india s post green revolution agricultural performance what is driving growth following a period of poor performance in the 1990s india s agricultural growth rate has reaccelerated in the 2000s some believe the reacceleration has been a product of intensified investment which in turn has spurred yield growth others suggest it is because india s newly wealthy citizens have demanded greater product diversification to examine these hypotheses we use growth accounting techniques in conjunction with more complete agricultural production data than in past studies to construct state regional and national output input and total factor productivity quantity indexes which can be decomposed into their underlying sources sectoral performance evaluation suggests that since 1980 output growth has diffused away from the northern grain belt and toward high value agriculture in traditionally less productive regions productivity growth rather than resource use has accounted for these geographical and intensity shifts the growth burst has not as the literature has primarily argued been uniquely explainable by yield growth or product diversification but by a variety of factors including area expansion for example the contributions of irrigation technologies permitting double cropping have until now been largely ignored

when higher prizes lead to lower efforts the impact of favoritism in tournaments we investigate the relationship between tournament prices and effort choices in the presence of favoritism high tournament prizes can decrease agents effort supply when the choice of the winner is not perfectly objective but affected to some extent by personal preferences of an evaluator

governing india s land under conditions of market orientation and globalization land is being transferred from agriculture and common property uses to corporate farming private industry and the service sector how are intra and international land transactions governed using the case of india this paper emphasizes the sub national scale fieldwork in gujarat west bengal and tamil nadu reveals states to be competing with each other to attract private investment yet given institutional and political variation their land provision ranges from attempted market friendly policy change to narrower state business alliances it is time for scholarship and resultant policy recommendations to look beyond the national and global scales

has india s economic growth become more pro poor in the wake of economic reforms the extent to which india s poor have benefited from the country s economic growth has long been debated a new series of consumption based poverty measures spanning 50 years including a 15 year period after economic reforms began in earnest in the early 1990s is used to examine that issue growth has tended to reduce poverty including in the post reform period there is no robust evidence of more or less poverty responsiveness to growth since the reforms began although there are signs of rising inequality the impact of growth is higher when using poverty measures that reflects distribution below the poverty line and when using growth rates calculated from household surveys rather than national accounts the urban rural pattern of growth matters for the pace of poverty reduction however in marked contrast to the period before the reforms urban economic growth in the period after the reforms has brought significant gains to the rural poor as well as the urban poor

the evolution of institutions in india and its relationship with economic growth this paper examines the evolution in a few public institutions over time in india it presents three types of evidence on institutional outcomes such as losses in power generation backlogs in disposal of court cases on perceptions based measures of governance some going back to the 1960s and finally on customs administration and whether it has been more effective at detecting evasion over time all the evidence suggests that institutional quality has not improved over time it then addresses the two way relationship between growth and institutions in terms of two apparent paradoxes the first is why growth has turned around so dramatically in india despite the relatively limited nature of reforms especially compared with other countries the second paradox is why despite nearly 30 years of rapid growth institutions have not improved the paper offers some explanations that might help explain these paradoxes

global order and the new economic policy in india the post colonial formation of the small scale sector using a class focused marxist approach we elucidate the adopted position of indian small scale sector as a devalued other within the adopted development paradigm that accords primacy to capital and west in the background of this understanding of small scale sector we demonstrate how the new economic policy in the era of globalization could be theorized as a tool to obtain the post colonial hegemony of capital over the small scale sector copyright the author 2008 published by oxford university press on behalf of the cambridge political economy society all rights reserved oxford university press

performance comparisons and dynamic incentives it is well known that comparative performance information cpi can enhance efficiency in static principal agent relationships by improving the trade off between insurance and incentives in the design of explicit contracts in dynamic settings however there may be implicit as well as explicit incentives for example managerial career concerns and the ratchet effect in regulation we show that the dynamic effects of cpi on implicit incentives can either reinforce or oppose the familiar static insurance effect and in either case can be more important for efficiency the overall welfare effects of cpi are thus ambiguous and can be characterized in terms of the underlying information structure

