explaining agricultural productivity growth an international perspective this article presents multi output multi input total factor productivity tfp growth rates in agriculture for 88 countries over the 1970 2001 period estimated with both stochastic frontier analysis sfa and the more commonly employed data envelopment analysis dea we find results with sfa to be more plausible than with dea and use them to analyze trends across countries and the determinants of tfp growth in developing countries the central finding is that policy and institutional variables including public agricultural expenditure and proagricultural price policy reforms are significant correlates of tfp growth the most significant geographic correlate of tfp growth is distance to the nearest oecd country

union power cost of job loss and workers effort the authors hypothesize that the effectiveness of external threats in raising workers effort is mediated by among other labor market conditions the presence or absence of a powerful union in particular they argue that because powerful unions reduce the potency of the external threat of job loss by making it more difficult for employers to dismiss workers the pace of work is less responsive to such a threat in strongly unionized plants than in weakly unionized plants the results of an analysis of data from the 1990 workplace industrial relations survey in britain support this hypothesis the analysis also yields evidence that effort is increased where workers are rewarded individually according to results and where there are various communication channels between workers and management

unemployment and effort at work we measure the sensitivity of work effort to local labour market conditions using self reported non work at the workplace in the american time use survey atus 2003 12 non work at work is quantitatively significant and varies positively with local unemployment but in opposite directions at the extensive and intensive margins the fraction of workers reporting positive values declines with unemployment while time spent in non work conditional on any such time rises with unemployment the results speak to issues of labour hoarding efficiency wages and the cyclicality of labour productivity we also demonstrate a relationship between the incidence of non work and unemployment benefits in state data linked to the atus there are also pronounced occupational differences in the incidence and intensity of non work

temporary foreign workers and firms theory and canadian evidence abstract temporary foreign worker tfw programs have grown considerably in size when uncapped we develop a simple efficiency wage model to explain this phenomenon and examine the empirical evidence for it we also use the model to evaluate the implications of tfw programs for domestic workers in our framework firms that have been unable to find domestic workers may hire tfws at the wage previously advertised to domestic workers due to the lower outside option for tfws than domestic workers tfws will exert more effort for the same wage firms would thus prefer to hire otherwise identical tfws rather than domestic workers our model identifies an unintended consequence of a tfw program since the repercussions of a failed domestic job search are less severe if a tfw may be hired instead firms have an incentive to lower their wage offers made to domestic workers using canadian data we find that relative to domestic workers tfws work longer hours have lower rates of absenteeism and are less likely to be laid off consistent with higher effort in our model moreover for tfws from home countries with a relatively high outside option effort is lower than for tfws from other countries resume travailleurs etrangers temporaires et entreprises theorie et exemple canadien en l absence de plafonnement les programmes de travailleurs etrangers temporaires ptet se sont considerablement developpes afin d expliquer ce phenomene et d en examiner les preuves empiriques nous avons developpe un modele simple de salaire d efficience nous avons egalement utilise ce modele pour evaluer l incidence des ptet sur les travailleurs domestiques dans notre cadre d etude les entreprises peinant a trouver une main d uvre locale peuvent embaucher des travailleurs etrangers temporaires au salaire prealablement propose aux travailleurs domestiques compte tenu d options exterieures plus faibles les travailleurs etrangers temporaires deploieront davantage d efforts pour le meme salaire les entreprises prefereront donc embaucher des travailleurs etrangers par ailleurs identiques plutot que des travailleurs domestiques notre modele identifie une consequence inattendue aux ptet etant donne que les consequences d une recherche d employes domestiques infructueuse sont attenuees par l embauche de travailleurs etrangers temporaires les entreprises sont incitees a diminuer les offres salariales proposees aux travailleurs locaux en exploitant les donnees propres au canada nous avons decouvert que les travailleurs etrangers temporaires travaillaient plus d heures avaient des taux d absenteisme inferieurs et etaient moins susceptibles de se faire congedier que les travailleurs domestiques conformement au concept d effort accru developpe dans notre modele en outre pour les travailleurs etrangers temporaires originaires de pays a options exterieures relativement elevees l effort sera moindre que pour ceux provenant d autres pays

