corporatism and unemployment in the 1980s and 1990s a number of studies have found an association between corporatist institutions and low unemployment in the 1970s and or 1980s three gaps in our understanding of corporatism s labor market effects are addressed here 1 which of the two principal forms of corporatism corporatist wage setting or union participation in economic policymaking or both generates these effects 2 what are the causal mechanisms 3 did these effects continue in the 1990s in the face of globalization restrictive monetary policy growing dissension within labor movements and related developments the impact of corporatism across 16 affluent oecd countries in the 1980s and 1990s is assessed using pooled time series cross section analysis the results suggest that wage coordination was conducive to low unemployment in the 1980s because it fostered moderation in labor costs spurred faster economic growth and encouraged governments to more aggressively pursue policies to reduce unemployment in the 1990s this effect disappeared largely because unemployment outcomes in low wage coordination countries improved rather than because unemployment outcomes in high wage coordination countries deteriorated union participation in economic policymaking was associated with low unemployment throughout the two decades conditional on the presence of leftist government union participation appears to have had this effect mainly via government policy

in search of smoking guns what makes income inequality vary over time in different countries we investigate the forces affecting the distribution of income by analyzing an unbalanced panel of information for 16 industrialized countries for the years 1966 through 1994 income inequality is measured with the gini coefficient of equivalent disposable income individuals are the unit of analysis the statistical analysis uses panel methods the results suggest that many factors affect the development of income inequality some factors are strictly economic a decreased industrial sector generally fosters inequality and some support is found for the view that increased trade of manufactured goods from developing countries is also a factor other forces are outside a strictly defined market sphere low inequality is found when a large proportion of the labor force belongs to a trade union and also when there is a large public sector in addition demographic circumstances are important since the proportion of the population under age 15 has a positive effect on inequality we find however no association between the unemployment rate and inequality

globalization and the great u turn income inequality trends in 16 oecd countries the debate on the resurgence of income inequality in some advanced industrial societies has often focused on the impact of an increasingly integrated world economy typified by growing capital mobility heightened international competition and an increase in migration this study represents one of the first systematic cross national examinations of the role of globalization in the inequality u turn results indicate on the one hand that total inequality variation is principally affected by the percentage of the labor force in agriculture followed by the institutional factors union density and decommodification and only then by globalization on the other hand longitudinal variation in inequality while still dominated by the percentage of the labor force in agriculture is also principally affected by aspects of globalization such as southern import penetration and direct investment outflow and to a lesser extent by migration in other words globalization explains the longitudinal trend of inc

the impact of sunday shopping on employment and hours of work in the retail industry evidence from canada abstract between 1980 and 1998 every canadian province passed legislation that in some way relaxed restrictions on sunday shopping this study exploits the variation in deregulation dates between provinces to identify how retail employers adjust employment and hours of work when deciding to open on sundays a major complication of this analysis is to first determine for which provinces the deregulation dates are useful indicators of increases in sunday store openings this paper uses a unique trading day regression approach to identify these provinces and then uses aggregate data from the selected provinces to estimate a simple dynamic labour demand model that allows employment and hours to be imperfect substitutes in production the results suggest that retailers needs for sunday labour were disproportionately satisfied through increases in employment levels comparison of the estimates at three levels of the retail industry suggests that the employment and hours gains were larger among general merchandise stores than among more specialized retail establishments and relatively modest at the aggregate retail industry level in addition despite evidence of an immediate shortfall in the employment level below the long run optimal level the results suggest that firms were unable to compensate by temporarily increasing the hours of their existing employees

equality employment and budgetary restraint the trilemma of the service economy this article presents an analysis of the postindustrial economy from a political economy perspective it identifies a set of specific distributional trade offs associated with the new role played by the services sector as the chief source of employment growth in advanced democracies over the last three decades it is argued that three core policy objectives budgetary restraint wage equality and expansion of employment constitute a political trilemma that allows only two of the goals to be successfully pursued at the same time using a combination of statistical and case oriented analysis the authors demonstrate the political and economic salience of the trilemma the distributional tensions inherent in each strategy to cope with it and the political institutional constraints under which these strategies are chosen

host country national networks and expatriate effectiveness a mixed methods study this paper integrates research on personality dissonance and social networks to explore how expatriate interactions with host country nationals hcns are associated with expatriate effectiveness a mixed methods study with expatriates working in china reveals that extraversion is positively related to overall performance a paradox is also noted whereas higher network ties with hcn colleagues are positively associated with performance they are negatively associated with adjustment interviews extend the survey results and highlight how the unclear boundaries between work and home impact on hcn network relationships

an institution based view of international business strategy a focus on emerging economies leveraging the recent research interest in emerging economies this perspective paper argues that an institution based view of international business ib strategy has emerged it is positioned as one leg that helps sustain the strategy tripod the other two legs consisting of the industry and resource based views we then review four diverse areas of substantive research 1 antidumping as entry barriers 2 competing in and out of india 3 growing the firm in china and 4 governing the corporation in emerging economies overall we argue that an institution based view of ib strategy in combination with industry and resource based views will not only help sustain a strategy tripod but also shed significant light on the most fundamental questions confronting ib such as what drives firm strategy and performance in ib