heterogeneity tournaments and hierarchies tournament contracts are characterized that simultaneously elicit first best efficient effort levels and self selection of risk neutral heterogeneous workers into ability specific contracts comparisons across self selected ability types are shown to be sometimes necessary to attain efficiency rationales are explored for not commonly observing such contracts in hierarchical organizations

india trade policy review the review of india s trade policy by the wto the third of its kind is in three parts the report by the wto secretariat a statement by the government of india and minutes of the discussion of the report by the trade policy review board the review provides detailed information not only on india s trade and foreign investment policies but also an analytical review of india s export and economic performance the review notes that india has made considerable progress with the liberalisation of its trade and investment regime but it has a long way to go if it were to achieve a growth rate of eight to nine per cent the stated objective of the policy makers this paper drawing upon the material in the report analyses india s growth prospects and endorses the broad conclusions of the report

is globalisation undermining the welfare state this paper analyses the evolution of the welfare states in the majority of oecd countries during the pre globalisation 1946 80 and globalisation 1980 2000 periods our purpose is to find out whether globalisation has produced a convergence towards a smaller welfare state funded increasingly by non mobile factors such as labour property and consumption rather than by mobile factors such as capital the data presented here challenge the claims about such a convergence showing that social public expenditures and public employment have continued to expand during the globalisation period in most oecd countries we also show that the welfare states remain rooted in the political traditions that have governed them copyright 2004 oxford university press

international search behavior of business group affiliated firms scope of institutional changes and intragroup heterogeneity this paper investigates whether and when affiliation to business groups enables or constrains firms international search behavior during institutional transitions we theorize that given the unique structure and complex form of business group organizations the search behavior of affiliated firms is influenced by the degree of misalignment in outlook at the group and affiliate levels of management we identify the scope of institutional changes business group attributes and affiliate characteristics as sources of such misalignment the results from panel data on 298 firms from the indian pharmaceutical industry for the 1992 2007 period show that the constraining effects of business group affiliation are observed only when institutional changes are specific to the affiliates industry and not when broad institutional changes affect the business group as a whole moreover we observe heterogeneity in the search behavior of group affiliated firms first the degree of misalignment is greater in the case of affiliates belonging to older business groups and those that are more distant in terms of age and industry since the group s founding second by contrast and suggesting an alignment in outlook we find that affiliated firms that occupy a prominent position within a group or industry are able to bargain for and receive attention and support from the business group to undertake international search our findings have implications for research on the role of business groups in a changing institutional context and for the strategic adaptation of firms embedded in complex organizational and institutional settings

the diverging patterns of profitability investment and growth of china and india during 1980 2003 summary this paper documents the diverging patterns of capital accumulation profit rates investment rates capital productivity and technological progress of china and india between 1980 and 2003 the two asian economies have followed very different growth patterns and today they face different challenges india s is how to accelerate growth while china s policy makers debate between the need to maintain a high growth rate to generate employment and the imperative to reduce it to cool the economy india must address impediments to investment china must deal with the question of whether investment can continue being the main source of growth

uncertainty electoral incentives and political myopia we study the determinants of political myopia in a rational model of electoral accountability with informational frictions and uncertainty when politicians ability is ex ante unknown and policy choices are unobservable elections improve political accountability and selection however incumbents underinvest in costly policies with future returns to signal high ability and increase re election probability surprisingly uncertainty reduces political myopia and may increase social welfare we also address the socially optimal political rewards and the desirability of a one term limit our predictions are consistent with several stylised facts and with a new empirical observation aggregate uncertainty is positively correlated with fiscal discipline