is the efficiency wage efficient the social norm and organizational corruption the effectiveness of efficiency wage incentives is often jeopardized by perverse organizational corruption we model organizational corruption as a phenomenon of social interaction and relate the substantial psychological role characterizing the social norm to the corruption problem we find that if the status quo bribery rate within the firm is high social norms can no longer serve as a sufficient sanction against a corrupt supervisor pandemic organizational corruption tends to generate a critical mass effect the snowball effect which intensifies the corruption effect this intensified effect due to the snowballing character of social norms may more than offset the usual incentive effect of wages resulting in more widespread shirking in the firm jel classification d82 j41

a multisector model of efficiency wages the pattern of effort and wages is derived in a multisector efficiency wage model firms choose effort endogenously easily monitored or low turnover jobs have high effort and may have low wages in equilibrium empirical wage differentials from a measure of supervision are smaller than observed industry differentials that have been attributed to efficiency wage models and are closer to those predicted by the model workers can search for and avail of on the job offers if sectors grow at different rates or the unemployment rate changes the pattern of wage differentials is unaffected

is there a trade off between supervision and wages an empirical test of efficiency wage theory abstract the logic of efficiency wage theory suggests a trade off between wages and supervision this paper reports evidence that high levels of supervision are indeed associated with lower wage levels the empirical investigation centers on the effect that safety supervision by host employers has on the wages of contract maintenance workers in the petrochemical industry this narrow focus is important special institutional features of the contract employment relationship in petrochemicals make it possible to ameliorate econometric problems that may have influenced earlier studies

accessing modern science policy and institutional options for agricultural biotechnology in developing countries the paper highlights the complexity of the challenge in developing forms of collaboration between a variety of actors in the biotechnology area in developing countries national research systems with diverse capacities in biotechnology international research centers local private research and development companies and advanced research institutes in both industrialized and developing countries case studies are provided from strong programs such as india china and brazil which will be tool developers as well as users programs that are developing an adaptive capacity in biotech to use tools and methods in a large number of countries whose research systems have virtually no capacity in molecular biology each type program presents challenges and opportunities for accessing new technologies based on facilitation of private investments public private partnerships and local capacity to design proprietary technologies working with the consultative group on international agricultural research centers as intermediaries and partners and with regional consortia policy and institutional issues for accessing modern science are then discussed and many of the challenges involve developing strategies in intellectual property management while pubic research organizations will need to develop innovative means of segmenting markets to complement private sector interests

a new theory of corporatism and wage setting abstract the standard view on corporatist institutions for wage setting in many european economies is based of the insider outsider model corporatism is associated with lack of wage flexibility this paper discusses a new approach starting from the importance of nominal contracts the rationale for these contracts is to avoid future bargaining adjusting these contracts ex post to aggregate shocks would raise their efficiency however avoiding the bargaining required for this adjustment was the main reason for negotiating these contracts in the first place this is the fundamental contradiction under corporatism outside institutions can play this role these institutions provide therefore a type of flexibility not available in decentralized economies empirical evidence supports the basic ideas of this model

can wage increases pay for themselves tests with a production function efficiency wage theories predict that companies that pay high wages will have higher productivity from high work effort low turnover and other efficiency enhancing effects this paper uses the pims line of business data set to test whether high wage businesses are more productive relative wages were measured by managers assessments of their relative compensation holding worker quality constant a positive relation was found between changes in relative wages and changes in total factor productivity the elasticity of output with respect to wages was of the magnitude predicted by efficiency wage theories also consistent with efficiency wage theories the relationship between changes in wages and changes in productivity was weaker at businesses with high unionization results from two additional data sets imply that high wages are not merely measuring high human capital copyright 1992 by royal economic society

adoption of agricultural innovations in developing countries a survey this paper reviews various studies which have provided a description and possible explanation to patterns of innovation adoption in the agricultural sector the survey points out that the tendency of many studies to consider innovation adoption in dichotomous terms adoption nonadoption may not be appropriate in many cases where the actual decisions are defined over a more continuous range more attention needs to be given to the socio cultural and institutional environment in area studies so that their interrelation with economic factors affecting adoption can be inferred the presence of several interrelated innovations is another aspect that needs to be considered more carefully in future research since a number of simultaneous decisions may be involved furthermore the possibility of regular sequential patterns in adopting components of a new technological package should be specifically addressed in future studies finally the impact of differential adoption rates on land holding distribution merits attention in future research

institutions and agricultural productivity in sub saharan africa agricultural productivity in 41 sub saharan africa ssa countries from 1960 to 1999 is examined by estimating a semi nonparametric fourier production frontier over the four decades the estimated rate of productivity change was 0 83 per year although the average rate from 1985 99 was a strong 1 90 per year former uk colonies exhibited significantly higher productivity gains than others while liberia and countries that had been colonies of portugal or belgium exhibited net reductions in productivity we measure a significant reduction in productivity during political conflicts and wars and a significant increase in productivity among those countries with higher levels of political rights and civil liberties

