market clearing with stochastic security part i formulation the first of this two paper series formulates a stochastic security constrained multi period electricity market clearing problem with unit commitment the stochastic security criterion accounts for a pre selected set of random generator and line outages with known historical failure rates and involuntary load shedding as optimization variables unlike the classical deterministic reserve constrained unit commitment here the reserve services are determined by economically penalizing the operation of the market by the expected load not served the proposed formulation is a stochastic programming problem that optimizes concurrently with the pre contingency social welfare the expected operating costs associated with the deployment of the reserves following the contingencies this stochastic programming formulation is solved in the second companion paper using mixed integer linear programming methods two cases are presented a small transmission constrained three bus network scheduled over a horizon of four hours and the ieee reliability test system scheduled over 24 h the impact on the resulting generation and reserve schedules of transmission constraints and generation ramp limits of demand side reserve of the value of load not served and of the constitution of the pre selected set of contingencies are assessed

the effect of unions on the structure of wages a longitudinal analysis this paper studies the effects of unions on the structure of wages using an estimation technique that explicitly accounts for misclassification errors in reported union status and potential correlations between union status and unobserved productivity the econometric model is estimated separately for five skill groups using a large panel data set formed from the u s current population survey the results suggest that unions raise wages more for workers with lower levels of observed skills in addition the patterns of selection bias differ by skill group among workers with lower levels of observed skill unionized workers are positively selected whereas union workers are negatively selected from among those with higher levels of observed skill despite a large and sophisticated literature there is still substantial disagreement over the extent to which differences in the structure of wages between union and nonunion workers represent an effect of trade unions rather than a consequence of the nonrandom selection of unionized workers over the past decade several alternative approaches have been developed to control for unobserved heterogeneity between union and nonunion workers 2 one method that has been successfully applied in other areas of applied microeconometrics is the use of longitudinal data to measure the wage gains or losses of workers who change union status unfortunately longitudinal estimators are highly sensitive to measurement error even a small fraction of misclassified union status changes can lead to significant biases if the true rate of mobility between union and nonunion jobs is low this sensitivity led lewis 1986 to essentially dismiss the longitudinal evidence in his landmark survey of union wage effects in this paper i present some new evidence on the union wage effect based on a longitudinal estimator that explicitly accounts for misclassification errors in reported union status the estimator uses external information on union status misclassification rates along with the reduced form coefficients from a multi variate regression of wages on the observed sequence of union status indicators to isolate the causal effect of unions from any selection biases introduced by a correlation between union status and the permanent component of unobserved wage heterogeneity recognizing that unions may raise wages more or less for

do unionized firms hire better workers i introduction many economists firmly believe that union firms offset higher union wages by hiring better workers the contrasting view that union employers react to higher union wages by hiring poorer quality workers is regarded as impossible 1 yet this contrasting view is highly plausible in the context of standard economic modeling and with what is known about labor markets there is evidence supporting this view the standard story for unionized firms hiring better workers goes like this a union raises wages and the firm foils the union by hiring better quality workers the problem with this myopic story is that it ignores what happens in the future it assumes that unions will sit idly by and let union firms whittle away any union wage differential by hiring better quality workers i would argue that it is more likely that unions would respond to better quality workers by raising wages even more employers anticipating this may respond by hiring lower quality workers this article is the first to consider how unionized firms choose worker quality when they anticipate the future consequences of quality on wages under reasonable conditions these consequences cause employers to hire lower quality workers while i do not contend this always occurs i do argue that there are reasonable grounds for rejecting the better quality proposition in addition there is evidence that unionization often does result in lower quality workers the results presented here suggest that economists should look again at how unions affect wages productivity equality and society this is not the first paper to suggest unions lead to lower quality workers it is however the first to suggest this result is due to employers making profit maximizing decisions when they anticipate the future consequences of their actions there are two other articles that also suggest unions can lead to lower quality workers first robinson 1989 assumes that unionized employers do want higher quality workers but do not hire them because nonunion firms pay them more as the nonunion firms are assumed to have better monitoring technology and a more flexible reward system second bronars and lott 1989 show that unions that seek the maximum dues will want poorer quality workers while these models focus on factors that may prove to be important the model presented here is theoretically more forceful first it is based upon standard economic modeling second using ochkam s razor it assumes the least added factors and finally its central assumption that people anticipate the future has a large body of economic evidence behind it by demonstrating that the better quality proposition is not supported by conventional economic analysis this article shows the better quality proposition should not be given a greater weight in the priors of economists having done this these other models then should and hopefully will be examined more closely ii the case for unions leading to better quality workers in discussing the wage gap between union and nonunion workers h gregg lewis 1986 46 concisely presents the case that union firms select better workers i have strong priors on the direction of the selectivity bias let a union through collective bargaining impose on an employer higher wages for his workers than he otherwise would pay them with worker quality not tightly specified in the collective bargaining agreement the higher wages will lengthen the queue of the applicants for the unionized jobs including some applicants of greater productiveness than otherwise would have applied the employer has an incentive to evade the increase in his labor costs by employing workers of greater quality the evasion will take time and will be impeded by the cost of screening workers imperfect substitution in production among worker quality and employment constraints in the collective bargaining agreements

