what has happened to union recognition in britain this paper examines the determinants of establishment level union recognition status using data from the three workplace industrial relations surveys of 1980 1984 and 1990 our theoretical approach argues that product and labour market variables dated at or around the establishment s setup should be considered the crucial determinants of recognition status confirmation of these predictions is found for private sector manufacturing establishments in the econometric analysis of particular interest are i the nonlinear relationship between historic industry quasi rents and recognition status and the stability of this aspect of the model over the three data sets and ii a marked downward shift in recognition probabilities that occurred during the 1980s which seems to be largely a consequence of the failure to organize new establishments set up in the 1980s

accounting rates of return many economic studies provide empirical evidence regarding cross sectional differences in firm profitability in most of these studies firm profitability is measured by an accounting rate of return net income dividend by the book value of assets hereafter arr rather than an economic rate of profit franklin fisher and john mcgowan define the firm s economic rate of profit irr as that interest rate which equates the present value of its net revenue stream to its initial outlay 1983 p 82 fisher and mcgowan examine the analytic relation between a firm s arr and its irr in a series of examples and conclude that the arr is such a bad surrogate for the irr that the results of arr based empirical studies are likely to be totally misleading p 91 william long and david ravenscraft 1984 have criticized the theoretical work of fisher and mcgowan because the nature of the analytic relationship between the arr and the irr in the context of highly simplified hypothetical examples may not be indicative of the nature of the relationship in empirical settings their criticism adopts the utilitarian view that the arr has to be treated as a suitable surrogate for the irr as long as no preferable alternative measure of profitability is available for empirical work this view has merit as long as the measurement error which is contained in the arr is random rather than systematic unfortunately the nature and extent of the measurement error which is contained in the arr in a particular empirical setting can only be determined unequivocally if the irr is unequivocally known in such a case of course there would be no need to rely on the arr at all due to this unhappy circle empirical research on firm profitability has continued to rely on the arr despite the fact that many persons reasonably believe that the results of such research may be totally misleading fisher and mcgowan g c harcourt 1965 while others reasonably believe that the results are reliable enough to form a basis for policy decisions long and ravenscraft recent work by y ijiri 1978 1979 1980 and by myself 1982 has shown that conditional irr estimates can be obtained from data in firms financial statements while these irr estimates are conditional they do abstract from certain extraneous factors that influence arrs and that differ across firms consequently the conditional irr estimates are free from some of the sources of measurement error which are known to contaminate the arr thus the conditional irr estimates can be used to provide evidence on whether these sources of measurement error have or have not affected the outcome of prior studies in which profitability was measured by the arr such evidence can help to objectively resolve the conflict between the opposing views on the reliability of arr based profitability research this paper uses conditional irr estimates to examine the properties of the measurement error in the arr in a study of the relationship between firm profitability and firm size the remainder of the paper is organized as follows in section i the theoretical work of fisher and mcgowan is used professor of accounting university of iowa iowa city ia 52242 i gratefully acknowledge the comments of william albrecht dan dhaliwal gary fethke franklin fisher scott linn william r kinney jr and the participants of a workshop at the university of florida on earlier versions of this paper 1 some authors for example william long and david ravenscraft 1984 have used the sales margin ratio earnings sales as a measure of profitability however if one views profitability as return per unit of sacrifice the sales margin ratio is not a profitability measure since it ignores the sacrifice or investment required to generate a dollar of sales consequently this paper does not attempt to shed any insight into prior studies that have relied on the sales margin ratio as a measure of profitability

union retreat and regional economic performance the uk experience monastiriotis v 2007 union retreat and regional economic performance the uk experience regional studies 41 1 14 a panel of regional data is used to investigate the impact the well documented decline in trade unionism in the uk had on the economic performance of its regions the analysis departs from the traditional firm level and cross sectional analyses and looks at the economy wide effects of unionism the findings provide evidence in line with theory that predicts that unions will increase wages and unemployment but they also indicate that unionism is positively related to productivity and incomes although in all cases the effects are non linear it is concluded that unionism is not necessarily a burden for the economy so long that the beneficial wage productivity effects outweigh the negative effects on employment monastiriotis v 2007 le declin syndical et la performance economique regionale etude de cas du r u regional studies 41 1 14 on emploie des donnees regionales provenant d un

