the demand for food products an analysis of interpurchase times and purchased quantities in this paper we study household purchase behaviour of storable food products an inventory model is developed in which the household chooses an optimal stock level of the product storage of the product is costly there is a fixed cost per purchase occasion and the market price is sometimes discounted because of price promotions we show that the optimal purchase policy is an s s policy the model is used to derive predictions on the correlations between interpurchase times and purchased quantities on the one hand and prices on the other these predictions are empirically verified using consumer panel data

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

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

out of the wallet and into the purse using micro data to test income pooling this paper uses an exogenous change in the intrahousehold distribution of income provided by a change in united kingdom family allowance policy to test the income pooling hypothesis implied by unitary household models expenditure shares are estimated for a wide range of goods using household level data shifts in expenditure shares suggest that children and mothers benefited at the expense of fathers when this policy change shifted income within households from men to women similar shifts are not found among married couple households with no children this paper refutes income pooling and confirms and extends results in lundberg pollak and wales 1997

a nonparametric cost approach to scale efficiency starting with farrell fieldhouse 1962 a host of notiparametric models have been developed for calculation of scale efficiency a common property of these models is that they are specified in terms of input output data duality theory has taught us that technological characteristics may be analyzed from either the primal or the dual cost side the purpose of this paper is to introduce a nonparametric dual method of calculating scale efficiency

investigating the cost performance of uk credit unions using radial and non radial efficiency measures abstract this paper examines the relative efficiency of uk credit unions radial and non radial measures of input cost efficiency plus associated scale efficiency measures are computed for a selection of input output specifications both measures highlighted that uk credit unions have considerable scope for efficiency gains it was mooted that the documented high levels of inefficiency may be indicative of the fact that credit unions based on clearly defined and non overlapping common bonds are not in competition with each other for market share credit unions were also highlighted as suffering from a considerable degree of scale inefficiency with the majority of scale inefficient credit unions subject to decreasing returns to scale the latter aspect highlights that the uk government s goal of larger credit unions must be accompanied by greater regulatory freedom if inefficiency is to be avoided one of the advantages of computing non radial measures is that an insight into potential over or under expenditure on specific inputs can be obtained through a comparison of the non radial measure of efficiency with the associated radial measure two interesting findings emerged the first that uk credit unions over spend on dividend payments and the second that they under spend on labour costs

zero expenditures and the estimation of engel curves over the brief interview periods typical of budget surveys such as the u k family expenditure survey households recorded expenditures are liable to be misleading indicators of their underlying consumption most starkly a household may not be observed to purchase commodities that it nevertheless consumes this paper considers the implications of such measurement errors for the estimation of demand systems and derives a consistent estimator for the special case of linear engel curves

unequal organizations or unequal attainments an empirical comparison of sectoral and individualistic explanations for aggregate inequality explanations derived from the sectoral perspective in sociology and the humancapital screening perspectives in economics are used to predict income inequality in the american states the sectoral perspective is represented by an indicator of the dispersion of concentration in product markets across manufacturing establishments within each state and by the dispersion of employment across enterprises in eight size categories individualistic explanations favored by neoclassical economists are operationalized with the dispersion in educational attainments and by the dispersion in the age experience of the labor force with the percentage of blacks and three additional variables in the equations four hypotheses receive consistent support the strongest determinant of income inequality is the dispersion in educational attainments but the indicator of concentration is significant in all equations states with more blacks and greater variance in establishment size also were likely to be comparatively unequal these results are consistent with both the individualistic emphasis in the neoclassical perspective and the emphasis on economic power in the sectoral perspective they also indicate that studies of income inequality by human capital economists may have been biased by a failure to control for the institutional variables that are emphasized in sectoral theories

the wage effects of high performance work organization in manufacturing an unresolved question about now widespread innovative work systems such as teams and quality programs is whether they influence wage determination this study examines that possible association in manufacturing the author uses data from the 1997 national establishment survey that allow examination of how new work systems affected not only employees who were directly involved in them but other workers as well the key finding is that for core blue collar manufacturing employees higher wages were associated with high performance work organization hpwo systems while higher skill levels and computer based technologies were associated with higher wages the key mechanism appears to have been productivity gains independent of skill and technology that were shared via various across the board wage payment systems hpwo systems appear to have increased managers wages as well although through different channels the author finds no evidence that hpwo related wage gains led to greater wage inequality amon

economic globalization and women s employment the case of manufacturing in mexico sociological research has been generally critical of the effects of economic globalization on developing countries however greater worldwide economic integration may have created new employment o

the rise of intra occupational wage inequality in the united states 1983 to 2002 wage inequality has increased dramatically in the united states since the 1980s this article investigates the relationship between this trend and occupational structure measured at the three digit level using the current population survey from 1983 to 2002 we find that the direct association between occupations and wage inequality declined over this period as within occupational inequality grew faster than betweenoccupational inequality we estimate multilevel growth models using detailed occupational categories as the unit of analysis to assess how the characteristics of occupations affect changes in mean wages and levels of wage inequality across this time period the results indicate that changes in mean wages across occupations vary depending on the characteristics of individuals in those occupations and that intraoccupational inequality is difficult to predict using conventional labor force data these findings seem largely inconsistent with the common sociological view of occupation as the most fundamental feature of the labor market correspondingly a more comprehensive approach one that incorporates the effects of organizational variables and market processes on rising wage inequality in the new economy is warranted

