the scope nature and effects of employee stock ownership plans in japan using data for various years including new data for 1973 84 the authors examine the scope nature determinants and effects of japanese employee stock ownership plans esops in 1988 of firms listed on japan s eight stock exchange markets 91 had an esop and the average non executive employee plan participant owned stock worth about 14 000 probit estimates for a sample of manufacturing firms show that firms were more likely to adopt esops when recent business performance was below average the capital labor ratio was relatively low and employment growth was relatively fast evidence is also found that esops enhanced enterprise productivity the authors argue that esops have played an important and largely overlooked role in the success of the japanese economy over the past two decades

tourism demand forecasting models choice of appropriate variable to represent tourists cost of living abstract price is generally regarded as a major determinant of demand tourism has two price elements the cost of travel to the destination and the cost of living for tourists in the destination previous studies where econometric forecasting models have been developed for international tourism demand usually take the consumer price index in a country to be a proxy for the cost of tourism in that country owing to lack of appropriate data this article attempts to evaluate the performance of proxy variables compared with a specific tourists cost of living variable within the context of tourism demand forecasting models

team human capital and worker mobility we discuss the concept of team human capital and study the renegotiation of labor compensation after team members privately observe their own reservation wage as labor productivity can only be high if the number of quits does not exceed a threshold decisions concerning acceptance of individual wage demands become interdependent when a team is made up of salaried workers a peculiar case of efficiency wage results moreover inefficient team dissolution may occur we then show that inefficiency is less likely to occur when team members form a partnership

on some recent explanations of why capital hires labor conventional microeconomics contains no explanation of why capital hires labor and not the reverse in view of some surprisingly positive results in the theoretical analysis of worker run enterprise systems recent contributions to the theory of the firm have attempted to explain the dominance of capitalist production relations in efficiency terms the present paper critically reviews works in this area by alchian and demsetz 1972 williamson 1975 1980 and jensen and meckling 1979 and contends that a convincing efficiency argument for the general superiority of capital owners over workers control of enterprises still is lacking

employee ownership and internal governance abstract this paper is designed to counter oliver williamson s hypothetical peer group model of organization with a discussion of three prosperous populations of employee owned firms worked owned scavenger companies taxi cooperatives and professional partnerships such as the large law firm it will be shown here that these firms are formed endure and prevail over their competition for reasons that williamson more than anyone else has taught us to appreciate in particular this paper will argue that the metering problems and human asset considerations that are so prominently featured in williamson s work are crucial for understanding the success of these firms

employment entrepreneurship and 1992 microeconomic policy and european problems this essay has covered several areas which are not usually regarded as closely interrelated policy conclusions have been discussed briefly at various points and will now be developed more fully in this final section as evidence for the interrelatedness of such disparate fields as corporate finance and employment policy we start from the observation that many large firms are relatively inefficient particularly at product innovation and flexible organization and employment policies in part because top managerial compensation depends mainly on size this creates an incentive for excessive growth and empire building rather than payment to shareholders of the free cash flow which cannot be profitably invested internally more appropriate incentives for top management would increase dividend payments and hence the flow of funds into the capital market available for financing new start ups and small firms as venture capital even in the u s the cost of obtaining external capital often constrains small firms to invest only their internal cash flow fazzari et al 1988

on the economic rationale for codetermination law abstract this paper develops a positive efficiency economic case for codetermination law resting on the correction of labor and capital market and organizational failures a legally mandated codetermination structure is shown to provide employee checks on several structural incentives for management opportunism codetermination is shown to offer advantages for technical efficiency skill development and knowledge generation through its protection of specific human capital investments financial markets cannot enforce codetermination due to a set of free rider problems

optimal labour contracts under asymmetric information an introduction the review of economic studies has instituted a new series of lectures to be given annually by a younger british economist at the association of university teachers of economics meetings the choice of lecturer is determined by a panel whose members are currently professors hahn mirrlees and nobay this paper is a revised version of the first lecture in the series it was presented at the aute meeting held at the university of surrey in april 1982 and was refereed in the usual way mak

innovation and market strategy in italian industrial cooperatives econometric evidence on organizational comparative advantage abstract this paper argues that more than one type of organizational form can be simultaneously efficient within an industry when differentiation in product qualities are significant firms with some exogenous or persistent component to their organizational structure will specialize in product qualities for which their organizational structure puts them at an advantage relative to other firms this framework is used in an empirical study of innovation and market strategy of industrial cooperatives results of management surveys of italian cooperatives on company strategy are combined with company financial data to test the hypothesis that industrial cooperatives will hold organizational comparative advantages in innovative activity which stresses the production knowledge of ordinary employees in high quality products and in the use of specialized corporate alliances strong evidence supporting the hypotheses are found when the performance of the firm is measured by its profitability and income per member

brand performance volatility from marketing spending although volatile marketing spending as opposed to even level spending may improve a brand s financial performance it can also increase the volatility of performance which is not a desirable outcome this article analyzes how revenue and cash flow volatility are influenced by own and competitive marketing spending volatility by the level of marketing spending by the responsiveness to own marketing spending and by competitive response from market response theory we derive propositions about the influence of these variables on revenue and cash flow volatility in addition we extend the dorfman steiner theorem to derive the optimal level and volatility of expenditures if volatility effects are taken into account based on a large sample of 99 pharmaceutical brands in four clinical categories and four european countries we test for the empirical relevance of the propositions and assess the magnitude of the different sources of marketing induced performance volatility we find broad support for the

