endogenous matching between landowners and tenants they find that wealthier tenants are more likely to be in fixed rent contracts in this paper we are able to address such estimation issues and check for the robustness of our results regarding the relationship between technology and the design of share contracts department of economics pennsylvania state university university park pa 16801 e mail pxp22 psu edu this paper derives from related work done earlier in my dissertation i am grateful to two anonymous referees for very helpful suggestions i thank james heckman lars stole robert townsend kala krishna and seminar participants for useful comments financial support from the andrew mellon foundation for both rounds of fieldwork is gratefully acknowledged any errors remain my own 1 see nirvikar singh 1991 for a survey of various theories of sharecropping including steven n cheung 1969 c h hanumantha rao 1971 joseph e stiglitz 1974 david newbery and stiglitz 1979 avishay braverman and stiglitz 1982 mukesh eswaran and ashok kotwal 1985 and sudhir shetty 1988 a common feature of the different theories is an emphasis on uncertainty and asymmetric information 2 an exception is daniel a ackerberg and maristella botticini 2002 ackerberg and botticini differ from our paper in that they examine the role of tenant s risk aversion in the choice between fixed rental contract and share contract they do not examine share contracts per se 3 see john e core and wayne guay 2000

privatisation and x inefficiency a bargaining approach the usual analysis of privatization and x inefficiency uses agency theory to model managerial effort the authors model worker effort as determined by a bargain between firms and workers workers dislike effort because it lowers utility firms prefer high effort because it raises productivity public sector firms are assumed to be social welfare maximizers and therefore compared to private sector firms they bargain lower effort levels since they have the interests of consumers and workers at heart the authors model predicts that under certain conditions privatization should raise effort and so lower x inefficiency and that wages may increase or decrease copyright 1995 by blackwell publishing ltd

an empirical examination of information barriers to trade in insurance this paper uses direct evidence to evaluate whether asymmetric information is a barrier to trade in the largest market for private insurance in the world life insurance we report several findings that seem difficult to reconcile with the conventional theory of insurance under asymmetric information we conjecture that sellers may know their costs of production better than consumers in this market as in those for most other products

the relative profitability of nash bargaining on the labour demand curve or the contract curve abstract given the nash bargaining solution with parametric bargaining strengths and threat points it is shown that profits are often higher if the bargaining agenda between a union and a single firm or two unions and cournot duopolists excludes employment

rural organization and land reform in brazil the role of nonagricultural benefits of landholding abstract this article examines the effects of nonagricultural land use on agrarian organization and land reform in an economy characterized by limited credit and land rental markets the nonagricultural demand for land under credit constraint generates a potential mismatch between the distribution of land and the distribution of farming skills this disparity reduces the agricultural output if the land rental market is absent a perfect land rental market is shown to determine the highest possible agricultural output policy implications from the model include in addition to market improvements the fact that small farmers rather than landless people should be the target of redistributive land reform programs

a bargaining model of farrell inefficiency abstract an enormous number of empirical papers have estimated technical efficiency the distance of firms inside a frontier following the model of farrell farrell 1957 the measurement of productive efficiency journal of the royal statistical society series a 120 3 253 290 we propose a theory that explains the distance these empirical papers seek to measure the theory is based on the idea that workers can bargain low effort high crew sizes etc if they and the firm have some monopoly power we provide simple theoretical expressions for the empirical measures of technical and allocative efficiency and compare them to those in the statistical literature we also consider the relation between competition and efficiency

credit and land contracting a test of the theory of sharecropping author s das n de janvry a sadoulet e abstract 2019 the author s 2019 published by oxford university press on behalf of the agricultural and applied economics association all rights reserved for permissions please email journals permissions oup com choice of a share vs fixed rent land rental contract has figured prominently in the theory of industrial organization this theory tells us that while a share contract is inefficient in a first best world it may be the preferred option under second best conditions it has thus predicted the existence of sharecropping as the potentially preferred contract under conditions of liquidity constraint rigorous empirical evidence is however still lacking on this basic contribution of theory we use a randomized experiment in a credit program for landless workers and marginal farmers organized by brac in bangladesh to show that increased access to credit has a large positive effect on the choice of fixed rent over share rent contracts both in terms of number of contracts and area contracted as predicted by theory the magnitude of this shift away from sharecropping is enhanced when the tenant is less exposed to risk development programs that facilitate access to credit to potential tenants can thus help them take more efficient land rental contracts