trips trade and technology transfer a north south model of unintentional technology transfer is developed where the stringency of southern patent protection provides the institutional backdrop for a strategic game in a high tech goods market the appropriability regime is set endogenously and combines elements of imperfect southern patent protection with the protection afforded by market made northern technology masking less stringent protection of northern intellectual property can work much like other strategic trade policies therefore developed countries appear to be right in demanding discussion of intellectual property rights in gatt

pro poor agricultural biotechnology can the international research system deliver the goods abstract while global investment in agricultural research by the private sector is increasing with growth in developing country markets and the emergence of new technologies complementary public sector investment is stagnating or declining in many developing countries this review argues that the changing roles of the public and private sectors in generating new scientific knowledge may adversely affect the diffusion of explicitly pro poor technologies technologies that are simultaneously yield enhancing and poverty reducing comparing historical evidence from the green revolution with recent evidence from the emerging era of agricultural biotechnology this review argues that a more pluralistic international system for agricultural research will be more responsive to poverty only if the strategic leadership role of the public sector is strengthened certain research functions are reallocated to the private sector and new policy and organizational mechanisms are used to stimulate pro poor research in and for developing country agriculture

discussion of the effects of corporate governance on firms credit ratings abstract ashbaugh skaife collins and lafond 2006 the effects of corporate governance on firms credit ratings journal of accounting and economics this issue find that better governed firms receive better credit ratings and poor governance costs the median speculative grade firm 38 million in excess interest they also find that managers choose to be poorly governed to expropriate wealth the results from the primary analysis are persuasive leaving little doubt on whether ratings agencies value corporate governance however the authors estimate of the economic costs of poor governance is likely to be overstated despite the evidence on the costs of poor governance the final analysis leaves the question as to why firms choose to be poorly governed largely unanswered

contracting with repeated moral hazard and private evaluations a repeated moral hazard setting in which the principal privately observes the agent s output is studied the optimal contract for a finite horizon is characterized and shown to require burning of resources these are only burnt after the worst possible realization sequence and the amount is independent of both the length of the horizon and the discount factor for the infinite horizon it is shown that there is no loss from restricting the analysis to contracts in which the agent receives a constant efficiency wage and no feedback until he is fired furthermore optimal contracts cannot be replicated by short term contracts a family of fixed interval review contracts is characterized longer review intervals are preferable but harder to implement comparative statics on the review length are carried out finally these contracts are shown approximate first best if players are very patient jel d82 d86

determinants of patent rights a cross national study abstract this paper presents an index of patent rights for 110 countries for the period 1960 1990 the index is used to examine what factors or characteristics of economies determine how strongly patent rights will be protected the evidence does indicate that more developed economies tend to provide stronger protection but the underlying factors which influence patent protection levels are the country s level of research and development r d activity market environment and international integration which are correlated with its level of development the results qualify however that r d activity influences patent protection levels after a nation s research sector reaches a critical size an implication of this is that to raise patent protection levels in weakly protecting countries it is important to foster a significant research base in those countries and thereby create incentives for protecting patent rights

intellectual property protection in plant varieties a worldwide index 1961 2011 in this paper we construct a new index measuring the strength of intellectual property ip protection for plant varieties in 69 countries over the period 1961 2011 we examine the statistical properties of the index and compare it with other indicators of ip protection we conclude that the index provides a reasonable synthetic assessment of the relative strength of ip protection in plant varieties across countries in addition we study the main determinants of the evolution of the index and examine the patterns of correlation between the index and agricultural production

covenants and collateral as incentives to monitor although monitoring borrowers is thought to be a major function of financial institutions the presence of other claimants reduces an institutional lender s incentives to do this thus loan contracts must be structured to enhance the lender s incentives to monitor covenants make a loan s effective maturity and the ability to collateralize makes a loan s effective priority contingent on monitoring by the lender thus both covenants and collateral can be motivated as contractual devices that increase a lender s incentive to monitor these results are consistent with a number of stylized facts about the use of covenants and collateral in institutional lending modern finance theory suggests that financial intermediaries such as commercial banks insurance companies and finance companies monitor and control their borrowers on behalf of other investors 1 this article investigates how the loans made by these institutions can be structured so as to best enhance the institutions role as delegated monitors covenants and collateral are common features of loans made by financial institutions but these features are somewhat difficult to justify consider loan covenants clauses in a loan contract that require the borrower to take or refrain from various actions berlin and mester 1992 magee and sridhar 1994 and park 1994 show that by giving institutions the right to renegotiate or call loans when covenants are violated covenants serve as tripwires that enhance the flexibility and efficiency of financial contracting also as documented in smith and warner 1979 control rights from covenants reduce borrower adverse selection or moral hazard nevertheless by allowing institutions to demand repayment based on any information contractible or not