sequential bargaining in a market with one seller and two different buyers abstract a matching and bargaining model in a market with one seller and two buyers differing only in their reservation price is analyzed no subgame perfect equilibrium exists for stationary strategies we demonstrate the existence of inefficient equilibria in which the low buyer receives the good with large probability even as friction becomes negligible we investigate the relationship between the use of nash and sequential bargaining nash bargaining seems applicable only when the sequential approach yields a unique stationary strategy subgame perfect equilibrium

decentralized trading strategic behaviour and the walrasian outcome for a market with a finite number of agents pairwise matching and bargaining it is shown that even when the market is frictionless the equilibrium is not necessarily competitive it depends on the amount of information agents use if their behaviour is conditioned only on the sets of agents present and the time the competitive solution is the unique subgame perfect equilibrium if agents have full information and condition their behaviour on some of it there are also noncompetitive equilibria in which behaviour depends on specific information such as the identity of the trading partner and past events

unions and profitability over the 1980s some evidence on union firm bargaining in the united kingdom in this paper an attempt is made to assess the behaviour of the rate of return on sales of unionised firms as compared to the non unionised ones in the late 1980s in the united kingdom the main aim is to examine what has happened to the relationship between unionisation and profitability after the changes in the union legislation competition environment and cyclical variations that took place over this period the impact of different forms of union firm bargaining on the union profitability effect is also examined the data reveal that the negative union effect on profitability exists even after controlling for firm specific fixed effects but that it has been sharply reduced over the 1980s

unions and monopoly profits using cross sectional data for u s manufacturing the author identifies a negative effect of unions on the profits of highly concentrated industries and virtually no effect on the profits of unconcentrated industries the results for concentrated industries are explained in terms of the monopoly model which predicts a negative effect of unions on profits equivalent to the change in employer s surplus the monopoly model also suggests that previous profit studies which omitted the union variable were likely to significantly underestimate the relationship between concentration and profits this prediction is also supported by empirical evidence m sany studies have demonstrated the ability of unions to raise wages above the level of nonunion workers higher union wages in turn may affect the level of prices employment capital intensity productivity and profits recent studies by clark 1982 and freeman 1983 have found significant negative effects of unions on profit rates in the united states using line of business data from 1970 to 1980 for 900 firms clark found a negative effect of unions on the rate of return to capital more specifically the union effects were found to be significantly negative when market shares were low and insignificant when market shares were high according to clark the absence of a union effect in the latter case can be explained by the ability of firms with market power to pass on higher union wages into higher prices 1982 p 47 on the other hand freeman 1983 using data from the survey of manufactures from 1958 to 1976 and the internal revenue service from 1965 to 1976 also found a negative effect of unions on profits contrary to clark s results however the union profit effect was negative only in concentrated industries the point of contention appears to be the role of concentration in determining the union profit effect rather than the overall negative impact of unions the results of clark and freeman are important because previous industrial organization research on profit rates generally ignored unions for instance of the forty six profit studies surveyed by weiss 1974 none included a union variable more recently a profit study in this review by ravenscraft 1983 using high quality line of business data from the federal trade commission also ignored unionization as will be demonstrated the omission of the union variable leads to an understatement of the effect of industrial concentration on profits this means that concentrated industries generate much greater profits than indicated by previous research in order to measure the size of the understatement a new concept employer s surplus is developed which illustrates the theoretical impact of a union wage increase on monopoly profits the empirical estimates of employer s surplus in this paper indicate how monopoly profits are divided between firms and unions most of the data used in this study were obtained from james medoff and charles brown 2 unlike the previous two studies each observation corresponds to a state by two digit sic industry for manufacturing in 1972 because of the large variations in unionization across states this data set offers a useful test of the union profit effect i employer s surplus according to accepted theory the profit maximizing monopolist will employ labor up to the point where the market wage equals the marginal revenue product mrp 3 if for simplicity we assume that all other factors are variable then the mrp curve represents the monopolist s long run demand for labor in the absence of unions employment is determined by the intersection of the mrp curve and nonunion wage wn as pictured in figure 1 if unions raise wages to wa employment will decrease from ln to l with the reducreceived for publication november 28 1983 revision accepted for publication july 6 1984 eastern washington university i am very grateful to dave bunting lisa brown bill dickens claire brown and george strauss for their valuable suggestions on this research this paper is a revised version of chapter 3 from the author s ph d thesis the union impact on profits productivity and prices university of california berkeley 1 see parseley 1980 for a recent review of this literature 2 i would like to thank brown and medoff for making these data available to me 3 marginal revenue product is equal to marginal revenue multiplied by marginal physical product see rees 1979

