a review of the recent empirical literature on displaced workers this article reviews the empirical literature on job displacement job displacement is widespread and strongly countercyclical tending to peak during economic downturns but concentrated in indus

rule changes and competitive balance in japanese professional baseball i introduction since rottenberg s 1956 classic analysis of baseball s reserve clause economists have been interested in whether the rules for initially allocating players among major league baseball mlb teams affect their final allocation el hodiri and quirk 1971 formalized rottenberg s analysis of player allocation rules for a sports league in which each team independently maximizes its profits within the league s institutional constraints 1 consider the effect of a player draft regime and an open bidding regime on the allocation of new players often called rookies if a player draft allows team a to claim initially a particular new player and that player would generate a higher marginal product with team b then the two teams have incentives to make an exchange and send the player to team b alternatively under an open bidding regime the new player signs with the team presenting the highest offer i e team b with which he generates the highest marginal product assuming that transaction costs of exchanging players are zero el hodiri and quirk showed that the final allocation of players across teams will be the same in both regimes this result that the final allocation of players does not depend on the rules governing the initial allocation of players is baseball s version of the coase theorem following coase s 1960 analysis this invariance result vanishes if there are obstacles to exchanging players after the initial allocation in an open bidding regime players are initially allocated to the team with which they have the highest marginal product thereby eliminating the need for player exchanges since the best players are likely to generate the highest marginal product with teams in cities that have a high demand for winning games in an open bidding regime these teams are likely to have higher winning percentages and win more championships than other teams 2 by contrast in a draft regime the best players are often initially allocated to a team located in a city with a low demand for winning games if there are obstacles to player exchange then players will be allocated more evenly across teams under a draft regime and competitive balance should improve both within a given season and over time 3 empirical studies have used performance data from north american mlb to analyze whether changes in the rules for allocating rookies among teams affect competitive balance fort and quirk s 1995 recent study found that mlb s change in 1965 from an open bidding to a draft regime for allocating new players increased competitive balance in the american league and had little effect on competitive balance in the national league the power of statistical tests conducted with the mlb data is however severely limited due to the small number of observations from the draft regime period this article uses a larger data set from japanese baseball to examine the same rule change that economists have analyzed for mlb remarkable as it may seem the japanese professional baseball league jpbl adopted the same rule change from an open bidding to a draft regime for rookies in the same year 1965 as major league baseball our goal is to examine how the rule change in the jpbl affected competitive balance in its two leagues and to compare the outcomes of these two remarkably similar experiments set in two very different cultures ii studies of north american mlb and japanese jpbl daly and moore 1981 compared player allocation in the two regimes for allocating rookies by examining mlb s 1965 switch from an open bidding to a draft regime they used pre and post 1965 performance data from the american and national leagues to examine several measures of competitive balance in the post 1965 draft regime they found substantially more competitive balance in the american league and somewhat more competitive balance in the national league using different tests for competitive balance fort and quirk 1995 1 282 86 also found evidence for more competitive balance in the american league but found no change in competitive balance in the national league

measuring market power in bilateral oligopoly the wholesale market for beef econometric methods for assessing the degree of market power typically rely on a maintained hypothesis of price taking behavior on one side of the market or the other in the analysis of bilateral oligopoly however one would like to leave open the question of whether buyers or sellers or both behave competitively while allowing for the possible exercise of market power on either side in this paper we address the problem of measuring market power in bilateral oligopoly this requires that we first distinguish among three candidate equilibrium concepts bilateral price taking seller price taking and buyer price taking choosing among them comes down to a test of nonnested nonlinear simultaneous equation models our application to the u s wholesale market for beef characterized by high degrees of concentration among both sellers beef packers and buyers primarily retail grocery chains reveals seller price taking among the three candidates to be the most consistent with the data in particular the hypothesis of price taking conduct on both sides of the market can be rejected this is a conclusion that would not have been reached had we considered monopoly conduct by sellers as the only alternative to perfect competition

cheating on collusive agreements abstract this paper addresses the question of why firms might incur great expense and individuals risk prison sentences to enter a collusive agreement and then not abide by it in the model firms must make pricing or production decisions at frequent intervals explicit coordination is therefore not possible in each decision period players have private information about their own costs which they can use in making their choices this private information can cause defection and precipitate the punishment phase nevertheless participants find it in their own best interest to enter the collusive arrangement

lasting or latent scars swedish evidence on the long term effects of job displacement recently improved swedish register data have made it possible to remedy many weaknesses of previous research on displaced workers using linked employer employee data we identify all workers displaced in 1987 due to an establishment closure and follow them over both a predisplacement period of 4 years and a postdisplacement period stretching until 1999 we find that the displaced workers suffer both earnings losses and worsened labor market position not only during a transitory period of adjustment but also in the longer run these longer run effects seem to be driven by an increased sensitivity to subsequent macroeconomic shocks

