some macroeconomic implications of alternative compensation systems a basic theme of this paper is the idea that some structural reform of employee compensation arrangements is necessary to make reasonable price stability compatible with reasonably full employment in this view even the best designed macroeconomic policies are much too aggregative to get at the heart of the stagflation problem the ultimate solution involves going inside the workings of a modern capitalist economy and correcting the underlying structural flaw directly on the level of the individual firm stagflation represents an especially intractable policy dilemma for macroeconomics without a decisive tendency of the economic system to remain near full employment there is a strong prima facie case for fighting recessions by exogenously stimulating aggregate demand but the usual keynesian expansionary policies tend to impart an inflationary inertia that is difficult to choke off and of course the basic strategy for fighting inflation is to cool down the economy by restrictive monetary and fiscal policy thereby increasing unemployment and closing the viscous circle because the practical macroeconomic policies for dealing with unemployment and inflation are so diametrically opposed stagflation is a pervasive structural problem when for whatever reason there is basically an unfavourable short run tradeoff between unemployment and inflation economic policy tends to vacillate between expansion of demand to fight unemployment and restriction of demand to fight inflation polarising the electorate and distracting society from dealing effectively with its underlying real economic problems even the difficulty of attaining external balance in foreign accounts is largely a spillover into the international payments arena of an inability to achieve an acceptable internal balance between full employment and price stability this paper takes what might be called a comparative systems approach to the problem of stagflation at the heart of modern industrial capitalism is an incredibly complicated system of overlapping monopolistic competitors 2 a starting point for the paper is the realisation that the coordination difficulty which can cause some systems to suffer involuntary unemployment is not inherent in laissez faire private enterprise per se it is closely tied to one particular property of a conventional wage payment system namely compensation of each firm s employees is stuck to an outside numeraire whether money or a cost of

the pricing of protected areas in nature based tourism a local perspective abstract this paper extends the literature on optimal pricing of recreation in protected areas by introducing price discrimination between groups of visitors and given that the agency charges different prices to subsets of visitors by including a distributional dimension that is particularly relevant for a national park agency receiving visitors from different origins other issues related to optimal entrance fees including negative ecological impacts and positive spillover effects on local communities resulting from changes in visitation are also discussed based on this model the paper provides an estimation of optimal entrance fees and revenues for the costa rican system of protected areas

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

wider share ownership and economic performance in the uk today almost one in every five adults directly own shares on the stock market compared with a figure of 5 as recently as 1983 this has been a remarkable change engineered by the conservative administration the government have argued that the policy is aimed at creating an enterprise culture nothing less than a fundamental change in attitudes to wealth creation in the economy while we would not disagree with this laudible objective it is clearly difficult to assess both in terms of attainment and consequences one would be happier if the justification for the policy could be grounded in more direct economic terms and the purpose of this paper is to attempt to provide an analysis of some economic aspects of wider share ownership as a policy objective we will attempt to provide a general theoretical analysis although this will inevitably be biased towards aspects of relevance to the uk experience

assessing the global poverty effects of antimicrobial resistance abstract as a result of antimicrobial resistance amr economies will experience an increase in mortality reduced productivity for labor and the livestock sector and increased health care costs this paper assesses the potential global poverty impacts of amr using a unique macro micro framework to estimate poverty effects of amr price wage and employment results from a dynamic multi country multi sector computable general equilibrium cge model are used in a microsimulation model that integrates household surveys from 104 countries the analysis in this paper advances other studies of amr in two ways 1 it links macro results to a microsimulation model to provide insight on poverty impacts for the world economy and countries of different income levels and 2 it uses a global multi sector model rather than an aggregate global model to generate macroeconomic results with structural details for capturing the economy wide impact within countries and the spread across countries via trade flows relative to a world without amr the progression of antimicrobial resistance is expected to make it more difficult to eliminate extreme poverty potentially adding 24 1 million people to become extremely poor of whom 18 7 million live in low income countries the expected losses during 2015 50 may sum to 85 trillion in gross domestic product and 23 trillion in global exports in present value by 2050 the global gross domestic product could deviate negatively by 3 8 percent from the baseline in the worst case scenario considered because it is a global public bad the optimal policy response will require global cooperation the poverty outcomes induced by amr in all country groups will deteriorate with short sighted isolationist policies moreover assistance from high income countries to improve the economic resiliency of lower income countries will also benefit the higher income countries and world economy in general

