union negotiations and corporate policy a study of labor concessions in the domestic steel industry during the 1980s abstract this paper studies managerial compensation financial reporting and dividend policies of the seven major domestic steel producers during requests for union concessions substantial layoffs reported losses and sacrifices by nonunion stakeholders buttressed managers case for union concessions from 1980 to 1988 sample firms reduced their work force by about 300 000 almost two thirds and annual wage payments from 16 1 to 8 6 billion reported income is lower during union negotiations controlling for cash flows as is managerial pay with average ceo salary plus bonus declining 18 dividend reductions and white collar pay cuts are substantial pervasive and clustered during union negotiations

paradoxes of social policy welfare transfers relative poverty and redistribution preferences korpi and palme s 1998 classic the paradox of redistribution and strategies of equality claims that universal social policy better reduces poverty than social policies targeted at the poor this article revisits korpi and palme s classic and in the process explores and informs a set of enduring questions about social policy politics and social equality specifically we investigate the relationships between three dimensions of welfare transfers transfer share the average share of household income from welfare transfers low income targeting and universalism and poverty and preferences for redistribution we analyze rich democracies like korpi and palme but we also generalize to a broader sample of developed and developing countries consistent with korpi and palme we show 1 poverty is negatively associated with transfer share and universalism 2 redistribution preferences are negatively associated with low income targeting and 3 universalism is positively associated with transfer share

how teachers unions affect education production this study helps to explain why measured school inputs appear to have little effect on student outcomes particularly for cohorts educated since 1960 teachers unionization can explain how public schools simultaneously can have more generous inputs and worse student performance using panel data on united states school districts i identify the effect of teachers unionization through differences in the timing of collective bargaining especially timing determined by the passage of state laws that facilitate teachers unionization i find that teachers unions increase school inputs but reduce productivity sufficiently to have a negative overall effect on student performance union effects are magnified where schools have market power

declining union membership in the post world war ii era the united furniture workers of america 1939 1982 an organizational explanation of post world war ii declining union membership termed the replenishment thesis is developed to compensate for the deemphasis on decline in marxian functional and economic theories of unionization since 1945 large nonunion corporations have stabilized their work forces by providing private employee welfare plans and unions have consequently been most successful in organizing employees of small establishments these have often folded thereby jeopardizing union membership the thesis is tested with analyses of the membership trends representation election outcomes and local union turnover rates of the united furniture workers between 1939 and 1982

what happened to long term employment the role of worker power and environmental turbulence in explaining declines in worker tenure recent declines in the average length of time that u s workers spend with a given employer represent an important change in the nature of the employment relationship yet it is one whose causes are poorly understood i explore those causes using current population survey data on the tenure of men aged 30 65 from the years 1979 2008 i argue that long term employment relationships primarily occur when workers pressure employers to close off employment from market competition reducing the attractiveness of external mobility relative to internal opportunities and increasing employment security i then explore how two changes in organizations environments a decline in union strength and increased turbulence from changes in technology and globalization might have affected workers ability to secure such closed employment relationships over the last 30 years my results support the argument that declines in tenure reflect the reduced power of workers to secure closed employment relationships recent declines in tenure have been concentrated in large organizations and many of those declines are explained by controlling for the changing levels of industry unionization i find little evidence that foreign competition or technological change affected mobility the results are robust to measures of changing industry growth rates and within industry reorganization supplementary analyses suggest that layoffs are associated with different industry pressures than tenure and that voluntary mobility may have played an important role in declines in tenure

the hazards of expert control chief risk officers and risky derivatives at the turn of the century regulators introduced policies to control bank risk taking many banks appointed chief risk officers cros yet bank holdings of new complex and untested financial derivatives subsequently soared why did banks expand use of new derivatives we suggest that cros encouraged the rise of new derivatives in two ways first we build on institutional arguments about the expert construction of compliance suggesting that risk experts arrived with an agenda of maximizing risk adjusted returns which led them to favor the derivatives second we build on moral licensing arguments to suggest that bank appointment of cros induced organizational licensing leading trading desk managers to reduce policing of their own risky behavior we further argue that ceos and fund managers bolstered or restrained derivatives use depending on their financial interests we predict that ceos favored new derivatives when their compensation rewarded risk taking but that both ceos and fund managers op

nonunion wage rates and the threat of unionization i investigate how the threat of union organization affects the wage paid to nonunion workers i start by outlining the standard model of wage determination by a nonunion employer when faced with the threat of union organization the model suggests that the nonunion wage will be directly related and the union wage gap will be inversely related to the threat i use repeated cross section data from the cps from 1977 2002 to develop a measure of the threat as the predicted probability of union membership i use this measure to estimate earnings functions that use several sources of variation in the likelihood of union membership to identify the threat effect in a manner that reduces the likelihood of omitted variable bias finally i investigate two cases where there has arguably been a change in the likelihood of union organization that is not correlated with changes in the demand for labor these include the wage changes surrounding the introduction of rightto work rtw laws in two states during the period studied and wage changes surrounding deregulation of key industries in the late 1970s and early 1980s the results are mixed the preferred estimates from the analysis using predicted probability of unionization as the threat measure imply very little relationship between either nonunion wages or the union wage gap and the threat the estimates that rely on the introduction of rtw laws show a significant relationship between nonunion wages and the introduction of rtw laws in one of the two states stronger evidence of threat effects is found in the experience of deregulated industries where regulation was a central factor in union strength

union strength neoliberalism and inequality contingent political analyses of u s income differences since 1950 do historically contingent political accounts help explain the growth in family income inequality in the united states we use time series regressions based on 60 years to detect such relationships

the politics of union decline the contingent determinants of union recognition elections and victories despite the close political regulation of union recognition disputes sociologists have paid little attention to recent political determinants of success in these contests a state centered political opportunity approach suggests that if conservative political officials can reduce the number of union recognition elections union organization will be blocked partly because many labor scholars claim there was a postwar departure in labor movement fortunes we attempt to detect and model a contingent break in the relationship between republican control of the presidency and these elections using interactive specifications our findings show that shortly after the conservative anti union reagan administration took office recognition elections and union victories in these elections fell sharply with macroeconomic and other determinants held constant other political conditions with explanatory power include congressional oversight committee ideology and conservative appointments to the key regulatory age