the effects of changes of the job offer arrival rate on the duration of unemployment generally it is acknowledged that changing the job offer arrival rate has two opposite effects on unemployment duration for a basic job search model sufficient conditions on the wage offer distribution have been derived ensuring that one of the effects dominates however these are not satisfied for the popular families of wage offer distributions here i show that the conditions can be weakened at virtually no cost the set of distributions satisfying the new conditions is considerably larger than the set previously established in particular it includes all wage offer distribution families that are popular in structural empirical research

a study of cartel stability the joint executive committee 1880 1886 this article employs weekly time series data on the joint executive committee railroad cartel from 1880 to 1886 to test empirically the proposition that observed prices reflected switches from collusive to noncooperative behavior an equilibrium model of dynamic oligopoly with asymmetric firms together with explicit functional form assumptions about costs and demand determines the estimating equations and stochastic structure of the econometric model the hypothesis that no switch took place so that price and quantity movements were solely attributable to exogenous shifts in the demand and cost functions is then tested against this alternative and rejected

managerial quality team success and individual player performance in major league baseball this paper uses 1969 87 major league baseball data to investigate the impact of managerial quality on team winning and individual player performance managerial quality and player performance are measured as predicted pay based on salary regressions these market based measures permit conclusions about costs and benefits of managerial quality there are two major findings first when player inputs are controlled for higher quality managers lead to higher winning percentages second players tend to play better relative to their prior performance levels the higher the manager s quality these findings suggest that as emphasized by the human resource management literature the quality of management makes an important difference in the performance of organizations

measuring managerial efficiency the case of baseball in economic analysis the role of the entrepreneur is paramount to the production process the entrepreneur is engaged in a darwinian game of efficiently transforming scarce resource inputs into outputs in the modern business organization this role is delegated to managers despite the conceptual importance of the role of management in the production function very little is known about the actual effect on output of variations in managerial skill in part this is due to the lack of proprietory data in part it is due to difficulties in measuring the outputs and inputs of complex production processes in a meaningful way a number of investigators have employed the concept of the frontier production function as developed by forsund and hjalmarsson 1 and timmer 6 and more recently by schmidt and lovell 3 to measure the effect on technical and price efficiency of various property rights structures or institutional constraints to our knowledge estimates of managerial efficiency have not been obtained with firm specific data except for some regulated industries in this study we estimate managerial efficiency by manager and by firm managerial marginal revenue product the rate of change in managerial efficiency over years of experience and relative factor price efficiency we use major league baseball teams over the period 1961 1980 as our data source what is particularly appealing about the choice of major league baseball teams as the industry for analysis is that outputs win percent and inputs player skills are unambiguously measured and the production function is simply specified as shown by scully 5 our results indicate that managerial skill in baseball contributes very substantially to the production process the paper will evolve as follows first the concept of the frontier production function is briefly outlined then estimates of managerial efficiency by manager and by team are provided and discussed a managerial efficiency learning curve is estimated an estimate of managerial marginal revenue product provided and the managerial efficiency

coaching for survival the hazards of head coach careers in the german bundesliga this article analyses how long head coaches survive in the clubs of the first german football league bundesliga where the dismissal of a presumably weak coach is a generally adopted procedure in case of a poor sporting performance of the team we use duration models for repeated events to accommodate the correlation within individuals we find that the head coaches of successful teams and those working during the more recent bosman effect period are more likely to survive in the bundesliga moreover the head coaches of clubs with relatively high team wage bills are likely to survive for shorter periods of time

measuring market power in multi product oligopolies the us meat industry this paper develops and estimates an economic model for measuring market power in a quantity setting oligopoly engaged in the joint production of demand related goods the model which allows for firms conjectures about both same and cross market responses to own output variation is applied to the us meat beef and pork industry he hypothesis that the industry s equilibrium reflects price taking behaviour is rejected the hypothesis of no cross effects cannot be rejected roughly half of the farm to retail price spreads for beef and pork appear to be attributable to market power

employment outcomes and plant closure in a post industrial city an analysis of the labour market studies of mg rover workers three years on this paper examines how the loss of 6300 jobs from the closure of mg rover mgr in the city of birmingham uk in april 2005 affected the employment trajectories of ex workers in the context of wider structural change and efforts at urban renewal the paper presents an analysis of a longitudinal survey of 300 ex mgr workers and examines to what extent the state of local labour markets and workers geographical mobility as well as the effectiveness of the immediate policy response and longer term local economic strategies may have helped to balance the impacts of personal attributes associated with workers employability and their reabsorption into the labour markets it is found that the relative buoyancy of the local economy the success of longer run efforts at diversification and a strong policy response and retraining initiative helped many disadvantaged workers to find new jobs in the medium term however the paper also highlights the unequal employment outcomes and trajectories that many lesser skilled workers faced it explores the policy issues arising from such closures and their aftermath such as the need to co ordinate responses to retain institutional capacity to offer high quality training and education resources to workers and where possible to slow down such closure processes to enable skills to be retained and reused within the local economy