from the fringe to the fore labor unions and employee compensation conventional wisdom suggests that labor unions raise worker wages while the newer empirical literature finds only negligible earnings effects i reconcile this apparent contradiction by arguing th

modeling food consumption decisions as a two step process this article evaluates the suitability of tobit analysis of food consumption patterns by comparing results generated by a tobit model and a modification with a two step decision process two samples of adult women were selected from the 1977 78 nationwide food consumption survey and the 1985 continuing survey of food intakes by individuals results show strong statistical evidence for questioning tobit analysis in examining food consumption decisions determinants of the decision to consume food within a particular food group often differ from the determinants of how much to consume particularly for more highly defined food groupings analysis of u s food consumption patterns and their dietary aspects with respect to consumer behavior has a long history traditionally ordinary least squares ols or some variant has been used in many studies where ols was not appropriate the tobit method was applied tobit allows for a discrete mass point for observations as well as a continuous range of values for the dependent variable this nonlinear method has yielded good results in a variety of studies e g mccracken and brandt lane and devaney and fraker this article examines the suitability of the tobit method for analysis of food consumption patterns the tobit method assumes that the decision to consume a given food item is the same as the decision about the amount of the food to consume ignoring the two step nature of the decision process may hamper understanding of true behavioral patterns lead to erroneous conclusions and generate incorrect policy recommendations this article compares results generated by a tobit model and a modification with a two step decision process in the next section the statistical methods used to test whether food consumption is a one or two step decision process are described the following sections discuss the variables and data present the results and consider the conclusions

estimating consumption from expenditure data abstract most studies of distributional issues have focused on the distribution of income but the income information usually available suffers from well known deficiencies this paper explores an alternative approach to distributional analysis based instead on expenditure data in many countries including the united kingdom available household budget data provides information on expenditures only over a short period the problems that consequently arise in interpreting data of this sort are emphasised a general specification for the stochastic structure of expenditure data is presented and a procedure for estimating participant households underlying consumption from their observed expenditures developed and discussed

gender domestic labor time and wage inequality this paper explores the relationship between domestic labor and wage labor by estimating the relative influence of hours spent in domestic labor e g housework and child care on women s and men s wages it is hypothesized that involvement in domestic activities negatively affects wages and is likely to be an important factor in explaining women s lower wages relative to men findings from ols regression analyses of white currently employed currently married women and men indicate that domestic labor time significantly decreases both sexes wages in order to assess whether this relationship differs by class the sex specific earnings equations also are estimated within the working class and the non working class the negative effect of domestic labor time on both sexes income persists in the within class analyses working class men are more vulnerable to the detrimental influence of domestic production unexpectedly housework and child care time decreases non workingclass women s wages more so than working class women s wages it is noted that these findings should be interpreted with caution due to the cross sectional nature of the data which precludes an unequivocal assessment of potential nonrecursivity in the linkages among key variables in the model overall the findings imply that a more equitable distribution of work in the home is necessary before labor market inequalities between the sexes can be ameliorated

demand systems estimation with microdata a censored regression approach demand systems estimation increasingly makes use of household level microdata mainly to measure the effects of demographic variables data based on these household expenditure surveys present a major estimation problem for any given household many of the goods have zero consumption implying a censored dependent variable techniques which do not take this censored dependent variable into account will yield biased results we utilize a censored regression approach that is computationally simple consistent and asymptotically efficient the results are then presented and compared with those obtained using an uncensored technique

testing the infrequent purchases model using direct measurement of hidden consumption from food stocks survey reports of zero expenditure result from either genuine non consumption or purchases undertaken too infrequently to observe during a survey with hidden consumption from stocks infrequent purchase models rely on untested hypotheses to distinguish these types of zeros we test such models with data from an unusual survey where food stocks are measured at the start and end of the survey reference period parameter estimates using these direct measures of hidden consumption out of stocks are compared with estimates from infrequent purchase models that attempt to recover this hidden consumption the results suggest considerable bias when using the infrequent purchase models copyright 2012 oxford university press

wages and labor management in african manufacturing using matched employer employee data on 10 african countries this paper examines the relationship beween wages worker supervision and labor productivity in manufacturing wages increase with rm size for both production workers and supervisors we develop a two tier model of supervision that can account for this stylized fact and we t the structural model to the data employee data is used to derive a rm speci c wage premium that is purged of the effect of worker observables we nd as trong effect of both supervision and wages on effort and hence on labor productivity labor management in sub saharan africa appears problematic with much higher supervisor to worker ratios than in morocco and a higher elasticity of effort with respect to supervision