the bargaining system and performance a comparison of 18 oecd countries theoretical reasoning disagrees about what type of bargaining system performs best the authors have tested the explanatory power of three competing hypotheses neoliberalism corporatism and the hump shape hypothesis all of these hypotheses lack empirical support due to two main shortcomings first they ignore that wage restraint raises three distinct types of collective action problems second they do not consider qualitative differences among the national bargaining systems particularly the role of the state that do not allow analysis to construct such ordinal rankings of bargaining coordination as adopted by all previous empirical studies proceeding from a revised hypothesis and new measures of national bargaining systems the authors have found a nonlinear relationship between the bargaining system and economic performance in a way that economy wide wage coordination is superior only when the bargaining system is able to make local bargaining comply with coordination activities

the transition to the knowledge economy labor market institutions and income inequality in advanced democracies the transition from fordism to the knowledge economy in the world s advanced democracies was underpinned by the revolution in information and communications technology ict the introduction and rapid diffusion of ict pushed up wages for college educated workers with complementary skills and allowed top managers and ceos to reap greater rewards for their own talents despite these common pressures income inequality did not rise to the same extent everywhere income in the anglo saxon countries remains particularly unequally distributed to shed new light on this puzzle the authors carry out a panel data analysis of eighteen oecd countries between 1970 and 2007 their analysis stands apart from the existing empirical literature by taking a comparative perspective the article examines the extent to which the relationship between the knowledge economy and income inequality is influenced by national labor market institutions the authors find that the expansion of knowledge employment is positively associated with both the 90 10 wage ratio and the income share of the top 1 percent but that these effects are mitigated by the presence of strong labor market institutions such as coordinated wage bargaining strict employment protection legislation high union density and high collective bargaining coverage the authors provide robust evidence against the argument that industrial relations systems are no longer important safeguards of wage solidarity in the knowledge economy

best of both worlds how embeddedness fit in the host unit and the headquarters improve repatriate knowledge transfer knowledge transfer within multinational enterprises is a source of competitive advantage however we know little about repatriates role in reverse knowledge transfer upon their return to headquarters hq using an organizational embeddedness perspective we conceptualized how embeddedness fit individuals perceived match between their knowledge and skills and the job requirements during the expatriation assignment and upon repatriation predicts repatriate knowledge transfer to test the hypotheses we collected multi wave survey data from 129 repatriates and their supervisors and developed a repatriate knowledge transfer scale the results show that perceived organizational support from hq positively influences embeddedness fit both in the host unit during expatriation and in the hq upon repatriation further embeddedness fit in the hq upon repatriation has a direct effect while embeddedness fit in the host unit during expatriation has an indirect effect on repatriate knowledge transfer via increased communication frequency with the former host unit in addition we found that knowledge transfer is particularly pronounced for repatriates with both high levels of embeddedness fit in the hq upon repatriation and frequent communication with colleagues in their former host unit our results highlight the critical importance of helping expatriates increase their perceived embeddedness fit for reverse knowledge transfer to occur

on data a case study of the evolution of income inequality across time and across countries this paper takes income distribution as a case study of the role of data in economics after describing the transformation which has taken place with regard to the availability of data on income inequality it discusses how the comparability of these estimates is brought into question by differences in methodology that cannot be eliminated by simple adjustments recent analyses of the relationships between income inequality and growth or globalisation are shown to be based on time series plagued by discontinuities which can seriously affect regression results the paper concludes by calling for greater attention to data quality in applied economics

high performance work systems and organizational performance across societal cultures this paper assesses whether societal culture moderates the relationship between human resource management hrm practices and organizational performance drawing on matched employer employee data from 387 organizations and 7187 employees in 14 countries our findings show a positive relationship between hrm practices combined in high performance work systems hpws and organizational performance across societal cultures three dimensions of societal culture assessed power distance in group collectivism and institutional collectivism did not moderate this relationship drawing on the ability motivation opportunity amo model we further consider the effectiveness of three bundles of hrm practices skill enhancing motivation enhancing and opportunity enhancing practices this analysis shows opportunity enhancing practices e g participative work design and decision making are less effective in high power distance cultures nevertheless in markedly different countries we find combinations of complementary hpws and bundles of amo practices appear to outweigh the influence of societal culture and enhance organizational performance

unequal organizations or unequal attainments an empirical comparison of sectoral and individualistic explanations for aggregate inequality explanations derived from the sectoral perspective in sociology and the humancapital screening perspectives in economics are used to predict income inequality in the american states the sectoral perspective is represented by an indicator of the dispersion of concentration in product markets across manufacturing establishments within each state and by the dispersion of employment across enterprises in eight size categories individualistic explanations favored by neoclassical economists are operationalized with the dispersion in educational attainments and by the dispersion in the age experience of the labor force with the percentage of blacks and three additional variables in the equations four hypotheses receive consistent support the strongest determinant of income inequality is the dispersion in educational attainments but the indicator of concentration is significant in all equations states with more blacks and greater variance in establishment size also were likely to be comparatively unequal these results are consistent with both the individualistic emphasis in the neoclassical perspective and the emphasis on economic power in the sectoral perspective they also indicate that studies of income inequality by human capital economists may have been biased by a failure to control for the institutional variables that are emphasized in sectoral theories

income inequality and co2 emissions in the g7 1870 2014 evidence from non parametric modelling abstract we examine whether income inequality effected carbon emissions in what are now the world s wealthiest countries over the period 1870 2014 employing a non parametric panel estimation method with cross sectional and time varying coefficients we find that the relationship between income inequality and co2 emissions is highly non linear in terms of signs and significance the nonparametric coefficient function for income inequality is found to vary over the period 1870 2014 income inequality exhibits a significant positive effect from 1870 to 1880 and a significant negative impact from 1950 to 2000 on co2 emissions we also find that for extended periods between 1881 and 1949 and between 2000 and 2014 there is no significant relationship between the two variables