the type agent core for exchange economies with asymmetric information abstract the type agent core is a new solution concept for exchange economies with asymmetric information it coincides with the set of subgame perfect equilibrium outcomes of a simple competitive screening game uninformed intermediaries help the agents to cooperate in an attempt to make some profit the paper extends the work of perez castrillo cooperative outcomes through non cooperative games games econ behav 7 1994 428 440 to exchange economies with non transferable utility and asymmetric information the type agent core is a subset of wilson s coarse core wilson information efficiency and the core of an economy econometrica 46 1978 807 816 it is never empty even though it may be a strict subset of wilson s fine core in addition it converges towards the set of constrained market equilibria as the economy is replicated

bargaining and value we present and analyze a model of noncooperative bargaining among n participants applied to situations describable as games in coalitional form this leads to a unified solution theory for such games that has as special cases the shapley value in the transferable utility tu case the nash bargaining solution in the pure bargaining case and the recently introduced maschler owen consistent value in the general nontransferable utility ntu case moreover we show that any variation in a certain class of our bargaining procedure which generates the shapley value in the tu setup must yield the consistent value in the general ntu setup

bargaining in a network of buyers and sellers abstract we analyze bargaining between buyers and sellers who are connected by an exogenously given network players can make repeated alternating public offers that may be accepted by any of the responders linked to each specific proposer our purpose is to find the conditions of the network which drive the price distribution in equilibrium this paper uses graph theory tools to provide necessary and sufficient conditions regarding the architecture of networks for the subgame perfect equilibrium of the bargaining game to coincide with the walrasian outcome

the structural determinants of union bargaining power this paper investigates the structural determinants of variation in union power across manufacturing industries using a pooled sample of unionized establishments from the expenditure on employee compensation surveys of 1968 72 the author estimates wage equations augmented with measures of product market structure bargaining structure and the size distribution of unions the results suggest that union wage gains are greatest where discretionary pricing power enhances employers ability to pay and where unions achieve high coverage practice centralized bargaining and avoid union fragmentation on the other hand centralized bargaining provides no advantage in competitive industries

a practice approach to the institutionalization of economic degrowth the degrowth literature is rich in critical debate about the unsustainability of the growth economies and in normative envisioning of a transition it lacks analyses on actual materialization and the nature of the change required there have been calls for research that pay attention to institutional constraints and possibilities of implementing a democratic process of sustainable degrowth this paper introduces a practice approach to institutional agency as a fruitful tool for future studies and politics of degrowth the potential of this approach is demonstrated through a struggle between finnish timebanking activists and the tax authorities the cultural and institutional transition promoted by radical bottom up initiatives requires a disruption of existing institutional arrangements some of which may be very persistent and supported by defenders who want to maintain the present institutional order in the case example the authorities and politicians managed to preserve the mechanisms through which certain sanctions are associated with the non compliance of timebanking with the income tax law a practice approach to institutionalization increases our understanding of institutional persistence and makes visible forces that support the present status quo it also enhances understanding of the opposing dynamics and gives tools to engage in more effective efforts to change institutions

profit margins and the business cycle evidence from uk manufacturing firms this paper presents some empirical models of profitability using panel data covering 709 large u k companies ove r the 1970s and 1980s focusing specifically on the role of aggregate demand shocks in shaping firm level profitability in basic regressi ons and in quite complex econometric models the results suggest that firm level profit margins fell heavily during the deep manufacturing recession of the early 1980s and as such are consistent with model s predicting the procyclical nature of profit margins this result hol ds across different product groups producer goods consumer durables a nd nondurables though the timing of the impact of aggregate shocks appears to differ copyright 1993 by blackwell publishing ltd

union wage differentials product market influences and the division of rents this paper examines the extent to which product market conditions limit the ability of trade unions to establish wage differentials over nonunion pay the mean union pay differential is estimated to be of the order of 8 percent to 10 percent in establishments with some degree of product market power but zero in establishments facing competitive product market conditions when competitive conditions are faced a preentry closed shop and high union coverage of the industry are both required it is estimated that only 5 percent of the establishments in which there are significant differentials over nonunion pay face generally competitive product market conditions copyright 1990 by royal economic society

