claim timing and ex post adverse selection many health care treatments are not urgent and may be delayed if patients so choose because insurance coverage is typically determined by the treatment date individuals may have incentives to strategically delay treatments to minimize out of pocket costs the strategic delay of treatment a particular form of moral hazard can be an important source of subsequent adverse selection in which ex ante identical individuals select insurance coverage based on their differing accumulation of previously delayed treatments this article investigates these forces empirically in the context of the missing market for dental insurance using rich claim level data my analysis reveals that approximately 40 of individuals strategically delay dental treatments when incentivized to do so and this flexibility in delaying treatment can explain why the market for dental insurance has largely unraveled more generally the counterfactual analysis suggests features such as open enrolment periods and contracting on pre existing conditions may be helpful tools in overcoming adverse selection in insurance contexts where the timing of uncertainty is not contractible

bank risk taking securitization supervision and low interest rates evidence from the euro area and the u s lending standards using a unique dataset of the euro area and the u s bank lending standards we find that low monetary policy short term interest rates soften standards for household and corporate loans this softening especially for mortgages is amplified by securitization activity weak supervision for bank capital and low monetary policy rates for an extended period conversely low long term interest rates do not soften lending standards finally countries with softer lending standards before the crisis related to negative taylor rule residuals experienced a worse economic performance afterward these results help shed light on the origins of the crisis and have important policy implications the author 2011 published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies all rights reserved for permissions please e mail journals permissions oup com oxford university press

on success and dissolution of the labor managed firm in the capitalist economy labor managed firms lmfs in the developed capitalist economy exhibit an interesting life cycle pattern often they come into existence as a way of reorganizing insolvent entrepreneurial profit maximizing firms yet successful lmfs tend to be assimilated to the entrepreneurial modus operandi in the long run i propose a simple theoretical model that explains this lmf phenomenon as the outcome of the lmf s interaction with outside markets especially competitive spot labor markets the interpretations and limitations of the model are also discussed as the basic framework is extended to deal with imperfections in capital markets and with contractual labor markets

compensation and productive efficiency in partnerships evidence from medical groups practice relatively little is known about the behavior and performance of firms organized as partnerships in this paper we attempt to fill that gap by developing and testing a model of the effect of alternative compensation arrangements on productive efficiency in medical group practices the technique employed is maximum likelihood production frontier estimation we provide a simple behavioral model of the determination of productive efficiency and a new interpretation of the economic measure of technical efficiency we derive a behavioral production function that relates production to individual responses to incentives and we indicate the impossibility of recovering the parameters of the production technology from observed behavior overall the empirical results indicate that incentives do affect productivity a larger number of members in a group decreases productivity while greater average experience leads to greater productivity

techno economic analysis of a coal fired chp based combined heating system with gas fired boilers for peak load compensation abstract combined heat and power chp plants dominate the heating market in china with the ongoing energy structure reformation and increasing environmental concerns we propose gas fired boilers to be deployed in underperforming heating substations of heating networks for peak load compensation in order to improve both energy efficiency and environmental sustainability however due to the relatively high price of gas techno economic analysis is required for evaluating different combined heating scenarios characterized by basic heat load ratio therefore we employ the dynamic economics and annual cost method to develop a techno economic model for computing the net heating cost of the system considering the current state of the art of cogeneration systems in china the net heating cost is defined as the investment costs and operations costs of the system subtracted by revenues from power generation we demonstrate the model in a real life combined heating system of daqing china the results show that the minimum net heating cost can be realized at 0 75 with a cost reduction of 16 8 compared to coal heating alone since fuel cost is the dominating factor sensitivity analyses on coal and gas prices are discussed subsequently

