competition and corporate performance are people right to think that competition improves corporate performance my investigations indicate first that there are some theoretical reasons for believing this hypothesis to be correct but they are not overwhelming furthermore the existing empirical evidence on this question is weak however the results reported here based on an analysis of around 670 u k companies do provide some support for this view most important i present evidence that competition as measured by increased numbers of competitors or by lower levels of rents is associated with a significantly higher rate of total factor productivity growth

the effects of human resource management practices on productivity a study of steel finishing lines the authors investigate the productivity effects of innovative employment practices using data from a sample of thirty six homogeneous steel production lines owned by seventeen companies the productivity regressions demonstrate that lines using a set of innovative work practices which include incentive pay teams flexible job assignments employment security and training achieve substantially higher levels of productivity than do lines with the more traditional approach which includes narrow job definitions strict work rules and hourly pay with close supervision their results are consistent with recent theoretical models which stress the importance of complementarities among work practices

are corruption and taxation really harmful to growth firm level evidence exploiting a unique data set containing information about the estimated bribe payments of ugandan firms the authors study the relationship between bribe payments taxes and firm growth in uganda for the period 1995 97 using industry location averages to circumvent the potential problem of endogeneity and to deal with issues of measurement error they find that both the rate of taxation and the rate of bribery are negatively correlated with firm growth for the full data set a one percentage point increase in the bribery rate is associated with three percentage point reduction in firm growth an effect about three times that of taxation moreover after excluding outliers the authors find that bribery has a much greater negative impact on growth and taxation a considerably smaller one this provides some validation of firm level theories of corruption which posit that corruption retards development even more than taxation does

what went wrong the erosion of relative earnings and employment among young black men in the 1980s this paper shows a widening in black white earnings and employment gaps among young men from the mid 1970s through the 1980s earnings gaps increased most among college graduates and in the midwest while gaps in employment population rates grew most among dropouts we attribute the differential widening to shifts in demand for subgroups due to shifting industry and regional employment the falling real minimum wage and deunionization the growing supply of black to white workers that was marked among college graduates and to increased crime among dropouts the different factors affecting subgroups highlight the economic diversity of black americans

organized labor and racial wage inequality in the united states why have african american private sector unionization rates surpassed those of white workers for decades and how has private sector union decline exacerbated black white wage inequality using data from the current population survey 1973 2007 the authors show that african americans join unions for protection against discriminatory treatment in nonunion sectors a model predicted wage series also shows that among women black white weekly wage gaps would be between 13 and 30 lower if union representation remained at high levels the effect of deunionization on racial wage inequality for men is less substantial but without deunionization weekly wages for black men would be an estimated 49 higher the results recast organized labor as an institution vital for its economic inclusion of african american men and women this study points to the need to move beyond class based analyses of union decline to an understanding of the gendered role unions once played in mitigating racial inequality

supply contracts profit sharing switching and reaction options a common theme in the studies of flexible supply contracts has been the producer s profit maximization problem without regard to the suppliers reactions however suppliers do react and protect their downside against producer s operating policies by revising their strategies in a manner consistent with their profitmaximization objectives this fact motivates our work using a real options contingent claims approach we analyze and value supply contracts in a setting characterized by exchange rate uncertainty supplier switching options order quantity flexibility profit sharing and supplier reaction options we also use basic diversification concepts from portfolio theory to analyze risk reduction in a unique framework given this setup we explicitly model how flexibility can be mutually beneficial to both the producer and the suppliers using this model we concurrently solve and examine the dual optimization problem for the suppliers and the producer our approach also endogenizes the extent and degree of profit sharing through the resulting optimal policies we also analyze what induces the producer and the suppliers to accept flexibility in their contracts

litigation costs and returns to experience we develop a model linking maximum damage awards available to plaintiffs in wrongful termination lawsuits workers propensity to sue as a function of experience and returns to experience using equal employment opportunity commission data on protected worker discrimination complaints and labor market data from the current population survey we examine how returns to experience among protected workers changed around the passage of the civil rights act of 1991 we show that employers reactions to employment protections may induce redistributive effects furthermore these effects operate not merely across groups of differing protected status but also within groups of identical protected status

racial discrimination and professional basketball salaries in the 1990s racial differences in professional basketball player salaries are examined to determine whether the 20 premium paid to whites in the mid 1980s has persisted into the 1990s ols and tobit regressions indicate no difference between white and black salaries controlling for player and team characteristics for the 1994 95 season however censored quantile regressions show substantial racial differences at certain points in the salary distribution whites earn less than blacks at the lower end of the distribution although the difference is not statistically significant and varies with minutes played in contrast whites receive a significant premium 18 at the upper end of the salary distribution these findings are consistent with a form of consumer discrimination in which sports fans prefer to see white star players all else equal