reservation wages expected wages and unemployment we model unemployment duration reservation and expected wages simultaneously for individuals not in work where wage expectations are identified via an exogenous policy shock the policy shock increased expected wages which were found to be positively associated with reservation wages

labour market externalities and regional growth in sweden the importance of labour mobility between skill related industries boschma r eriksson r h and lindgren u labour market externalities and regional growth in sweden the importance of labour mobility between skill related industries regional studies this study investigates the relationship between labour market externalities and regional growth based on real labour flows in particular it tests for the importance of labour mobility across so called skill related industries between 435 four digit industries within 72 swedish functional regions 1998 2002 both the fixed effect models and generalized method of moments gmm estimates demonstrate that a strong intensity of intra regional labour flows between skill related industries impacts positively on regional productivity growth but less so on employment growth labour mobility between unrelated industries tends to dampen regional unemployment growth while a high degree of intra industry labour flows is only found to be associated with rising unemployment

the impact of managerial change on performance the role of team heterogeneity when a key responsibility of a manager is to allocate more or less attractive tasks to subordinates these subordinates have an incentive to work hard and demonstrate their talents as a new manager is less well acquainted with these talents this incentive mechanism is reinvigorated after a management change but only when the team is suciently homogenous otherwise a new manager quickly makes similar choices as the old one did we investigate this hypothesis using a large data set on coach dismissals in the german football league where the selection of players is indeed a key task of the coach indeed we nd substantial evidence that coach replacements enhance team performance only in homogenous teams moreover from a methodological point of view we argue that there is typically a negative selection bias when evaluating succession eects which might reconcile previous ndings of no or even negative eects with the vast number of dismissals

an econometric analysis of reservation wages this paper describes an analysis of survey data on unemployed people who reported their asking wage and the wage they expected to earn we show that if agents behavior is described by the standard optimal job search model one can use these data to deduce structural parameters rather than estimate them and we report our deductions from two surveys 1 of british unemployed people

measuring oligopsony power with shadow prices u s markets for pulpwood and sawlogs empirical estimation of input market power hindered by problems in measuring an input s value of marginal product vmp by estimating a variable profit function system however one can infer a factor s vmp through its shadow price this technique is used here to specify a structural equation system which is estimated using time series data for the u s sawmilling and paper industries to empirically measure the degree of oligopsony power for sawlog and pulpwood inputs respectively results evaluated at sample means indicate that pulpwood markets are more oligopsonistic than sawlog markets though both perform closer to perfect competition than monopsony time trends for market power differ for each product and perfect competition cannot be rejected for sawlogs in later years copyright 1995 by mit press

analysing the technical efficiency of the spanish football league first division with a random frontier model this article analyses technical efficiency of football clubs in the spanish football league division 1 primera liga from the seasons 1995 1996 to 2004 2005 with an unbalanced panel data the random frontier model is used allowing the identification of random variables in the cost frontier it is concluded that the price of capital investment the number of points won and attendance are heterogeneous variables therefore no common public policy aiming to improve efficiency can embrace all of the clubs so that policies by clusters are required

a bayesian stochastic frontier of italian football this study analyses the technical efficiency of serie a italian football clubs during the 2004 2012 seasons with a bayesian stochastic frontier model using unique data extracted from clubs annual reports specifically the focus of the study is on assessing the impact effects on clubs efficiency whether they are big clubs they employ several foreign player they compete in european competitions and their involvement with football scandals in the italian football the empirical results reveal that efficiency varies among the clubs analysed and policy implications are derived

shirking on the court testing for the incentive effects of guaranteed pay prior work on long term contracts and the incentive to shirk has focused almost exclusively on major league baseball the current inquiry is the first to examine shirking in the national basketball association we employed two different measures of player productivity when the nba s measure is used we find evidence consistent with allegations of shirking behavior but when productivity is measured in a fashion more consistent with economists definition of marginal product the evidence of shirking evaporates jel j41 j44 l83 i introduction

cost efficiency of french rugby clubs this article analyses the cost efficiency of french first league rugby clubs using a stochastic frontier model the frontier estimation confirmed that the model fits the data well with all coefficients correctly signed and in line with the theoretical requirements the results show that one of the clubs is operating efficiently with the majority of clubs clustered around 20 inefficiency policy implications are derived

in pursuit of monopoly power recent quantitative work in industrial economics this paper reviews empirical work in industrial organization devoted to the question of inferring the existence of monopoly power from data on observed market outcomes like profits and prices the discussion covers inter industry work long conventional in the area newer developments in intra industry analysis and case studies and concludes with some remarks on a small but growing body of work assessing market dynamics the wide range of studies reviewed all generally reveal that market power exists in many industries