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

small is bountiful labor markets and establishment size although there exist no detailed published studies on trends in workplace size most research in stratification and industrial sociology has operated with the implicit assumption that in the course of the twentieth century workers have found themselves in increasingly larger establishments this assumption has focused considerable attention on such concomitants of the assumed increase as growth in bureaucratic control and internal labor markets this paper gives thefirst systematic empirical account of the evolution of workplace size and presents results that call into question the appropriateness of the current allocation of research energy it is suggested that far more attention be paid to analysis of small firms and establishments it is well known that one of the major changes in the organization of work during the twentieth century has been the shift from small to large employers in contested terrain edwards 1979 vii notes that seventy five or a hundred years ago nearly all employees worked for small firms while today large numbers toil for the giant corporations from the theory of segmented labor markets we know that the internal labor market in the large company has become an increasingly standard locale for intragenerational mobility and that as thurow points out the need for on the job training leads employers to eliminate competition for jobs among those who must train one another the net result is the formation of a series of internal labor markets with limited ports of entry thurow 1975 85 86 dunlop 1966 32 observes in a similar vein that for the typical enterprise hiring in jobs are only a small fraction of the total number of job classifications the forces that have brought about this transformation of the workplace have been extensively documented advances in technology have facilitated increasingly large operations with corresponding scale

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

making it underground comparative material on the informal sector in western market economies this paper examines the informal economy and its relationship to commonly held theories of industrial development although these theories stem from very different intellectual traditions their general assumption has been that widespread informal economic activities are primarily a feature of third world economies in which they function as a refuge from destitution such activities are presumably destined to desappear with the advance of modern industry led growth evidence is presented that indicates that these assumptions including the identification of informality with conditions in the less developed countries are wrong alternative interpretations of the resilience of these activities in third world countries despite rapid industrialization and their continuity and apparent revival in the advanced economies and discussed

an economic theory of a credit union the majority of research to date on cus has been empirical cf cargill 1 and kidwell and peterson 7 yet there is serious need to develop a theoretical framework of cu behavior that incorporates their unique characteristics a cu is essentially a financial intermediation cooperative however the standard theoretical treatments of financial intermediaries cf meyer 8 and cooperative enterprises cannot be directly applied to model credit union behavior there are two principal characteristics of cus that prevent this first in a cu and cooperatives in general the members are both the owners of the organization and the consumers of its output or suppliers of its input one cannot simply assume that the members seek to maximize the profit generated by their transactions with the cu irrespective of the price and quantities of those same transactions thus models of a financial firm based on profit maximization cannot be directly translated to a cu environment second in a cu the membership provides both the demand for and supply of loanable funds the cu then intermediates between its member savers and member borrowers this heterogeneity is an inherent source of conflict between members clearly a cu cannot simultaneously maximize its dividend rate for savers and minimize its loan rate for borrowers since most theoretical models of cooperative enterprises assume a homogeneous member objective they are not generally applicable to cus there are two basic requirements for a framework to model cu behavior first the specification of the objective function should focus on the value of cu participation to the members this value should include the prices and quantities of transactions as well as any profit that results second the analysis should explicitly consider the possibility of conflict among members and the resolution of that conflict being a preference to either the borrowers or savers the existing literature on cus contains a wide variety of objective functions hempel and yawitz 5 ignore the owners are consumers issue and simply contend that cus like other financial intermediaries should maximize profit most writers however recognize that profit maximization would be a somewhat incongruous objective for an organization that typically labels itself not for profit murray and white 9 use cost minimization subject to an output constraint keating 6 employs the managerial discretion approach by maximizing the manager s utility function subject to minimum member benefit constraints taylor 11 12 suggests that the cu should minimize the difference between its average loan rate and savings rate paid smith 10 argues that the cu should

the care economy gender economic restructuring and job polarization in the u s labor market the u s job structure became increasingly polarized at the turn of the twenty first century as high and low wage jobs grew strongly and many middle wage jobs declined prior research on the sourc

the dominance of inefficiencies over scale and product mix economies in banking abstract this study measures and analyzes inefficiencies for all u s banks in 1984 inefficiencies are measured relative to a thick frontier cost function and are found to dominate measured scale and product mix economies most inefficiencies are operational in nature involving the overuse of physical inputs rather than financial involving overpayment of interest also technical inefficiencies proportionate overuse of all inputs dominate allocative inefficiencies improper mix of inputs these results suggest that competitive pressures in banking from deregulation will be focused primarily on banks that do not control costs rather than on those of a particular size or product mix

exchanging good ideas abstract this paper develops a framework to describe how the existence of technological spillovers leads to a distribution of technology clusters marshallian spillovers in this paper are assumed to be due to interaction of labor the dynamics of cluster size composition and technology accumulation are characterized

a theoretic framework for the analysis of credit union decision making this paper presents a formal theoretic framework to analyze credit union interest rates on loans and savings deposits the unique motivational and institutional features of a credit union in particular its structure as a financial service cooperative are used to develop the objective function this is based on a comparison of the credit union s rates to alternatively available market rates and includes parameters to recognize the possibility of borrower saver conflict the principal result is that the optimal rates and reactions to exogenous changes depend critically on the preference of the organization toward financial gain to the borrowing and saving members