why shops close again an evolutionary perspective on the deregulation of shopping hours this paper introduces a new perspective on the deregulation of shopping hours based on ideas from evolutionary game theory we study a retail economy where shopping hours have been deregulated recently it is argued that first the deregulation leads to a coordination problem between store owners and customers and second the solution to this problem depends on the specific cost structure of stores and the preferences of customers in particular it may happen that even if extended shopping hours are pareto efficient stores and customers do not succeed in coordinating on this equilibrium the analysis explains the observation in germany where shopping hours have been deregulated recently that store owners tend to go back to the former shopping hours again moreover it emphasizes the important role of advertisement campaigns as a signalling device

deregulation of shopping hours the impact on independent retailers and chain stores this paper studies shopping hour decisions by retail chains and independent competitors we use a salop type model where retailers compete in prices and shopping hours our results depend significantly on efficiency differences between retail chain and independent retailer if the efficiency difference is small the independent retailer may choose longer shopping hours than the retail chain and may gain from deregulation at the expense of the retail chain the opposite result emerges when the efficiency difference is large then the retail chain may benefit whereas the independent retailer loses from deregulation

the limits of wage flexibility to curing unemployment this article takes a critical look at the view that wage flexibility us style is the panacea to european unemployment problems it shows that the wage flexibility in the us in the 1980s 1990s was associated with rising inequality and falling real wages for many workers reduced rather than increased employment for the low paid and less skilled whose wages fell and arguably contributed to the growth of a significant criminal population the proportion of american men incarcerated comes close to the proportion of european men long term unemployed the limits to wage flexibility in curing unemployment noted in the paper does not mean the reductions in pay may not under some circumstances raise employment but rather that by themselves massive pay cuts for the low paid are no cure to economic problems copyright 1995 by oxford university press

mixed signals central bank independence coordinated wage bargaining and european monetary union plans for the european monetary union emu are based on the conventional postulate that increasing the independence of the central bank can reduce inflation without any real economic effects however the theoretical and empirical bases for this claim rest on models of the economy that make unrealistic information assumptions and omit institutional variables other than the central bank when signaling problems between the central bank and other actors in the political economy are considered we find that the character of wage bargaining conditions the impact of central bank independence by rendering the signals between the bank and the bargainers more or less effective greater central bank independence can reduce inflation without major employment effects where bargaining is coordinated but it can bring higher levels of unemployment where bargaining is less coordinated thus currency unions like the emu may require higher levels of unemployment to control inflation than their proponents envisage they will have costs as well as benefits and these will be unevenly distributed among and within the member nations depending on the changes they induce in the status of the bank and of wage coordination

shopping hours and price levels in the retailing industry a theoretical and empirical analysis i introduction the debate surrounding shopping laws is very much the same regardless of the country in which it occurs the traditional objectives of regulating store opening hours can be divided into four categories i to guarantee access to essential goods and services ii to promote and protect a certain way of life iii to protect small businesses and iv to assure a day of rest for everyone despite these concerns the recent trend in canadian provinces is to extend store opening hours in the retailing industry for instance in july 1990 the quebec government allowed retail stores to stay open on wednesday nights and on sundays the recent deregulation was prompted by changes in lifestyles and increasing constraints on the time people can devote to shopping activities perhaps the most significant are that the number of one parent families is increasing as is the number of couples in which both spouses work there is evidence that changes in opening hours influence the structure of the retailing industry morrison and newman 1983 show that there is a redistribution of sales from small stores to large stores after deregulation an empirical study by moorehouse 1984 shows that in the united states those states that strictly regulate store opening hours do have a smaller proportion of large stores building on their work we examine the short term impact of extended shopping hours on prices at large stores to determine whether consumers have to pay higher prices for greater shopping flexibility to our knowledge this issue has not been addressed in the literature first we develop an extension of morrison and newman s 1983 theoretical model inspired by becker 1965 and location models pioneered by hotelling 1929 chamberlin 1951 1962 lancaster 1966 and salop 1977 we deem the price of a good to have two components the price itself and the time spent by the consumer to purchase the good thus opening hours and store location play a role in the determination of prices we explore the effect of increased opening hours on the demand faced by stores of different sizes and thus on their price levels among other things our model predicts that after deregulation price levels at large stores will increase because of a demand shift in favor of large stores at the expense of small stores we then test this prediction using pooled time series and cross section data prices of five products for thirty one weeks collected before and after the deregulation of store hours in quebec on july 8 1990 the data were collected at three major food stores in the montreal area we obtain estimates of price equations using the pooling method developed by kmenta 1986 the results support our view that prices have increased at large stores since the deregulation the rest of the paper is organized as follows in section ii we develop our analytical framework section iii presents the data and the estimation strategy since a price increase may signal an increase in costs rather than an increase in demand we deal explicitly with this issue in that section of the paper we discuss the empirical results in section iv and we conclude in section v ii the model the following analysis extends that of morrison and newman 1983 a brief initial overview of their work is needed to develop the necessary notation and to set up the problem in their model morrison and newman make two simplifying yet standard assumptions they assume a single perfectly divisible homogeneous commodity and only two types of stores large and small thus consumers choose to shop at small or large stores to minimize the total cost tc of purchasing the commodity on a given shopping trip the total cost includes the cost of the bundle of goods p sub j b where p sub j is the price per unit at store j and b is the bundle size a consumer intends to buy and his own valuation of the time needed to travel to the store a