equilibrium in a market with sequential bargaining this paper considers a market where pairs of agents who are interested in carrying out a transaction are brought together by a stochastic process and upon meeting initiate a bargaining process over the terms of the transaction the basic bargaining problem is treated with the strategic approach the paper derives the steady state equilibrium agreements analyzes their dependence on market conditions such as the relative numbers of agents of different types and discusses their relations with the competitive equilibrium outcome and other results in the search equilibrium literature this paper considers a market that operates in the following way pairs of agents who have mutual interest in carrying out a transaction are brought together by a stochastic process when two agents meet they initiate a bargaining process over the terms of the transaction if two agents reach an agreement a transaction takes place and they leave the market of course the bargaining positions and hence the agreement reached in any particular meeting will be affected by the conditions prevailing in the market these will include the chances that each of the negotiating parties have of meeting other partners in the event that the agreement in the current negotiations is delayed also the expected length of time required to achieve an alternative transaction and the expected behavior of alternative partners the study of such a market mechanism is of interest for two reasons firstly it captures some realistic aspects of the trade in certain specific markets e g asset markets such as housing and some labor markets secondly it contributes to an understanding of the micro mechanisms of price formation and their role in shaping market outcomes in both cases the features studied are largely neglected in the traditional market equilibrium analyses the related literature includes the articles by diamond 4 5 diamond and maskin 6 mortensen 8 9 and zusman and bell 13 these articles consider markets of the type described above in which transactions are concluded at pairwise meetings of agents the major difference between our work and these articles is in the approach to the basic bargaining problem in the cited articles it is assumed that a meeting is concluded with an instantaneous agreement which divides the associated surplus in an arbitrary predetermined way when the surplus is assumed to be divided equally the division rule is in fact nash s axiomatic bargaining solution in contrast the present paper treats the basic bargaining problem with the strategic approach see rubinstein 19 which constitutes an attempt to look into the bargaining black box this approach explicitly models the time dimension of the bargaining process describes in detail the bargaining procedure and justifies the agreement as a perfect equilibrium in

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

the union impact on profits evidence from industry price cost margin data this paper uses industry price cost margin data to estimate the extent to which unions reduce profits estimates allowing for the endogeneity of union status are contrasted with estimates that assume union status is exogenous and not determined in part by either profitability or industry structure endogeneity is found to be an important consideration in estimating the union impact on profits two stage estimates are considerably larger than ols estimates the final section explores the total estimated redistribution from capital to labor in the manufacturing sector an important conclusion is that unions raise prices less than was previously believed

local currencies for purposive degrowth a quality check of some proposals for changing money as usual this article provides a quality check of the degrowth movement s proposal of local currencies as tools for advancing socially equitable and ecologically sustainable degrowth the article draws comprehensively upon mainly english language academic research about four widespread local currency types lets time banks hour currencies and convertible local currencies clcs to assess their performance with respect to four degrowth related criteria community building advancement of alternative values in economic exchange facilitation of alternative livelihoods and eco localization lets have been found to support alternative livelihoods under quite uncommon conditions and contribute indirectly to eco localization by moderately facilitating informal resale repair and sharing of commercially produced goods although their burdensome management and confinement to small memberships limit their usefulness time banks help expand social networks and are best at reaching the socially excluded however they are confined to unskilled personal services and dependent on grant funding hour currencies do not stand out with regard to any criteria but may have a minor capacity to promote local purchasing clcs are best at attracting local businesses but no significant evidence of their said capacity to localize supply chains has surfaced as yet and their business friendly design works to the detriment of other criteria in sum existing research provides a very weak basis for advocating local currencies as tools for purposive degrowth local currencies are here categorized as two utopian socialist approaches the behind society s back variety of lets and hour currencies and the appeal to elites variety of time banks and clcs marx and engels s critiques of these approaches remain valid successful monetary systems require resources that are not available behind society s back notably the power to levy taxes and designate by which means they can be paid local currencies that appeal for elite support without mass popular backing have shaken off most radical connotations and are vulnerable to changing policy agendas given the present historical conjuncture of popular outrage against the banking sector this paper argues that the degrowth movement would improve its chances of contributing to purposive degrowth by prioritizing government centred ecological reform of the monetary system over local currencies