on the incentive effects of job rotation abstract a new employee may work hard to build his reputation this effect is greatest when he starts the longer he is employed at his job the more the firm will already have learned about his ability the incentives for an employee to influence the firm s perceptions of his ability decrease over time if rotating the employee to a different job leads to new uncertainty about his ability this generates a fresh impulse for effort however job rotation also reduces the employee s time horizon thus reducing future rents from reputation this trade off leads to a unique optimum we derive a simple rule of thumb for an optimal rotation time our main results still hold for cases of complete but imperfect information transmission the incentive effects of job rotation also prevail in a setting in which skills are job specific we study several extensions rotations across multiple employees absence of commitment to a rotation time different bargaining positions discounting over time and learning by doing effects

rewarding performance by promotion to a different job abstract use of promotions rather than performance related pay to provide incentives can be justified if performance is non verifiable information this does not explain why promotion is to a different job rather than simply a better paid job the effectiveness of tournaments is undermined however if unsuccessful workers are equally suited to higher paid jobs and can engage in bribery or other influence activity a promotion based reward structure with pay tied to jobs can be made immune to such activity if misallocations of employees to jobs are costly to the firm

the enigma of india india s high growth over the last fifteen years has inspired several recent books and papers to examine the growth s source and sustainability the two volume study by arvind virmani being a case in point this paper evaluates these recent works it is argued that the cause of the take off does not fit into any easy ideological category as suggested by virmani the current high growth has been achieved in several steps with distinct factors of propulsion behind each step there is reason to expect the growth to be sustainable although destabilizing political tensions will arise from the increasing inequality the paper also evaluates how india s growth relates to the global economy

co2 emissions from household consumption in india between 1993 94 and 2006 07 a decomposition analysis abstract co 2 emission from anthropogenic activities is one of the major causes of global warming india being an agriculture dependent country global warming would mean monsoon instability and consequent food scarcity natural disasters and economic concerns however with proper policy interventions co 2 emissions can be controlled input output analysis has been used to estimate direct and indirect co 2 emissions by households for 1993 94 1998 99 2003 04 and 2006 07 complete decomposition analysis of the changes in co 2 emissions between 1993 94 and 2006 07 has been done to identify the causes into pollution energy intensity structure activity and population effects according to broad household consumption categories results indicate that activity structure and population effects are the main causes of increase in co 2 emission from household fuel consumption to identify the causes at the sectoral level a second decomposition has been done for changes between 2003 04 and 2006 07 to identify the causes in the next stage finally alternative energy policy options have been examined for each consumption category to reduce emissions combined strategies of technology upgradation fuel switching and market management in order to reduce co 2 emissions for sectors like batteries other non electrical machinery construction and electronic equipments including television for which all the effects are positive need to be adopted

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

up or out contracts a signaling perspective a firm will typically gather information concerning its own workers that is not available to other potential employers while other firms will attempt to reduce this information asymmetry by observing the actions of the initial employer i argue that this process can be important in environments characterized by up or out contracts in that the retention decision can serve as a signal of productivity the article investigates this argument in an environment where up or out contracts are employed because they provide workers with an incentive to accumulate general human capital and where learning takes place in a diffuse fashion

job transfers and incentives in complex organizations thwarting the ratchet effect many complex organizations such as planned soviet enterprises and the u s military routinely transfer employees between jobs since this sacrifices job specific human capital the practice is puzzling this article shows that regular job transfers may be part of an optimal incentive scheme in organizations plagued by the ratchet effect the ratchet effect arises when an employer is uncertain as to the productivity of the various positions or jobs within an organization workers in highly productive jobs then have an incentive to disguise the productivity of their jobs by expending low effort and producing low output this avoids having the employer construct more demanding remuneration schemes once the high productivity of a job becomes known job transfers break the link between current performance and future incentive schemes and hence remove the incentive stifling implications of the ratchet effect this article examines the tradeoff between providing more effective incentives via job transfers and the accompanying sacrifice of job specific human capital establishes conditions under which job transfers are optimal and develops comparative static results