how destructive is creative destruction effects of job loss on job mobility withdrawal and income we analyze short and long term effects of worker displacement our sample consists of male workers displaced from norwegian manufacturing plants we find that displacement increases the probability of leaving the labor force by 31 the drop out rate from the labor force is particularly high in the first years following displacement the average earnings effects for those who remain in the labor force are moderate a 3 loss relative to non displaced workers after seven years splitting displaced workers on within and between firm movers we find that the estimated earnings loss is entirely driven by between firm movers who experience a 3 6 loss transfers to other plants within multi plant firms upon displacement are quite common our results support the view that human capital is partly firm specific and partly industry specific we find no evidence suggesting that human capital is plant specific

the brazilian soccer championship an efficiency analysis this article analyses the top brazilian football league from 2003 to 2011 by estimating a cost function and using a stochastic frontier model among the covariates the number of fans per club and club remoteness is taken into account the brazilian clubs are then ranked according to their technical efficiency during the 2000 2011 period based on the results the policy implication is presented and the economic implications arising from the study are also considered

analysing head coach dismissals in the german bundesliga with a mixed logit approach abstract this article analyzes the dismissal of head coaches in the top tier of german professional football the bundesliga a random parameter logit model is used to analyse the characteristics that are associated with the probability of a coach to be dismissed taking into account uncontrolled heterogeneity of the data policy implications are presented

oligopoly power in the food and tobacco industries in this article we estimate and test for the degree of oligopoly power and economies of scale in forty food and tobacco industries using the new empirical industrial organization neio framework and four digit sic data lerner indices and elasticities of scale are compared throughout the entire food and tobacco industries t tests verify that all but three of these industries exert statistically significant degrees of oligopoly power and that over 82 of these industries exhibit nonconstant returns to scale the empirical results also provide estimates of the price elasticities of demand for each industry

market structure in the us electricity industry a long term perspective we estimate changes in market structure in the us electric power industry during the last three decades using two independent approaches first we estimate an industry wide conjectural variations parameter we find that industry concentration was generally rising during the 1970s but has been gradually and consistently falling since the early 1980s to check the robustness of these results we then use a translog production function to estimate the lerner index the results confirm that the industry was becoming less concentrated during the 1980s though the lerner index tended to fluctuate during the late 1980s and early 1990s our results suggest that the current state of the electricity industry may have more to do with long term changes in market structure than recent attempts to establish competitive wholesale electricity markets

continuity and evolution in an old industrial region the labour market dynamics of the rise and fall of northern rock dawley s marshall n pike a pollard j and tomaney j continuity and evolution in an old industrial region the labour market dynamics of the rise and fall of northern rock regional studies the northern rock mortgage bank was a high profile casualty of the credit crunch in 2007 an evolutionary geographical political economy approach demonstrates that northern rock s growth and decline was shaped by its location in an old industrial region and echoes the historical position of the peripheral region in the spatial division of labour a longitudinal investigation focuses on the labour market dynamics of northern rock s rapid growth and decline on the north east of england the northern rock case highlights the enduring occupational structure of the region s labour market and shows how older industrial regions suffer from a process of occupational disadvantage that restricts their ability to adapt to economic change

wage disparity and team productivity evidence from major league baseball using data describing baseball teams from 1985 to 1998 it is found that levine s levine d i 1991 cohesiveness productivity and wage dispersion journal of economic behavior and organization 15 237 255 team cohesiveness hypothesis is supported over ramaswamy and rowthorn s ramaswamy r rowthorn e 1991 efficiency wages and dispersion economica 58 501 514 danger potential hypothesis the implication is that teams with greater wage disparity experience a reduction in team performance 2000 elsevier science s a all rights reserved

migration and employment after an economic shock regional characteristics and migration patterns this study addresses the migration dynamics of workers after their workplace has closed it analyses to what extent migration responses differ between regions with different characteristics for ind

economic fluctuations market power and returns to scale evidence from firm level data recent research on aggregate fluctuations coupled with ongoing work in industrial organization has renewed interest in the existence magnitude and cyclical pattern of market power and the extent of increasing returns to scale by exploiting restrictions from dynamic theory and information from financial markets we present a framework for generating quantitative evidence on market power and returns to scale tailoring the econometric model to firm level panel data we calculate the percentage differential between price and marginal cost the lerner index in terms of the parameters from the econometric system results for firms in eleven industries indicate that there is a great deal of heterogeneity in the extent of market power industries with significantly positive lerner indices tend to have substantial increasing returns in the production technology we find that there is only a modest relation between our estimated lerner indices and traditional measures of market power and that when market power varies temporally it is usually procyclical thus variations in the markup of price over marginal cost may help dampen aggregate economic fluctuations