internal bargaining and strategic innovation in the theory of the firm abstract the transaction cost analysis of the firm has identified asset idiosyncrasy and the risk of ex post opportunism as key determinants of organizational form simultaneously several writers have modeled the distribution of quasi rents among input suppliers as a bargaining game these complementary ideas are used to formalize the notion of strategic innovation where capital and labor attempt to redistribute firm income after specialized assets are in place through unilateral modifications in production technology because strategic behavior can enlarge the quasi rent component of fifirm income this process may persist in equilibrium asset idiosyncrasy therefore creates room for an autonomous theory of organizational dynamics partially insulated from events at the market level of analysis

equilibrium in competitive insurance markets with ex ante adverse selection and ex post moral hazard abstract existence of pure strategy equilibria is studied in health insurance markets that exhibit both ex ante adverse selection of the rothschild stiglitz wilson type and ex post hidden information moral hazard it is found that ex post moral hazard has two offsetting effects on the existence of equilibrium and that in general it is difficult to say whether an equilibrium is more or less likely to exist numerical simulations and an analytical example confirm that moral hazard may increase the likelihood of equilibrium these results are interpreted as evidence that health maintenance organization hmo markets could be less likely to exhibit stable equilibria than are fee for service insurance markets

monitoring physicians a bargaining model of medical group practice this paper challenges the proposition that large physician owned groups will be inefficient because of failures to control opportunism a bargaining model implies that even large partnerships will make efficient resource and monitoring decisions in addition opportunism has much the same payoff for employees and partners the data show that most large medical practice organizations are physician owned empirical analyses of nine forms of monitoring by large groups generally show no clear link between monitoring and ownership there is one exception physician owned firms tend to base compensation on productivity which may help explain the continued dominance of professional partnerships

a brand name firm theory of medical group practice medical group practices are firms voluntary contracts between two or more practitioners to jointly provide services purchase inputs and distribute income it is hypothesized that one reason why such organizations are formed is to more efficiently convey information on quality of care to patients and further that the increased efficiency of doctor patient exchange is usually more important than economies of scale in production a brand name firm theory of medical group practice is presented and then tested by comparisons between medicine and dentistry generalist and specialist practice and by variations in mobility across patients and providers observed variation in the extent and contractual structure of group practice strongly supports the brand name firm hypothesis and is inconsistent with economies of scale explanations

sovereign stress and smes access to finance evidence from the ecb s safe survey abstract we study the effect of sovereign stress on smes capital structure using restricted access data from the european central bank we find that during the sovereign debt crisis and controlling for borrowers quality firms in stressed countries became more likely to be denied credit to be credit rationed and to face higher loan rates less creditworthy firms were not more likely to become credit constrained suggesting no flight to quality in lending we also find that in order to make up for the decline in bank credit firms in stressed countries began relying considerably more on retained earnings and government subsidies

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

entry and managerial incentives abstract this paper presents a two period full information model of entry where owners of incumbent and entrant firms endogenously select the incentive schemes for their managers it is shown that when output decisions are delegated to managers the incumbent s owner chooses to base incentive schemes only partly on profit but if output decisions are reached via nash bargaining between managers the incumbent s owner will base the reward on profit alone the entrant never bases the incentive scheme solely on profit if there is a sufficiently high fixed cost of entry then the incumbent can deter entry by providing management with appropriate incentive schemes

wage pressure bargaining and price cost margins in uk manufacturing to the extent that union employer bargaining is efficient price cost margins in oligopolistic industries are predicted to depend on wage rents and on the elasticity of substitution between wages and employment in union preferences unanticipated wage inflation will also affect margins cross section and time series analysis of price cost margins in u k manufacturing industries finds that margins tend to be eroded by the level of wage rents and are invariant to the rate of wage inflation copyright 1990 by blackwell publishing ltd

does privatization improve job satisfaction the case of ghana this paper analyzes the impacts of privatization in ghana on the basis of a survey of 300 workers in privatized and state owned enterprises the findings indicate a significant positive relationship between privatization and job satisfaction whereas monthly wage is an important determinant of job satisfaction in state owned enterprises education and the availability of training opportunities are strong determinants in privatized enterprises the study also shows that there exists a variety of instruments to implement a privatization program smoothly