paired difference analysis of size economies in uk credit unions this study utilizes a paired difference approach to investigate for the existence of scale economies in uk credit unions the analysis is conducted for both credit unions in aggregate as well as a number of sub groups with the latter defined in terms of the trade organization to which credit unions are affiliated this decomposition was viewed as particularly important in that the respective umbrella organizations have different growth strategies the analysis revealed that significant efficiency gains are available through credit unions adopting a policy of asset growth this finding held good irrespective of the umbrella organization to which credit unions belong although the analysis also revealed that the opportunity for efficiency gains was not so pronounced for the members of one of the trade organizations the national federation of credit unions this finding was due to the nfcu s much more overt emphasis on self help and community development particularly in areas of economic disadvantage

employer size wage effects evidence from matched employer employee survey data in the uk this paper employs a random sample of matched employer employee data from the uk to test seven possible explanations for the positive relationship between employer size and pay individual wage equations show a large employer size wage premium we then control for a range of establishment level variables based on seven hypotheses typically advanced to explain this premium each establishment level factor reduces the wage premium but a sizeable premium nonetheless remains in adjudicating on these hypotheses we find a strong association between the internal labour market and the employer size wage premium this finding supports the theory that the employer size wage effect may be due to the higher costs of turnover or monitoring in larger firms however we find contrasting effects for public versus private sector establishments

consumer behaviour theory and empirical evidence a survey this survey is designed to emphasize the relationship between empirical a nd theoretical considerations in the analysis of consumer behavior a lthough it focuses primarily on analysis at the individual or micro l evel it tries where possible to draw implications for the estimati on of aggregate relationships the importance of micro level analysis stems from the rapid expansion in available panel and survey data se ts this development has generated its own theoretical and empirical issues many of which are raised in this survey copyright 1988 by royal economic society

explaining organizational diseconomies of scale in r d agency problems and the allocation of engineering talent ideas and effort by firm size the comparative efficiency and success of small firms in r d remains largely unexplained this paper empirically examines scale diseconomies in offering employment contracts as an explanation for diseconomies of scale in r d the paper argues that small firms more efficiently resolve the severe agency problems of hidden information and hidden behavior in r d small firms more efficiently offer contracts that reward performance than large firms and consequently small firms attract and retain engineers with higher ability and skill further small firms through these more performance contingent contracts induce higher levels of effort than large firms the study tests and generally confirms these hypotheses using data collected from 912 current and former engineering employees of two large high technology companies

human capital and information this paper examines the issue of the establishment size wage effect it analyzes a cross section for the year 1979 with information on 607 individuals and the 60 private sector establishments where they work it discusses four theories of the establishment size wage effect and uses empirical proxies to test them it shows that when a dummy variable on computer access in the establishment is introduced as a regressor the establishment size variable is an insignificant regressor this result and other evidence supports the contention that the establishment size coefficient captures the effect of unobserved human capital accumulation

new evidence on the fed s productivity in providing payments services abstract as the dominant provider of payments services the efficiency with which the federal reserve provides such services is an important public policy issue this paper examines the productivity of federal reserve check processing offices during 1980 1999 using non parametric estimation methods and newly developed methods for non parametric inference and hypothesis testing the results support prior studies that found little initial improvement in the fed s efficiency with the imposition of pricing for federal reserve services in 1982 however we find that median productivity improved substantially during the 1990s and the dispersion of productivity across fed offices declined

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

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

unwelcome immigrants the labor market experiences of 1980 mariel cuban and haitian refugees in south florida this article examines the situation of 2 recently arrived and disadvantaged immigrant groups in the context of 2 competing theoretical traditions classical assimilation and recent labor market segmentation theories predictions of both concerning us labor market entry of foreign minorities and determinants of subsequent mobility are tested on the basis of representative surveys most are not confirmed the analysis supports the hypothesis of heterogeneous modes of incorporation into the labor market including substantial numbers of refugees who remain outside of it sizable proportions have only managed to find fringe employment in a energing informal economy in south florida among cubans employment in the ethnic enclave is associated with positive returns comparable to those of entry into the primary labor market haitians lack an enclave option and thus cluster into secondary and informal employment although most remain without work determinants of these various situations are examined on the basis of multivariate logistic regressions implications of results for immigration theory and policy are discussed authors

getting paid wage arrears and stratification in russia1 wage arrears have played an important yet unappreciated role in the stratification of contemporary russian society delays in wage payments became rampant and persistent during the 1990s because of the particular structural institutional and policy context that accompanied russia s market reforms recent improvements in russia s economy have reduced but not eliminated wage arrears an innovative practice that has become institutionalized in some but not all postsocialist societies analyses of survey data collected in early 1998 confirm the independent stratifying role of arrears inequality in getting paid is socially structured in a different manner than inequality in contracted wages and the former proves equally or more decisive in shaping inequality in actual wages arrears occur with some regularity in other national and historical contexts this study of russia shows that where arrears are rampant researchers should incorporate them into conceptual and empirical models of earnings inequalit

financial markets and wages we study a labor market equilibrium model in which flrms sign optimal long term contracts with workers firms that are flnancially constrained ofier an increasing wage proflle they pay lower wages today in exchange of higher wages once they become unconstrained and operate at a larger scale in equilibrium constrained flrms are on average smaller and pay lower wages in this way the model generates a positive relation between flrm size and wages using data from the national longitudinal survey of youth nlsy we show that the key dynamic properties of the model are supported by the data jel classiflcation g31 j31 e24