measurement of technological and market structure alternative methodological perspectives discussion all three of the papers in this session lived up to the promise of delivering alternative methodological perspectives but only that of paul and muth and wohlgenant came close to providing a framework for measurement of technological and market structure perhaps a more fitting and inclusive title of the session in light of goodwin and holt s contribution would be technology market structure and price adjustment in the beef marketing channel beef is added because it is on the menu of each of the papers taken together the three papers are timely and important in view of the ongoing changes in market structures and organization of the livestock sector taken individually the degree to which each paper furthers our understanding of those changes varies with the type of issues raised and methodological perspective offered

performance evaluation of the english premier football league with data envelopment analysis this paper uses data envelopment analysis dea to evaluate the performance of english premier league football clubs from 1998 99 to 2002 03 combining sport and financial variables the paper evaluates how close the clubs are relative to the frontier of best practices analysing how they manage sport as well as financial results managerial implications of the research are devised

working through knowledge pools labour market dynamics the transference of knowledge and ideas and industrial clusters this article explores a prominent cluster in the swedish capital stockholm and its surrounding region the ict information and communications technology cluster in particular the article focuses on the issue of the extent to which labour market and labour mobility are the most likely channels for local and extra local sources of knowledge and ideas thus the article positions itself against a growing literature that focuses on rather diffuse and vague notions that knowledge and innovation reside in the air or in the buzz of urban life instead the underlying hypothesis is that in many sectors and industries such things as a cosmopolitan street life or accidental face to face encounters play relatively little part in the flow of experiences knowledge and innovation rather it is in the workplace that these exchanges and flows are located and it is thus through labour mobility that intracluster exchanges occur the article tests such ideas in relation to the ict cluster and the stockholm region using a uniquely detailed time series data set the data set used is based on official taxation and civil registration records and contains complete details on everything from education to career changes to income levels for every individual resident in sweden the detail of the individual records and the complete nature of the data set mean that it offers a unique possibility to examine on a large scale the micro dynamics of individuals in the labour market and in clusters the data are used to examine whether there have existed over time higher levels of labour market mobility in clusters as opposed to the rest of the urban economy the article empirically verifies the idea that labour market mobility is significantly higher in the cluster than in the rest of the urban economy

testing oligopolistic behavior abstract this paper develops an empirical model of short run pricing behavior for firms in a homogeneous product oligopoly it is based on the variable profit function and related output supply and factor demand equations and is used to analyze the behavior of firms in the coffee roasting industry a parametric test of the dominant firm model is developed and applied the hypothesis of dominant firm behavior and cournot behavior are rejected the hypothesis of price taking behavior is rejected for the largest two firms in the industry but is not rejected for all other firms using the estimated pattern of firm behavior an index of overall industry performance is constructed

labour work and regional resilience recent political and economic events have thrown into question several assumptions about how regional economies work and for whom for regional studies the result is a wave of policy relevant empi

unemployment durations and local labour market conditions abstractunemployment durations vary across local authority districts in the uk we explore the extent to which this variation is explained by differences in local labour demand as opposed to compos

conjectures firm characteristics and market structure abstract this paper makes use of a unique data set to investigate how firms in the vancouver british columbia retail gasoline market view their rivals and how consumers in turn view these firms own and rival price elasticities of demand conjectural variations and lerner indices are estimated for thirteen service stations in a submarket of vancouver these variables are then related to firm characteristics such as type of ownership degree of horizontal and vertical integration and type of service in this way systematic patterns in seller behavior and in buyer attitudes are revealed

exports margins and productivity growth with an application to the canadian softwood lumber industry the purpose of this paper is to evaluate the allocative and dynamic efficiency of the canadian softwood lumber industry by testing for the existence of price cost margins and decomposing rates of total factor productivity tfp growth a dynamic model of multiple output production and investment is developed in which output is sold domestically and exported price cost margins are parametrized and estimated the empirical results show that prices are equated to short run marginal costs in domestic and export markets tfp growth is decomposed into four elements technological change returns to sale price cost margins and capital adjustment the empirical results show that for the canadian softwood lumber industry tfp growth averaged 3 percent per year and the major contributing element was the rate of technological change copyright 1994 by mit press

an empirical analysis of dynamic nonprice competition in an oligopolistic industry this article develops a dynamic model of nonprice competition in an oligopolistic industry and uses it to analyze advertising competition in the u s cigarette industry the model generalizes existing studies by allowing advertising to affect both firm market shares and the total size of the market the model also allows dynamic conjectural variations to arise from the intertemporal links created by the durability of advertising we use these dynamic conjectural variations to distinguish alternative models of competitive interaction we estimate the complete model of firm production demand and advertising choice by using data for u s cigarette producers the results indicate that firm advertising primarily affects the level of market demand with a firm s effect on rival firms market shares arising through variations in the number of brands sold empirical results on firm behavior suggest that firms act as if their advertising choices will alter the future advertising choices of rival firms in both the high tar and low tar cigarette markets