dependency disarticulation and denominator effects another look at foreign capital penetration less developed countries desparately need capital to develop but countries dependent on foreign capital face slower economic growth higher income inequality and possibly impaired domestic capital formation these conclusions emerge from a reassessment of glenn firebaugh s broad critique of capital dependency research which exposed an important error in earlier studies the solution charts new theoreticall ground by factoring dependency effects into the differential productivity of foreign and domestic investment and the negative externalities from foreign capital penetration the revised formulation is applied to cross national analyses of economic growth decapitalization and income inequality the findings consistently support capital dependency theory

macroeconomic performance and collective bargaining an international perspective this paper critically reviews the research on how collective bargaining systems influence macroeconomic performance in industrialized countries the review considers effects of bargaining level coordination and corporatist institutional arrangements key empirical results turn out to be quite fragile and much of the paper explores issues of measurement and specification that account for the fragility the paper concludes that complementarities between key institutions and between institutions and the economic environment may be more important for macroeconomic performance than the effects of individual institutions and it suggests research strategies

wage inequality and varieties of capitalism this article draws on a new data set that enables the authors to compare the distribution of income from employment across oecd countries specifically the article conducts a pooled cross sectional time series analysis of the determinants of wage inequality in sixteen countries from 1973 to 1995 the analysis shows that varieties of capitalism matter the authors find that the qualities that distinguish social market economies from liberal market economies shape the way political and institutional variables influence wage inequality of particular interest to political scientists is the finding that the wage distributive effects of government partisanship are contingent on institutional context union density emerges in the analysis as the single most important factor influencing wage inequality in both institutional contexts

timing constraints and the allocation of time the effects of changing shopping hours regulations in the netherlands abstract a 1996 change in shopping hours regulations in the netherlands provides an opportunity to study the effects of timing constraints on total time spent in shopping working and other activities as well as the timing of these activities we develop a simple structural model to make predictions about the effects of imposition and relaxation of a timing constraint on time use patterns and utilize time diary data from 1995 1997 1999 and 2000 to examine time use patterns by demographic group before and after the change in addition to a change in the timing of shopping we find a non negligible increase in the total time spent shopping

do affluent countries face an incomes jobs tradeoff according to an influential view in the united states pay for less skilledworkers is lowand government benefits are stingy but this facilitates the creation of newjobs and encourages such individuals to take those jobs inmuch of westerneurope relative pay levels are higher for those at the bottom and benefits are more generous but this is said to discourage job creation and job seeking this article offers a comparative assessment of this trade off viewbased on pooled timeseries cross section analyses of 14 countries in the 1980s and 1990s the findings suggest that greater pay equality and a higher replacement rate do reduce employment growth in lowproductivity private sector service industries and in the economy as a whole however these effects are relatively weak the results point to a variety of viable options for countries wishing to maintain or move toward a desirable combination of jobs and equality

cooperation and political economic performance in affluent democratic capitalism research on comparative political economic performance has traditionally followed two separate tracks one concerned with collective economic gain growth and efficiency and the other focused on distribution and redistribution cooperative institutions offer a key to understanding cross national variation among the affluent capitalist democracies in both facets of political economic performance these institutions cluster along two dimensions neocorporatism and firm level cooperation pooled time series analysis for 18 nations over 1960 89 suggests that 1 neocorporatism is a major source of distributive redistributive policies and outcomes and of several sources of collective gain 2 firm level cooperation is a key contributor to economic growth

shopping hours and price competition abstract this paper develops an argument why retail prices may rise in response to the deregulation of opening hours we make this point in a model of imperfect duopolistic competition in a deregulated market retailers view the choice of opening hours as a means to increase the degree of perceived product differentiation thus relaxing price competition if the consumers preference intensity for time is sufficiently high the equilibrium configuration has asymmetric shopping hours where one retailer stays open for longer than the other both retailers charge higher prices than under regulation and both are strictly better off

centralization of bargaining and wage inequality a correction of wallerstein wage inequality is a subject of intense political and substantive concern and di erencesin the extent of wage inequality between the anglo american economies and those of con tinental europe animate public and scholarly discussion the wide earnings di erentialsobserved in the united states and the united kingdom are commonly justi ed as the properand necessary incentives for a mature growth oriented economy the narrower income dif ferentials encountered in continental europe are rationalized as necessary for the protectionof the less well paid and the integrity of the social fabric the upward secular trend in wageinequality in the us since the 1970s which is a stark reversal of the pattern observed duringthe preceding 40 years is also a topic attracting wide public and scholarly attention despite the importance of the subject and the amount of attention that it has received the extensive literature on the economic impact of wage bargaining institutions in advanceddemocratic societies contains only a few widely accepted ndings one of these is that morecentralized bargaining institutions strongly encourage wage equality no less an authoritativeorgan than the oecd notes for instance that there is a fairly robust relation betweencross country di erences in earnings inequality and bargaining structures oecd 1997 p 64 several well designed country speci c studies support the claim that the system ofcollective bargaining is a major determinant of variations in the extent of wage inequality hibbs and locking 1996 2000 erickson and ichino 1995 yet even the most careful andwell executed country level results may be a ected by idiosyncratic country speci c factors evidence at the cross national level is required the most careful and convincing cross national empirical documentation of the link between centralized bargaining institutionsand wage inequality appears in wallerstein 1999 published in this journal