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

why do smaller firms pay less this paper uses data from the national longitudinal survey of young men and the current population survey for 1983 to examine the relationships among wages firm size and plant size we reach three key findings first plant size has little independent effect on wages once we have controlled for firm size for firms with fewer than 1 000 employees second we find evidence of sorting on observed and unobserved ability characteristics across firm sizes better educated and more stable workers are in larger firms third results from a first difference estimator indicate that about 60 percent of the wage size effect is due to unobserved heterogeneity when all firms are considered and about 100 percent when firms with 25 or more employees are considered

economic dualism a critical review in this paper we examine the model underlying the dual economy approach to labor market segmentation we provide a specification of the components of the model as well as the linkages between components this construction of the underlying model allows us to evaluate it systematically as a model to consider and to evaluate each component and linkage separately while we conclude that there are several important contributions to retain from the dual approach including the insight that capital structure conditions labor market outcomes we argue that it is inadequate for sustaining theoretical and empirical development as a new starting point for the study of economic and labor market segmentation we suggest a resource perspective which retains insights from the dual approach but avoids its overly restrictive assumptions

further evidence on returns to schooling by establishment size stolzenberg 1978 has argued thatfor white male employees the effect of schooling on logearnings is greater in larger establishments we replicate stolzenberg s study using the 1979 current population survey this survey includes information on establishment size and provides a much larger sample size to work with our results do not indicate a positive establishment size schooling interaction to the contrary when stolzenberg s 1978 model specification is used ourfindings suggest that the interaction may be negative we explore the sources of this discrepancy and are skeptical of the conventional wisdom that returns to schooling increase with establishment size

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

a structural decomposition of black white earnings differentials this research demonstrates the impact of labor market structure and segmentation on differentials in black and white earnings this paper argues that there are two very different factors which create black white earnings differences 1 differences between blacks and whites within divisions of the labor market and 2 differences between labor market divisions in earnings combined with the differential distribution of blacks and whites across labor market divisions use of a decomposition based on a regression standardization approach discloses that the second factor accounts for a minimum of 14 of the black white earnings gap this implies that eliminating all black white differences within labor market divisions would still leave a significant earnings gap between blacks and whites due to the structure of the labor market

property rights and stratification in socialist redistributive economies in socialist economies work organizations differ widely in the compensation they provide employees despite the absence of key product and labor market processes thought to ex plain such inequalities in market economies existing theories of stratification in socialist economies focus on the power and privilege of elites but inequalities among organizations are not created by political particularism or elite power in this paper i sketch elements of an institutional theory of stratification anchored in a conception of property rights the right to derive income from productive assets two aspects of property rights guide the analysis 1 the dispersion of property rights across a hierarchy of governmentjurisdictions and 2 the exercise of these rights by government jurisdictions as they extract revenues primarily through taxation extraction of revenues from a work organization varies with the budgetary resources of a government jurisdiction and the dependence of that jurisdiction on the out puts of the organization variation in revenue extraction in turn creates inequalities among work organizations in their abilities to provide benefits to employees an analysis of survey data on the provision of housing and benefits by work organizations in the large industrial city of tianjin china provides provisional support for these ideas s tudents of communist states have had little reason to dispute lenski s 1966 claim that the distribution of rewards in a society is a func tion of the distribution of power p 63 as ex emplified in szelenyi s wedding of elite theory to institutional economics this idea has been de veloped primarily in terms of the power of class es or occupational groups szelenyi 1978 be gan with the observation that planned economies operate according to redistributive rather than market principles however the process of re

consumption inequality and income uncertainty this paper places the debate over using consumption or income in studies of inequality growth in a formal intertemporal setting it highlights the importance of permanent and transitory income uncertainty in the evaluation of growth in consumption inequality we derive conditions under which the growth of variances and covariances of income and consumption can be used to separately identify the growth in the variance of permanent and transitory income shocks household data from britain for the period 1968 1992 are used to show a strong growth in transitory inequality toward the end of this period while younger cohorts are shown to face significantly higher levels of permanent inequality

economies of diversification in the banking industry abstract this paper defines a new measure economies of diversification to examine the cost effect of product line expansion this measure is a special case of expansion path subadditivity and contains economies of scope as a special case a nonparametric frontier technique which isolates the effects of inefficiency and scale is used to measure economies of diversification applied to a set of 468 u s depository institutions operating in 1984 we find slight diseconomies of diversification diseconomies of diversification and inefficiency due to the overutilization of resources are found to be more important determinants of bank costs than is the failure to operate at optimal scale

mythologies of work a comparison of firms in state socialism and advanced capitalism comparative studies of capitalist and state socialist countries have rested on weak empirical bases namely the comparison of ideal type models or comparisons of the realities often distorted of one society with an ideal type of the other this is particularly true of the firm which has remained a black box in conventional analyses of state socialism on the basis of case studies of two comparable firms one in the united states and one in hungary we criticize eight stereotypes that underly the presumption that state socialist firms are necessarily less efficient than capitalist firms we then propose conditions under which capitalistfirms may be less technically efficient than state socialist firms