multiskilling technical change and the japanese firm worker cooperation with technical change accounts for much of the success of large japanese firms the authors argue t hat this cooperative attitude is due in large part to multiskilling by training workers in more than one job a firm assures its workers th at they will not be made worse off by labor saving innovations in a simple model the authors show that multiskilling leads to an endoge nous distinction between permanent and temporary workers wages that are attached to the worker rather than the job and comparative advantage in process style innovations there is even a role for the company song copyright 1993 by royal economic society

getting reforms done in inhospitable institutional environments untying a gordian knot in india s power distribution sector when grand institutional reforms based on idealized models are stalled by the poor institutional environments and difficult politics which often surround large infrastructure systems in developing countries partial reforms whose design and implementation take into account the different interests of the key stakeholders can provide valuable and immediate benefits while moving these systems from low towards higher level equilibria strategically negotiated experimentally partial and purposefully hybrid these reforms are based on careful stakeholder analysis and strategic coalition building that avoid rigid positions based on idealized models our findings are based on a study of power sector reforms in india where we performed a micro level and in depth analysis of a partial and innovative experiment which has allowed private sector participation in electricity distribution within a hostile institutional environment

optimal tournament contracts for heterogeneous workers abstract we consider a rank order tournament between workers with different abilities under malcomson s self commitment property the employer optimally uses individual tournament prizes to extract rents from the workers without the self commitment property individual prizes are used to make the asymmetric competition less uneven by discriminating against the more able worker i e he is offered a lower winner prize than the less able worker in this spirit individual prizes serve as a substitute for handicaps

economic reforms in india since 1991 has gradualism worked opinions on the causes of india s growth deceleration vary world economic growth was slower in the second half of the 1990s and that would have had some dampening effect but india s dependence on the world economy is not large enough for this to account for the slowdown critics of liberalization have blamed the slowdown on the effect of trade policy reforms on domestic industry however the opposite view is that the slowdown is due not to the effects of reforms but rather to the failure to implement the reforms effectively this in turn is often attributed to india s gradualist approach to reform which has meant a frustratingly slow pace of implementation however even a gradualist pace should be able to achieve significant policy changes over ten years this paper examines india s experience with gradualist reforms from this perspective

incentives to create jobs regional subsidies national trade policy and foreign direct investment a national authority wishes to attract foreign direct investment fdi to create local jobs we analyse the optimal national trade policy when local authorities might offer subsidies to convince a multi national enterprise mne to invest in their jurisdiction with centralised decision making or with allocation of investment to particular localities the central authority s optimal policy is to use a high tariff to avoid payment of any subsidy to the mne despite this some socially undesirable but locally desirable fdi cannot be avoided if local authorities compete to offer subsidies to attract local investment then the central government s optimal policy is to try to discourage fdi by choosing a low tariff despite this some socially undesirable and even locally undesirable fdi prevails we conduct our analysis both assuming an upper bound on tariffs as would be consistent with trade liberalisation and allowing tariffs to vary freely the effect of increasing trade liberalisation depends heavily on the system of granting local subsidies if the system is centralised trade liberalisation decreases the range of parameters for which fdi occurs if the system is decentralised and competitive it increases this range

output and labor productivity in organized manufacturing a panel cointegration analysis for india abstract one of the policy puzzles faced in india during the last two and half decades has been the weak association between output and labor markets particularly in the manufacturing sector in this research we investigate the long run relationship between output labor productivity and real wages in the case of organized manufacturing we adjust the measure of labor productivity incorporating bottlenecks such as lack of infrastructure access to external finance and labor regulations which all may influence labor market outcomes using panel data from seventeen manufacturing industries we establish long run dynamics for the output labor productivity real wages series over a period of nearly three decades we employ recently developed panel unit root and cointegration tests for cross sectional dependence to incorporate heterogeneity across industries long run elasticities are generally found to be low for labor productivity compared to real wages due to the changes in manufacturing output there are variations across industries within the manufacturing sector for the effects of the labor market on manufacturing output in some industries lower wages are associated with higher output and the reason for the positive relationship in other industries could be due to workers bargaining power