cross border banking credit access and the financial crisis abstract we study the sensitivity of credit supply to bank financial conditions in 16 emerging european countries before and during the financial crisis we use survey data on 10 701 applicant and non applicant firms that enable us to disentangle effects driven by positive and negative shocks to the banking system from demand shocks that may vary across lenders we find strong evidence that firms access to credit was affected by changes in the financial conditions of their banks during the crisis firms were more credit constrained if they were dealing with banks that experienced a decline in equity and tier 1 capital as well as losses on financial assets we also find that access to credit reflects the balance sheet conditions of foreign parent banks the effect of positive and negative shocks to a bank is greater for riskier firms and firms with fewer tangible assets

small and medium sized enterprise financing and securitization firm level evidence from the euro area this paper analyzes the impact of securitization on access to finance for small and medium sized enterprises smes in the euro area using firm level survey data on sme financing conditions we show that an increase in securitization issuance reduces the probability of smes facing credit constraints and decreases the costs of bank financing for nonconstrained firms our results reveal that in addition to the volume of securitization its type and quality matter for credit extension to smes the paper thus provides empirical support for recent initiatives to revive securitization in europe and for effective monetary policy transmission in the euro area jel d22 e44 e51 e58 g21

employee participation in management bargaining power and wages the paper analyzes the impact of employee participation in management on bargaining power and wages it presents an empirical model which allows for variable bargaining powers of the parties who jointly control the firm and it tests this model with postwar west german data the results suggest that parity codetermination has had a positive effect on earnings in iron and steel but not in coal mining moreover it appears that the positive effect in iron and steel could be due to increased profitability rather than an increase in the bargaining power of labor as defined in this study

making inferences from controlled income maintenance experiments nationally this paper addresses a question whose answer is essential for interpreting the results of such experiments if an experiment of limited duration is conducted under ideal conditions what can be inferred from the experimental results about behavior in a world where nit is adopted permanently by ideal conditions we mean that a individuals or households 2 in the experiment are conventional utility maximizers given the structure of the experiment and b the experiment is sufficiently well designed to permit the differential responses of individuals to be identified 3 the

evaluation of financial incentives for combined heat and power chp systems in u s regions abstract in recent years combined heat and power chp systems have gained more attention from the u s government both the federal government and the state government have proposed many incentive policies to promote chp systems this paper focuses on analyzing and evaluating the effectiveness of existing incentive policies for chp systems in various u s states in this paper the existing incentive policies for chp systems in different states are classified in four categories capital cost rebate tax credits low tax loan and utility credits four types of buildings including hospitals large offices large hotels and primary schools located in different u s regions are selected and analyzed for the chp incentives using the energyplus simulation software the energy consumption of each building is obtained then the simulation models of a chp system are established for each building type from the simulation results the payback period of the chp systems in different locations is calculated according to local incentive policies this payback period is then compared with the one without regard for incentive policies the results show that most of the incentive policies could obviously shorten the payback period in various u s regions however some of them seem meaningless because some incentives were not effective enough to give a favorable payback period this paper reveals that the type and level of incentives to promote chp systems need to be carefully determined because the effectiveness and usefulness of incentive policies are highly dependent on the chp performance due to the capacity of the power generation unit the operational strategy of chp system the climate location and the ratio of electricity cost to fuel cost

competition within the firm theory plus some evidence from medical group practice recent work on the economics of the firm and other organizations has emphasized the importance of internal organization and incentives the issue of competition within the firm has not arisen however in this article i construct a model of nonprice competition among members of a professional partnership and test the model with data on medical group practice the empirical results are consistent with the hypothesis of nonprice competition among members of the firm