wage employment determination and a union tax on capital can theory and evidence be reconciled if unions appropriate quasi rents from relation specific capital observed factor prices no longer reflect effective costs unionism has effects akin to a partial factor tax on capital demand curve settlements need not imply higher k l among union firms

efficient share tenancy contracts under risk the case of two rice growing villages in thailand abstract two categories of thai sharecroppers are observed to be efficient those under high poverty and high risk and those in a long term relation of gift exchange with their landlord econometric estimates show that use of variable factors by these sharecroppers is insignificantly different from that by owner operators and significantly higher than that by generic sharecroppers interpretations for this behavior are provided by models of sharecropping under safety first and of repeated contracts with gift exchange

on the contract curve a test of alternative models of collective bargaining the traditional model of collective bargaining confines unions to settlements constrained by the employer s labor demand curve but an alternative model places wage employment outcomes on a contract curve that extends beyond the labor demand curve this paper derives a multidimensional hedonic contract curve model in which employment security provisions are used to maintain efficient bargains outside the employer s demand curve and distinguishes empirically between the contract curve and demand constraint models using data for public school teachers in new york state estimates clearly support the contract curve model over the demand constraint model by linking the gap between compensation and the value of the marginal product to the strength of employment security provisions

limited liability wealth differences and tenancy contracts in agrarian economies abstract an explanation is provided for two observations concerning variations in the choice of tenants and their welfare differences in tenants wealth imply corresponding differences in liability when default is possible on fixed rental commitments in this context the inability of landlords to specify their tenants effort lead to effort choices that vary with the type of contract offered the selection of tenants and the contract terms they receive thus depend on wealth with wealthier tenants being preferred and receiving fixed rent contracts these results also predict that wealthier tenants earn higher profits on their leased plots

margins concentration unions and the business cycle theory and evidence for britain abstract a number of recent studies have examined the cyclical relationship between price cost margins concentration and unions u s data has concluded that unions reduce margins margins vary over the cycle and concentration unionisation and the cycle interact in their effect on margins however there is almost no theory to account for these results we propose a simple theory that assumes only that there is overhead labour present at the firm this produces theoretical predictions that can explain these results and discriminate between existing theories we present results of our own using u k panel data and show similar findings to the u s

limited liability contractual choice and the tenancy ladder abstract we re examine the connection between limited liability contractual form and the agricultural tenancy ladder in a model with only labor moral hazard we show that ex post limited liability does not explain sharecropping in this model but that ex ante limited liability can do so we characterize the nature of the tenancy ladder in either case

teacher unions and the cost of public education do teacher unions affect the cost of public education based upon data from two national surveys and holding measures of educational output and other factors constant the authors of this paper find that teacher unions raise costs by 7 to 15 percent the estimated differential is not reduced by treating unionization as endogenous by distinguishing between large and small districts or by distinguishing between districts in large and small cities the union effect on cost works through teacher compensation production technology and factor use and is borne primarily by taxpayers with little or no effect on average student achievement

bargaining power and wage employment contracts in a unionized industry input and output data are used in conjunction with negotiated wages and employment to estimate a fully specified bargaining model between a labour union the international woodworkers of america and representatives from the british columbia wood products industry bargaining powers are modelled as functions of exogenous variables believed to have influenced the parties relative strike costs the estimated bargaining powers are plotted over time and compared to the proportion of rents captured by each party parameters of the union utility function and the firms technology are also estimated and hypothesis tests are conducted on various aspects of the model there are still relatively few studies in which fully specified models of bargaining between labour unions and firms are estimated this reflects both the extensive data requirements and the complexity of the models involved a fully specified model includes a representation of the firms objectives and technological constraints the union s goals and constraints and the bargaining structure furthermore even when micro data are available usually more than two parties are involved i e firms will negotiate with several unions and each union will have to deal separately with the many firms operating within the industry this complicates the modelling of the bargaining setting considerably in this study data on the wood products industry in british columbia canada are analyzed during the period under study 1963 1983 negotiations in this industry were highly centralized in fact the bargaining setting can be described as a bilateral monopoly between the international woodworkers of america iwa a powerful and stable union and the forest industrial relations an employer association representing firms in the industry this data set includes information on outputs and nonlabour inputs thus allowing the calculation of profits and the joint determination of output and other inputs along with employment and wages a structural model with four dependent variables wages employment output and a materials and supplies input is estimated firms are assumed to maximize profits and union objectives are modelled by a ces utility function with employment and the difference between union wages and alternative wages as arguments given a representation for the firms technology and the union preferences a