trade barriers multinational involvement and intra industry trade panel data evidence from india the article analyses the effects of trade barriers and multinationals on the intensity of intra industry trade iit in a panel of indian manufacturing industries from 1988 to 1999 we find that the intensity of iit increases with the reduction of trade barriers this is expected as greater competition from imports leads individual plants in the domestic industry to specialize in the manufacturing of unique varieties the analysis suggests that horizontal market seeking multinational activities in the domestic industries exert a negative influence on iit this is consistent with the view that horizontal multinationals displace exports to the host country at the same time our results indicate that iit will be stimulated to the extent that the entry of multinationals induces intra industry specialization we also analyse the role of product differentiation and plant level scale economies in determining iit

emotions in tournaments abstract we introduce a concept of emotions that emerge when agents compare their own performance with the performances of other agents assuming heterogeneity among the agents the interplay of emotions and incentives is analyzed within the framework of rank order tournaments which are frequently used in practice tournaments seem to be an appropriate starting point for this concept because a tournament induces incentives by making agents compare themselves with their opponents we identify certain conditions under which the principal benefits from emotional agents furthermore the concept of emotions is used to explain the puzzling findings on the oversupply of effort in experimental tournaments

drivers for energy consumption a comparative analysis of china and india abstract china and india accounted for two thirds of the world s rise in energy use between 2000 and 2012 this paper aimed to calculate the p population a affluence t technology effects of energy use in china and india the world s two most populous and largest developing countries to this end a combination of the ipat method and the logarithmic mean divisia index technique and annual time series data on population energy consumption and gross domestic product during 1970 2012 are used in china a 12 53 fold growth of energy use emissions from 1970 to 2012 is driven by a combination of rapid growth in individual income and slow growth in population with offset by technological advancement since 1980 the accelerating rise in energy use since 2000 is a result of accelerating growth rates in individual income and a reversal of earlier declining in energy intensity technological advancement unlike china the long term rise in energy use exceeded the long term rise in individual income in india in addition a strong trend of decline in energy intensity has not yet occurred in india thus a 7 39 folds growth of indian energy use for 1970 2012 was a result of relatively rapid increase in population and relatively slow increase in income without effective offset by technological advancement it suggests that market oriented economic and energy reforms need to send the correct price signal to promote energy efficient technologies thus improving energy efficiency which is the key to a sustainable energy future in china and india

advertising as signal jamming abstract this paper considers a model of informative advertising that allows firms to jam the consumers signals on product quality before choosing prices at a second stage we find that the price competition at the second stage may overrule the basic insights from the signal jamming approach in other areas of application as a consequence a firm may advertise more intensely the higher is the difference of the expected product qualities moreover a firm s optimal advertising intensity can decrease with quality uncertainty

economic consequences of deregulation evidence from the removal of voting cap in indian banks abstract we examine the effect of the 2005 banking regulation amendment bill and the 2011 banking laws amendment bill proposals for removal of the 10 percent voting rights cap in indian banks the 2011 banking laws bill was first introduced in 2005 but lapsed with the dissolution of the 14th lok sabha the bill was passed in december 2012 and raised the voting cap in private sector banks from 10 to 26 percent we present evidence that the removal of the voting cap enhances the value of votes of bank stocks by reducing the wedge between cash flow and control rights thus increasing monitoring and the probability of takeover post deregulation analysis reveals that the passage of the bill was followed by increasing blockholders number and percentage of shares held in larger and government banks furthermore a stronger negative relationship between banks profitability and size as well as share of non performing loans is observed this study makes an important contribution to the growing literature on the valuation impact and efficiency gains of liberalization of ownership restrictions in emerging markets as well as the rich literature on corporate governance and control relating to the value of voting privilege in companies with disparate voting rights