price margins and capital adjustment canadian mill products and pulp and paper industries abstract the purpose of this paper is to estimate a model incorporating non competitive behaviour in product and factor markets in addition capital accumulation is subject to adjustment costs so that firms are not constrained to be in long run equilibrium the model is applied to two major canadian manufacturing industries pulp and paper and mill products the results show for both industries in each of three product markets and the wood input market that there is competitive behaviour in addition the industries are not in long run equilibrium as marginal adjustment costs cause marginal profit to exceed the rental rate on capital with the industries exhibiting short run competitive behaviour in product and factor markets new estimates are derived for scale economies and rates of technological change unlike the results from other studies both industries exhibit small scale economies and positive rates of technological change

reservation wages and their labor market effects for black and white male youth this paper presents an empirical analysis of self reported reservation wages for unemployed young black and white males the results show that young blacks seek wages which are comparable to those of young whites in absolute terms but which are higher relative to what is available on the demand side of the market these relatively higher reservation wages of young blacks contribute to their unemployment durations and somewhat to their subsequently received wages changes in reservation wages may thus help to explain the trends in wages and employment of young blacks in recent years

the relationship between unemployment spells and reservation wages as a test of search theory the theory of stationary job search predicts that controlling for other factors that affect the probability of leaving unemployment duration and reservation wages are likely to be positively associated the paper tests this prediction for british cross sectional data from 1982 using an estimating equation implied by search theory simultaneity is crucial in the evaluation of this prediction with single equation and instrumental variable estimates differing markedly perhaps surprisingly given the extreme paucity of both job interviews and offers in the sample the main finding is that reservation wages play a significant role in the determination of duration

reply on comment to small firms and the merger mania research on performance differences between small and large firms is booming it emerges relatively separated from the mainstream industrial organization literature inspired by levy s comment on an earlier paper we try to bridge the gap between the two areas especially we screen non cooperative game theoretical models for predictions on performance differences most of them forecast higher profits for larger firms but there exist also some models which predict the opposite for very specific circumstances

which types of relatedness matter in regional growth industry occupation and education abstractwhich types of relatedness matter in regional growth industry occupation and education regional studies this paper provides a conceptual discussion of relatedness which suggests a focus on individuals as a complement to firms and industries the empirical relevance of the main arguments is tested by estimating the effects of related and unrelated variety in education and occupation among employees as well as in industries on regional growth the results show that occupational and educational related variety are positively correlated with productivity growth which supports the conceptual discussion put forth in the paper in addition related variety in industries is found to be negative for productivity growth but positive for employment growth

responding to the coffee crisis what can we learn from price dynamics an econometric model of coffee price dynamics is specified and estimated to capture the evolution of coffee prices at the farm wholesale and retail levels it investigates the historical influence of the international coffee agreement ica through its effects on yield and planting decisions in the short run the ica caused brazilian farm prices to become disconnected from international prices the ica helped coffee producers to better incorporate current world price information into planting decisions this created a price cycle that did not exist in non ica periods the low coffee prices experienced since the disintegration of the ica are consistent with low supply response to price information asymmetric price transmission at the retail level helped roasters and retailers benefit from upstream price interventions our results urge caution when considering future coffee price interventions

team effects on compensation an application to salary determination in the national hockey league leo h kahane studies of salary determination largely model pay as a function of the attributes of the individual and the workplace i e employer size job characteristics and so forth this article empirically investigates an additional factor that may influence individual pay specifically coworker productivity data from professional sports are used to evaluate this question because both salary and teammate performance measures are readily available we find that team attributes have both direct effects on an individual s pay and indirect effects through altering the rates at which individual player productive characteristics are valued jel j31 l83 i introduction when complementary exists between labor inputs individual productivity may be poorly measured by treating the individual worker separately from the character of the organization or team within which he works namely individual productivity may vary when working in different settings to the extent that coworkers offer different degrees of assistance 1 if such complementary between human capital inputs is present say a team dynamic it suggests the possible existence of both team and individual effects on productivity and hence compensation empirical analysis of team effects has been hindered by the lack of data on individuals and their coworkers including managers one source though that contains much of this requisite information is data on professional sports teams in this article we exploit this unique attribute of professional sports data in order to empirically assess the effect of complementarities between labor inputs on individual compensation specifically we use a team sport setting to situate the worker in an organizational environment where we can observe the impact of coworkers on individual productivity thereby allowing us to examine the separate effects of individual and team productivity on salary determination the general question asked is whether individual attributes are valued or rewarded differently in different work environments or in our specific case on different teams this study will investigate these questions by empirically assessing the effects of coworker productivity that is the effects of the qual ity productivity of teammates on individual compensation although a number of different highly team oriented sports would serve our purpose such as basketball this particular study uses data from professional hockey to investigate team effects on compensation 2 the remainder of the article is organized as follows section ii outlines the empirical framework used to analyze the posited team effects and discusses some of the theoretical issues relating to team effects on compensation section iii describes the data used in the analysis section iv reports the empirical results and section v reports our conclusions and directions for further work ii team and coworker effects as noted above the goal of this study is to evaluate empirically whether average coworker attributes 1 affect individual salaries 2 affect the rate at which individual attributes are valued by the firm and 3 are complementary inputs to the attributes of individual team members the question arises though as to why we might expect on theoretical grounds that individual players would earn any part of the team s contribution the classic model of alchian and demsetz 1972 suggests that the capitalist manager will reap the returns from any incremental team output as the primary function of the manager is to discover complementarities between inputs and enhance organizational output by optimally combining resources and to monitor effort so as to reduce shirking as a result the manager will capture all of the returns that are not specific to the inputs in which case we would not expect to observe team effects on individual compensation yet although a manager acting as the residual claimant is one solution to the problem of reducing shirking in the context of complementary inputs whose effort is difficult to monitor other models suggest that it may be desirable to compensate team members based on the value of team output in order to provide optimal incentives for effort for example see akerlof 1982