deferred compensation vs efficiency wages an experimental test of effort provision and self selection abstract we compare the ability of two common compensation structures efficiency wages ew and deferred compensation dc at inducing effort from workers we test predictions on effort provision and elicit preferences between the two wage structures the theoretical predictions on effort are generally well supported although we find over provision of effort with ew in consequence although the theoretical prediction that dc is more cost effective is supported the difference is small we also find a marked preference for ew that cannot be explained by risk aversion the two effects combine to largely dissipate any advantage that dc may have in inducing effort

efficiency wages and employment rents the employer size wage effect in the job market for lawyers the efficiency wage hypothesis offers an explanation for employment rents according to this hypothesis firms pay wages above the opportunity cost of labor to elicit productivity or quality enhancing behaviors from employees firms pursue this strategy when alternative incentive schemes are unavailable or too costly thus firms will not pay premium wages when employees post sufficiently large performance bonds this article examines employment rents in a setting where employees post sizable performance bonds large law firms contrary to the efficiency wage hypothesis we find that associates in these large firms post substantial performance bonds while also receiving substantial ex ante rents

shirking and choking under incentive based pressure a behavioral economic theory of performance production abstract significant empirical evidence exists within psychology and economics that greater incentives under pressure can lead to lower performance outcomes however standard economic theory does not account for this possibility efficiency wage models for example conclude a positive relationship between wage incentives and productivity while efficiency wage models are shown to describe productivity behavior in numerous settings said models do not describe labor markets featuring counterproductive performance pressure we put forth a theoretical model of performance production in which performance incentives induce productive effects and counterproductive effects the model treats explicit monitoring and distraction as distinct counterproductive processes within a cohesive theory of performance production in settings featuring performance pressure we find that higher levels of performance contingent compensation may decrease not only labor output i e likelihood of task success but also labor input i e effort if counterproductive processes decrease the marginal effectiveness of effort sufficiently the latter finding challenges a common view that performance decrements under pressure occur despite greater effort levels

research productivity and output growth in chinese agriculture recent attempts to quantify the sources of growth in chinese agriculture have attributed an exceptionally large share of this growth to the contemporary institutional and market reforms within china to analyze this important issue we use a newly constructed panel data set that includes an agricultural research or stock of knowledge variable our results suggest that while still a significant source of growth the direct growth promoting consequence of institutional change and market reforms have been overstated by these earlier studies research induced technical change accounts for a significant share 20 of the growth in agricultural output since 1965

innovation intellectual property rights and economic development a unified empirical investigation two important strands of literature investigate the way the effect of intellectual property rights ipr on innovation depends on either the initial ipr level or the level of economic development we expand on this by studying their joint effect in a single unified empirical framework we find that the effect of ipr on innovation is more complex than previously thought displaying important nonlinearities depending on the initial levels of both ipr and per capita gdp the policy implications of this are examined and include the conclusion that a single global level of ipr is in general sub optimal

performance pricing in bank debt contracts abstract performance pricing links bank debt interest rate spreads to a borrower s performance via two options interest decreasing performance pricing reduces spreads if credit quality improves it is more common when prepayment is more likely or costly and when adverse selection costs are higher and is less common when multiple performance measures better predict credit quality interest increasing performance pricing increases spreads if credit quality deteriorates it is more common when lenders reduce interest rates to add this provision when downgrades are more likely and when moral hazard costs are higher we find lower spreads for contracts with interest increasing performance pricing