do new brooms sweep clean when and why dismissing a manager increases the subordinates performance abstract if a manager stays in office for a long time he will have learned much about his subordinates thus competition among them will be weak as the manager has made up his mind who is suited best for which position with a new manager the race for favorable tasks is restarted leading subordinates to exert higher effort but for the firm owner the trade off arises that with a new manager effort is larger but the quality of task allocation is worse since information is lost the optimal dismissal policy will be nonmonotonic in the expected heterogeneity of the subordinates abilities

the role of promotion in inducing specific human capital acquisition workers routinely carry out activities that increase their productivity with their current employer for which they are not directly compensated for example a worker may be asked to develop relationships with clients or shop floor staff or he may develop a better understanding of how his firm operates firmspecific human capital of this type is difficult to quantify so that it is likely to be difficult to directly compensate the worker for its acquisition this paper is concerned with designing compensation schemes for employees to induce them to collect nonverifiable firm specific human capital if firms develop reputations for fairly compensating workers for skill collection the vagueness of these skills may not provide a significant incentive problem i consider the case where firms do not have the opportunity to develop reputations as a result the acquisition of human capital is subject to a dual moral hazard problem first noted in kahn and huberman 1988 first a worker only collects skills if there is a promise of a higher wage if he does so second the employer has an incentive to claim that the worker has not collected these skills even when he in fact has in order to save on wage costs so on the one hand it is difficult to repay the worker after skills are collected as the firm has an incentive to renege however the worker cannot be repaid before collecting skills as he has no subsequent incentive to collect them following the institutional literature i assume that the firm can commit to a labor contract which attaches wages to different tasks the principal purpose of the paper is to show that the firm can use this ability to commit to a wage scale for different tasks to induce a worker to collect firm specific human capital in the presence of this dual moral hazard problem where the worker is rewarded for skill acquisition by promotion to another job assume that a worker can be assigned to one of two jobs d and

biased contests for symmetric players in a biased contest one of the players has an advantage in the winner determination process we characterize a novel class of biased contest success functions pertaining to such contests and provide necessary and sufficient conditions for zero bias to be a critical point of arbitrary objectives satisfying certain symmetry restrictions we however challenge the common wisdom that unbiased contests are always optimal when contestants are symmetric ex ante or even ex post we show that contests with arbitrary favorites i e biased contests of symmetric players can be optimal in terms of various objectives such as expected aggregate effort the probability to reveal the stronger player as the winner or expected effort of the winner

efficiency dynamics in indian banking a conditional directional distance approach abstract the paper contributes to the contemporary research on bank efficiency in india we analyze the efficiency dynamics of the indian banking industry from 2004 to 2012 based on the recent methodological developments of the conditional and unconditional directional distances introduced by daraio and simar 2014 we apply a conditional directional distance estimator in order to analyze the dynamic effects of industry s performance levels the results indicate that foreign banks perform better compared to national and domestic private banks there is also evidence of technological change at the period before the global financial crisis however during and after the global financial crisis these gains diminished the evidence suggests that national banks fail to sustain their high performance levels gained after the industry s restructuring period finally the findings support the view that ownership structure affects banks technical efficiency levels

does europe need neoliberal reforms this paper examines the neoliberal claim that the only way to achieve sustainable growth and full employment is to abandon keynesian macroeconomic management and the welfare state and bring back flexible labour market policies it summarises the conditions required for neoliberal policies to produce such an outcome and their relevance to contemporary economic social and political realities this is followed by an empirical comparison of the economic performance and social well being of seven advanced economies widely regarded as leading proponents of the three models of capitalism liberal corporatist and social democratic contrary to the claim the model that performs best is the one that has least in common with the neoliberal economic orthodoxy a conclusion that is likely to be of particular relevance in the present century