price cost margins exports and productivity growth with an application to canadian industries a model is estimated for oligopolistic industries producing multiple outputs in short run equilibrium outputs are sold domestically and exported while capital is treated as a quasi fixed factor the model is applied to the canadian non electrical machinery electrical products and chemical products industries the results show that there is significant oligopoly power in each of the industries and that the degree of this power differs between the domestic and export markets total factor productivity is decomposed price cost margins exert little influence but the rate of technological change returns to scale and the rate of capital adjustment determine productivity growth

imperfect competition in multiproduct food industries with application to pear processing agricultural product markets often involve relatively few firms processing a farm product into multiple processed products this market structure prompts concern that processing firms may exercise both oligopsony and oligopoly power the present paper develops and applies a methodology to test simultaneously for market power in both the raw input market and multiple processed output markets application of the methodology to california pear processing indicates the industry has exerted power in both its farm input market and the markets for canned pears and fruit cocktail

coaching team production coaching team production the actual function of managers is the subject of much debate using data on more than 3000 male college basketball players their coaches and their skill levels we find a positive and significant relation between our ability to replicate an individual coach s allocation of playing time across players and his winning percentage although this result does not answer the central question of just what it is that managers contribute the results do support the property rights paradigm managers are the employees of workers and more generally sports data can be used to help understand related economic processes where quantifiable measures of inputs and outputs are more costly to obtain what is meant by performance input energy initiative work attitude perspiration rate of exhaustion or output sometimes by inspecting a team member s input activity we can better judge his output effect it is not always the case that watching input activity is the only or best means of detecting measuring or monitoring output effects of each team member but in some cases it is a useful way i introduction a major tenet of the alchian demsetz 1972 representation of the firm is that managers are hired by workers to prevent shirking and malfeasance in their own ranks absent overseers individual workers bear only a fraction of the cost of shirking and hence everyone undersupplies labor relative to its opportunity cost in this world the managerial function is to monitor inputs and meter rewards thereby reducing the incentive to shirk and raising each worker s marginal productivity the more dependence there is in the marginal products of laborers the more important the role of management this view of supervision is simultaneously intuitively pleasing and difficult to quantify this paper investigates the role of management in a setting where indisputably there is team production intercollegiate basketball 1 data on 3012 college basketball players across ten years and sixty five teams are used to replicate one aspect of coaching the allocation of playing time next we attempt to link coaching decisions to winning the goal is to determine if coaches who manage well by our standards are successful section ii motivates the paper in section iii the empirical methodology is detailed the monitoring function is estimated and related to coaching success section iv contains a summary and conclusion ii coaching decisions the essence of team production is interdependence and the inherent immeasurability of marginal productivity across workers however this does not mean that proxies for marginal productivity cannot be developed managers monitor worker inputs and deduce marginal products accordingly of course some inputs are more cheaply quantified than others attitude is hard to measure but heart rate is easy sweat is observed cheaply but workers can feign exhaustion in the famous chinese boatpullers fable the coxswain uses his whip to insure that coolies pull efficiently to persuade each worker to give the appropriate effort 2 mcmanus 1975 341 relates a story told by cheung boats are pulled upstream by a team of coolies prodded by an overseer with a whip an american lady horrified at the sight of the overseer whipping the men as they strained at their harness demanded that something be done about the brutality she was quickly informed those men own the rights to draw boats over this stretch of water and they have hired the overseer and given him his duties here the monitor uses his vision intuition and experience to determine shirking counseling the loafers with his whip but employing subjective observation is just one way to monitor