the red queen in organizational creation and development we synthesize organization learning theory and organizational ecology to predict systematic patterns in the founding and growth of organizations over time our central argument is that competition triggers organizational learning which in turn intensifies competition that again triggers an adaptive response we model this self exciting dynamic sometimes referred to as the red queen in general evolutionary theory to explain organizational founding and growth rates among the thousands of retail banks that have operated in illinois at any time from 1900 1993 we find strong evidence that red queen evolution led some organizations to grow quickly and to place strong competitive pressure on rivals red queen evolution also helped establish barriers to entry however this same evolutionary process appears to make organizations more susceptible to competency traps ultimately slowing their growth rates and inviting new market entry organizations confronted by a widely varying distribution of competitors grow more slowly and are more likely to face new entrants overall the results suggest that processes of organizational creation and growth emerge from ecologies of learning organizations more generally we discuss the use of ecological theory and models to study the empirical consequences of organizational learning opyright 2002 oxford university press

statistical models for zero expenditures in household budgets household budget surveys are an important source of data on consumer s expenditure not just for individual consumers but also for estimating national aggregates however it is a widespread finding that for certain commodities most notably tobacco and alcohol the estimate from the household survey falls short of the known consumption total calculated with some confidence from data on production imports exports and excise duties for example in the british family expenditure survey with which we shall largely be concerned total tobacco expenditure was underestimated in 1976 by 21 percent see kemsley redpath and holmes 1980 p 51 much of this understatement together with that on alcohol is thought to occur because of the design of the survey which excludes many persons amongst whom consumption of such items is thought to be atypically high e g prisoners hoteliers and their residents merchant seamen even so the possibility remains that some of the understatement is due to various types of misreporting by households included in the survey in this paper we consider a model in which the standard tobit specification tobin 1958 is supplemented by the operation of a simple binary censor the tobit model is essentially a linear regression model in which non positive observations of the dependent variable are replaced by zero we take this specification as our starting point but add a second censoring process that randomly replaces a fraction of the observations generated by the tobit model bv zeroes the combined model can serve as a representation of several types of

understanding organizational wage structures a resource dependence approach data on the salaries for high level administrative positions in 608 colleges and universities were used to examine the relative salaries for six positions controlling for other factors we found t

local industrial dominance and earnings attainment drawing on the ecological concept of local industrial dominance we examine how the industrial distribution of the metropolitan labor force influences workers earnings industrial dominance is defined as the proportional overrepresentation of the local labor force in a given industry or industrial sector a contextual analysis of census microdata for the largest 125 smsas shows that within industries and sectors workers in metropolitan areas in which their industry is dominant have significantly higher earnings than workers in areas in which that industry is less dominant these results holdfor two different measures of dominance andfour racelsex groups the effects of local dominance on earnings appear stronger for industries in the core and state sectors for financial business and personal service functions andfor public administration the influence of dominance is partly explained by the tendency of locally dominant industries to be composed of larger establishments

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

does firm size matter anymore the new economy and firm size wage effects researchers have long known that large firms pay higher wages than small firms for workers with similar measured characteristics however an agreed upon explanation for this firm size wage effect fswe has not been reached recent changes in the economy provide new leverage for testing competing theories for the effect while questions about the existence and nature of the new economy provide new motivation for exploring this topic this study uses the 1988 2003 current population survey and finds that the fswe has declined by about one third over the study period examining the competing explanations for the fswe this study finds that while the sorting of workers by traits unions and industry factors all contribute to some portion of the effect in cross section they fail to explain why it has declined over time market power explanations also fail to find support shifts in organizational structures particularly a decline of internal labor markets appear to best fit the results these findings

frontier estimation and firm specific inefficiency measures in the presence of heteroscedasticity the purpose of this article is to illustrate a straightforward and useful method for addressing the problem of heteroscedasticity in the estimation of frontiers a heteroscedastic cost frontier model is developed and estimated using bank cost data similar to that used by ferrier and lovell our results show dramatic changes in the estimated cost frontier and in the inefficiency measures when accounting for heteroscedasticity in the estimation process we find that the rankings of firms by their inefficiency measures is affected markedly by the correction for heteroscedasticity but not by alternative distributional assumptions about the one sided error term

a simultaneous approach to the whether what and how much to buy questions consumer s purchase decisions of whether to buy what to buy and how much to buy are examined simultaneously based on a consumer utility maximization problem an unobservable threshold price about which a consumer pivots from nonpurchase to purchase can be deduced with any model specification the interrelationships between purchase decisions can be explicitly derived the model is applied to coffee purchasing data in addition by suppressing the nonpurchase options the model is compared with an alternative approach appearing in the marketing literature

sex segregation and sectors an analysis of gender differences in returns from employer changes sweet james 1973 women in the labor force new york seminar press vanek joann 1974 time spent in housework scientific american 231 116 20 1980 household work wage work and sexual equality pp 275 91 in sarah f berk ed women and household labor beverly hills ca sage walker k and m woods 1976 time use a measure of household production of family goods and services washington d c american home economics association

unobserved heterogeneity and the relation between earnings and firm size evidence from two developing countries abstract large firms in ghana and kenya pay much higher wages than small ones we use panel data to show this is not the result of employing high ability individuals the size effect remains substantial with controls for individual fixed effects