the influence of expatriate cultural intelligence on organizational embeddedness and knowledge sharing the moderating effects of host country context this study advances our understanding of the contextualization of the effects of cultural intelligence cq drawing from trait activation theory and institutional theory we develop a multi level model showing how host countries informal and formal openness towards foreigners facilitate or constrain the importance of expatriates cq in becoming embedded in the host organization furthermore this study positions organizational embeddedness as a mediator in the association between expatriates cq and a central element of expatriates jobs knowledge sharing in the foreign workplace results from a cross lagged survey of 1327 expatriates from 100 different nations residing in 30 host countries combined with secondary data indicate expatriate cq relates positively to organizational embeddedness cross level interaction analyses further suggest that in group collectivism the proxy for host countries informal openness towards foreigners facilitates the importance of cq as a predictor of expatriates organizational embeddedness in contrast cq was not found to interact with the proxy for host countries formal openness towards foreigners i e national immigration policies consistent with predictions we identified that cq relates positively to knowledge sharing and that organizational embeddedness carries an indirect effect we discuss the implications for theory and practice

the role of shocks and institutions in the rise of european unemployment the aggregate evidence two key facts about european unemployment must be explained the rise in unemployment since the 1960s and the heterogeneity of individual country experiences while adverse shocks can potentially explain much of the rise in unemployment there is insufficient heterogeneity in these shocks to explain cross country differences alternatively while explanations focusing on labour market institutions explain current heterogeneity well many of these institutions pre date the rise in unemployment based on a panel of institutions and shocks for 20 oecd nations since 1960 we find that the interaction between shocks and institutions is crucial to explaining both stylised facts

cultural intelligence a theory based short form measure this article reports the development and validation of a theory based short form measure of cultural intelligence sfcq the sfcq captures the original theoretical intent of a multifaceted culture general form of intelligence that is related to effective intercultural interactions the validity of the scale is established with 3526 participants in five language groups from around the world results provide evidence for construct and criterion related validity of the measure and indicate that cultural intelligence is a single latent factor reflected in three intermediate facets in support of construct validity the measure is modestly related to but distinct from emotional intelligence and personality and correlates positively with several indicators of multicultural experience with regard to criterion related validity it relates as predicted to several dimensions of intercultural effectiveness implications for the measurement and understanding of culture and the influence of culture on management practice are discussed

is tullock correct about sunday closing laws the evidence presented in this note suggests that other things equal the imposition of a sunday closing law reduces the number of food stores in a given market this finding directly contradicts tullock s hypothesis about the long run effects of sunday closing laws on investment in food stores by implication the evidence also casts doubt on the appropriateness of using sunday closing laws as an example of a government sanctioned privilege that generates no long run benefits even to those who sought the grant of privilege in the first place but there is little surprise in all this particularly if the real impetus behind blue laws comes not from store keepers seeking higher profit margins but from those of certain religious convictions as the preamble to the arkansas statute says keeping a grocery open on sunday is a temptation to vice p 569 however while tullock s particular illustration may be a poor one his main thesis concerning the transitional gains trap remains a useful insight

does foreign capital harm poor nations new estimates based on dixon and boswell s measures of capital penetration l a s efforce de mesurer l impact economique de la penetration du capital et de l investissement etranger sur l economie des pays en voie de developpement il examine et critique le mode d evaluation de la production propose par w j dixon et t boswell il estime qu il convient de distinguer investissement local et investissement etranger il presente les differents types d interpretation et etudie un certain nombre de donnees collectees concernant le panama la jamaique le liberia la guinee et enfin trinidad et tobago il se demande d une part si l investissement local et preferable a l investissement etranger et d autre part si ce dernier appauvrit les pays en voie de developpement il s interroge sur le bien fonde de la theorie de la dependance

a new data set measuring income inequality this article presents a new data set on inequality in the distribution of income the authors explain the criteria they applied in selecting data on gini coefficients and on individual quintile groups income shares comparison of the new data set with existing compilations reveals that the data assembled here represent an improvement in quality and a significant expansion in coverage although differences in the definition of the underlying data might still affect inter temporal and international comparability based on this new data set the authors do not find a systematic link between growth and changes in aggregate inequality they do find a strong positive relationship between growth and reduction of poverty

unions taxes and the structure of multinational enterprises abstract this note analyzes how a firm s relationship with unions or tax authorities influences its basic structure in particular it is shown that the prospect of capture by unions or tax authorities of part of the rents associated with the firm s investments leads it to open more plants than is technologically efficient thus unions and taxes are an independent reason for a firm s expansion nationally and for foreign direct investment

the thick description and comparison of societal systems of capitalism critiques of international business theory have recently pointed to weaknesses in the handling of context of culture and of policy implications it is contended that the origins of such failings lie in the discipline s commonly accepted methodologies and in turn that they have epistemological roots as a route out of the dilemmas faced a proposal is made to adopt more complete ways of handling determinacy including the influences of history culture and the societal emergence of institutions business systems theory is drawn upon and a model proposed developed from the work of whitley in this culture is seen as underpinning formal institutions which in turn underpin societal business systems the use of the model relies on the ideas of geertz on thick description and of ragin on holistic analysis it is illustrated with a comparison of the american and french socio economic systems seen historically findings in strategy research about the geographically defined nature of firm supremacy in many industries are brought into the account using the business systems literature consistent patterns of determinacy as well as distinct and contrasting trajectories of business system evolution are noted a more complete and multidisciplinary form of explanation grounded in socio economics is advocated as a means of meeting the challenges both of understanding and of policymaking at several levels