does demand for product quality increase worker training abstract we uniquely examine the relationship between firm organized training and the sensitivity of consumer demand to product quality cross section panel fixed effect and instrumental variable estimates confirm that british workplaces provide more intensive training when their product demand is more sensitive to product quality robustness checks including using alternative key variable definitions and a counterfactual analysis examining the importance of competing on price support this confirmation

black white wage inequality employment rates and incarceration the observed gap in average wages between black men and white men inadequately reflects the relative economic standing of blacks who suffer from a high rate of joblessness the authors estimate the black white gap in hourly wages from 1980 to 1999 adjusting for the sample selection effect of labor inactivity among working age men in 1999 accounting for labor inactivity including prison and jail incarceration leads to an increase of 7 20 in the black white wage gap adjusting for sample selectivity among men ages 22 30 in 1999 increases the wage gap by as much as 58 increasing selection bias which can be attributed to incarceration and conventional joblessness explains about two thirds of the rise in black relative wages among young men between 1985 and 1998 apparent improvement in the economic position of young black men is thus largely an artifact of rising joblessness fueled by the growth in incarceration during the 1990s

does delegation increase worker training we model a principal firm offering training to its agent worker under two alternative organizational structures integration where the principal retains authority to overrule the investment project recommended by the worker and delegation where the principal cannot overrule the worker s preferred investment project we assume that training reduces the worker s effort cost of assembling information about alternative projects payoffs and identify the conditions under which delegation increases the profit maximizing intensity of training empirical estimates from matched employer employee data show that workplaces delegating authority do provide more worker training this result persists in two cross sections in panel fixed effect estimates and critically in an instrumental variable exercise that also controls for establishment fixed effects jel d21 d22 d23 m53 m54

male white black wage gaps 1979 1994 a distributional analysis 1 introductionnumerous studies show that during the 1980s the mean white black wage gap among new entrant 0 10 years of potential experience males expanded 1 juhn murphy and pierce 1991 jmp attribute the mean gap s expansion to a widening of the overall u s wage distribution caused by a host of economy wide race neutral changes that led to labor demand shifts toward better educated and better skilled workers regardless of race because african americans tend to be at lower levels of the overall skill distribution the shifts adversely impacted african american men more than white men leading to an expansion in the mean wage gap to arrive at this conclusion jmp decompose the expansion in the mean new entrant wage gap into four components the first two components measure the wage gap s increase because of a widening in observable racial differences in measured characteristics and their prices for example educational attainment and the returns to education the third component captures the contribution of growing racial discrimination and widening differences in unmeasured skills to the wage gap s expansion this term s contribution is measured by the drop in the mean percentile rank of blacks in the white residual wage distribution the fourth component identifies the role of increases in the prices of unmeasured skills and is measured by the increase in the variance of the white residual wage distribution when applied to the march annual demographic files of the current population survey jmp find that from 1979 to 1987 increases in the price of unmeasured skills explain all of the new entrant mean wage gap s expansion indicating that factors that adversely impacted less skilled workers regardless of race are the primary cause of the wage gap s expansion in related work reardon 1997 uses a national sample of white and african american men from the 1980 and 1990 decennial censuses and shows that the mean racial wage gap s expansion is caused by increased variance in the distribution of residual wages generated by labor demand shifts toward high skilled whites and away from medium skilled whites and high skilled african american men the wage gap expands because high skilled african american men earn wages that are similar to those of whites in the middle and upper third of their wage distribution the labor demand shifts led to a stretching or increased variance in the wage distribution that favored high skilled whites relative to high skilled african americans and medium skilled whites this paper makes several contributions to the literature on racial wage gaps and the technical literature on wage decompositions first i examine whether jmp s 1991 results hold up when the analysis is disaggregated by experience and educational attainment this is an important extension for two reasons bound and freeman 1992 rodgers 1997a and others have found that the racial wage gap among high school graduates and particularly among college graduates expanded significantly after the late 1970s over the same time period the variance of wages within these educational categories increased second it is important to determine the extent to which racial inequality that was generated while a cohort was a new entrant persists as it ages the paper s technical innovation is the development of a distribution or skill specific decomposition that identifies whether the stretching of the white wage distribution uniformly contributes to an expansion in racial inequality at all skill levels or quantiles of the wage distribution or whether the contribution of the wage distribution s stretching is specific to a skill level for example does the increase in the price of unmeasured skills explain a greater portion of the increase in the racial wage gap between high skilled african americans and whites than it does between medium skilled african americans and whites