infrastructure provision and macroeconomic performance this paper studies the differences between private and government provision of infrastructure capital utilization decisions and their differential role in determining market prices for capital goods under the two regimes of infrastructure provision serve as a critical transmission mechanism for fiscal policy a subsidy to private providers of infrastructure is preferable to direct government provision irrespective of how the subsidy or expenditure is financed the case for private provision is much stronger in economies characterized by high levels of congestion the choice between private and government provision also has a crucial effect on the design of optimal fiscal policy 2011 elsevier b v all rights reserved

intellectual capital and firm performance evidence from indian banking sector in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis the entire indian banking industry was paralysed and their performance was shattered by the unfolding of enormous cases of non performing assets npa

economic liberalization and indian economic growth what s the evidence india s growth and poverty performance over the last three decades has been a subject of great curiosity unlike the east asian countries india s growth spurt is not associated with exceptionally high domestic savings or foreign capital inflows or manufacturing exports so what triggered the change in the growth trajectory did the market liberalization policies of the 1990s help how have the initial conditions shaped the process and how has the indian model impinged on india s central problem of mass poverty this paper surveys the literature and offers its own assessment of the drivers of change jel i32 o13 o14 o15 o21 o47

some methodological problems with the neoclassical analysis of the east asian miracle this paper discusses the recent controversy over the sources of economic growth in east asia this empirical work has either used growth accounting or estimated econometrically aggregate production functions it is shown that it is possible to approximate the value added accounting identity i e value added equals labour s compensation plus total profits by a mathematical expression that has all the properties of a well behaved neoclassical aggregate production function this implies that statistical estimations of putative aggregate production functions can provide no independent evidence as to whether they accurately describe the production technology of the economy or indeed whether the aggregate production function actually exists a corollary is that the conventional measures of the growth of total factor productivity cannot be unambiguously interpreted as an estimate of the rate of technical progress the paper reviews the works of kim and lau and young and in the light of this explains why both analyses and interpretations of the notion of total factor productivity growth as the rate of technical progress are problematical copyright 2003 oxford university press

sickness absence an international comparison this paper shows how internationally and intertemporally consistent information on sickness absence can be constructed from labour force surveys and describes some important features of data that we have generated using the luxembourg employment study we also analyse sickness absence rates by age gender and other socio economic characteristics of workers these relationships prove to be similar across countries with widely differing mean rates of absence in this dataset workers with longer tenure tend to have higher absence rates even when age is controlled for absence is also positively correlated with higher usual hours of work we show how internationally and intertemporally consistent information on sickness absence can be constructed from labour force surveys lfs and describe some important features of data that we have generated using the luxembourg employment study les such data fill an important gap in available information about absence since they have the potential to provide answers to a number of issues that remain unresolved in its study there is now substantial evidence going back to the work of the industrial fatigue research board in the 1920s and 1930s i that sickness absence is not purely a response to a medical condition workers who have access to compensation payments are more likely to be absent than those without buzzard and shaw 1952 the higher the rate of compensation the more absences workers are likely to take buzzard and shaw 1952 furthermore the higher the rate of compensation the longer absences are likely to be barmby et al 1991 the analysis of sickness absence is placed firmly in the agenda of economics by the idea that sickness absence rates are the consequence of choices that can be mediated by financial and other incentives the provision and level of sickpay is typically determined at two levels by negotiation between firms and their workforces and by government regulation interfirm variations in absence and their correlates are not well understood coles and treble 1996 have argued that the marginal cost of an absence is partially in the control of firms and can be usefully seen as driven by the nature of the technology adopted these theoretical arguments remain largely unexplored empirically but the ability to compare similar industries across different countries is likely to be revealing this paper was drafted during a visit to ceps instead in the summer of 1999 the research was funded by a grant of the european commission under the tmr programme access to large scale facilities hosted by iriss c i at ceps instead in differdange luxembourg we are also grateful for support from the leverhulme foundation through a grant to the institute for labour research at the university of essex and to colleagues at the ilr for their constructive comments acknowledgements to les data providers are given at the end of the paper we would also like to thank paul alkemade elena bardasi and pascal garin for their help any remaining errors are our own and the views expressed herein are not necessarily those of ceps instead 1 see for example vernon and bedford 1928