rubinstein auctions on competition for bargaining partners abstract this paper analyzes the effect of competition for bargaining partners on the prices that prevail in thin markets as well as how the matches are simultaneously determined three trading processes or bargaining procedures are described in all the variants that we consider except for one case of public offers either there is no pure strategy subgame perfect equilibrium or such equilibria exhibit delay in reaching agreement journal of economic literature classification numbers c72 d43

willing consumers or locked in policies for a sustainable consumption postmodern explanations of consumer behaviour stress social and psychological factors to the neglect of explanations based on structural issues such as the working life conditions which favour a work and spend lifestyle the conditions of urban living or the effects of pervasive marketing this paper argues that consumers may not be so keen and willing but are rather locked in by circumstances some of these circumstances are deliberately created by other interests and a policy to limit consumption must look for adequate means over a large and varied field in the end shorter working hours may be an important key to a more sustainable future 2002 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

local clearing unions as stabilizers of local economic systems a stock flow consistent perspective various examples of complementary currencies have recently emerged in europe in response to the impact of the 2007 financial crisis they have been variously labelled as social local and alternative money but their economic meaning has still to be discussed on the one hand they have been hailed as innovative tools for socio territorial policies with a focus on localist anti globalist and anti capitalist values on the other the emphasis on the value of currencies as instruments of alternative territorial development runs the risk of overshadowing issues concerning the specific features of such projects the first part of this paper puts forward an interpretation of the current situation as a crisis of the liquidity principle and suggests that the principle of clearing instead represents the primary point of reference for any institutional arrangement aimed at restoring a balanced relationship between lenders and borrowers a critical review of known european complementary monetary circuits is followed by examination of the sardex clearing system the paper then goes on to argue by means of a stock flow consistent model that complementary monetary circuits can serve to stabilise local economic systems in particular a local clearing union for local exchanges has the effect of stabilising the profits of firms while attenuating the impact of the credit crunch at same time

the folk theorem with imperfect public information the authors study repeated games in which players observe a public outcome that imperfectly signals the actions played they provide conditions guaranteeing that any feasible individually rational payoff vector of the stage game can arise as a perfect equilibrium of the repeated game with sufficiently little discounting the central condition requires that there exist action profiles with the property that for any two players no two deviations one by either player give rise to the same probability distribution over public outcomes the results apply to principal agent partnership oligopoly and mechanism design models and to one shot games with transferable utilities copyright 1994 by the econometric society

the relationship between union wage and profitability effects abstract this paper presents empirical evidence on the relationship between union effects on wages and on profitability as expected unions are found to increase wages albeit significantly in smaller firms only and to reduce profitability in a sample of british engineering firms over the period 1979 1982 the key question asked is whether the observed union effect on profitability is no more than a further manifestation of the observed wage effect estimates of profit equations normalised to take account of the union wage effect do not reject the hypothesis that it is

on the misuse of the profits sales ratio to infer monopoly power the common use of the profits sales ratio as a measure of the lerner index of monopoly power is flawed even with the assumption of constant returns because of problems connected with the valuation of capital the size of the error is related to the cost of capital the growth rate of the firm the depreciation method used and most important the shape of the stream of benefits resulting from an investment examples show that the error can be quite large further the error is likely to be systematically related to the variables used in regression studies

in pursuit of monopoly power recent quantitative work in industrial economics this paper reviews empirical work in industrial organization devoted to the question of inferring the existence of monopoly power from data on observed market outcomes like profits and prices the discussion covers inter industry work long conventional in the area newer developments in intra industry analysis and case studies and concludes with some remarks on a small but growing body of work assessing market dynamics the wide range of studies reviewed all generally reveal that market power exists in many industries

the determination of profit margins in uk manufacturing this paper examines the determinants of profit margins in 91 u k manufacturing industries over the period 1983 86 it considers how the inclusion of labor market characteristics in empirical industrial organization specifications affects the estimated concentration margins relationship the empirical work pays detailed attention to the endogenous nature of variables derived from structural industrial organization models the authors report instrumental variables estimates of margins equations in which there emerges a significant role for labor market characteristics indeed both unionization and industrywide unemployment are found to depress profit margins the impact of concentration is seen to be biased downward when these variables are omitted

a multilateral telephone bargaining game abstract this paper studies a multilateral bargaining game with unanimity rule offers and responses are communicated through private telephone conversations and they are never revealed to all players with a plausible restriction on beliefs we obtain a unique perfect public equilibrium