unionism in a competitive industry this article explores a model in which a union confronts many competitive workers firms and consumers under monopoly unionism union coverage may be incomplete then union wages and employment are insensitive to product demand variation under efficient unionism coverage can never be incomplete some union variables necessarily vary with product demand preliminary evidence on the demand independence under incomplete coverage hypothesis is presented also more structure is imposed and further hypotheses are derived and the manner in which the model can be enriched to allow for a variety of union related issues within a consistent framework is set out

employment determination in a unionized public sector labor market the case of ontario s school teachers a standard efficient contracts model of employment determination in a unionized labor market is contrasted with a naive model of labor supply and demand that allows for the possibility of monopsony in the market for public school teachers the standard model is consistent with the data and suggests that employment contracts are strongly efficient but a more surprising result is that the simple supply demand model is not rejected by the data either estimates of the latter suggest that the demand for teachers is inelastic and that the supply curve is slightly upward sloping rather than perfectly elastic at the union wage

union effects on productivity profits and growth has the long run arrived this article interprets literature examining union effects on economic performance production function studies indicate small overall union impacts on productivity positive effects where they exist appear to result from management response to decreased profit expectations and from a natural selection process lower profitability among unionized firms is well established more interesting is the possibility that unions appropriate quasi rents deriving from long lived tangible and intangible capital the connection between unions investment behavior and productivity growth emerges as a particularly fruitful line of empirical inquiry although it does not encourage a sanguine view of unionism s long run impact

economic reform and labor unions noting the trend toward more independent trade unions in developing countries this article examines whether the presence of unions strengthens or weakens the benefits to be gained from economic policy reform we show that the presence of passive unions ones that choose their wage employment contract given the firm s cost minimizing strategy increases the welfare gains from trade liberalization because trade reform lowers the wage premium enjoyed by the unionized sector reducing a distortion in the labor market these gains are amplified when the unions are active namely when they negotiate a contract with the firm that is off its labor demand curve such a contract results in featherbedding paying workers more than their marginal product and trade reform reduces the amount of featherbedding the policy implication for bangladesh a country with strong trade unions and a protected unionized sector is that the benefits of further trade liberalization may be greater than otherwise predicted in indon

the scope of bargaining and bargaining outcomes in the public schools this study examines state to state variations in the legality of bargaining over class size in public schools to determine first whether these variations in the legal scope of bargaining bear any relationship to actual class sizes and second whether these variations are indirectly associated with teachers salaries using a model of the quality of education to analyze data from the 1977 census of governments on 4 851 independent school districts the author concludes that restrictions on class size bargaining are associated with both larger student teacher ratios and higher teachers salaries he also finds that the availability of voluntary arbitration and the limited right to strike are related to lower student teacher ratios

intertemporal discounting and tenurial contracts a simple two period model without uncertainty and strategic complementarity in the labor market or asymmetric information of any kind is employed to study the nature of contracts signed between a landlord and a tenant in a rural economy the paper provides conditions under which different types of contracts may prevail q 2001 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

bargaining and the determinants of teacher salaries this study examines the impact of collective bargaining on salary setting in public school districts using a 1969 82 sample of oregon school districts the author focuses particularly on the roles

precautionary saving in the small and in the large the theory of precautionary saving is shown to be isomorphic to the arrow pratt theory of risk aversion making possible the application of a large body of knowledge about risk aversion to precautionary saving and more generally to the theory of optimal choice under risk in particular a measure of the strength of the precautionary saving motive analogous to the arrow pratt measure of risk aversion is used to establish a number of new propositions about precautionary saving and to give a new interpretation of the dreze modigliani substitution effect copyright 1990 by the econometric society

teacher mobility responses to wage changes evidence from a quasi natural experiment low mobility responses to wage changes imply rents associated with existing employment relationships for example continued employment after a wage cut all else equal reflects rents in the hand of the worker at the outset and symmetrically voluntary quits after a