economic implications of antibiotic resistance in a global economy this paper concerns the economic implications of antibiotic resistance in a global economy the global economy consists of several countries where antibiotic consumption creates a stock of bacteria which is resistant to antibiotics this stock affects the welfare in all countries because of the risk that resistant bacterial strains may be transmitted the main purpose of the paper is to compare the socially optimal resource allocation with the allocation brought forward by the decentralized market economy in addition a dynamic pigouvian tax designed to implement the globally optimal resource allocation is presented

implicit contracts moral hazard and unemployment this paper considers a firm whose marginal revenue product of labor is a random variable we derive the form of an optimal long term contract between workers and the firm under the assumption that labor s marginal product is observed by the firm but not by the workers we show that the existence of asymmetric information causes unemployment to be greater than in a situation where information about labor s marginal product is public or where employment is determined in spot markets in particular unemployment can occur when the marginal product of labor exceeds the reservation wage

profit sharing in the british retail trade sector the relative performance of the john lewis partnership this paper investigates the effects of profit sharing on wages and employment by comparing the labour market behaviour of the john lewis partnership with that of four main competitors the john lewis partnership employs around 30000 workers who since 1970 have been paid between 13 and 24 per cent of workers income in the form of a profit related bonus the empirical works suggests that profit sharing in the john lewis partnership may be associated with greater levels of employment but does not significantly affect the level of remuneration in recent years a growing proportion of employment contracts in britain have linked pay with the fortunes of the firm see for example blanchflower and oswald 1988 this trend has been stimulated by the british government s introduction of tax relief for profit related pay prp first in 1987 and extended in 1991 weitzman 1984 argues that profit sharing will stabilize employment reduce unemployment and increase wage flexibility the possibility of these externalities from profit sharing on wider economic performance has been used to justify policy interventions this paper reports empirical tests of wage determination and employment creation effects based on a comparison of the labour market behaviour of the john lewis partnership with that of four important competitors in the british retail sector we find some evidence that profit sharing enhances employment

technological learning environments and organizational practices cross sectoral evidence from britain this study explores the co occurrence of technological and organizational learning processes by analyzing the adoption and use of four types of human resource management hrm practices rewarding problem solving top down management and decentralization in the 1990s across different technological learning environments using a sample of british workplaces we show that the level of use of diverse hrm practices aimed at creating different learning incentives is persistently heterogeneous across technological learning environments suggesting that hrm forms an essential part of the technological learning structure of firms copyright 2011 the author 2011 published by oxford university press on behalf of associazione icc all rights reserved oxford university press

should new antimalarial drugs be subsidized malaria kills over a million people each year the loss of chloroquine due to the spread of parasite resistance is largely responsible for the resurgence of malaria a new class of antimalarial drugs called artemisinins are available but are unaffordable to most people in malaria endemic countries and may quickly face the same fate as chloroquine unless they are combined with a partner drug subsidies for artemisinin combination treatments may be warranted on second best grounds as they deter use of single ingredient drugs for which externalities from the risk of resistance evolution are larger furthermore by expanding total effective drug use subsidies reduce infection transmission externalities among individuals however use of combination treatments could still lead to drug resistance and the subsidies themselves entail welfare consequences this paper develops a conceptual and numerical framework for understanding the conditions under which subsidies for artemisinin combinations can be justified on economic efficiency grounds

use value of cultural experiences a comparison of contingent valuation and travel cost abstract few applications to assess the value of cultural experiences exist this is particularly frustrating for cultural institutions as it provides them with few opportunities to reveal their importance in terms of attractiveness and thus what drives tourism demand this study applies the travel cost method tcm and contingent valuation method cvm to assess the value of two rural cultural institutions in order to compare the results of the valuation methods the results reveal that visitor experiences consist of a core cultural experience as well as other valuable experiences before and after whereas cvm allows for a valuation of the core cultural experience separately from other experiences the tcm is limited to an overall assessment the tcm is therefore an inappropriate measure of the value of the cultural experiences when the total experience includes several other experiences if visitors travel for the sake of only one cultural experience tcm may be preferable due to its simple applicability and cost efficiency if however as is most often the case a cultural experience is part of a bundle of experiences the application of cvm is recommendable this is also the case if only visitors who state the cultural experience to be the primary reason for travelling are included