health insurance and the demand for medical care evidence from a randomized experiment we estimate how cost sharing the portion of the bill the patient pays affects the demand for medical services the data come from a randomized experiment a catastrophic insurance plan reduces expenditures 31 percent relative to zero out of pocket price the price elasticity is approximately 0 2 we reject the hypothesis that less favorable coverage of outpatient services increases total expenditure for example by deterring preventive care or inducing hospitalization

patient cost sharing in low income populations economie theory suggests that a natural tool to control medical costs is increased consumer cost sharing for medical care while such cost sharing reduces full insurance wherein patients are indifferent between falling sick or remaining healthy a greater reliance on coinsurance and copayments can in theory stem patient and provider incentives to engage

employment determination in enterprises under communism and in transition evidence from central europe the authors present a comparative analysis of employment determination in four transition economies as they moved from central planning to a market economy in the early 1990s they use firm level panel data sets from the czech republic hungary poland and slovakia to estimate dynamic employment equations for the period from immediately before to immediately after the start of transition for the most part firms appear to have been quick to adjust employment to wage levels and there is little evidence of labor hoarding there were important cross country variations in the determinants of employment during the reform process however hungarian and polish firms started the transition already substantially reformed and became even more responsive to market signals as transition proceeded in contrast firms in the czech and slovak republics started in the completely unresponsive mode characteristic of central planning but rapidly caught up with their counterparts in hungary and poland

intrafirm competition and charter evolution in the multibusiness firm we develop a theoretical framework for a specific form of intrafirm competition namely the extent of overlap between the charters of two or more units in a single organization this phenomenon is commonly seen in large organizations e g cases of two business units producing competing products or two product development groups trying to solve the same technological problem but the existing academic literature provides little insight into the forms intrafirm competition takes or the conditions under which it is beneficial or harmful to the organization building on the concept of an organization charter galunic and eisenhardt 2001 we identify two generic forms of intrafirm competition the dynamic community model has fluid and frequently changing charter boundaries and it emerges through the creation of strategic options in the face of a changing environment the coexistence model has fixed and relatively static charter boundaries and it owes its existence to economies of scope and differentiation of unit charters to cover multiple market segments in the body of the paper we develop a theoretical framework to specify the environmental and organizational conditions under which each form of intrafirm competition is expected to occur

when arm s length is too far relationship banking over the credit cycle we conduct face to face interviews with bank ceos to classify 397 banks across 21 countries as either relationship or transaction lenders we then use the geographic coordinates of these banks branches and of 14 100 businesses to analyze how the lending techniques of banks in the vicinity of firms are related to credit constraints at two contrasting points of the credit cycle we find that while relationship lending is not associated with credit constraints during a credit boom it alleviates such constraints during a downturn this positive role of relationship lending is stronger for small and opaque firms and in regions with a more severe economic downturn moreover our evidence suggests thatrelationship lending mitigates the impact of a downturn on firm growth and does not constitute evergreening of loans

pay equality and industrial politics personnel managers often argue that equitable pay treatment manifested as wage compression is useful because it reduces disharmony among workers but it is far from obvious that a compressed salary structure is morale improving since better workers may feel disenchanted by this scheme however when workers rewards are based on relative comparisons salary compression reduces uncooperative behavior that is detrimental to the firm relative comparisons imply that some reference group must be selected the major result is that within the relevant groups some wage compression is efficient

worker reputation and productivity incentives this paper examines firms problem of how to motivate risk averse workers not to shirk when workers utility functions are unknown the problem is studied in a 2 period setting in which a worker s actions today can influence not only his compensation today but the firms beliefs about his preferences firms cannot credibly commit to ignore the revealed information so workers actions today affect their future compensation contracts it is shown that in the wilson miyazaki equilibrium firms may pool workers and learn about their types gradually over time rather than inducing them to separate and reveal their types immediately