business organization segmentation and location taylor m and thrift n 1983 business organization segmentation and location reg studies 17 445 465 this paper is intended to provide a coherent theoretical framework for industrial geography industrial economics and organization theory based on the notion of the segmentation of business organizations the literature on dualism and segmentation of business organizations is reviewed and found wanting an alternative process oriented account of segmentation of the business organization is presented which can account for the structural variations in present day developed economies the geographical implications of the framework are brought out

credit unions and low income communities since the late 1980s the number of community based credit unions in britain has grown steadily these are financial co operatives based on low income neighbourhoods owned and controlled by local residents which aim to provide savings and low cost credit facilities to their members although located in economically disadvantaged communities credit unions are not exclusively used by the poor while better off groups save and borrow more a greater proportion of low income users would not have purchased goods and services in the absence of a credit union credit unions are making useful but marginal contributions to the credit and debt problems of low income families they could probably achieve more with additional resources but any intervention by external agencies should be sensitive and avoid damaging the strong mutual aid foundations upon which credit unions are based

equality for whom organizational policies and the gender gap across the german earnings distribution work establishments are critical for the creation and maintenance of gender inequality organizational practices most notably those that formalize personnel systems or target gender inequality are often assumed to have uniform effects on inequality across the wage hierarchy this assumption has eluded careful empirical scrutiny the authors estimate unconditional quantile regressions with a unique german linked employer employee data set to assess whether formalized human resource practices female friendly diversity measures and the availability of workplace child care facilities affect wage inequality differently across the wage distribution while these policies reduce gender inequality in general they do so more strongly near the bottom of the earnings distribution policies that formalize personnel systems and explicitly promote female employees are particularly advantageous to women in low wage jobs these results suggest that gender policies have a more subtle effect on earnings inequality than

the payoff to consistency in performance this study investigates whether firms are willing to pay higher wages to workers who demonstrate consistent performance than to those whose performance is more volatile a formal model reflects a production technology view assuming the law of diminishing marginal product this model suggests that a more consistent worker produces higher expected output and therefore receives a higher wage the test of the model uses data from the national basketball association the empirical data support the model players whose performances were more consistent than the performances of other players received higher wages on average jel d41 j31 m52 z20

deposit insurance and risk taking behavior in the credit union industry abstract this paper examines the relationship between deposit insurance and risk taking behavior within the credit union industry time series tests employing industry average financial ratios for federal and state credit unions did not support the increased risk taking hypothesis although federal credit union capital declined immediately following the adoption of deposit insurance this was most likely the result of reduced capital requirements not deposit insurance liquidity and loan delinquency ratios had a negative time trend coefficient implying a decline in risk taking behavior during the post insurance period cross sectional test results employing iowa state chartered credit union data indicated that insured credit unions were better capitalized and more liquid than their uninsured counterparts overall there was no evidence that the adoption of deposit insurance increased the risk taking behavior of credit unions

examining the employer size wage premium in the manufacturing retail trade and service industries using employer employee matched data economists have long sought to understand why large employers pay higher wages than small employers despite decades of study and analysis researchers have been unsuccessful in fully accounting for the employersize wage premium one problem has been insufficient data most empirical efforts to examine the size related wage premium rely on worker level data that contain little information about a worker s employer or firm level data that lack information on the characteristics of a firm s workforce although more recent attempts exploit newly developed employer employee matched data kevin t reilly 1995 troske 1999 most matched data sets cover only limited segments of the population thus raising doubt about the generality of the findings in this paper we use the recently created new worker establishment characteristics database nwecd to examine the employer size wage premium unlike other matched data sets the nwecd contains information on workers and employers in all sectors and regions of the econ

sustained competitive advantage temporal dynamics and the incidence and persistence of superior economic performance competitive advantage is a key concept in strategic management research for a number of reasons not the least of which is that an avowed consequence of its attainment is held to be superior economic performance however few prior empirical studies have directly and systematically documented the incidence or prevalence of persistent superior economic performance the research reported here is based on empirical studies of a large number of industry samples for which longitudinal data were stratified by levels of performance using a new methodology and then analyzed in terms of their dynamics this new stratification technique was used in lieu of autoregressive methods employed in prior studies of performance persistence to allow for a true outlier analysis because persistent superior economic performance both has been argued theoretically and found empirically to be rare detailed results from a sample of 6 772 firms in 40 industries over 25 years are presented to illustrate the findings that 1 while some firms do exhibit superior economic performance 2 only a very small minority do so and 3 the phenomenon very rarely persists for long time frames these results while not providing direct support for a particular extant strategic management or economic theory concerning firm performance are most consonant with the resource based view of the firm and have implications for significant aspects of other received strategic management and economic theories

joint purchasing decisions a multivariate negative binomial approach the analysis of household purchasing decisions for understanding consumption behaviour has received much attention recently mainly because of the measurement error problems that appear when using expenditure data to approximate consumption this paper discusses some empirical regularities of the household purchasing behaviour based on information about the number of purchases a household has declared having done during the survey period the concern of this paper is two fold first to show how to recover purchase frequency data from the spanish budget survey 1990 1991 second to discuss some empirical regularities of the joint purchasing decisions based on multivariate negative binomial models