profitability and profit sharing claims that profit sharing is a purely distributive wealth confiscation scheme without incentive effects due to free rider problems are based on neglect of cooperation and interaction in the workforce when these activities are difficult to monitor directly group incentives such as profit sharing can increase efficiency and maintain a superior nashequilibrium with strictly individual optimization with simultaneous wls tobit estimates we find here strong effects of profit sharing and worker ownership shares on residual owners return on capital in medium sized metal working firms in west germany complementing earlier results on productivity

the macroeconomic implications of profit sharing some empirical evidence the macroeconomic implications of profit sharing some empiricals paper attempts an empirical assessment of weitzman s proposition that profit sharing provides an antidote to stagflation taking japan as an example of a profit sharing economy the author shows that it does not have either lower cyclical variability of output or lower inflation than other industrial countries the authors then reject the propositions that in a profit sharing economy 1 aggregate demand shocks have a smaller effect on output deviations and 2 import price shocks and wage push have a smaller effect on inflation therefore one should be wary of the claim that the japanese case supports weitzman s model copyright 1987 by royal economic society

a theoretical approach to the effect of trade union immunities on investment and employment the uk trade union immunity laws have been the subject of considerable political debate in recent years with the political parties differing markedly in their attitudes to the present status of labour contracts in contrast to the political debate no positive economic analysis of the consequences of these laws exists on which one might base policy judgements the purpose of this paper is to suggest one approach which provides a positive theoretical analysis of the effects of these laws on investment and employment for our analysis the crucial feature of the law is that an employer cannot recover any losses suffered if a union withholds labour from his firm even if there is a written contract that labour will work for an agreed period at a given wage rate this is a feature of uk collective bargaining which is unique amongst advanced countries see sachs 1979 there are several approaches one could take to analyse the effects of trade union immunities tui put most generally the critical reason for following the present approach is the view that one will gain most insight into the effects of tui on investment and employment by looking at models where workers have an incentive to push home an ex post advantage that arises because shareholders are locked into specific capital levels the model we analyse a single investment opportunity where workers do not have access to perfect capital markets is the extreme case of many models of this type the notion which underlies the model is the following a union is only able to extract a wage which is greater than the competitive wage w from a firm if they can threaten the firm with some strategy that hurts shareholders if the union can prevent production taking place then the shareholders are hurt because they are the owners of capital purchased at c per unit which is lying idle the more

trans boundary commons in infectious diseases emerging threats to global health including drug resistant pathogens emerging pandemics and outbreaks represent global trans boundary commons problems where the actions of individual countries have consequences for other countries here we review what economic analysis can offer in countering these problems through the design of interventions that modify the behaviour of institutions and nations in the direction of greatest global good

monopoly pricing of an antibiotic subject to bacterial resistance we develop a dynamic bio economic model of bacterial resistance and disease transmission in which we characterize the pricing policy of a monopolist who is protected by a patent after expiration the monopolist behaves competitively in a generic industry having open access to the common pool of antibiotic efficacy and infection the monopolist manages endogenously the levels of antibiotic efficacy as well as the infected population which represent quality and market size respectively and achieves at least temporarily higher such levels than a hypothetically myopic monopolist who does not take into account the dynamic externalities the pricing policy and the biological system is characterized by the turnpike property before the patent vanishes the monopolist behaves more and more myopically leading to a continuous decrease in the price of the antibiotic once the generic industry takes over a discontinuous fall in price occurs whether a prolongation of the patent is socially desirable depends on the relative levels of antibiotic efficacy and infection

pay and employment determination in britain what are labour contracts really like the recent growth of unemployment in western economies has prompted new research on the workings of the labour market there has been much interest in particular in the questions what determines the level of real pay and why is it apparently so insensitive to changes in aggregate demand and unemployment european economists now find it hard to take seriously the notion still taught to many undergraduate that wages are determined by the intersection of demand and supply curves roughly half of all british employees belong to trade unions a much higher percentage have their pay fixed by some kind of collective bargain in this country it is negotiations not impersonal com petitive markets which decide what most of us will be paid the difficult problem is that of how to understand this process or to put it differently of how to think up the right model of the world

profit sharing in a unionised economy with imperfect competition abstract this paper sets up a simple model of a unionised economy and shows that the introduction of profit sharing unambiguously reduces the unemployment rate the result arises because unions are assumed to care about the employment of their members but cannot bargain over employment directly profit sharing reduces the perceived cost in terms of worker income foregone of increasing employment in the firm in the economy as a whole the equilibrium unemployment rate falls