how unregulated is the u s labor market the penal system as a labor market institution1 comparative research contrasts the corporatist welfare states of europe with the unregulated u s labor market to explain low rates of u s unemployment in the 1980s and 1990s in contrast this article argues that the u s state made a large and coercive intervention into the labor market through the expansion of the penal system the impact of incarceration on unemployment has two conflicting dynamics in the short run u s incarceration lowers conventional unemployment measures by removing able bodied working age men from labor force counts in the long run social survey data show that incarceration raises unemployment by reducing the job prospects of ex convicts strong u s employment performance in the 1980s and 1990s has thus depended in part on a high and increasing incarceration rate

promise and pitfalls in the use of secondary data sets income inequality in oecd countries as a case study this paper examines the role of secondary data sets in empirical economic research taking the field of income distribution as a case study we illustrate problems faced by users of secondary statistics showing how both cross country comparisons and time series analysis can depend sensitively on the choice of data after describing the genealogy of secondary data sets on income inequality we consider the main methodological issues and discuss their implications for comparisons of income inequality across oecd countries and over time the lessons to be drawn for the construction and use of secondary data sets are summarized at the end of the paper

money supply class power and inflation monetarism reassessed recent sociological work shows that pro market neoliberal policies across advanced capitalist countries are due to distributional struggle between classes in the 1970s and 1980s the orthodox monetarist view alternatively sees neoliberal reform as a nonpolitical attempt to end the stagflation crisis of the 1970s from this perspective monetary and fiscal expansions brought high inflation and central bank discipline and government austerity is the solution but the recent trend of low inflation despite accelerating money growth and government spending contradicts this view analyses of time series cross section data for 23 oecd countries from 1960 to 2009 support the thesis that the rise and fall of inflation is more about distribution of power between labor and capital than about monetary and fiscal discipline inflation in the 1970s originated from a strong working class and hurt capital more than it did workers while neoliberal repression of workers power has kept inflation low from the 1980s onwa

income inequality development and dependence a reconsideration we reconsider the role of foreign investment in income inequality in light of recent critiques that question the results of quantitative cross national research on foreign capital penetration we analyze an unbalanced cross national data set in which countries contribute different numbers of observations with a maximum of 88 countries and 488 observations dated from 1967 to 1994 random effects regression models that control for unmeasured country heterogeneity are used to investigate effects of foreign capital penetration on inequality measured as the gini coefficient against the background of an internal developmental model of inequality we adapt firebaugh s 1992 1996 critique of the literature on the effect of foreign investment on economic growth to the study of income inequality and find that the stock of foreign direct investment has an effect on inequality that is independent of the mechanisms identified by firebaugh we explore tsai s 1995 claim that the effect of foreign capital penetration is spurious and find that foreign stock has a significant positive effect on inequality net of region specific differences an alternative interpretation of the findings of the foreign investment inequality literature is discussed in light of the discovery of an inverted u shaped relationship between income inequality and foreign investment stock per capita we conclude that thinking on the relationship between income inequality and investment dependence should be revised in light of an investment development path relating the inflow and outflow of foreign capital to economic development

globalization and global inequality assessing the impact of the rise of china and india 1980 20051 this article uses updated purchasing power parity measurements of countries income and a new strategy for approximating global inequality to examine how global income inequality as a combination of increasing average within country inequality and decreasing between country inequality changed in the period 1980 2005 in view of the overwhelming influence of china and india on trends in global inequality change the authors base their strategy on estimating the change in world average within country inequality from change in within country inequality of these two countries the authors find that global inequality decreased continuously throughout the period they also project that global inequality will likely rise again in the next 25 years unless the stellar economic performance of china and india spreads widely to other developing countries

explaining deindustrialization globalization failure or success although sociologists have expressed growing interest in globalization they have devoted little sustained empirical attention to the many claims made in its name i focus on the link that has been drawn between globalization and the deindustrialization of the advanced industrial societies to examine this i employ a pooled time series of cross sections data set that combines observations on 18 oecd nations across the 1968 1992 period fixed effects regression models that control for unmeasured country specific effects reveal support for arguments that implicate foreign direct investment and north south trade in the declining percentage of the labor force employed in manufacturing in the oecd countries regression results also show that deindustrialization across this period is largely explained by a model that combines an attention to the post golden age troubles of northern manufacturing with classic generalizations of the process of development interpretation of the empirical findings is tempered by an exercise in counterfactual history which reveals that deindustrialization would have been considerable in these countries even if the upswings in direct investment and southern imports had not occurred or if the performance of the manufacturing sector had been stronger

determinants of labour s income share in the era of financialisation numerous studies have analysed the decline in the labour share of income but only few have linked it to the increase in financialisation the process of financialisation can roughly be described as an increasing importance of the financial sector that had an impact on the distribution between wages and profits on the one hand and retained earnings and financial income in the form of dividends and interests on the other hand this article seeks to explore the relationship between financialisation and labour s share of income using a time series cross sectional dataset of 13 countries over the time period from 1986 until 2007 the results suggest that there is indeed a relationship between increasing dividend and interest payments of non financial corporations and the decline of the share of wages in national income other factors that can account for the decline relate to globalisation and a decrease in the bargaining power of labour

book reviewinequality poverty and history jeffrey g williamson basil blackwell cambridge ma 1991 isbn 1 55786 118 8 pp vii 151 19 50

what you do depends on where you are understanding how domestic and expatriate work requirements depend upon the cultural context to empirically address the importance of the cultural context for successful assignments we conducted two studies using a large sample of public sector us professionals working in comparable jobs in 156 different countries the results provided direct evidence that social and perceptual skill reasoning ability and adjustment and achievement orientation personality requirements are higher in expatriate assignments which has implications for pre departure selection also the results partly supported the hypothesis that expatriates are required to adjust their behavior to be consistent with the local cultural values which has implications for post arrival behavioral training