revenge of the managers labor cost cutting and the paradoxical resurgence of managerialism in the shareholder value era 1984 to 2001 institutional changes associated with the rise of shareholder value capitalism have had seemingly contradictory effects on managers and managerialism in the united states economy financial critiqu

rules of thumb for sovereign debt crises abstract this paper investigates the economic and political conditions that are associated to the occurrence of a sovereign debt crisis we use a new statistical approach classification and regression tree that allows us to derive a collection of rules of thumb that help identify the typical characteristics of defaulters we find that not all crises are equal they differ depending on whether the government faces insolvency illiquidity or various macroeconomic risks we also characterize the set of fundamentals that can be associated with a relatively risk free zone this classification is important for discussing appropriate policy options to prevent crises and improve response time and prediction

the political economy of minimum wage legislation two questions are addressed in this paper a why do labor unions and certain employer organizations respectively promote and impede minimum wage legislation b do these groups have significant impacts on minimum wages question a is examined in the context of models that identify the economic self interest of unionized skilled workers and capitalists in legal wage floors question b is approached by a median legislator utility maximization model that leads to tobit estimation of the relationship between state minimum wage rates and measures of statewide organized labor and capital and average hourly earnings

on the estimation of union threat effects some researchers view unions primarily as functioning to increase earnings inequality among the working class while others see them as threatening employers so that they raise wages for unorganized workers and minimize working class inequality threat effects are defined as the tendency for nonunionized employers to respond to the threat of unionization by increasing the earnings and benefits of their workers this paper probes a contextual method for estimating the effects of unionization on the earnings of unorganized workers this method controls for structural characteristics that affect workers earnings and incorporates information about the organizational strength and vitality of specific unions using data from seven manufacturing industries in indianapolis the results suggest that 1 unionized workers earnings positively affect the earnings of unorganized workers in unionized plants 2 unionized workers earnings negatively affect nonunionized workers earnings in nonunionized plants and 3 when plant size is controlled unionized workers earnings have no significant effect on the earnings of nonunionized workers in nonunionized plants these results highlight the complexity and difficulty of estimating the effects of union threat and their importance for understanding earnings inequality in the workplace

locus of control and job turnover in this paper i investigate how a workeri s locus of control the perception of control over daily events affects job to job and job to nonemployment turnover i find that an increase in internality the degree to which respondents believe that the outcomes of their life events are determined by their own actions versus external factors increases job to job transitions in addition the data reveal that the annual wage growth rate and the wage gains from job to job transitions increase with internality the influence of locus of control on job to nonemployment turnover however is insignificant once the workeri s level of attained education is controlled for

occupations and the structure of wage inequality in the united states 1980s to 2000s occupations are central to the stratification systems of industrial countries but they have played little role in empirical attempts to explain the well documented increase in wage inequality that occurred in the united states in the 1980s and 1990s we address this deficiency by assessing occupation level effects on wage inequality using data from the current population survey for 1983 through 2008 we model the mean and variance of wages for each occupation controlling for education and demographic factors at the individual level to test three competing explanations for the increase in wage inequality 1 the growth of between occupation polarization 2 changes in education and labor force composition and 3 residual inequality unaccounted for by occupations and demographic characteristics after correcting for a problem with imputed data that biased kim and sakamoto s 2008 results we find that between occupation changes explain 66 percent of the increase in wage inequality from 1992 to 2008

performance pay and wage inequality an increasing fraction of jobs in the u s labor market explicitly pay workers for their performance using bonus pay commissions or piece rate contracts using data from the panel study of income dynamics we show that compensation in performance pay jobs is more closely tied to both observed and unobserved productive characteristics of workers than compensation in non performance pay jobs we also find that the return to these productive characteristics increased faster over time in performance pay than in non performance pay jobs we show that this finding is consistent with the view that underlying changes in returns to skill due for instance to technological change induce more firms to offer performance pay contracts and result in more wage inequality among workers who are paid for performance thus performance pay provides a channel through which underlying changes in returns to skill get translated into higher wage inequality we conclude that this channel accounts for 21 of the growth in the variance of male wages between the late 1970s and the early 1990s and for most of the increase in wage inequality above the eightieth percentile over the same period

identification of endogenous social effects the reflection problem this paper examines the reflection problem that arises when a researcher observing the distribution of behaviour in a population tries to infer whether the average behaviour in some group influences the behaviour of the individuals that comprise the group it is found that inference is not possible unless the researcher has prior information specifying the compisition of reference groups if this information is available the prospects for inference depend critically on the population relationship between the variables defining reference groups and those directly affecting outcomes inference is difficult to implossible if these variables are functionally dependent or are statistically independent the prospects are better if the variables defining reference groups and those directly affecting outcomes are moderately related in the population

skill biased technological change and wage inequality evidence from a plant retooling1 one of the most popular explanations for the increased wage inequality that has occurred since the late 1970s is that technological change has resulted in a downward shift in the demand for low skill workers this pattern is also alleged to account for the growth in racial inequality in wages over the same period this article reports on a case study of the retooling of a food processing plant a unique longitudinal multimethod design reveals the nature of the technological change the changes in job requirements and the mechanisms by which the changes affect the wage distribution for hourly production workers this research finds that indeed the retooling resulted in greater wage dispersion and that the changes have also been associated with greater racial inequality in wages however contrary to the claims of advocates of the skill bias hypothesis organizational and human resources factors strongly mediated the impact of the changing technology absent these high road organizational choices th

two economists musings on the stability of locus of control empirical studies of the role of non cognitive skills in driving economic behavior often rely heavily on the assumption that these skills are stable over the relevant time frame we analyze the change in a specific non cognitive skill i e locus of control in order to directly assess the validity of this assumption we find that short and medium run changes in locus of control are rather modest on average are concentrated among the young or very old do not appear to be related to the demographic labor market and health events that individuals experience and are unlikely to be economically meaningful still there is no evidence that locus of control is truly time invariant implying that the use of lagged measures results in an errors in variables problem that could downward bias the estimated wage return to locus of control by as much as 50 percent those researchers wishing to analyze the economic consequences of non cognitive skills should consider i restricting their analysis to the working age population for whom there is little evidence of systematic change in skill levels and ii accounting for error in the skill measures they employ