price regulation under uncertainty in an asymmetric decision environment a regulated firm that can make decisions both before and after uncertainty is resolved with respect to input use cannot be led to competitive solutions by regulatory price ceilings whether those ceilings are imposed before or after the resolution of uncertainty they present incentives for undercapitalized production contrary to usual aj assertions under these conditions the fair return objective is neither a sufficient nor an unambiguous regulatory target

profit sharing risk sharing and firm size implications of efficiency wages by taking account of output fluctuations this paper constructs a synthesis of profit sharing and efficiency wage models to highlight the role of the risk attitudes of the firm and its employees we show contrary to the traditional efficiency wage theory that in a profit sharing economy unemployment is no longer a necessary device to induce work effort and consequently the labor market equilibrium may be characterized by full employment such a result is more likely to be true when the economy is characterized by small sized firms in addition we also provide a preliminary sketch of the situations in which the firm chooses a profit sharing program or a fixed wage one and discuss how a firm determines its pay parameters and employment in response to output fluctuations

the economic consequences of community support for tourism a case study of a heritage fish hatchery abstract although tourist attractions are the drivers of tourism to many communities and local citizens support of these attractions is vital to their viability the economic outcomes of such support have never been assessed to help fill this information void the authors examined the unusual case of a historical attraction that was closed in 1983 by the federal government agency operating it but resurrected the following year by local citizens who considered it indispensable to their town s identity cultural heritage and tourist appeal since the attraction would not exist but for this intervention the current value of the community s resuscitation of it in 1984 was inferred from the economic impacts it currently generated in 2007 these were estimated to be about us 1 6 million in direct attraction related expenditures in the town us 2 1 million in business revenues us 629 000 in personal income us 141 000 in local and state taxes and fees and 27 new jobs

is profit sharing participation evidence on alternative firm types from west germany abstract systematic differences are reported in the structural and performance characteristics of firms in subsamples based on a profit sharing and b participation in control employee involvement in decision making moreover whereas group b firms tend to conform to a theoretical participatory stereotype group a firms do not the coincidence of profit sharing and participation in control in a given firm is not surprisingly quite low these results cast doubt on current theoretical and policy arguments concerning productivity gains dependent on the joint use of participation and profit sharing but indicate that one precondition for weitzman type macro economic benefits of profit sharing in the absence of participation may be present

ecotourism demand and differential pricing of national park access in costa rica ecotourism presents developing countries with growing opportunities for enhancing resource conservation and economic growth but also raises pressing management and policy challenges this paper presents a conceptual framework and empirical analysis of the impacts of introducing a differential entrance fee policy at three national parks in costa rica data are collected using a contingent behavior methodology designed to elicit information on foreign tourists hypothetical park visitation behaviors at alternative entrance fee levels park visitation demand functions and price and income elasticities are estimated revenue maximizing fees are calculated and applications of differential pricing principles to park management are discussed

pricing policy in nature based tourism abstract visitors to publicly owned national parks wildlife reserves and other natural areas pay entrance fees and other charges for their access and use what principles and criteria contribute to an appropriate pricing policy the answers to this are complex because of multiple pricing objectives visitor categories visitor activities fee instruments and philosophical positions in this review paper these issues are examined from the perspective of public agencies that are working to improve their pricing practices pricing is a potentially powerful tool to move towards greater efficiency fairness and environmentally sustainable management to date this tool is underutilized

is profit sharing a cure for unemployment in less developed countries abstract the effects of introducing profit sharing in modern sectors in ldcs are discussed within a dual model with endogenous wages and internal migration profit sharing does not have a direct job creation effect as long as firms set the pay parameters yet the new system may have long run effects on employment allocation under some circumstances profit sharing may in fact destabilize short run employment such that jobs last for a shorter duration modern sector wages are then raised to discipline workers and urban unemployment goes up arguments are also given for the hypothesis that profit sharing stabilizes short run employment with the opposite results

profit related pay prose discovered this paper estimates that in 1984 43 percent of british private sector establishments had some form of profit related pay regression results do not show that these establishments had statistically significant better financial performance cross ta bulations do not suggest that the establishments with income sharing schemes had noticeably greater employment growth or better industrial relations copyright 1988 by royal economic society