human resource management and performance in european firms we develop a theoretical framework to examine three hypotheses on the relationship between human resource management hrm practices and organisational performance in european firms the first is that collaborative forms of hrm practice are more strongly associated with superior firm performance than calculative forms the second is that these associations are strongest where national institutional and normative settings support them the third is that employer employee consultative committees and collective payment methods are also associated with superior firm performance the first two propositions are strongly empirically supported as is the third albeit more weakly the implications of the findings for european policy and varieties of capitalism theory are discussed

arm s length relationships we show that lowering the cost of acquisition of information that a principal obtains about the performance of an agent may make it more difficult for the principal to commit to threats hence it will weaken incentives and can therefore be counterproductive this phenomenon is explored in a framework where improving the quality of information makes a commitment not to renegotiate less credible applications to the theory of the firm are briefly explored

crowding out or crowding in public and private investment in india abstract this paper contributes to the debate on the relationship between public and private investment in india along the following dimensions first acknowledging major structural changes that the indian economy has undergone in the past three decades we study whether public investment in recent years has become more or less complementary to private investment in comparison to the period before 1980 second we construct a novel data set of quarterly aggregate public and private investment in india over the period 1996 2015 using investment project data from the capex cmie database third embedding a theory driven long run relationship on the model we estimate a range of structural vector error correction models svecms to re examine the public and private investment relationship in india identification is achieved by decomposing shocks into those with transitory and permanent effects our results suggest that while public investment crowds out private investment in india over the period 1950 2012 the opposite is true when we restrict the sample to post 1980 or conduct a quarterly analysis since 1996 this change can likely be attributed to the policy reforms which started during the early 1980s and gained momentum after the 1991 crisis

fatal fluctuations cyclicality in infant mortality in india this paper investigates the impact of aggregate income shocks on infant mortality in india and investigates likely mechanisms a recent oecd dominated literature reports the provocative finding that mortality at most ages is pro cyclical similar analyses for poorer countries are scarce and both income risk and mortality risk are greater in poor countries this paper uses data and methods designed to avoid some of the specification problems in previous studies and it explores mechanisms and extensions that have not been previously considered it uses individual data on infant mortality for about 150 000 children born in 1970 1997 merged by cohort and state of birth with a state panel containing information on aggregate income identification rests upon comparing the effects of annual deviations in income from trend on the mortality risks of children born at different times to the same mother conditional upon a number of state time varying covariates including rainshocks and state social expenditure rural infant mortality is counter cyclical the elasticity being about 0 33 this is despite the finding that relatively high risk women avert birth or suffer fetal loss in recessions it seems in part related to recessions stimulating distress labor amongst mothers in contrast to the case in richer countries where they discourage labor market participation health care seeking declines in recessions and this appears to be related to the opportunity cost of maternal time disaggregation reveals that the average results are driven by rural households in which the mother is uneducated or had her first birth in teenage and that it is only girls that are at risk boys are protected from income shocks exposure to poor conditions in the fetal and neonatal period appears to have a larger effect on infant mortality than similar exposure in the postneonatal period

ex post unbalanced tournaments tournaments create strong incentives under the assumption that the competition between the agents is balanced if at the outset one agent is stronger than the other the tournament is ex ante unbalanced and incentives break down handicaps can in this case restore incentives in practice competing agents are often overall equally strong but have different sorts of strengths then competition will typically be unbalanced ex post and incentives break down but handicaps cannot be used we show how a simple means introducing the possibility of a tie can often resolve the problem we examine under what conditions incentives are maximized by ties