the effects of organizational and political embeddedness on financial malfeasance in the largest u s corporations dependence incentives and opportunities this article examines the causes of financial malfeasance in the largest u s corporations between 1995 and 2004 the findings support organizational political embeddedness theory which suggests that differential social structures create dependencies incentives and opportunities to engage in financial malfeasance the historical analysis shows that neoliberal policies enacted between 1986 and 2000 resulted in organizational and political structures that permitted managers to engage in financial malfeasance our quantitative analysis provides three main findings first capital dependence on investors creates incentives to engage in financial malfeasance second managerial strategies to increase shareholder value create incentives to engage in financial malfeasance third the multilayer subsidiary form and the political structure permitting corporate pac contributions create opportunities to engage in financial malfeasance these findings have important implications for public policy the corporate an

how you downsize is who you downsize biased formalization accountability and managerial diversity scholars and pundits argue that women and minorities are more likely to lose their jobs in downsizing because of segregation or outright discrimination in contrast this article explores how the f

determinants of relative poverty in advanced capitalist democracies using relative poverty measures based on micro level data from the luxembourg income study in conjunction with pooled time series data for 14 advanced capitalist democracies between 1970 and 1997 the authors analyze separately the rate of pretax transfer poverty and the reduction in poverty achieved by systems of taxes and transfers socioeconomic factors including de industrialization and unemployment largely explain pre tax transfer poverty rates of the working age population in these advanced capitalist democracies the extent of redistribution measured as poverty reduction via taxes and transfers is explained directly by welfare state generosity and constitutional structure number of veto points and the strength of the political left both in unions and in government

immigration and inequality immigration is often viewed as a proximate cause of the rising wage gap between highand low skilled workers nevertheless there is controversy over the appropriate theoretical and empirical framework for measuring the presumed effect and over the precise magnitudes involved this paper offers an overview and synthesis of existing knowledge on the relationship between immigration and inequality focusing on evidence from cross city comparisons in the u s while some researchers have claimed that a cross city research design is inherently flawed i argue that the evidence from cross city comparisons is remarkably consistent with recent findings based on aggregate time series data in particular cross city and aggregate time series comparisons provide support for three key conclusions 1 workers with below high school education are perfect substitutes for those with a high school education 2 high school equivalent and college equivalent workers are imperfect substitutes with an elasticity of substitution on the order of 2 3 within education groups immigrants and natives are imperfect substitutes together these results imply that the average impacts of recent immigrant inflows on the relative wages of u s natives are small the effects on overall wage inequality including natives and immigrants are larger reflecting the concentration of immigrants in the tails of the skill distribution and higher residual inequality among immigrants than natives even so immigration accounts for a small share 5 of the increase in u s wage inequality between 1980 and 2000

good times bad times postwar labor s share of national income in capitalist democracies this article returns to a classic question of political economy the zero sum conflict between capital and labor over the division of the national income pie a detailed description of labor s shar

the davis bacon act an appraisal of recent studies the intensified controversy in recent years over the davis bacon act which requires the payment of prevailing wages on federally funded construction projects has resulted in several new studies of the effects of that act this invited paper reviews the evidence presented in these recent studies on several aspects of the act including how davis bacon wage determinations compare to local construction wages as measured by sources other than the act s administrators the effects of lags in the act s data gathering process and the savings that would result from calculating the prevailing rate as the arithmetic mean of local wages instead of the current use of the modal rate in most cases the authors conclude that although the cost studies to date have been faulty in several respects it is reasonably clear that davis bacon is unattractive on grounds of economic efficiency alone the question remains however whether these efficiency costs are offset partially or wholly by the possible equity benefits o

the effect of unions on the structure of wages a longitudinal analysis this paper studies the effects of unions on the structure of wages using an estimation technique that explicitly accounts for misclassification errors in reported union status and potential correlations between union status and unobserved productivity the econometric model is estimated separately for five skill groups using a large panel data set formed from the u s current population survey the results suggest that unions raise wages more for workers with lower levels of observed skills in addition the patterns of selection bias differ by skill group among workers with lower levels of observed skill unionized workers are positively selected whereas union workers are negatively selected from among those with higher levels of observed skill despite a large and sophisticated literature there is still substantial disagreement over the extent to which differences in the structure of wages between union and nonunion workers represent an effect of trade unions rather than a consequence of the nonrandom selection of unionized workers over the past decade several alternative approaches have been developed to control for unobserved heterogeneity between union and nonunion workers 2 one method that has been successfully applied in other areas of applied microeconometrics is the use of longitudinal data to measure the wage gains or losses of workers who change union status unfortunately longitudinal estimators are highly sensitive to measurement error even a small fraction of misclassified union status changes can lead to significant biases if the true rate of mobility between union and nonunion jobs is low this sensitivity led lewis 1986 to essentially dismiss the longitudinal evidence in his landmark survey of union wage effects in this paper i present some new evidence on the union wage effect based on a longitudinal estimator that explicitly accounts for misclassification errors in reported union status the estimator uses external information on union status misclassification rates along with the reduced form coefficients from a multi variate regression of wages on the observed sequence of union status indicators to isolate the causal effect of unions from any selection biases introduced by a correlation between union status and the permanent component of unobserved wage heterogeneity recognizing that unions may raise wages more or less for

the rise of the super rich power resources taxes financial markets and the dynamics of the top 1 percent 1949 to 2008 the income share of the super rich in the united states has grown rapidly since the early 1980s after a period of postwar stability what factors drove this change in this study we investigate the institutional policy and economic shifts that may explain rising income concentration we use single equation error correction models to estimate the long and short run effects of politics policy and economic factors on pretax top income shares between 1949 and 2008 we find that the rise of the super rich is the result of rightward shifts in congress the decline of labor unions lower tax rates on high incomes increased trade openness and asset bubbles in stock and real estate markets

collective labor rights and income inequality this article examines the relationship between income inequality and collective labor rights conceptualized as workers legal and practical ability to engage in collective activity although worker organization is central to explaining income inequality in industrialized democracies worldwide comparative studies have neglected the role of class based actors i argue that the repression of labor rights reduces the capacity of worker organizations to effectively challenge income inequality through market and political processes in capitalist societies labor rights however are unlikely to have uniform effects across regions this study uses unbalanced panel data for 100 developed and less developed countries from 1985 through 2002 random and fixed effects models find that strong labor rights are tightly linked to lower inequality across a large range of countries including in the global south interactions between regions and labor rights suggest that the broader context in which class based actors a