profit sharing in internal labour markets a main point of weitzman s analysis of profit sharing is that although profit sharing may result in a pareto superior configuration it is not stable under free choices of payment mechanisms weitzman i987 p ioi insiders who face virtually zero probability of unemployment given the set of possible shocks the economy faces will always prefer the fixed wage payment to a profit sharing system since the latter system would result in the firm hiring outsiders and lowering the pay of insiders thus if all the parameters of pay are bargained over in a single firm or industry the profit sharing parameter is zero on the other hand if profit sharing were introduced from outside in all the firms of the economy the macroeconomic impact higher employment and lower prices would offset the negative impact on insiders pay to say it with weitzman s words if every firm converted to profit sharing there would be no outsider unemployed workers to hire and the insiders would be no worse off p i02 weitzman suggests correcting this macroeconomic externality with a subsidy for profit sharing in the form of a reduced rate of tax on income that workers derive from their share of company profits the debate on weitzman s proposal has focused mainly on the effectiveness of subsidies and on efficiency wage considerations see the surveys by estrin et al i986 wadhwani i987 and rees i990 so far little has been done to examine the robustness of the proposition that insiders who face a close to zero probability of unemployment always prefer a wage to a share system so that in equilibrium profit related pay is zero 1 this proposition is obviously a central feature of weitzman s proposal because it implies that without government intervention profit sharing should not be observed this is not very satisfactory if one considers the empirical evidence suggesting that profit related pay is widespread in japan see freeman and weitzman i987 and present both in the united kingdom see blanchflower and oswald i988 and the united states see mitchell et al i990 as remarked by rees this empirical evidence suggests that a desirable feature of the equilibrium should be that the bargain between insiders and the firm yield a corner solution with zero profit sharing in some well specified circumstances and an internal solution with positive profit sharing in others the purpose of this paper is to present an example of such an equilibrium where the factor determining whether we have a corner or an internal solution is the nature of promotion in a hierarchical firm the key idea is to introduce

the relationship between production and unemployment in japan okun s law in comparative perspective abstract this paper studies the question whether the celebrated okun s law a relation between excess capacity and unemployment applies to the postwar japanese economy though the fitness of estimation is weak the coefficient that measures the responsiveness of the output gap to the unemployment rate is very large reaching 28 this large coefficient can be attributed to the elastic response in the female participation ratio to flexible working hours to the slow adjustment in employment and to changes in industrial structures the results are compared with those in the united states

profit sharing and employee share ownership profit sharing and employee share ownership saul estrin paul grout and sushil wadhwani this paper evaluates the likely effects of linking a part of a worker s pay to the employer s profits it has been suggested by weitzman that this would raise employment by lowering the cost of taking on an extra worker however this can only happen if existing workers are willing to let their share of value added fall and experience of those firms in the uk who already operate profit sharing schemes suggests that the weitzman mechanism is not operative there is however some evidence that profit related pay does boost productivity but there are other ways of raising productivity such as performance related pay which may be more effective productivity enhancing effects are likely to be greatest when employees are involved in decision making as well but this is likely to undermine the weitzman case still further even if the argument that profit sharing raises employment is not compelling it is sometimes suggested that it can do little harm however there is evidence that it may well be inflationary in which case the government would be advised to proceed cautiously we argue that there is very little case for the introduction of a permanent subsidy to encourage increased profit sharing although there may be a case for a temporary one to overcome managerial inertia however there is a danger that a subsidy will promote cosmetic schemes designed to be eligible for the subsidy but which do not reflect any real change in behaviour

the simple macroeconomics of profit sharing this paper is in the spirit of the temporary equilibrium approach to macroeconomics it basically extends that framework to cover a profit sharing system and then compares the macroeconomic characteristics with those of the more familiar wage system a first preliminary step is to demonstrate how a microeconomic model of monopolistic competition can be built up into a junior member of the keynesian macro family the methodology is to create from first principles including a careful formulation of a monopolistically competitive product market structurea natural underpinning for the standard aggregate demand specification the primary goal of the paper is to apply the integrated monopolistic competitionkeynesian type apparatus described above to investigate the macroeconomic properties of a profit sharing economy the existence of a consistent general framework covering both cases invites meaningful comparisons that indicate clearly why an economy based on profit sharing principles possesses natural immunity to stagflation by contrast the wage economya system we have largely accepted without critically examining its macroeconomic consequences is more prone to suffer from unemployment and inflation the policy implications for aggregate demand management in wage and share systems are analyzed and contrasted in writing this paper my philosophy has been to not shirk from using those reasonable parameterizations and functional forms which yield nice crisp results and permit me to focus sharply on the essential logic of basic issues it is certainly possible to present the main results in a somewhat more general formulation as the astute reader will appreciate but i fear only at some cost of distracting attention from those central features i wish to highlight