behavior of participatory firms in yugoslavia lessons for transforming economies this paper develops a multiparty model of enterprise behavior with the management workers and government authorities being the decisionmakers the model captures the behavior of yugoslav enterprises in the 1970s and 1980s enterprises in transitional economies and public sector bargaining in western countries estimating the model on yugoslav firm level data from the 1970s and 1980s indicates that the perverse behavior predicted by the ward domar vanek model of labor managed firms is not supported by the data as firms place emphasis on both wages and employment a direct test shows that the employment response to output price changes is insignificant coauthors are jan svejnar dubravko mihaljek and vesna prasnikar copyright 1994 by mit press

unemployment collective bargaining and the demand for protection there is a widespread consensus among nonacademic observers that labor unions with large numbers of unemployed members have been central actors in political coalitions demanding protectionist trade policies since the mid 1970s in advanced industrial societies yet trade unions and unemployment are hardly mentioned in most theories of the politics of international trade the purpose of this paper is to develop a theoretical framework for understanding the importance of unemployment as a determinant of protectionist demands that is consistent with optimizing behavior on the part of union members and firms models of labor negotiations derived from cooperative bargaining theory are used to illustrate why the material benefits of protection received by union members and their employers in protected industries increase when union members are unemployed even when workers are risk neutral and capital is immobile

transaction costs and partnerships the case of rock bands abstract this paper applies transaction cost economics to rock bands it develops the importance of asset specificity a number of phenomena in the field are shown to be explicable in terms of transactions costs

strategic investment and the co existence of labour managed and profit maximising firms the authors examine firm profitability in mixed duopoly equilibrium with one labor managed lm firm and one profit maximizing pm firm and with strategic investment conventional wisdom suggests that firms deviating from profit maximization will suffer forced exit in the long run the authors reverse this conclusion in mixed lm pm duopoly with strategic investment no equilibrium can have both firms making zero profits and pm profitability implies lm profitability but not the converse adverse parameter shifts would cause the pm firm to exit first empirical evidence is consistent with this prediction of robust market survivability of lm firms

market imperfections labor management and earnings differentials in a developing country theory and evidence from yugoslavia in this paper we evaluate empirically the relative importance of two explanations of yugoslav interindustry income differentials one explanation proposed initially by vanek and jovicic 1975 stresses capital market imperfections which permit capital rents to be appropriated as workers incomes the second explanation points to labor allocation problems under self management we first present a critique of the vanek jovicic original formulation and then respecify the problem to permit simultaneous evaluation of the two schools of thought results based on two data sets suggest that labor allocation factors and monopoly power rather than capital rents are the main source of yugoslav earnings dispersion

internal bargaining labor contracts and a marshallian theory of the firm the theme of this paper is due to alfred marshall who states that nearly the whole income of a business may be regarded as a composite quasi rent divisible among different persons in the business by bargaining supplemented by custom and by notion of fairness and the division of quasi rents entails de facto some sort of profit loss sharing between almost every business and its employees principles of economics 8th ed book vi ch viii sec 10 pp 520 21 marshall emphasizes that a significant portion of composite quasi rent is derived from the organization of business and would be lost if employer employee connections were dissolved in this view bargaining can even be tacit insofar as there is an organizational basis which ensures agreement among the concerned parties consequently internal bargaining models of the firm may be applicable to the analysis of european style codetermination and japanese style labor management also as the relative bargaining strength between labor and management changes such a view of the firm admits as its extrema the organization of a labor managed firm lmf and the textbook case of a profit maximizing firm pmf masahiko aoki 1980 1982 and jan svejnar 1982 have recently explored models of an internal bargaining firm their analyses however consider the firm s long run behavior only under restricted circumstances without market uncertainty the relevance of the internal bargaining approach to profit sharing and labor management would be enhanced if we integrated the firm s short run wage employment policies with its long run plans for the rate of growth and capital labor substitutions this i do by underscoring the firm s organizational basis which is essentially a long term contractual association between workers and management i combine costas azariadis 1975 and martin baily s 1974 apparatus of labor contracting with efficient bargaining to investigate the effect of varying degrees of labor s bargaining power upon the firm s shortand long run policies under uncertainty these results are then contrasted with the empirical findings of collective bargaining for example richard freeman and james medoff 1981 conventional results of lmf models jaroslav vanek 1970 benjamin ward 1958 and the recent macroeconomic approaches to wage employment adjustments ian mcdonald and robert solow 1981