returning to work regional determinants of re employment after major redundancies abstractusing matched employer employee data on roughly 429 000 workers made redundant from large plant closures or major downsizing in sweden between 1990 and 2005 this paper analyses the role of the regional industry mix specialization related and unrelated variety in the likelihood of returning to work the results show that a high presence of same or related industries speeds up the re employment process while high concentrations of unrelated activities do not the role of related activities is particularly evident in the short run and in regions with high unemployment consequently the prospect of successful diversification is enhanced in regions with related industries

an empirical investigation of returns to search using data on search and choice behavior from a local automobile market we estimate monetary returns to search in terms of lower prices resulting from additional time invested in price search for our analytical framework we adapt a model developed in the job search literature to the problem of consumer search this framework is especially useful for illuminating the relationship between time spent searching the outcome of search and demand and supply side variables our results indicate that for this particular sample of buyers marginal returns to search are broadly consistent with what one might expect if consumers balance costs and benefits of search and that potential gains from additional search for lower car prices do not appear to be large for most consumers our study highlights many of the methodological difficulties involved in estimating returns to search including isolating returns to different outcomes of search and sensitivity of results to model specification and sampling error we deal with these problems by trying to isolate time spent searching for price from other uses of search time by deriving our model used in estimation from a specific conceptual framework and by extensive specification testing

do other firms matter in oligopolies this paper examines how firms interact with their rivals the main novelty of our approach is that we let conjectural variations depend on the actual ability of other firms to react which we measure by both the physical capacity and financial status of firms our main findings are twofold first physical and financial capacity significantly affect conjectures second we recover the implied conjectural variations and reject homogeneous conjectures we generally find that leaders expect aggressive responses and followers are cournot players

unemployment dynamics and labour market tightness an empirical evaluation of matching function models the implications of matching function models for the relationship between labour market tightness and the transition probability into employment are summarized these implications are then tested using monthly data for three canadian provinces british columbia ontario and quebec testing methods use flexible regression techniques so as to reduce the effect of any extraneous restrictions the results show rough concordance between theoretical assumptions and empirical facts evidence of non linearity in the estimated relationships favours a search theoretic model of labour markets over one based on queues and some quantitative results offer guidance to those using calibrated search models in theoretical analysis

baseball specific human capital why good but not great players are more likely to coach in the major leagues the career choice of retiring athletes provides an interesting example of a midcareer transition conditioned on specific human capital previous research examines the determination of earnings in professional sports 3 5 14 but does not consider how skills developed during an athlete s playing years affect subsequent opportunities in this paper i test the hypothesis that skills specific to baseball increase the probability a player will choose to coach the empirical work confirms the importance of baseball specific human capital in the decision to coach and provides some of the first formal evidence that the opportunities of star players differ distinctly from players that are marginally less talented in the theoretical section i develop a random utility model in which a retiring player chooses between coaching and non coaching careers on the basis of potential earnings and a random taste component earnings in either career are determined by a vector of career attributes that embody the player s productivity in each if the random taste component is normally distributed the probability a player chooses a coaching career can be estimated using probit the empirical results support the predictions of the model that baseball specific human capital is positively correlated with the probability of a player coaching and that star players are unlikely to coach because their marginal skill advantage is not baseball specific in particular the findings imply that players with long but unexceptional careers are more likely to coach in the major leagues an extension of the empirical model is applied to the issue of discrimination the insignificance of a black dummy variable suggests that black players have the same probability of coaching as comparably skilled white players however a more complex interactive specification suggests that relatively poor opportunities for black stars outside the game leads to their crowding out those black players who if they were white would most likely coach

spatial externalities relatedness and sector employment growth in great britain bishop p and gripaios p spatial externalities relatedness and sector employment growth in great britain regional studies this paper examines the impact of externalities on employment growth in sub regions of great britain by estimating ordinary least squares ols and maximum likelihood spatial models at the two digit level for 23 sectors issues arising from relatedness sector differences competition cross boundary spillovers and spatial autocorrelation are explicitly addressed results indicate that specialization has a generally negative impact on growth whilst the impact of diversity is heterogeneous across sectors and strong local competition has a typically positive impact the results question the merits of policies primarily aimed at promoting regional specialization and suggest that diversity local competition and sector heterogeneity are important policy issues bishop p et gripaios p les effets externes geographiques la connectivite et la croissance de l emploi sectoriel en grand

do coffee roasters benefit from high prices of green coffee abstract the german coffee industry has repeatedly made the puzzling statement that it would prefer higher prices of green coffee its main input likewise it supported the maintenance of the coffee tax in this paper an oligopoly model with differentiated products is used to illustrate the possibility of profit raising cost increases the relationship between prices and costs of roasted coffee in germany is estimated and the hypothesis of overshifting is tested in addition the demand for coffee is studied however the empirical analysis does not confirm that increasing costs lead to higher profits alternative explanations for the coffee industry s statements based on long term considerations are also discussed