wage setting institutions and pay inequality in advanced industrial societies the distribution of pay differs significantly across countries and over time among advanced industrial societies in this paper institutional and political determinants of pay inequality are studied in sixteen countries from 1980 to 1992 the most important factor in explaining pay dispersion is the level of wage setting i e whether wages are set at the level of the individual the plant the industry or the entire private sector the impact of centralization is the same whether centralization occurs via collective bargaining or via government involvement in private sector wage setting the concentration of unions and the share of the labor force covered by collective bargaining agreements also matter after controlling for wage setting institutions other variables such as the governing coalition the size of government international openness and the supply of highly educated workers have little impact economic political and norm based explanations for the association of centralization with egalitarian outcomes are discussed

the economic efficiency of sunday trading restrictions restriction of shop opening hours is current but controversial pr actice in britain and much of europe the economic case presented for such restrictions is that given the constraint that individual shop s may not vary their price by time of day competitive pressures woul d induce excessive opening at times when high costs would be incurred such as on sundays the authors show that such inefficient equilib ria are a theoretical possibility empirical evidence on retail costs and demand in the united kingdom shows that this case does not arise in practice and that deregulation of opening hours would lead to low er costs and prices copyright 1987 by blackwell publishing ltd

perceived organizational support pos across 54 nations a cross cultural meta analysis of pos effects the authors meta analyze relationships of perceived organizational support pos with attitudinal and behavioral outcomes in western i e horizontal individualistic and eastern i e vertical collectivistic cultures the social exchange perspective suggests that pos effects are stronger in western cultures because employees are more likely to see the self as independent and understand their relationship with the organization in terms of reciprocity however the social identity perspective suggests that pos effects are stronger in eastern cultures because employees are more likely to see the self as interdependent and are more attuned to organizational support as an identity related cue addressing these competing hypotheses meta analytic results from 827 independent samples n 332 277 across 54 countries show support for both perspectives in the west pos was more strongly associated with social exchange processes than organizational identification processes in contrast in the east pos was more strongly associated with organizational identification processes than social exchange processes overall pos was more strongly related to job attitudes and performance in the east than in the west cultural differences in pos effects on attitudinal outcomes were found to be increasing over time we discuss the implications of these findings for organizational support theory and research

hours of operation restrictions and competition aming retail firms this study examines the redistributive effects of government regulations concerning the hours in which retail stores may remain open for business throughout canada municipal by laws restrict nighttime shopping hours to a few specified days of the week in analyzing the outcome of these restrictions a model of consumer behaviour is used which emphasizes the consumers s decision concerning the allocation of purchases between small and large retail outlets the empirical results are consistant with the theoretical model indicating that such market intervention redistributes sales from large to small stores

the economics of immigration this literature review concerns the impact of immigration on the economy of the host country focusing on the experience of the united states the emphasis is on the period from the 1970s to the 1990s the author shows that research earlier in this period generally concluded that the economic effects of immigration were positive but that more recent research on later migrations have generally concluded that immigration may be having an adverse effect on the earnings of native unskilled workers and be placing an increased burden on welfare programs the importance of such economic analysis for the formulation of appropriate migration policies is stressed

differences and changes in wage structures preface introduction and summary richard b freeman lawrence f katz 1 a comparison of changes in the structure of wages in four oecd countries lawrence f katz gary w loveman david g blanchflower 2 international differences in executive and managerial compensation john m abowd michael l bognanno 3 the gender earnings gap some international evidence francine d blau lawrence m kahn 4 international wage curves david g blanchflower andrew j oswald 5 the changing structure of male earnings in britain 1974 1988 john schmitt 6 real wages employment and wage dispersion in u s and australian labor markets robert g gregory francis vella 7 labor markets and economic growth lessons from korea s industrialization 1970 1990 dae il kim robert h topel 8 wage differentials in italy market forces institutions and inflation christopher l erickson andrea c ichino 9 the swedish wage structure the rise and fall of solidarity wage policy per anders edin bertil holmlund 10 getting together and breaking apart the decline of centralized collective bargaining richard b freeman robert s gibbons 11 earnings inequality in germany katharine g abraham susan n houseman 12 a comparative analysis of east and west german labor markets before and after unification alan b krueger jorn steffen pischke contributors author index subject index

level of economic development and income inequality evidence from the postwar developed world using a recent high quality panel dataset on income distribution for 19 developed countries the postwar relation between the level of economic development and income inequality is estimated in terms of several kuznets type specifications contrary to what one might expect on the basis of kuznets s hypothesis inequality does not decline with an increase in income even at such high levels of development but shows an uninverted u pattern that is characterized by an initial decline and a subsequent increase in income inequality the estimates suggest that the position noted for the postwar united states is shared widely in the developed world

a new theory of retailing costs in cross section studies of shops of the same type we find that costs in general and labour in particular depend on the sales size per shop according to a linear function with a positive intercept this paper provides some empirical evidence and a theoretical explanation based on queuing theory

the kuznets curve and the great u turn income inequality in u s counties 1970 to 1990 the authors examine the determinants of inequality in the distribution of family income in approximately 3 100 counties of the united states in 1970 1980 and 1990 such a study provides a window on global trends in social inequality during the period which spans the tail end of the kuznets curve and the more recent upswing in income inequality results from random effects regression models that control for unmeasured heterogeneity among states reveal the continued importance of the kuznetsian pattern of declining inequality with economic development a positive effect of urbanization on inequality a declining positive impact of sector dualism an increasing positive effect of educational heterogeneity and a persistent effect of racial dualism several variables associated with the recent upswing in inequality have significant effects female labor force participation negative female headed households positive percent of the population over age 65 changes from positive to negative over the period manufacturing employment negative and unemployment ambiguous they also discuss methods of estimating the gini coefficient for income inequality at the county level and measures of sector farm nonfarm dualism racial black white dualism and educational heterogeneity