competition and the capital labor conflict abstract this paper analyzes the distributional effects of changes in the intensity of product market competition the focus is on the interaction between imperfect competition in product markets and bargaining in the labor market the main result is that while a uniform intensification of product market competition increases employment it may cause real wages to fall in the short run as well as in the long run this is especially likely if labor market regulations are favorable to workers therefore product market and labor market regulations tend to reinforce each other politically and compensatory fiscal transfers may be needed in order to enact employment enhancing deregulation policies

sustainable consumption the new economics and community currencies developing new institutions for environmental governance seyfang g 2006 sustainable consumption the new economics and community currencies developing new institutions for environmental governance regional studies 40 781 791 sustainable consumption is gaining currency as a new environmental policy objective but there is a limit to the changes in consumption behaviour that individuals can make within current socio economic frameworks the new economics literature argues that sustainable consumption is characterized by five factors localization reducing ecological footprints community building collective action and building new social institutions these form a set of indicators for the evaluation of initiatives and policies community currencies have been put forward as a new tool to promote sustainable consumption but until now there has been no appraisal of their ability to deliver this goal three different community currency types are described and their effectiveness and potential in enabling more sustainable consumption patterns are assess

union rent seeking intangible capital and market value of the firm abstract this study considers the effect of unions on intangi ble capital investment and profitability within the context of a market value rather than a more traditional accounting based approach theory is provided suggesting unions are able to affect profitability by sharing in the economic returns to firm specific intangible capital in support of this hypothesis we find unionization reduces the returns to r d and produces a corresponding limiting influence on r d investment at the firm level i introduction a n extensive literature in economics has ex amined the determinants of profitability with much of the focus centering on the role of market structure only recently however have the effects of labor unions on profitability been analyzed ths is surprising since labor economists long have emphasized union influences on wages and productivity that in turn may affect profitabil ity in recent studies freeman 1983 and karier 1985 report a significant limiting influence of unions on price cost margins in high concentra tion manufacturing industries using firm level data and the market based tobin s

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

a non cooperative bargaining model with strategically timed offers abstract rubinstein s alternating offers bargaining model is enriched by allowing players to choose when and whether or not to make an offer time is continuous and players make offers whenever they wish it is assumed that upon making an offer players must wait a fixed amount of time before making another it is shown that if players can react arbitrarily quickly to their opponent s offers then all subgame perfect equilibrium outcomes are rubinstein like in particular efficient however if it takes time to react then some delay can be supported this potential delay becomes arbitrarily large as reaction times increase journal of economic literature classification numbers c78 c72

coalition theory and its applications a survey we survey some of the major advances in coalition theory in recent years we then look at the recent applications of the theory in the area of political economy and touch upon some important theoretical and applied open questions in the field

growing green money mapping community currencies for sustainable development abstract parallel sustainable monetary systems are being developed by civil society groups and non governmental organisations ngos informed by ecological economics perspectives on development value economic scale and growth and responding to the unsustainability of current global financial systems these parallel systems of exchange or community currencies are designed to promote sustainable development by localising economic development building social capital and substituting for material consumption valuing work which is marginalised in conventional labour markets and challenging the growth based monetary system however this international movement towards community based ecological economic practices is under researched this paper presents new empirical evidence from the first international study of the scope and character of community currencies it identifies the diversity scale geography and development trajectory of these initiatives discusses the implications of these findings for efforts to achieve sustainable development and identifies future research needs to help harness the sustainability potential of these initiatives

bilateral trading and incomplete information price convergence in a small market abstract we study a model of decentralised bilateral interactions in a small market where one of the sellers has private information about her value in addition to this seller with private information there are two identical buyers and another seller whose valuation is commonly known to be in between the two possible valuations of the seller with private information we consider an infinite horizon game with simultaneous one sided offers and simultaneous responses we construct one particular pbe of the game and show that as the discount factor goes to 1 prices in all transactions converge to the same value we then show that this is the case with any stationary equilibrium of the game that is the asymptotic outcome is unique across all stationary equilibria

unions and the capture of economic rents an investigation using british firm level data this paper considers the relationship between unions and profitability in a sample of large british firms in 1984 and 1985 the initial finding is that unionised firms have significantly lower profit margins than otherwise comparable non union firms tests of whether the ability of unions to influence profit margins varies with the product and labour market characteristics of the firms in which they are located are then conducted the ability of unions to capture economic rents is seen to be significantly greater in firms which have a high market share and or operate in highly unionised industries