would higher salaries keep teachers in high poverty schools evidence from a policy intervention in north carolina abstract for a three year time period beginning in 2001 north carolina awarded an annual bonus of 1800 to certified math science and special education teachers working in public secondary schools with either high poverty rates or low test scores using longitudinal data on teachers we estimate hazard models that identify the impact of this differential pay by comparing turnover patterns before and after the program s implementation across eligible and ineligible categories of teachers and across eligible and barely ineligible schools results suggest that this bonus payment was sufficient to reduce mean turnover rates of the targeted teachers by 17 experienced teachers exhibited the strongest response to the program finally the effect of the program may have been at least partly undermined by the state s failure to fully educate teachers regarding the eligibility criteria our estimates most likely underpredict the potential outcome of a program of permanent salary differentials operating under complete information

growth and adjustment in east asia and latin america this paper compares the experience of growth performance and macroeconomic adjustment between east asia and latin america over the period from 1970 to 2000 we find that the difference in growth performance between two regions are largely attributed to the differences in fundamental growth factors such as investment rate human resources fertility institutional quality macroeconomic stability and the degree of trade openness we also discuss the role of quality of education and differences in inequality between the two regions balance of payments crisis shocks have also contributed significantly to the differences of growth performance across regions the adjustment from balance of payments crises shows that the growth rates tend to be lowered only temporarily following a crisis and then rebound to the pre crisis levels thereby existing the typical v type pattern of adjustment from crises has been in both east asia and latin american crisis episodes however often a balance of payments crisis is associated with a large decline of growth rates and developed into another crisis in the future we estimate the determinants of the output costs of crises and find that international liquidity financial soundness real exchange rate depreciation and monetary policy play a critical role in reducing output losses from crises

how central banks prepare for financial crises an empirical analysis of the effects of crises and globalisation on international reserves central banks international reserve holdings have increased significantly in the recent past while traditional models fail to explain this accumulation of reserves the more recent literature argues that reserves are used as a lifejacket against currency crises however research so far has neglected the question whether and how central banks change their precautionary reserve holdings after the country was affected by a currency crisis this paper tests the hypothesis that central banks revise their reserve policy in the aftermath of currency crises a dynamic panel data model is estimated for developing and industrial countries covering the period from 1975 to 2003 the evidence suggests that currency crises induce a permanent increase of reserves this effect is particularly strong for recent currency crises since the asian financial crisis

unions and nonunion wage dispersion previous research has found that union standard rate policies lower the dispersion of union wages and that unions indirectly raise nonunion wage levels as firms weigh the probability of unionizing and wage costs these two findings imply that unions lower the dispersion of nonunion wages since for a given payroll a nonunion firm can achieve the greatest reduction in the probability of unionism by giving raises to those who would benefit most from a union this hypothesis is confirmed on current population survey data taking into account the endogeneity of unionism ceteris paribus nonunion wage dispersion is lower in more highly unionized industries copyright 1987 by mit press

when unionization disappears state level unionization and working poverty in the united states although the working poor are a much larger population than the unemployed poor u s poverty research devotes much more attention to joblessness than to working poverty research that does exist o

my end of the bargain are there cross district effects in teacher contract provisions a large literature on teacher collective bargaining describes the potential influence of the provisions in collectively bargained teacher union contracts on teachers and student achievement but li

economic segmentation worker power and income inequality how economic segmentation generates income inequality constitutes a central question for theories of economic and social organization and of socioeconomic achievement previous research emphasizes two sources of the structural variation in income 1 employers with large amounts of resources for a variety of reasons may find it in their interests to pay workers higher wages and 2 some workers are able to acquire power against their employers as well as against other workers and can therefore extract higher earnings in this paper we investigate several issues involved in the links among economic segmentation worker power and income inequality we argue that the structure of economic segmentation is multidimensional and reflects such distinct concepts as concentration economic scale state intervention in the market capital intensity and organization size worker power also is derived from diverse sources such as union membership occupational skill and licensing class position and tenure wi

currency crashes in emerging markets an empirical treatment we use a panel of annual data for over 100 developing countries from 1971 through 1992 to characterize currency crashes we define a currency crash as a large change of the nominal exchange rate that is also a substantial increase in the rate of change of nominal depreciation we examine the composition of the debt as well as its level and a variety of other macroeconomic factors external and foreign crashes tend to occur when output growth is low the growth of domestic credit is high and the level of foreign interest rates are high a low ratio of fdi to debt is consistently associated with a high likelihood of a crash

economic impacts of new unionization on private sector employers 1984 2001 economic impacts of unionization on employers are difficult to estimate in the absence of large representative data on establishments with union status information estimates are also confounded by selection bias because unions could organize at highly profitable enterprises that are more likely to grow and pay higher wages using multiple establishment level data sets that represent establishments that faced organizing drives in the united states during 1984 1999 this paper uses a regression discontinuity design to estimate the impact of unionization on business survival employment output productivity and wages essentially outcomes for employers where unions barely won the election e g by one vote are compared with those where the unions barely lost the analysis finds small impacts on all outcomes that we examine estimates for wages are close to zero the evidence suggests that at least in recent decades the legal mandate that requires the employer to bargain with a certified union has had little economic impact on employers because unions have been somewhat unsuccessful at securing significant wage gains

the evidence on globalisation globalisation is blamed for many socioeconomic shortcomings i discuss the consequences of globalisation by surveying the empirical globalisation literature my focus is on the kof indices of globalisation that have been used in more than 100 studies early studies using the kof index reported correlations between globalisation and several outcome variables studies published more recently identify causal effects the evidence shows that globalisation has spurred economic growth promoted gender equality and improved human rights moreover globalisation did not erode welfare state activities did not have any significant effect on labour market interaction and hardly influenced market deregulation it increased however within country income inequality the consequences of globalisation thus turn out to be overall much more favourable than often conjectured in the public discourse

class forces political institutions and state intervention subnational economic development policy in the united states 1971 1990 the united states has experienced a major devolution of social and economic policy responsibilities to the states subnational industrial policies to create jobs and qualitative economic growth are key to this devolution the authors examine the development of these policies in terms of 1 the articulation of class interests 2 state level political institutions 3 prior political legacies 4 underlying production regimes and 5 interactions of strong political institutions and class mobilization an annual pooled cross sectional time series analysis of three state level economic development policies entrepreneurial industrial recruitment and labor market regulation shows that in addition to business power and strong state capacities the political legacies of 1930s welfare policy innovations and mezocorporatist bargaining potential condition the effects of business power