growth effects of foreign and domestic investment over tha past few years numerous studies in sociology have concluded that foreign investment harms poor nations these studies have focused on the coefficient for foreign capital stock controlling for flow new investment and defying logic have inferred that a negative coefficient for stock reflects dependency effects that retard economic growth since capital stock is the denominator for investment rate the greater the stock the lower the investment rate for a given level of new investment hence the negative coefficient for capital stock found in dependency studies indicates a beneficial investment effect not a harmful effect this point is demonstrated by reanalysis of the data used in dependency studies in these data foreign investment spurs growth earlier analysts have concluded otherwise only because their conclusions have belied their findings

economic globalization domestic politics and income inequality in the developed countries a cross national study this article assesses the impact of economic globalization and domestic political factors on income inequality and state redistribution in the developed countries over the past two decades using household level data from the luxembourg income study that are more detailed accurate and cross nationally comparable than those used in previous empirical work it examines three major modes of international integration trade direct foreign investment and international financial flows as well as four domestic political variables the partisan balance of national cabinets electoral turnout union density and the centralization of wage setting institutions the study finds only scattered relationships between global integration and income distribution or redistribution but reasonably strong positive relationships between several domestic political variables and an egalitarian distribution of income and or extensive state redistribution these findings are consistent with a growing number of studies that emphasize the resilience of domestic political factors in the face of economic globalization

free trade old and new challenges the paper analyses the old and new challenges to the theory and policy of free trade the old challenges have sought to undermine the case for free trade by citing one or another type of market imperfection thus the postwar period has seen two such challenges factor market imperfections were analysed in the 1950s to 197os product market imperfections in the i980s the new challenges are twofold one comes from the demands for fair trade as a precondition for free trade the other from the concern that free trade while efficient immiserises the unskilled in the richer countries having given a harry johnson lecture four years ago in london i was startled to be invited to give yet another one today but then i recalled his unmatched productivity his articles continued to be published even after his death the pipelines in several journals being full of them it is only appropriate then that he be honoured many times over also in these days of preoccupation with increasing returns to scale such a proliferation of lectures in the memory of a great economist is doubly fitting since harry johnson was in the english tradition of taking his theory from the real world s problems and then taking it back to talk penetratingly about them i thought it appropriate to address the earlier johnson lecture to the threats posed currently to the multilateral trading system by increasing resort

income disparities and employment and occupational changes in new york preston v and mclafferty s 1993 income disparities and employment and occupational changes in new york reg studies 27 223 235 to determine how deindustrialization and the growth of service employment have affected geographic disparities in income within urban areas we examined empirically the spatial distribution of household income in the new york cmsa between 1960 and 1980 and the associations between income growth and employment and occupational change geographic disparities in median household income increased as wealth dispersed to the periphery and income grew slowly in counties adjacent to manhattan despite the loss of 400 000 manufacturing jobs total employment increased albeit unevenly on the periphery employment in all sectors grew rapidly while the inner counties lost manufacturing jobs loss of blue collar workers did not alter occupational segregation substantially correlation analysis revealed that income growth was associated significantly with employment growth in all sect

determinants of relative poverty in advanced capitalist democracies using relative poverty measures based on micro level data from the luxembourg income study in conjunction with pooled time series data for 14 advanced capitalist democracies between 1970 and 1997 the authors analyze separately the rate of pretax transfer poverty and the reduction in poverty achieved by systems of taxes and transfers socioeconomic factors including de industrialization and unemployment largely explain pre tax transfer poverty rates of the working age population in these advanced capitalist democracies the extent of redistribution measured as poverty reduction via taxes and transfers is explained directly by welfare state generosity and constitutional structure number of veto points and the strength of the political left both in unions and in government

the danish miracle luck pluck or stuck the 1980s and 1990s saw employment miracles in denmark australia and the netherlands this article analyzes the dynamics and substance of danish policy responses to poor export employment and fiscal performance to see whether remediation should be attributed to pluck intentional strategic remediation of dysfunctional institutions to make them conform with the external environment luck environmental change that makes formerly dysfunctional institutions suddenly functional or just being stuck endogenous not entirely strategic change that leaves institutions in conformity with the environment it addresses these issues to remedy biases in the literature toward sweden as model toward pessimism about the welfare state s survivability and toward privileging intentional action the analysis finds that stuck endogenous dynamics probably explains as much as pluck strategic choice suggesting only limited transferability for policy lessons from the miracles

trade globalization since 1795 waves of integration in the world system the term globalization as used by social scientists and in popular discourse has many meanings we contend that it is important to distinguish between globalization as a contemporary political ideology and what we call structural globalization the increasing worldwide density of large scale interaction networks relative to the density of smaller networks we study one type of economic globalization over the past two centuries the trajectory of international trade as a proportion of global production is trade globalization a recent phenomenon a long term upward trend or a cyclical process using an improved measure of trade globalization we find that there have been three waves since 1795 we discuss the possible causes of these pulsations of global integration and their implications for the early decades of the twenty first century

good times bad times postwar labor s share of national income in capitalist democracies this article returns to a classic question of political economy the zero sum conflict between capital and labor over the division of the national income pie a detailed description of labor s shar