capacity and competition empirical evidence on uk panel data following d kreps and j scheinkman 1983 it is common to view the difference between cournot and bertrand competition as depending on production capacity bertrand undercutting is only feasible if firms have capacity to serve the market gained if firms are capacity constrained the cournot model is more appropriate this paper tests the capacity and competition idea by looking at the relationship between profits and capacity constraints if capacity constrained firms become more cournot like it should be positive using survey data on capacity constraints merged into a panel industry data set for the united kingdom the authors find a robust positive relationship copyright 1994 by blackwell publishing ltd

the validity of profits structure studies with particular reference to the ftc s line of business data the simple proposition that consumerdamaging collusion is more likely to occur when there are fewer competitors has given rise not only to legal restrictions of economic activity thought to restrict output but also to an enormous amount of empirical work attempting to relate market concentration to the exercise of monopoly power most such studies measured market structure by an index of concentration for example four firm concentration or herfindahl and performance by accounting profit for example net profit divided by assets or price cost margins sales less direct costs divided by sales from the positive statistically significant correlations often found between greater concentration and profit with other factors presumably accounted for some researchers conclude that increases in concentration are anticompetitive and that concentration therefore is bad the concentration profits studies have been criticized essentially on two grounds one is that the positive relationship is not indicative of collusive behavior in particular oliver williamson 1968 john mcgee 1971 harold demsetz 1973 1974 and sam peltzman 1977 point out that higher profits could result from efficiencies experienced by large firms which resulted both in greater market shares and high levels of concentration analytical arguments show that higher profits logically follow as much from lower costs that are associated with higher levels of concentration as from collusion determined higher prices some empirical evidence that supports this belief is presented by demsetz peltzman and bradley gale and ben branch 1982 however their findings have been contested on the grounds that the data used are biased or inadequate or that the researchers have not demonstrated that the observed higher profits greater concentration relationship was caused by lower costs 2 the second criticism is that available data provide an inadequate basis for such conclusions the concentration numbers are based usually on industries defined by the commerce department s standard industrial classifications sic the sic definitions tend to be supply production rather than demand determined include nonhomogeneous products and exclude sales of similar products that are included in different sic groups or are imported the profit data are taken from accounting reports that provide poor measures of economic values weiss 1974 describes many of these problems however he does not believe that these shortcomings invalidate the studies as weiss 1979 concludes

bargaining and search with incomplete information about outside options abstract this paper considers a model of bargaining in which the seller makes offers and the buyer can search at a cost for an outside option the outside option cannot be credibly communicated and the seller s offer is recallable by the buyer for one period there are essentially two equilibrium regimes for sufficiently high search cost the game ends immediately otherwise the search occurs in equilibrium compared to the case where the buyer can communicate his outside option the seller is worse off and the game results in search for a smaller set of values of the search cost i e less equilibrium delay c72

union relative wage effects a survey of macro estimates this paper surveys union wage effect estimates drawn from empirical cross section wage equations fitted to macro aggregated data in 34 post 1963 studies containing such equations each estimate is the partial derivative of the dependent wage variable in logarithmic units with respect to the extent of unionism fraction unionized variable in the equation this paper shows that these estimates contain a mixture in uncertain ratio of the union nonunion wage differential or wage gap on the one hand and an extent of unionism effect on the other therefore the macro estimates should not be interpreted as wage gap estimates

transparency complementarity and holdout this paper characterizes the conditions under which holdout i e bargaining inefficiency may or may not be significant in a two sided one buyer many seller model with complementarity we address this problem in a very general setup with a bargaining protocol that is symmetric and allows for both publicly observable as well as secret offers and a technology that allows for variable degrees of complementarity the central insight is that the transparency of the bargaining protocol formalized by whether offers are publicly observable or secret as well as the extent of complementarity play a critical role in generating efficiency even with perfect complementarity holdout seems to be largely resolved whenever the bargaining protocol is public but not if it is secret further irrespective of the bargaining protocol holdout is resolved if the marginal contribution of the last seller is not too large

on the application of accounting rates of return the article presents a study on the application of some accounting concepts and functions in economic analysis according to the author his analysis will provide a basis on which accountants can discriminate between the alternative rules and standards available to them by reference to their relevance to the information required by investors or regulators the author states that current cost accounts should be used with care the appropriate method for economic interpretation of rates of return on capital deals with the application of the balance sheet conventions of current cost accounting