can the share economy conquer stagflation this paper analyzes weitzman s contention that a share economy will significantly improve the unemployment inflation tradeoff it is shown that the argument rests on a critical proposition that share contracts lead to labor s being in perpetual excess demand the basis of this proposition is challenged using a wide variety of models of the labor market the paper concludes that the microeconomics of share economies differs little from that of wage economies and that a widespread introduction of share contracts is unlikely to improve macroeconomic performance

unions and the incidence of performance linked pay schemes in britain abstract this paper examines the relationship between trade unions and the incidence of share ownership profit sharing and value added schemes in britain the first two schemes are more common in the union sector whilst the third occurs more in non union establishments a distinction is made between weak and strong unions and it is found that performance linked pay schemes are in general less likely to be present if an establishment has a strong union rather than a weak one

efficiency wage models of unemployment keynesian economists hold it to be self evident that business cycles are characterized by involuntary unemployment but construction of a model of the cycle with involuntary unemployment faces the obvious difficulty of explaining why the labor market does not clear involuntarily unemployed people by definition want to work at less than the going wage rate why don t firms cut wages thereby increasing profits

profit sharing employment efficiency and wage stability a contract between a risk neutral firm and its risk average workers is considered under uncertainty about product demand we show that profit sharing can be used to attain the efficient level of employment and at the same time preserve optimal risk sharing between the parties optimal profit sharing does not imply wage variability instead wages are stabilized across states

steady state unemployment under profit sharing this paper demonstrates how asymmetric treatment of high seniority insider workers and non tenured outsiders gives rise to bad macroeconomic st eady states in a wage economy the framework uses a nash bargaining solution where workers may bargain over pay but firms control hiring profit sharing is then considered as an alternative payment mechanism having the automatically corrective incentive property that employers want to hire more outsiders given the assumptions of the model it is shown that widespread profit sharing results in lower unemployment and more output even though it is individually rational for insiders to prefer wages over profit shares copyright 1987 by royal economic society

assessing the economic value of a world heritage site and willingness to pay determinants a case of changdeok palace abstract the main objective of this study is to estimate use value of a world cultural heritage in korea using the contingent valuation method cvm the type of question used in this study was closed ended or dichotomous choice based on the results of the pre test 10 price offers were given the logit models in both linear and logarithmic forms were employed to identify determinants from the dichotomous question the mean wtp values were 5706 won 5 70 in a log linear model and 6005 won 6 00 in a log logit model taking into account only domestic visitors aggregate use value from the log linear model was estimated to be approximately 1 93 million dollars while aggregate use value from the log logit model was estimated as 2 01 million dollars the results from this study revealed the economic value of the world heritage site to users or tourists in levels exceeding its monetary benefits

the effects of workers participation on enterprise performance empirical evidence from french cooperatives abstract the results of estimating production functions augmented by various measures of workers participation on a large enterprise level data set of french cooperatives are reported value added is found to be an increasing function of participation in profits in collective membership and in ownership even when a wide assortment of enterprise specific and environmental factors are taken into account this finding is very robust surviving tests between alternative specifications of technology for reverse causality for simultaneous equation bias and for multicollinearity the typical productivity effect from participation however is small around 5 of output the results suggest that western policymakers should investigate ways to increase workers participation in capital stakes and profit shares

profit sharing as a cure for unemployment some doubts abstract in this paper we argue that given that a wage system is preferred to profit sharing in an insider outsider model tax incentives to encourage profit sharing could be dissipated by the use of cosmetic schemes the same may also be true in models in which unions care about employment hence we should be cautious about accepting weitzman s claim that profit sharing will reduce unemployment

the effects of improshare on productivity analyzing 112 responses to a 1988 questionnaire sent to all known users of improshare the author estimates the effects on productivity of this gain sharing plan which is being used by a growing number of companies the data indicate that improshare has led to significant increases in productivity the median productivity increase was about 8 in the first year and the cumulative productivity gains had risen to 17 5 by the third year after which they began to level off the mean productivity increases were even greater than the median increases and followed a similar pattern the author finds that a sizable portion of the gains reflects reductions in defect and downtime rates and that firm size was inversely related to productivity gains