swinging for the fences the effects of ceo stock options on company risk taking and performance we unpack the concept of managerial risk taking distinguishing among three of its major elements the size of an outlay the variance of potential outcomes and the likelihood of extreme loss we

the mechanisms of policy diffusion local policy adoptions provide an excellent opportunity to test among potential mechanisms of policy diffusion by examining three types of antismoking policy choices by the 675 largest u s cities between 1975 and 2000 we uncover robust patterns of policy diffusion yielding three key findings first we distinguish among and find evidence for four mechanisms of policy diffusion learning from earlier adopters economic competition among proximate cities imitation of larger cities and coercion by state governments second we find a temporal component to these effects with imitation being a more short lived diffusion process than the others third we show that these mechanisms are conditional with larger cities being better able to learn from others less fearful of economic spillovers and less likely to rely on imitation

job relocation and the racial gap in unemployment in detroit and chicago 1980 to 1990 the spatial mismatch hypothesis argues that residential segregation and job decentralization combine to adversely affect the employment opportunities of minorities while employment is increasingly located outside of central cities residential segregation prevents minorities from moving closer to suburban jobs although this hypothesis has intuitive appeal there is little consensus regarding its empirical validity this study 1 constructs detailed geographic measures of changes in employment opportunities 2 estimates a fixed effects model of changes in the unemployment rate over time and 3 accounts for spatial correlation in the error term neighborhood level employment data from 1980 and 1990 are used to measure changes in the distance to jobs from census tracts in the detroit and chicago metropolitan areas in both cities the decentralization of employment and the loss of manufacturing jobs resulted in substantial changes in the spatial distribution of employment the empirical results indicate that a decline in the spatial proximity to employment is associated with an increase in the unemployment rate for blacks

fear of appreciation abstract in recent years the term fear of floating has been used to describe exchange rate regimes that while officially flexible in practice intervene heavily to avoid sudden or large depreciations however the data reveals that in most cases and increasingly so in the 2000s intervention has been aimed at limiting appreciations rather than depreciations often motivated by the neo mercantilist view of a depreciated real exchange rate as protection for domestic industries as a first step to address the broader question of whether this view delivers on its promise we examine whether this fear of appreciation has a positive impact on growth performance in developing economies we show that depreciated exchange rates indeed lead to higher growth but that the effect rather than through import substitution or export booms as argued by the mercantilist view works largely through the deepening of domestic savings and capital accumulation

does membership payoff for covered workers a distributional analysis of the free rider problem this paper examines the union membership wage premium among private sector employees covered by collective bargaining agreements using current population survey data for 2000 2003 the author not only estimates the conditional mean wage premium the metric on which most previous research has focused but also employs recently developed instrumental quantile regression techniques to estimate the wage effect of membership across the wage distribution members enjoyed on average a wage premium of 9 over comparable covered nonmembers further analyses find no evidence that this mean premium is explained either by unobserved differences or by measurement error the author also finds that a narrow focus on the mean impact partially masks heterogeneity in the impact across the distribution notably membership wage effects were considerably more pronounced for low wage earners than for high wage earners

welfare benefits and unemployment in affluent democracies the moderating role of the institutional insider outsider divide the effect of generous welfare benefits on unemployment is highly contested the dominant perspective contends that benefits provide disincentive to work whereas others portray benefits as job sea

can leading indicators assess country vulnerability evidence from the 2008 09 global financial crisis abstract we investigate whether leading indicators can help explain the cross country incidence of the 2008 09 financial crisis rather than looking for indicators with specific relevance to the recent crisis the selection of variables is driven by an extensive review of more than eighty papers from the previous literature on early warning indicators our motivation is to address suspicions that indicators found to be useful predictors in one round of crises are typically not useful to predict the next round the review suggests that central bank reserves and past movements in the real exchange rate were the two leading indicators that had proven the most useful in explaining crisis incidence across different countries and episodes in the past for the 2008 09 crisis we use six different variables to measure crisis incidence drops in gdp and industrial production currency depreciation stock market performance reserve losses and participation in an imf program we find that the level of reserves in 2007 appears as a consistent and statistically significant leading indicator of who got hit by the 2008 09 crisis in line with the conclusions of the pre 2008 literature in addition to reserves recent real appreciation is a statistically significant predictor of devaluation and of a measure of exchange market pressure during the current crisis we define the period of the global financial shock as running from late 2008 to early 2009 which probably explains why we find stronger results than earlier papers such as obstfeld et al 2009 2010 and rose and spiegel 2009a b 2010 2011 which use annual data

does globalization affect growth evidence from a new index of globalization the study develops an index of globalization covering its three main dimensions economic integration social integration and political integration using panel data for 123 countries in 1970 2000 it is analysed empirically whether the overall index of globalization as well as sub indexes constructed to measure the single dimensions affect economic growth as the results show globalization indeed promotes growth the dimensions most robustly related with growth refer to actual economic flows and restrictions in developed countries although less robustly information flows also promote growth whereas political integration has no effect

the role of foreign currency debt in financial crises 1880 1913 versus 1972 1997 abstract we show that exposure to foreign currency debt does not necessarily increase the risk of having a financial crisis some countries do not suffer from financial fragility despite original sin before 1913 british offshoots and scandinavia afflicted with it avoided financial meltdowns today many advanced countries have original sin but few have had crises in both periods aggregate balance sheet mismatches are associated with a greater likelihood of a crisis the evidence suggests that foreign currency debt is dangerous when mis managed this is part of the difference between developed countries and emerging markets both of which borrow in foreign currency

does competition among public schools benefit students and taxpayers tiebout choice among districts is the most powerful market force in american public education naive estimates of its effects are biased by endogenous district formation i derive instruments from the natural boundaries in a metropolitan area my results suggest that metropolitan areas with greater tiebout choice have more productive public schools and less private schooling little of the effect of tiebout choice works through its effect on household sorting this finding may be explained by another finding students are equally segregated by school in metropolitan areas with greater and lesser degrees of tiebout choice among districts

behavior of output during currency crises abstract this paper documents the behavior of output and its association with other macroeconomic variables in 195 episodes of currency crises in developing countries during 1970 2000 we find that about 60 of the crises are contractionary while the rest are expansionary crises are one and a half times more likely to be contractionary in emerging markets than in other developing economies the number of contractionary crises or their severity does not increase in the 1990s economies which experience capital inflows in the years prior to the crisis or an increase in external debt burden during the crisis are more likely to slow down during crises while those with restrictions on capital flows prior to the crisis or are more open to international trade are less likely to do so the results are robust to different ways of measuring changes in output during crises