are wages habit forming evidence from micro data although utility functions play a central role in economics the axiom that utility depends only on the absolute levels of its arguments is rarely tested this paper uses panel data on 2000 british employees who remain with the same employer and who are not promoted from one wave to the next it is shown that one important measure of well being overall job satisfaction is strongly positively correlated with the change in the worker s pay between waves but is unrelated to the current level of pay empirical tests suggest that a reference dependent satisfaction function where individual well being depends on current pay relative to past pay is more consistent with these regression results than are productivity or agency explanations of increasing wage profiles some evidence is presented of greater job satisfaction effects of pay rises for lower paid less well educated and younger workers these results provide some micro evidence consistent with the theory widespread in social science of habituation individuals may become used to any given level of consumption or income as such they tie in with the finding that a country s well being as measured by the average happiness of its citizens is only weakly correlated with its per capita gnp

financial intermediation and delegated monitoring this paper develops a theory of financial intermediation based on minimizing the cost of monitoring information which is useful for resolving incentive problems between borrowers and lenders it presents a characterization of the costs of providing incentives for delegated monitoring by a financial intermediary diversification within an intermediary serves to reduce these costs even in a risk neutral economy the paper presents some more general analysis of the effect of diversification on resolving incentive problems in the environment assumed in the model debt contracts with costly bankruptcy are shown to be optimal the analysis has implications for the portfolio structure and capital structure of intermediaries

trips trade and growth a two country model of endogenous growth is employed to assess the importance of intellectual property rights to trade growth and technology transfer the paper provides theoretical results linking the intellectual property rights regime to trade patterns aggregate r d worldwide growth and aggregate welfare measures failure to provide patent protection for foreign made innovations forces innovators to employ less than the best practice research technologies reduces aggregate r d activities worldwide effectively eliminates technology transfer across countries and reduces worldwide growth copyright 1994 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

welfare effects of global patent protection this paper uses a simple model of invention and patent protection to examine the welfare effects of extending patent protection from the country where invention takes place to another country that is only a consumer of invented products it is shown that while the welfare of the inventing country certainly rises with the extension of patent protection that of the other country probably falls and may well fall by more than the increase in welfare of the inventing country in particular as patent protection is extended to a larger and larger portion of the world the effect on the welfare of the world as a whole of extending it to the rest of the world becomes negative

the determinants of the maturity of corporate debt issues we document the determinants of the term to maturity of 7 369 bonds and notes issued between 1982 and 1993 our main finding is that large firms with investment grade credit ratings typically borrow at the short end and at the long end and of the maturity spectrum while firms with speculative grade credit ratings typically borrow in the middle of the maturity spectrum this pattern is consistent with the theory that risky firms do not issue short term debt in order to avoid inefficient liquidation but are screened out of the long term debt market because of the prospect of risky asset substitution traditionally capital structure research has focused on how much of a firm s future cash flows should be paid out to debtholders instead of equityholders an equally important issue is when future cash flows should be paid out to debtholders a firm that finances its projects with short term debt risks serious financial difficulty if the debt cannot be extended similarly a firm that finances its activities with long term debt can sacrifice profits by needlessly risking mismanagement of resources after cash flows are returned from investments but before they are due to debtholders this study investigates the factors that firms consider when choosing the maturity of their liabilities we document the determinants of the maturity of 7 368 public debt issues made by u s corporations between 1982 and 1993 our empirical tests are based on existing theoretical models that relate the maturity of a firm s borrowings to the riskiness of its cash flows the time until investments pay off the quality of information held by outsiders the expected

carrots and sticks pay supervision and turnover the efficiency wage model ewm has been advanced as an explanation for large and persistent wage differentials the shirking version of the ewm assumes a trade off between self supervision and external supervision the turnover version assumes turnover is costly to the firm variation across firms in the cost of monitoring shirking or turnover then is hypothesized to account for wage variations across firms for homogeneous workers using a new sample of firm data this paper presents empirical evidence of the trade off of wage premiums for supervisory intensity and turnover little evidence is found to support either version of the ewm

international patent protection 1960 2005 abstract this note provides an update to the index of patent protection published in this journal in 1997 the original paper presented the index for 1960 1990 for 110 countries the index has now been updated to 2005 and extended to 122 countries the adoption of stronger patent laws and the composition of patent rights vary across countries by level of economic development

are wages too low empirical implications of efficiency wage models firms may pay efficiency wages to enhance productivity the conventional presumption is that efficiency wages are inefficiently high because they lead to unemployment that is also inefficiently high government policies that lower wages raise output using a simple and general efficiency wage model this paper finds a necessary and sufficient condition for the opposite conclusion if the condition holds wages are inefficiently low leading to productivity that is also inefficiently low it is the high wage policies that raise output even if they also lower employment published empirical results support the condition no evidence is found for the conventional presumption