training and worker effort a signalling perspective this paper analyzes the interaction between firms investment in general skills training and workers incentives it shows that when a firm has an informational advantage over its workers its provision of free general skills training can serve as a signal that there will be a long term relationship between the firm and its workers this signal induces the workers to exert more effort in learning firm specific skills which enhances the firm s profits in contrast with most of the existing literature the model implies that firms may provide free general skills training even if there is no labour market friction ce memoire analyse l interaction entre l investissement des entreprises dans l acquisition d habiletes generales de leurs employes et les incitations des travailleurs a fournir un effort on montre que quand une firme a un avantage informationnel sur ses travailleurs le fait de fournir gratuitement de la formation qui permette aux employes d acquerir des habiletes generales peut servir de signal qu il va y avoir une relation a long terme entre la firme et ses travailleurs ce signal incite les travailleurs a investir plus d effort dans l acquisition d habiletes specifiques a la firme ce qui augmente les profits de l entreprise ce modele en porte a faux par rapport au gros de la litterature existante suggere que les entreprises peuvent fournir gratuitement de la formation permettant aux employes d acquerir des habiletes generales meme s il n y a pas de friction dans le marche du travail

why do firms train theory and evidence this paper offers a theory of training whereby workers do not pay for the general training they receive the superior information of the current employer regarding its employees abilities relative to other firms creates ex post monopsony power and encourages this employer to provide and pay for training even if these skills are general the model can lead to multiple equlibria in one equilibrium quits are endogenously high and as a result employers have limited monopsony power and provide little training while in another equilibrium quits are low and training is high using microdata on german apprentices we show that the predictions of our model receive some support from the data

separate and unequal in the labor market human capital and the jim crow wage gap competing explanations for the long standing gap between black and white earnings attribute different weight to wage discrimination and human capital differences using new data on local school quality we find that human capital played a predominant role in determining 1940 wage and occupational status gaps in the south despite entrenched racial discrimination in civic life and the lack of federal employment protections the resulting wage gap coincides with the higher end of the range of estimates from the post civil rights era we estimate that truly separate but equal schools would have reduced wage inequality by 29 48

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

the impact of product market competition on training provision evidence from canada while standard models of training focus on how input market affects firms training decisions this paper investigates the impact of product market competition on training provision using the longitudinal data from statistics canada s workplace and employee survey we find that increased competition is strongly associated with more training provision this association is unlikely to be driven by unobserved heterogeneity specific measures used and other relevant factors to the extent that training is a significant source of human capital and industry competitiveness our results suggest that increasing training is an important channel through which competition raises productivity

why do temporary help firms provide free general skills training the majority of u s temporary help supply ths firms offer nominally free unrestricted computer skills training a practice inconsistent with the competitive model of training i propose and test a model in which firms offer general training to induce self selection and perform screening of worker ability the model implies and the data confirm that firms providing training attract higher ability workers yet pay them lower wages after training thus beyond providing spot market labor ths firms sell information about worker quality to their clients the rapid growth of ths employment suggests that demand for worker screening is rising

competition and product quality in the supermarket industry this article analyzes the effect of competition on a supermarket firm s incentive to provide product quality in the supermarket industry product availability is an important measure of quality using u s consumer price index microdata to track inventory shortfalls i find that stores facing more intense competition have fewer shortfalls competition from walmart the most significant shock to industry market structure in half a century decreased shortfalls among large chains by about a third the risk that customers will switch stores appears to provide competitors with a strong incentive to invest in product quality

sources of racial wage inequality in metropolitan labor markets racial ethnic and gender differences research on racial inequality has become increasingly specialized often focusing on a single explanation and subgroup of the population in a diverse society a broader comparative framework for interpreting the causes of wage inequality for different racial ethnic and gender groups is called for the effects of a range of different factors on the wages of latinos asians and blacks relative to whites and separately for women and men are examined new sources of racial wage inequality are also considered significant differences are found in the sources of wage inequality across race ethnicity and gender differences are generally greater between racial and ethnic groups than between men and women key findings include a large negative effect of immigration on the relative wages of latinos and asians and only a small effect on the relative wages of black women and no effect on black men in contrast the relative wages of blacks remain most affected positively by the presence of manufacturing employment and unions new economy indicators of high skill services and flexible employment conditions play only a secondary role in explaining metropolitan racial wage inequality