income inequality in the united states 1913 1998 this paper presents new homogeneous series on top shares of income and wages from 1913 to 1998 in the united states using individual tax returns data top income and wages shares display a u shaped pattern over the century our series suggest that the large shocks that capital owners experienced during the great depression and world war ii have had a permanent effect on top capital incomes we argue that steep progressive income and estate taxation may have prevented large fortunes from fully recovering from these shocks top wage shares were flat before world war ii dropped precipitously during the war and did not start to recover before the late 1960s but are now higher than before world war ii as a result the working rich have replaced the rentiers at the top of the income distribution

did lower unionization in the united states result in more flexible industries do unions really impede manufacturers output flexibility if so in what ways the authors propose a methodology for quantifying george stigler s concept of output flexibility and for decomposing the effects of unionization on average cost differences between union and non union plants using a recently compiled data set on u s three digit manufacturing industries from 1973 to 1996 they adapt this methodology to simulate the effects of unionization on flexibility and average costs for average size plants simulation results indicate that higher unionization was associated with higher average costs and lower flexibility than low unionization higher average costs appear to have been primarily due to higher fixed costs such as higher benefits

foreign currency debt financial crises and economic growth a long run view what are the costs of hard currency liabilities after being implicated in the global financial instability of the late 1990s the costs are widely believed to be large and as a result many emerging markets have pushed to minimize currency mismatches we study the growth effects of exposure to foreign currency debt using data from two periods of international financial integration 1880 1913 and 1973 2002 for over 45 countries hard currency debt is associated with increased risks of currency and debt crises in both periods especially when a country s macroeconomic financial fundamentals are weak we find the risk of financial crisis associated with hard currency debts translated into significantly diminished growth rates however we also find evidence that strong financial development and policy credibility attenuate the crisis risks associated with high exposure to hard currency debt which has implications for eastern european countries where large current account deficits and high levels of hard currency debt are believed to pose financial risks in this region some countries have adopted flexible exchange rates and avoided foreign currency debt several others have built up large net foreign currency liabilities and are exposed to a significant likelihood of a financial crisis in the near future

the effect of unions on wage inequality in the u s labor market this study uses current population survey micro data for 1973 74 and 1993 to evaluate the effect of changing union membership on trends in male and female wage inequality unionization rates of men fell between the two sample periods with bigger declines among lower skill groups these trends account for 15 20 of the rise in male wage inequality union membership rates of low wage women also declined while unionization increased among higher wage women on balance shifting unionization accounts for very little of the rise in female wage inequality economy wide trends in unionization mask a sharp divergence between the private sector where unionism was declining and the public sector where it was rising comparisons across sectors suggest that unionization substantially slowed the growth in wage inequality in the public sector

union membership union organization and the dispersion of wages a variance components model explains wage dispersion with a specific version of generalized least squares the estimation preserves individual data while examining the influence of union penetration on dispersion in both the union and nonunion sectors controlling for both individual and industry characteristics and for the endogeneity of wages union penetration correlates strongly with reduced dispersion in the union sector but not in the nonunion sector a decomposition reveals the relative importance of the influences of union penetration and of union membership copyright 1990 by mit press

a clash of capitalisms foreign shareholders and corporate restructuring in 1990s japan this article examines the clash between stakeholder and shareholder based business systems resulting from an increase in foreign portfolio investment in the japanese economy during the 1990s an analysis of 1 108 firms between 1991 and 2000 shows that as foreign institutional investors who were more interested in investment returns than in long term relationships replaced domestic shareholders one fundamental pillar of japan s stakeholder capitalism began to crack japanese firms began to adopt downsizing and asset divestiture practices more characteristic of anglo american shareholder economies the influence of foreigners however was weaker in firms more deeply embedded in the local system through close ties to domestic financial institutions and corporate groups thus foreign investors were influential primarily in firms less embedded in the existing stakeholder system this research contributes to debates on globalization and convergence of business systems institutional change and corporate

life course risks mobility regimes and mobility consequences a comparison of sweden germany and the united states1 the analysis of intergenerational mobility has primarily used measures of social position that are functions of an individual s occupation occupation based models of social mobility however have limitations that arguably have grown in recent decades meta analysis of available evidence for sweden western germany and the united states concerning occupational mobility household income mobility job displacement union dissolution and poverty dynamics shows the limitations of the individual level occupation based career trajectory approach to life course mobility this article develops an alternative formulation at the household level which focuses on cross national variation in the extent to which societal institutions influence the rate of events with the potential to change a household s life conditions via the manipulation of incentives for mobility generating events and the extent to which they mitigate the consequences of these events through social insurance the combination of these institut

through the contested terrain implementation of downsizing announcements by large u s firms 1984 to 2005 since the 1980s leading u s firms have announced massive downsizing plans in the name of maximizing shareholder value but some observers are skeptical about how serious firms are in implementing

internal external attitudes sense of efficacy and labor market experience a reply to duncan and morgan the paper studies direct evidence on reservation wages reported in great britain in 1982 to assess 1 whether such asking prices are high and 2 whether variations in these reservation wages are related to differences in measures of the subjective

financial instability reserves and central bank swap lines in the panic of 2008 in this paper we connect the events of the last twelve months the panic of 2008 as it has been called to the demand for international reserves in previous work we have shown that international reserve demand can be rationalized by a central bank s desire to backstop the broad money supply to avert the possibility of an internal external double drain a bank run combined with capital flight thus simply looking at trade or short term debt as motivations for reserve holdings is insufficient one must also consider the size of the banking system m2 here we show that a country s reserve holdings just before the current crisis relative to their predicted holdings based on these financial motives can significantly predict exchange rate movements of both emerging and advanced countries in 2008 countries with large war chests did not depreciate and some appreciated meanwhile those who held insufficient reserves based on our metric were likely to depreciate current account balances and short term debt levels are not statistically significant predictors of depreciation once reserve levels are taken into account our model s typically high predicted reserve levels provide important context for the unprecedented u s dollar swap lines recently provided to many countries by the federal reserve this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