monitoring motivation and management the determinants of opportunistic behavior in a field experiment economic models of incentives in employment relationships are based on a specific theory of motivation employees are rational cheaters who anticipate the consequences of their actions and shirk when the marginal benefits exceed costs we investigate the rational cheater model by observing how experimentally induced variation in monitoring of telephone call center employees influences opportunism a significant fraction of employees behave as the rational cheater model predicts a substantial proportion of employees however do not respond to manipulations in the monitoring rate this heterogeneity is related to variation in employee assessments of their general treatment by the employer jel d2 j2 l2 l8 m12

the provision of incentives in firms i ncentives are the essence of economics despite many wide ranging claims about their supposed importance there has been little empirical assessment of incentive provision for workers the purpose of this paper is to critically overview existing work on the provision of incentives since the interests of workers and their employers are not always aligned a large theoretical literature has emphasized how firms design compensation contracts to induce employees to operate in the firm s interest this literature has reached into many areas of compensation and has pointed to a multitude of different mechanisms that can be used to induce workers to act in the interests of their employers these include piece rates options discretionary bonuses promotions profit sharing efficiency wages deferred compensation and so on my objective here is to evaluate this literature in the light of a growing empirical literature on compensation where possible i will address the literature from two perspectives first an underlying assumption of this literature is that individuals respond to contracts that reward performance accordingly i consider whether agents behave in this way and whether these responses are always in the firm s interest second i address whether firms write contracts with these responses in mind in other words do contracts look like the predictions of the theory incentives are provided to workers

government spending growth and poverty in rural india using state level data for 1970 93 a simultaneous equation model was developed to estimate the direct and indirect effects of different types of government expenditure on ruralpoverty and productivity growth in india the results show that in order to reduce rural poverty the indian government shoul d give highest priority to additionalinvestments in ruralroads and agricul turalresearch these types of investment not only have much larger poverty impacts per rupee spent than any other government investment but also generate higher productivity growth apart from government spending on education which has the third l argest marginalimpact on ruralpoverty and produc

executive compensation and the maturity structure of corporate debt executive compensation influences managerial risk preferences through executives portfolio sensitivities to changes in stock prices delta and stock return volatility vega large deltas discourage managerial risk taking while large vegas encourage risk taking theory suggests that short maturity debt mitigates agency costs of debt by constraining managerial risk preferences we posit and find evidence of a negative positive relation between ceo portfolio deltas vegas and short maturity debt we also find that short maturity debt mitigates the influence of vega and delta related incentives on bond yields overall our empirical evidence shows that short term debt mitigates agency costs of debt arising from compensation risk

private sector incentives and the diffusion of agricultural technology evidence from developing countries abstractthe role of intellectual property rights iprs has been extensively debated in the literature on technology transfers and agricultural productivity growth in developing countries however few studies offer cross country evidence on how iprs affect yield growth by incentivising private sector investment in cultivar improvement we address this knowledge gap by testing technology diffusion patterns for six major crops using a unique dataset for the period 1961 2010 and an arellano bond linear dynamic panel data estimation approach findings indicate that biological and legal forms of iprs promote yield gap convergence between developed and developing countries although effects vary by crop

unemployment and welfare consequences of international outsourcing under monopolistic competition this paper challenges the conventional academic view that international outsourcing is just another form of gainful trade contrary to that view we show that labour service outsourcing can reduce the high wage country s welfare even when product market trade is beneficial within a model that combines involuntary unemployment and monopolistic competition outsourcing s impact on welfare is worsened by a definite loss of jobs and a possible contraction in the range of varieties produced worldwide while owners of capital benefit from outsourcing under certain conditions labour s welfare always falls resume consequences de la sous traitance internationale sur le chomage et le bien etre en regime de concurrence monopolistique ce texte remet en question le point de vue conventionnel des universitaires pour qui la sous traitance internationale n est qu une autre forme de commerce porteur de gains en opposition a ce point de vue on montre que la sous traitance de services de travail peut reduire le niveau de bien etre du pays a hauts salaires meme quand le commerce dans le marche des produits est benefique dans un modele qui combine chomage involontaire et concurrence monopolistique l impact de la sous traitance sur bien etre est rempire par une perte d emplois et une contraction possible de la variete de produits au plan mondial alors que les proprietaires de capital beneficient de la sous traitance dans certaines conditions le bien etre du travail decline toujours