do smaller firms pay less in the caribbean the case of trinidad and tobago this article constitutes the first study of the employer size wage effect for a caribbean country namely the republic of trinidad and tobago using a rich micro level data set we estimate the firm size wage premium in an empirical model of wage determination despite exploring a variety of theories samples estimation techniques and tests we find that consistent with the empirical literature larger firms in trinidad and tobago pay higher wages than smaller firms for equally productive workers

mismanagement or mismeasurement pitfalls and protocols for dea studies in the financial services sector abstract dyson et al dyson r g allen r camanho a s podinovski v v sarrico c s shale e a 2001 pitfalls and protocols in dea european journal of operational research 132 245 259 suggest that the application of dea presents a range of problems and they suggest that the systematic collection and reporting of these problems would significantly enhance dea practice it is widely accepted that dea studies may be compromised by the problem of data heterogeneity while this problem is expected in studies that cross national boundaries it may also arise in studies for a single country there can for example be significant market and regulatory differences between regions within a single country using a sample of australian credit unions this paper demonstrates the pitfalls and protocols of using dea it is intended that the guidelines provided in this study will enhance dea practice in the financial services sector

ownership and corporate wage policy the signal and its strength abstractwe argue that identification and proper specification of ownership links among firms is an important factor and is affecting firm performance on different dimensions we focus on the corporate wage policy where we show that firms with same stockholders have similar average labour costs after controlling for standard factors of the wage equation moreover we propose new measures of stockholders ability to influence firms decision signal and its strength the signal measures stockholder s preferences over a given corporate policy while the strength function describes stockholder s ability to influence a firms corporate policy

dynamic monopsony evidence from a french establishment panel this paper uses a panel of about 6000 french establishments to test some implications of the modern theory of dynamic monopsony or upward sloping labour supply curves for average firm wages panel estimates provide strong evidence of a much larger long run employer size wage effect eswe than found previously while controlling for worker quality and compensating differentials with lagged wages and for profitability rent sharing employment expansion also has a positive effect on wages providing further evidence for upward sloping labour supply as distinct from the effect of shocks in a perfectly competitive labour market

intrafirm human capital externalities and selection bias this article investigates the existence of intrafirm human capital externalities in the spanish economy in doing so it focusses on two estimation issues first a semiparametric methodology is used to estimate externalities in a more flexible way that allows to affect all parameters in the equation second two approaches to control for selection bias are designed for use in cross section data our results show a higher externality effect on wages when using the semi parametric approach as compared to the standard estimation approach additionally the estimations even when controlling for selection bias give evidence of externalities

new firms and labor market entrants is there a wage penalty for employment in new firms in this paper we explore the role of new firms as an entry point to the labor market because the vast majority of new firms are short lived it is a risky decision to accept employment in a new venture it can be argued that individuals with little or no labor market experience are more willing to accept the high risks associated with employment in new firms hence new firms may work as an entry point to the labor market nevertheless some research concludes that one disadvantage of employment in a new firm is that new firms pay less shane in small bus econ 33 141 149 2009 however this empirical conclusion is primarily based on literature on the wage penalty of small firms in this paper we study whether the wage penalty of employment in a new firm persists if we focus solely on labor market entrants in the empirical analysis we employ an employer employee matched dataset that covers the swedish population during the period from 1998 to 2008 we use the propensity score matching method to study the wage differences between labor market entrants employed in new and incumbent firms we find an average wage penalty of 2 9 for labor market entrants employed in new firms over the studied period

the rise of finance and firm employment dynamics this article sheds light on the ongoing employment stagnation in the united states by investigating the links between the rise of finance and firm employment dynamics during the 1982 2005 period i argue that the rise of finance marginalized the role of labor in revenue generating and sharing processes which led to employment stagnation among the largest nonfinancial firms in the united states evidence suggests that increasing investment in financial assets depresses the workforce size the growing dependence on debt reprioritizes the order of distribution heightening the need for workforce reduction the increasing rewards for shareholders generate a downsize and distribute spiral in which labor expense becomes a primary target of cost cutting strategies further analysis indicates that production and service workers are more vulnerable to shifts associated with the rise of finance than managers and professionals

vertical and nonvertical effects in class mobility cross national variations class theorists often argue against the use of unidimensional or hierarchical analyses in class mobility research they assert that nonvertical effects are of paramount importance in understanding the structure and process of stratification by explicitly incorporating both vertical and nonvertical effects into the structural model of class mobility i demonstrate the importance of both effects for understanding the structure of mobility chances within and between countries although vertical and nonvertical effects are equally important in explaining association patterns in individual countries nonvertical effects are the major source of cross national variation two nonvertical effects are particularly important economic sector of employment whether nonmanual manual or farm and employment status whether self employed or not

evaluating the performance of us credit unions credit unions are small cooperative not for profit institutions which distinguishes them from other financial intermediaries in this study we conduct a performance evaluation of credit unions the criteria respect the unique organizational and institutional features of credit unions without losing sight of the fact that they must compete with other financial intermediaries we use nonparametric nonstochastic techniques to measure performance and we use parametric stochastic techniques to attribute performance variation to features of credit unions and their operating environment our sample consists of two thirds of all active credit unions in 1990