cooperation v rivalry price cost margins by line of business fl c bureau of economics working papers are preliminary materials circulated to stimulate discussion and critical comment all data contained in them are in the public domain this includes information obtained by the commission which has become part of public record the analyses and conclusions set forth are those of the authors and do not n essarily ref1 t the views of other members of the bureau of economics other commission staff or the commission itself upon request single copies of the paper will be provided references in publications to fit bureau of economics working papers by ffc economists other than acknowledgement by a writer tnat ne has access to such unpublished materials should be cleared with the author to prot t the tentative character of these papers

a noncooperative theory of coalitional bargaining the authors explore a sequential offers model of n person coalitional bargaining with transferable utility and with time discounting their focus is on the efficiency properties of stationary equilibria of strictly superadditive games when the discount factor delta is sufficiently large it is shown that delay and the formation of inefficient subcoalitions can occur in equilibrium the latter for some or all orders of proposer however efficient stationary equilibrium payoffs converge to a point in the core as delta approaches one strict convexity is a sufficient condition for there to exist an efficient stationary equilibrium payoff vector for sufficiently high delta

a noncooperative view of coalition formation and the core a noncooperative implementation of the core is provided for games with transferable utility the implementation obtained here is meant to reflect the standard motivation for the core as closely as possible in the model proposed time is continuous this idealized treatment of time is most amenable for capturing an essential feature of the core there is always time to reject a noncore proposal before it is consumated

margins concentration unions and the business cycle theory and evidence for britain abstract a number of recent studies have examined the cyclical relationship between price cost margins concentration and unions u s data has concluded that unions reduce margins margins vary over the cycle and concentration unionisation and the cycle interact in their effect on margins however there is almost no theory to account for these results we propose a simple theory that assumes only that there is overhead labour present at the firm this produces theoretical predictions that can explain these results and discriminate between existing theories we present results of our own using u k panel data and show similar findings to the u s

unions and the financial performance of british private sector establishments summary this paper considers the relationship between unions and financial performance using data from the 1980 and 1984 workplace industrial relations surveys a qualitative indicator of financial performance is utilized and ordered probit estimates presented these indicate that unionized establishments are characterized by lower performance levels than are non union concerns the interface between union effects and relative market power is also explored and the ability of unions to extract a share of the available rents is found to be greater if the plants in which they are located possess a higher market share

policy objectives and performance in a mixed market with bargaining abstract we analyse a mixed duopoly in which wages and salaries are determined by nash bargaining and where the public firm s unit costs depend on its objectives because of constant returns to scale welfare maximisation without restriction would eliminate or significantly weaken the private firm therefore we focus on constrained welfare maximisation in which case unit costs are normally higher in the public firm on the other hand the private firm may even earn more than in a monopoly if the public firm maximises profits or if the constraint offers too much protection

order independent equilibria we study a noncooperative game of coalition formation based on an underlying game in coalitional form we introduce order independent equilibria oie a strategy profile is an oie if for any specification of first movers in the sequential game it remains an equilibrium and leads to the same payoff our results are 1 payoffs in oie that use pure stationary strategies must be in the core of the underlying game in coalitional form 2 if the underlying game has the property that all its subgames have nonempty cores then for each payoff vector there exists an oie with the same payoff journal of economic literature classification numbers c70 c71 c72 c78

bargaining with outside options wages and employment in uk manufacturing 1974 1982 this paper studies the determinants of wages and employment at the firm level the question which is addressed is the extent to which external market pressures are important relative to economic variables which are specific to the firm one can interpret the former set of factors as outsider variables and the latter as reflecting the importance of insider variables the research is therefore a microeconomic investigation on insider versus outsider factors in wage and employment determination it can thus provide some evidence on the role played by the currently incumbent workers in affecting the economic conditions at the workplace see e g lindbeck and snower i986 i988 the issue has recently attracted considerable attention in view of its alleged capability of explaining the high and persistent levels of unemployment in western countries see also blanchard and summers i986 i987 and layard and bean i989 the theoretical model developed in the first part of the paper section i and then tested in the second part sections ii iv is a variant of the efficient bargains model of the labour market modified in accordance to recent developments in non cooperative game theory the classical model of labour bargaining is set out in mcdonald and solow i98i the firm and the union bargain over wages and employment simultaneously and the outcome is thus efficient in the sense of leontief 1946 traditional axiomatic bargaining