cyclicality of credit supply firm level evidence abstract we quantify fluctuations in bank loan supply in the time series by studying firms substitution between loans and bonds using firm level data any firm that raises new debt must have a positive demand for external funds conditional on the issuance of new debt we interpret firms switching from loans to bonds as a contraction in bank credit supply we find strong evidence of this substitution at times that are characterized by tight lending standards depressed aggregate lending poor bank performance and tight monetary policy we show that this substitution behavior has strong predictive power for bank borrowing and investments by small firms

models of modern sector labor market institutions in developing countries abstract the paper argues that policy conclusions derived from existing theories of economic development may be seriously flawed because the theories do not model correctly the modern sector labor market the paper first presents evidence that trade unions and governments frequently exert positive influence not only on firms wages but also on their employment levels it then presents models that capture this phenomenon and permit one to determine whether the observed levels of employment are insufficient optimal or excessive from the private and social standpoints the paper concludes with a discussion of how the analysis could be implemented in empirical studies and in practical policy work

rational behavior in the presence of coverage ceilings and deductibles consumers of health care services with insurance plan features such as deductibles copayments and coverage ceilings in which the price of health care depends upon expenditures accumulated during a single year should rationally anticipate the impact of current consumption decisions on the price of health care later in the year we show that in the absence of wealth effects and risk aversion a utility maximizing consumer should base current consumption decisions on the expected end of year price of health care in a specific model with risk aversion and lumpy consumption decisions we show that the expected end of year price remains close to the true shadow price of health carefor plausible insurance plan and demand parameters we use this result in an econometric model of the demand for ambulatory mental health services

priorities and sequencing in privatization evidence from czech firm panel data abstract while privatization of state owned enterprises has been one of the most important aspects of the economic transition from a centrally planned to a market system no transition economy has privatized all its firms simultaneously this raises the question of whether governments privatize firms strategically in this paper we examine the determinants of the sequencing of privatization to obtain testable predictions about the factors that may affect sequencing we investigate the following competing government objectives i maximizing efficiency through resource allocation ii maximizing public goodwill from the free transfers of shares to the public iii minimizing political costs iv maximizing efficiency through information gains and v maximizing privatization revenues next we use firm level data from the czech republic to test the competing predictions about the sequencing of privatization consistent with the hypotheses of a government priority on revenues and public goodwill we find strong evidence that more profitable firms were privatized first the sequencing of privatization is also consistent with maximizing efficiency through information gains our results indicate that many empirical studies of the effects of privatization on firm performance suffer from a selection bias

optimal membership employment and income distribution in unionized and labor managed firms this article presents a static and dynamic intertemporal analysis of employment and income distribution in unionized and labor managed firms motivated by theoretical considerations and institutional features of western trade unions and labor managed firms we examine firms in which worker members share the risk of layoffs by acting as if compensating laid off members in the static framework we show that although the firms do not behave perversely their behavior depends crucially on the initial membership since the issue of optimal initial membership has been virtually ignored in the literature we analyze it next within a dynamic framework

information production decisions and intra firm bargaining a firm s factor suppliers often receive private signals which are useful in managerial decision making productive efficiency requires the pooling of such decentralized information however factor suppliers may threaten to withhold private signals in order to secure side payments from the potential beneficiaries of this information j harsanyi s theory of the n person cooperative game is applied to a model where both physical inputs and information can be withheld by factor owners for the special case of a binary decision problem the central limit theorem is used to approximate the harsanyi solution by a linear combination of are as under the standard normal curve copyright 1988 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