determinants of the incidence of group incentives evidence from canada we use canadian data on four group incentive schemes to examine the deter minants of the probability that a firm offers each scheme to its non managerial workers and to production workers alone we find that unionization lowers the incidence of group incentives except for productivity gainsharing larger firms are more likely to offer share purchase plans to all non managerial employees and profit sharing to production workers cash bonuses are less common in larger firms we find little indication that group incentives are either discouraged by machine paced production or more common in firms with good industrial relations

information distortion in a supply chain the bullwhip effect this article originally appeared in management science april 1997 volume 43 number 4 pp 546 558 published by the institute of management sciences consider a series of companies in a supply chain each of whom orders from its immediate upstream member in this setting inbound orders from a downstream member serve as a valuable informational input to upstream production and inventory decisions this paper claims that the information transferred in the form of orders tends to be distorted and can misguide upstream members in their inventory and production decisions in particular the variance of orders may be larger than that of sales and distortion tends to increase as one moves upstream a phenomenon termed bullwhip effect this paper analyzes four sources of the bullwhip effect demand signal processing rationing game order batching and price variations actions that can be taken to mitigate the detrimental impact of this distortion are also discussed

an econometric study of recruitment marketing in the u s navy since the abolishment of the mandatory draft the u s navy along with the other services has engaged in aggressive marketing strategies in order to attract a sufficient number of qualified individuals to volunteer enlistment the purpose of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of these efforts primarily advertising and personal selling within the general framework of the recruiting environment the study uses insights into the recruiting process provided by the navy recruiting command along with principles of economics and marketing to develop an econometric model of recruiting performance the parameters of the model are then estimated on a monthly data base for the 43 navy recruiting districts from january 1976 to december 1978 the objective of the model is descriptive i e it quantifies the effects of various environmental and marketing variables on three measures of recruiting performance nationally generated leads contracts for the delayed entry program and direct shipment contr

some behavioral perspectives on the dominance of hierarchical over democratic forms of enterprise abstract this paper explores possible reasons why participatory modes of organization whole potentially viable and preferable to hierarchical modes for a large majority of workers may be dominated by the latter in capitalist market economies after exploring the developmental preconditions for the evolution of a mature participatory mode using a behavioral approach to organizations it is suggested that since the interest of those possessing scarce managerial skills may lie with hierarchical firms a participatory sector may be uncompetitive unless rights to enter labor contracts are redefined thus the analysis offers a partial explanation of the political nature of the demand for workplace democracy

inventories and the volatility of production a stylized fact associated with inventory behavior is that the variance of production exceeds the variance of sales this paper presents a model of production decisions with demand uncertainty that incorporates no nnegativity constraints on inventories even with no productivity shocks optimal behavior by the firm is consistent with this stylized fact either if demand exhibits positive serial correlation or if the firm can backlog excess demand the reason is that a demand shock affects both the actual inventory level given unchanged production and the desired level production must replenish the stock and adjust to the new desired level copyright 1987 by american economic association

on the incidence of profit and equity sharing theory and an application to the high tech sector abstract profit and equity sharing benefit some firms through improvements in innovation production quality retention of key employees and specific human capital formation the analysis predicts high share contract incidence in the high tech sector a hypothesis supported by survey data collected from small and large high tech firms however externalities associated with this sector s market entry mechanism imply that the optimal level of profit and equity sharing may not have been achieved

a system of equations model of uk tourism demand in neighbouring countries this paper uses a system of equations model to examine tourism demand during periods of destination country transition and integration into the wider international community the almost ideal demand system model is applied to the uk demand for tourism in the neighbouring destinations france spain and portugal spain and portugal are interesting cases as during the period under consideration they experienced a process of transition from economies with characteristics typical of developing countries only entering the world bank s industrialized countries classification in the 1980s the paper examines the evolution of tourism demand during these countries transition from developing to developed status consideration of france as a neighbouring destination also allows the behaviour of tourism demand to be compared between relatively rich and poor countries the results show the extent to which the cross country behaviour of demand becomes more or less similar over time with respect to changes in ex

competitiveness of international tourism in taiwan us versus japanese visitors this paper intends to identify the factors determining the relative competitiveness of taiwan s international tourism among a group of seven east asian countries using data on visitors from the usa and japan the major message which emerged from this study is that there are sharp differences between factors affecting us visitors and japanese visitors specifically we found 1 the decline of taiwan s market share in japan has been mainly due to appreciation of nt dollars and changing preferences whereas they are not crucial factors in the us market 2 qualitative supply side factors indeed could have decisive influences on the market share however their effect is again origin dependent the open door policy of china is the only important determinant of taiwan s competitiveness in the us market while it has no impact on the japanese visitors

the effects of advertising prices and distribution on market share volatility although the influence of marketing decision variables on market share has received ample attention in the literature less is known about their effects on volatility this study attempts to shed light on this issue by empirically examining the effects of advertising pricing and distribution not only on market share but also on its volatility using an egarch model we argue that establishing a link between management controlled actions such as advertising pricing and distribution and market share volatility may benefit firms seeking to reduce uncertainty in their market share performance application of the proposed model to data on two markets suvs and minivans suggested that advertising pricing and distribution significantly influence market share volatility