teacher pay and school productivity exploiting wage regulation abstract the impact of teacher pay on school productivity is a central concern for governments worldwide yet evidence is mixed in this paper we exploit a feature of teacher labour markets to determine the impact of teacher wages teacher wages are commonly set in a manner that results in flat wages across heterogeneous labour markets this creates an exogenous gap between the outside labour market and inside regulated wage for teachers we use the centralised wage regulation of teachers in england to examine the effect of pay on school performance we use data on over 3000 schools containing around 200 000 teachers who educate around half a million children per year we find that teachers respond to pay a ten percent shock to the wage gap between local labour market and teacher wages results in an average loss of around 2 in average school performance in the key exams taken at the end of compulsory schooling in england

gone fishing reported sickness absenteeism and the weather i introduction the principal agent problem of contracting employee work effort that is imperfectly monitored arises in a number of areas of economic theory including models of remuneration by seniority lazear 1979 involuntary unemployment e g shapiro and stiglitz 1984 performance based pay macleod and malcomson 1998 and labor hoarding depken redmount and snow 2001 given the importance of this mechanism in the theoretical work the empirical research on the agency problem is remarkably scant in part this reflects the limited availability of personnel data as baker and holmstrom argue in their review article internal labour markets too many theories too few facts 1995 but more fundamentally it reflects the inherent difficulty of empirically capturing the employee effort levels that underlie the models using direct measures of employee or firm level productivity is unquestionably the preferred approach but these measures are notoriously problematic and the studies that use them tend to be case studies introducing external validity issues it is also unlikely to isolate the type of malfeasant shirking behavior that concerns variants of the models where the employee effort decision entails disciplinary risk to inform employee incentives to engage in malfeasant behavior economists have relied on two measures employee disciplinary rates e g cappelli and chauvin 1991 ichino and maggi 2000 and absenteeism rates e g arai and thoursie 2005 bradley green and leeves 2007 ichino and riphahn 2005 the difficulty is that disciplinary rates capture only shirking activity that is identified by employers not that which goes undetected while reported absenteeism particularly sickness absenteeism rates may be entirely legitimate one can therefore never be sure whether differences in these rates across workers facing different shirking costs reflect actual shirking activity as opposed to differences in employers willingness or ability to detect and punish shirkers or differences in employee health that may be correlated with these costs in this paper we identify a different type of shirking activity that potentially addresses both of these shortcomings employees misreporting health in order to exploit weather conditions favorable to high utility outdoor recreation 1 we begin by considering a shirking model of sickness absenteeism in which employees marginal utility of outdoor leisure is increasing in the interaction of two state dependent parameters health and outdoor weather quality the intuition being that ideal weather conditions for engaging in outdoor recreation are valued more when one is physically and perhaps also mentally healthy this assumption leads to two main propositions first increases in sickness absenteeism associated with marginal improvements in weather quality reflect the decisions of the inframarginal workers those workers who in the absence of the weather improvement would be present at work who are the healthiest implying an increase in absenteeism that is unambiguously illegitimate second comparing across workers marginal weather improvements should have the largest impact on sickness absenteeism where shirking costs are highest the reason is that where existing incentives to misreport health are the weakest such as where sick pay is not offered or job protection is weak existing sickness absenteeism levels will be lowest and the inframarginal workers will be the healthiest thereby benefitting most from the weather improvement we examine the empirical relevance of these propositions using a two step approach first we construct an index of weather preferences by linking temperature relative humidity precipitation wind speed and cloud cover data to time use data identifying the weekend and weekday evening outdoor recreational activities of employees with regular daytime work schedules we then examine the empirical relation between the resulting index of the recreational quality of the weather hereafter referred to simply as weather quality and the incidence of short term spells of sickness absenteeism reported in survey data comparing the magnitude of this relation across workers facing different levels of sick pay job protection and job finding rates

the determinants of dismissals tests of the shirking model with individual data abstract this study tests the shirking model by estimating dismissal equations with data on individual workers fires were found to depend negatively on firm size and on the local and industry unemployment rates and to depend positively on the capital labor ratio

making do with less working harder during recessions why did productivity rise during recent recessions one possibility is that average worker quality increased a second is that each incumbent worker produced more the second effect is termed making do with less using data from 2006 to 2010 on individual worker productivity from a large firm these effects can be measured and separated for this firm most of the gain in productivity during the recession was a result of increased effort additionally the increase in effort is correlated with the increase in the local unemployment rate presumably reflecting the costs of losing a job