on illyrian macroeconomics the ward vanek labor managed economy macro models are found to contain errors in capital pricing treatment which when correct ed removes perverse responses and leads to monetary neutrality vanek s 1977 open model is shown not to be a labor managed econ omy model but rather one of any economy with fixed output a rational e xpectations macro model is developed in which labor managed firms mus t decompose price movement into its nominal and real parts this unce rtainty about the information content of observed prices leads to out put effects similar in spirit to the ward vanek models implications for monetary policy are explored copyright 1988 by the london school of economics and political science

relative wage effects of unions dictatorship and codetermination econometric evidence from germany t he present study estimates the effects of trade unions hitler s regime and codetermination on relative wages in germany i each of these establishments is considered to have had important implications for germany s labor market moreover a thorough understanding of their effects can be valuable for comparative purposes following a brief discussion of these phenomena and their hypothesized effects on wages the analytical model is developed in section ii the empirical results are reported in section iii and section iv contains the summary and conclusions the extensive literature on the relative wage effects of trade unions has focused almost exclusively on the union impact in north america2 and more recently in great britain 3 since the german institutions of industrial and labor relations differ considerably from their angloamerican counterparts4 and often have been studied as a successful possibly superior system which might be adopted by others it is worthwhile exploring the magnitude of the union wage effect in the german institutional setting in particular it has been argued that compared to their american and british counterparts the continental unions tend to place more emphasis on political and social rather than economic achievements 5 if this hypothesis is correct then ceteris paribus the estimated relative wage effect of german unions ought to be smaller than that found in the united states and great britain with the advent of hitler s regime in 1933 there was a dramatic transformation of the existing political and economic institutions trade unions which in 1932 represented over 40 of the industrial labor force were promptly abolished6 and replaced by a government operated labor front 7 strikes and lockouts were forbidden and wages were determined centrally 8 while the effects of these changes on the cultural political and social life have been well documented few economic studies attempted to analyze the effect of hitler s regime on wages and incomes moreover those that did used a qualitative or only a loose quantitative approach partially as a result of the lack of a systematic wage series prior to 1934 9 w krelle 1962 p 17 has shown for example that labor income received for publication july 30 1979 revision accepted for publication may 1 1980 cornell university i would like to thank orley ashenfelter albert rees and two anonymous referees for helpful comments i have also benefited from discussions with j s butler william greene louis phlips and katherine terrell any remaining errors are of course my own this research was in part supported by a grant to the princeton university economics department from the sloan foundation i the term codetermination refers to the german participatory system of management as it was originally established in the federal republic by the 1951 codetermination act and the 1952 works constitution act 2 the most important work and collection of references on the subject is still lewis 1963 among the later studies in the private sector are ashenfelter 1972 ashenfelter and johnson 1972 bloch and kuskin 1978 boskin 1972 de menil 1971 rosen 1969 and schmidt and strauss 1976 public sector studies are summarized by lewin 1977 x see especially pencavel 1974 mulvey 1976 and metcalf 1977 4 needless to say there are important differences between the u s and british systems of industrial and labor relations they exhibit considerable homogeneity however when compared to the systems in continental europe historically the relatively most salient features of the german system have been 1 trade union affiliation with political parties and or religioiis organizations 2 industrial unionism 3 governmental interference in industrial and labor relations and 4 paternalistic management world war ii led to the unification of the formerly splintered unions in the deutsches gewerkschafts bund dgb close collaboration with the social democratic party sdp and the establishment of codetermination for institutional references see almanasreh 1977 fiirstenberg 1969 1977 schregle 1978 and vollmer 1976 1979 5 see kassalow 1969 1980 and windmuller 1969 6 employers associations followed their lead in 1934 7 the labor front included all employees and employers it represented the nazi government in the factories and possessed broad powers over its member subjects 8 in fact the entire economy underwent considerable centralization as hitler proclaimed his first four year plan in 1933 and a second one in 1936 9 among the most thorough and informative of these conventional studies is that of bry 1960 for a discussion of the data see gerss 1977