inequality in the working class the unanticipated consequences of union organization and strikes this paper explores one possible explanation for the uniquely apolitical character of the u s labor movement compared to the labor movements of other western capitalist democracies employing a neo marxist class perspective the author examines the relationship of union density union members as a percentage of the nonagricultural work force and of strike frequency to the distribution of earned income in the united states from 1949 to 1976 time series regression analysis of the quintile distribution of earned income and the gini index of the inequality of earned income shows that union density has had mixed effects on inequality with higher union density tending to redistribute income from middle income workers to both the least prosperous and most prosperous workers whereas higher strike frequency has tended to reduce income inequality generally the author suggests that union organization may be a source of divisiveness within the working class in the postwar era

foreign exchange market intervention and reserve accumulation in emerging asia is there evidence of fear of appreciation abstract asian central banks react more strongly to currency appreciations than depreciations and more to nominal effective exchange rates neers than to bilateral us dollar rates this rationalizes the relative exchange rate stability and the sustained reserve accumulation in the region

the new great debate about unionism and collective bargaining in u s state and local governments recently some state and local governments in the united states have sharply reduced or eliminated public employee unionism and bargaining rights in the belief that their fiscal adversity stems mainly from overcompensation of public employees caused by collective bargaining the authors examine public private sector pay and benefit relationships the effects of unions on public employee pay the effectiveness of employment dispute resolution procedures and the ability of public sector labor and management to combat fiscal adversity they provide new evidence showing that on balance public employees are undercompensated relative to their private sector counterparts the effects of unions on compensation are smaller in the public than in the private sector and public sector dispute resolution procedures and joint labor management initiatives to reform work function reasonably well

the transition to the knowledge economy labor market institutions and income inequality in advanced democracies the transition from fordism to the knowledge economy in the world s advanced democracies was underpinned by the revolution in information and communications technology ict the introduction and rapid diffusion of ict pushed up wages for college educated workers with complementary skills and allowed top managers and ceos to reap greater rewards for their own talents despite these common pressures income inequality did not rise to the same extent everywhere income in the anglo saxon countries remains particularly unequally distributed to shed new light on this puzzle the authors carry out a panel data analysis of eighteen oecd countries between 1970 and 2007 their analysis stands apart from the existing empirical literature by taking a comparative perspective the article examines the extent to which the relationship between the knowledge economy and income inequality is influenced by national labor market institutions the authors find that the expansion of knowledge employment is positively associated with both the 90 10 wage ratio and the income share of the top 1 percent but that these effects are mitigated by the presence of strong labor market institutions such as coordinated wage bargaining strict employment protection legislation high union density and high collective bargaining coverage the authors provide robust evidence against the argument that industrial relations systems are no longer important safeguards of wage solidarity in the knowledge economy

skill biased technological change and rising wage inequality some problems and puzzles the recent rise in wage inequality is usually attributed to skill biased technical change sbtc associated with new computer technologies we review the evidence for this hypothesis focusing on the implications of sbtc for overall wage inequality and for changes in wage differentials between groups a key problem for the sbtc hypothesis is that wage inequality stabilized in the 1990s despite continuing advances in computer technology sbtc also fails to explain the evolution of other dimensions of wage inequality including the gender and racial wage gaps and the age gradient in the return to education

chronicle of currency collapses re examining the effects on output abstract the impact of currency collapses i e large nominal depreciations or devaluations on real output remains unsettled in the empirical macroeconomic literature this paper provides new empirical evidence on this relationship using a dataset for 108 emerging and developing economies over the period 1960 2006 we provide estimates of how these episodes affect growth and output trend our main finding is that currency collapses are associated with a permanent output loss relative to trend which is estimated to range between 2 and 6 of gdp however we show that such losses tend to materialize before the drop in the value of the currency which suggests that the costs of a currency crash largely stem from the factors leading to it taken on its own i e ceteris paribus we find that currency collapses tend to have a positive effect on output more generally we also find that the likelihood of a positive growth rate in the year of the collapse is over two times more likely than a contraction and that positive growth rates in the years that follow such episodes are the norm finally we show that the persistence of the crash matters i e one time events induce exchange rate and output dynamics that differ from consecutive episodes

risky business the decline of defined benefit pensions and firms shifting of risk since the early 1980s employment in the united states has undergone significant transformation as the large corporations that once safeguarded employees with stable jobs and rewards for loyalty have replaced these employment relationships with ones based on cost containment and flexibility one important consequence of these developments is that firms have abdicated their role as a critical risk bearer in society although evidence suggests that firms have increasingly shifted market risks onto their workforce to date there have been few detailed analyses exploring what factors have driven this phenomenon this study adds to our understanding of why firms have transferred risk to their employees by examining the decline of a highly institutionalized practice wherein large u s firms used to bear retirement risk the defined benefit db pension plan through a detailed analysis i show that variance in the presence power and interests of shareholders and employees at the firm level differentially affect a firm s willingness to shift the risk of retirement onto its workers specifically i demonstrate empirically that different types of shareholders have differential effects on a firm s retirement practices suggesting that the changing equity ownership structure of large u s firms has played a key role in how risk is allocated between workers and firms declines in employee power have also played a role because firm levels of unionization positively affect rates of db participation for both unionized and nonunionized workers

compensation benchmarking leapfrogs and the surge in executive pay scholars frequently argue whether the sharp rise in chief executive officer ceo pay in recent years is efficient or is a consequence of rent extraction because of the failure of corporate governance in individual firms this article argues that governance failure must be conceptualized at the market rather than the firm level because excessive pay increases for even relatively few ceos a year spread to other firms through the cognitively and rhetorically constructed compensation networks of peer groups which are used in the benchmarking process to negotiate the compensation of ceos counterfactual simulation based on standard and poor s execucomp data demonstrates that the effects of ceo leapfrogging potentially explain a considerable fraction of the overall upward movement of executive compensation since the early 1990s

quality over quantity reexamining the link between entrepreneurship and job creation although much has been written about the quantity of jobs created by entrepreneurs scholars have yet to examine the quality of these jobs in this article the authors begin to address this important issue by examining nearly 5 000 businesses that began operations in 2004 they investigate the extent to which nascent employers provide what many think of as quality jobs those offering health care coverage and a retirement plan the authors find that because of small scale constrained resources and protection from institutional pressures start up companies do not provide their employees with either of these proxies for job quality and their likelihood of offering health or retirement benefits increases only marginally over their first six years of operation the finding that entrepreneurs impressive record of job creation is not matched by a similarly impressive outcome with respect to job quality challenges policymakers to ensure that entrepreneurs are encouraged to create quality employment opportunities in the course of creating new businesses abstract from author