bridging the gap between partial and total factor productivity measures using directional distance functions technical dependencies as well as data constraints limit our ability to allocate inputs across sectors and hence our ability to measure sectoral productivity we adapt a directional measure of efficiency to the measurement of sector specific productivity that does not require allocating all inputs across sectors applied to the agricultural sector of a group of countries the results show important differences in livestock and crops productivity growth commonly used partial factor productivity measures for livestock and crops tend to overestimate productivity growth in most developing countries while underestimating it in european countries

changing locus of agricultural research will the poor benefit from biotechnology and privatization trends over the past decade the locus of agricultural research and development has shifted dramatically from the public to the private multinational sector three interrelated forces are transforming the system for supplying improved agricultural technologies to the world s farmers the first is the strengthened and evolving environment for protecting intellectual property in plant innovations the second is the rapid pace of discovery and growth in importance of molecular biology and genetic engineering finally agricultural input and output trade is becoming more open in nearly all countries these developments have created a powerful new set of incentives for private research investment altering the structure of the public private agricultural research endeavor particularly with respect to crop improvement

empirical tests of efficiency wage models two digit manufacturing industry level production functions are used to test efficiency wage propositions conclusive tests require functional forms which allow differences in elasticities of substitution between observable human capital wage premia and other inputs results demonstrate that unexplained industry wage premia and higher unemployment rates raise productivity wage premia and the human capital wage component cannot be aggregated into a single human capital index nevertheless 88 of the productivity effect associated with industry wages can be tied to observable human capital in the industry with only 12 associated with the wage premium

growing apart the changing firm size wage premium and its inequality consequences wage inequality in the united states has risen dramatically over the past few decades prompting scholars to develop a number of theoretical accounts for the upward trend this study argues that large firms have been a prominent labor market institution that mitigates inequality by compensating their low and middle wage employees with a greater premium than their higher wage counterparts large u s firms reduced overall wage dispersion yet broader changes to employment relations associated with the demise of internal labor markets and the emergence of alternative employment arrangements have undermined large firms role as an equalizing institution using data from the current population survey and the survey of income and program participation we find that in 1989 although all private sector workers benefited from a firm size wage premium the premium was significantly higher for individuals at the lower end and middle of the wage distribution compared to those at the higher end between 1989 and

the effect of financial development on convergence theory and evidence we introduce imperfect creditor protection in a multicountry schumpeterian growth model the theory predicts that any country with more than some critical level of financial development will converge to the growth rate of the world technology frontier and that all other countries will have a strictly lower long run growth rate we present evidence supporting these and other implications in the form of a cross country growth regression with a significant and sizable negative coefficient on initial per capita gdp relative to the united states interacted with financial intermediation in addition we find that other variables representing schooling geography health policy politics and institutions do not affect the significance of the interaction between financial intermediation and initial per capita gdp and do not show any independent effect on convergence in the regressions our findings are robust to removal of outliers and to alternative conditioning sets estimation procedures and measures of financial development

radical political economy and the economics of labor markets this essay is the result of a long process involving many drafts and revisions i am grateful to duncan foley for the careful and constructive criticisms offered throughout the project the following people read the manuscript at different stages and although they often disagreed with me they generously provided helpful comments two anonymous referees for this journal samuel bowles william dickens greg dow robert drago richard edwards kathleen engel richard freeman james galbraith herbert gintis jody hoffer gittel sandfordjacoby tom kochan david levine lisa lynch paul osterman michael piore bob rebitzer gil skilman dan slesnick robert thomas and tsuyoshi tsuru comments from participants in seminars at the massachusetts institute of technology university of massachusetts at amherst and hitotsubashi university are also gratefully acknowledged

an argument for deregulating the transfer of agricultural technologies to developing countries in the past few decades many developing countries have liberalized trade and investment removing barriers to imports and allowing the introduction of new foreign technologies unfortunately agriculture often remains outside this reform process regulatory obstacles continue to restrain the transfer of technologies through private trade in seeds and other inputs industrial countries characteristically allow the transfer of private and public technologies through multiple channels developing countries often force technology transfer through a single channel controlled by government agencies with an emphasis on official performance tests this article analyzes the institutional arrangements governing the international transfer of new agricultural technologies examining the cases of agricultural machinery in bangladesh and seed varieties in turkey the analysis shows that allowing the private transfer of technologies and refocusing input regulations on externalities could lead to significant productivity and income gains in developing countries