do combined heat and power plants perform case study of publicly funded projects in new york abstract we investigate lower than expected capacity factors of combined heat and power plants using a publicly available dataset of hourly performance for plants in the state of new york low utilization of a chp indicates underperformance we examine possible causes of this underperformance including economic arbitrage poor maintenance and operational practices oversizing of plants and reliability and resiliency needs based on seasonal and weekday weekend capacity factor averages we find that there is not enough evidence to support the economic arbitrage cause out of 99 plants in the dataset 64 plants have average capacity factor below 60 indicating they are either oversized and or poorly maintained this suggests that the current practice of one time fixed incentive kw favors investment in capacity with no incentive for utilization unlike a production credit which incentivizes generation kw h from a policy perspective this paper recommends better pre engineering assessment for correct sizing as well as revision of incentives based on performance additional information should be collected so that a more accurate ongoing analysis of the societal benefits of chp projects can be made lastly the energy efficiency gap may be smaller than is commonly assumed and other options should be explored to meet energy efficiency goals

wage bargaining imperfect competition and the markup optimizing microfoundations abstract combining the conjectural variations and nash bargaining approaches it is shown that the demand insensitive markup depends on the bargaining power of unions relative to owners of firms in addition to more standard product market characteristics

a comparison of alternative models for the demand for medical care we have tested alternative models of the demand for medical care using experimental data the estimated response of demand to insurance plan is sensitive to the model used we therefore use a split sample analysis and find that a model that more closely approximates distributional assumptions and uses a nonparametric retransformation factor performs better in terms of mean squared forecast error simpler models are inferior either because they are not robust to outliers e g anova anocova or because they are inconsistent when strong distributional assumptions are violated e g a two parameter box cox transformation

optimal departures from marginal cost pricing focuses on departures from marginal cost pricing optimal allocation or resources level of tax revenue that will be collected by the government theorems developed for resource allocation ebsco

reviewing electricity production cost assessments a thorough review of twelve recent studies of production costs from different power generating technologies was conducted and a wide range in cost estimates was found the reviewed studies show differences in their methodologies and assumptions making the stated cost figures not directly comparable and unsuitable to be generalized to represent the costs for entire technologies moreover current levelized costs of electricity methodologies focus only on the producer s costs while additional costs viewed from a consumer perspective and on external costs with impact on society should be included if these results are to be used for planning although this type of electricity production cost assessments can be useful the habit of generalizing electricity production cost figures for entire technologies is problematic cost escalations tend to occur rapidly with time the impact of economies of scale is significant costs are in many cases site specific and country specific circumstances affect production costs assumptions on the cost influencing factors such as discount rates fuel prices and heat credits fluctuate considerably and have a significant impact on production cost results electricity production costs assessments similar to the studies reviewed in this work disregard many important cost factors making them inadequate for decision and policy making and should only be used to provide rough ballpark estimates with respect to a given system boundary caution when using electricity production cost estimates are recommended and further studies investigating cost under different circumstances both for producers and society as a whole are called for also policy makers should be aware of the potentially widely different results coming from electricity production cost estimates under different assumptions

moral hazard and risk spreading in partnerships partnerships provide a classic example of the tradeoff between risk spreading and moral hazard the degree to which firms choose to spread risk and sacrifice efficiency incentives depends upon risk preferences for which data are typically unavailable we use a unique dataset on medical group practice to investigate this tradeoff risk aversion leads to compensation arrangements which spread risk through greater sharing of revenues we find that compensation arrangements with greater degrees of revenue sharing significantly reduce physician effort the results imply that changing the method of physician payment from fee for service to capitation will dramatically reduce physician effort