an integration of trade union models in a sequential bargaining framework this paper aims to embed two popular models of trade union behavior the monopoly model and the efficient bargaining model in a more general framework it does this by analyzing sequential bargaining models where wages are determined before employment and the power of the union in the two stages of the bargain differs as well as finding that the monopoly and efficient bargain models are special cases of this model a new class of models is also discovered this framework is used to analyze the relationship between union pow er and efficiency the empirical analysis of trade unions and the effects of trade union legislation copyright 1987 by royal economic society

union effects on nonunion wages evidence from panel data on industries and cities the authors test for threat and crowding effects of unions on non union wages at the industry and city levels using panel data on the percent organized and nonunion industry and city wage differentials constructed from current population surveys over the period 1973 89 at the industry level increases in the percent organized were associated with decreases in the nonunion industry wage differential suggesting that crowding effects were the predominant union effect on nonunion industry wage differentials in contrast at the city level increases in the percent organized were associated with increases in the nonunion city wage differential suggesting that threat effects predominated the authors also find evidence of negative cross occupation union effects on nonunion industry wage differentials supporting their hypothesis that the industry level results were partly driven by complementarity between union and nonunion labor

regulating american industries markets politics and the institutional determinants of fire insurance regulation1 this article assesses three approaches to state regulation capture theory interest group analyses and neoinstitutional research state level event history analyses of fire insurance rate regulation from 1906 to 1930 are used contrary to capture theory regulation was not driven simply by firms interests in market control instead consistent with interest group analyses regulation was more likely when anticompany forces farmers and small businesses could challenge big business politically further as neoinstitutional research suggests regulation was more likely when industry governance evoked legitimacy crises when courts and professions endorsed regulation and its underlying models and when states developed system wide administrative capacities institutional conditions also mediated the effects of markets and politics on regulation using these findings we develop a theory of how political and institutional conditions shape industries governance options

unions norms and the rise in u s wage inequality from 1973 to 2007 private sector union membership in the united states declined from 34 to 8 percent for men and from 16 to 6 percent for women during this period inequality in hourly wages increased by over 40 percent we report a decomposition relating rising inequality to the union wage distribution s shrinking weight we argue that unions helped institutionalize norms of equity reducing the dispersion of nonunion wages in highly unionized regions and industries accounting for unions effect on union and nonunion wages suggests that the decline of organized labor explains a fifth to a third of the growth in inequality an effect comparable to the growing stratification of wages by education

a note on the severity of the decline in union organizing activity using data on representation elections conducted by the national labor relations board from 1975 to 1987 the authors examine the extent of the recent decline in union organizing activity an analysis of elections for selected unions and in major industry categories shows no widespread recovery from the sharp drop in organizing that occurred from 1981 to 1982 although union success rates in new units have been fairly constant the low number of new members recruited through elections points to a continuation of the downward trend in union density

sluggish institutions in a dynamic world can unions and industrial competition coexist during the 1930s and 1940s collective bargaining emerged as the workplace governance norm in much of the u s industrial sector following its peak in the 1950s union density in the u s private sector fell steadily to only 7 4 percent in 2006 governance shifted from a formalized union norm to one of constrained managerial discretion in competitive and dynamic economic environments a union tax on company earnings and slow response to economic shocks combine to produce poor performance by union companies two industries automotives and airlines are used to illustrate these points if worker based institutions are to flourish they must add value and permit companies to perform at levels similar to those obtained under evolving nonunion governance norms

labor market institutions and wage inequality the authors investigate how labor market institutions such as unemployment insurance unions firing regulations and minimum wages have affected the evolution of wage inequality among male workers results of estimations using data on institutions in eleven oecd countries indicate that changes in labor market institutions can account for much of the change in wage inequality between 1973 and 1998 factors found to have been negatively associated with male wage inequality are union density the strictness of employment protection law unemployment benefit duration unemployment benefit generosity and the size of the minimum wage over the 26 year period institutional changes were associated with a 23 reduction in male wage inequality in france where minimum wages increased and employment protection became stricter but with an increase of up to 11 in the united states and united kingdom where unions became less powerful and in the united states minimum wages fell

collapsing exchange rate regimes some linear examples abstract we construct a pair of linear examples to study the collapse time of a fixed exchange rate regime the first example is a perfect foresight continuous time model which allows calculation of the exact collapse time and the tracking of reserves the second example is a discrete time stochastic model which yields an endogenous probability distribution over the collapse time and produces a forward discount of the exchange rate

too much of a good thing the adequacy of international reserves in the aftermath of crises this paper has a number of purposes first it revisits the older theory of reserve adequacy and optimality to see whether this can still be used and perhaps strengthened in ways that would inform the current debate second it explores the connection between reserve adequacy and currency crisis in the light of recent experience and empirical research third it critically investigates alternative rule of thumb measures of reserve adequacy fourth and drawing on the foregoing analysis it examines the extent to which crisis countries should seek to replenish and build up their international reserves in the post crisis period additional owned reserves represent a guaranteed and unconditional source of liquidity is this what is needed

match bias in wage gap estimates due to earnings imputation about 30 of workers in the current population survey have earnings imputed wage gap estimates are biased toward zero when the attribute being studied e g union status is not a criterion used to match donors to nonrespondents an expression for match bias is derived in which attenuation equals the sum of match error rates attenuation can be approximated by the proportion with imputed earnings union wage gap estimates with match bias removed are presented for 1973 2001 estimates for recent years are biased downward 5 percentage points bias in gap estimates accompanying other non match criteria public sector industry etc is examined

do sales of foreign exchange reserves lead to currency appreciation we employ novel time stamped reserve sales data provided by the czech national bank cnb to carry out a time series analysis of the exchange rate implications of czech reserve sales aimed at mitigating valuation losses on euro denominated assets the sales were explicitly not intended to influence the value of the koruna relative to the euro the period under study includes a well defined regime change in the cnb s approach to reserves sales allowing us to address whether the manner in which the sales are carried out matters for their influence on the relative value of the domestic currency we find little evidence that reserve sales influence the exchange rate when sales are carried out on a discretionary and relatively infrequent basis however when the sales are carried out daily we find a statistically and economically significant appreciation of the domestic currency follows