new perspectives on the innovation strategies of multinational enterprises lessons for technology policy in europe abstract the aim of this contribution is to learn more about changes in the innovation strategies of large multinational corporations whereby one focus is on internationalization aspects as sources for our analyses we reviewed the main empirical studies and gathered information and insights from 21 corporations our results show firstly that the internationalization of research and technology is still characterized by triadization involving companies from the us the european union and japan secondly qualitative motives are increasingly driving r d location decisions like learning from technological excellence and lead markets and dynamic interactions within the value chain thirdly the process of internationalization in research and technology has been accompanied by an increasingly selective focus on a very few locations and the concentration of innovation activities on worldwide centers of excellence we conclude that these changes in the innovation strategies of large multinational companies put several topics on the agenda for technology policy in europe 1 a stronger focus on extra european collaboration and mobility 2 strengthening the attractiveness of the european union to foreign r d investment and 3 the absorptive capacities of r d organizations in europe 4 a stronger integration of different policy areas and of indirect policy measures 5 as well as the establishment of a transparent and global framework for policy coordination and priority setting worldwide

reserve requirements to efficiently manage intra zonal congestion the security constrained unit commitment problem schedules power generators to minimize cost subject to operating constraints reserve requirements ensure that reserve is available to re balance the system following a contingency but do not guarantee reliability in congested systems where reserve activation is limited by transmission constraints operators improve reserve deliverability by limiting power flows and controlling the location of reserves zones are used to address inter zonal congestion but operators lack efficient ways to handle intra zonal congestion we propose dynamically relating minimum reserve levels to transmission stress in a computationally efficient approach that complements existing reserve models from the literature analysis on the ieee rts 96 test case demonstrates the approach can mitigate intra zonal congestion more economically than traditional reserve policies

search strategy in product innovation process theory and evidence from the evolution of agrochemical lead discovery process this paper investigates different problem solving strategies herein called search strategies in the process of product innovation it takes issue with the basic assumption of current models of the product innovation process pip which unrealistically consider that the actors of product innovation the product innovators are all hyper rational homogeneous and non choice restricted actors in order to take into account the more realistic view of the product innovators as bounded rational heterogeneous and choice restricted actors this paper proposes an alternative model of pip based on cognitive psychology according to this framework the options of search strategy available to each product innovator depend on certain problem solving related capabilities that he or she is able or not to use to examine the validity of this theoretical framework this paper investigates the phenomenon of the evolution of discovery methods in the agrochemical lead discovery process data for this investigation have been gathered through chronological product innovation survey of an agrochemical product registration database as well as a patent and publications index database results from this investigation seem to confirm the above argument copyright 2003 oxford university press

stochastic security for operations planning with significant wind power generation in their attempt to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions from electricity generation several countries are committed to install wind power generation up to and beyond the 10 20 penetration mark however the large scale integration of wind power represents a challenge for power system operations planning because wind power 1 cannot be dispatched in the classical sense and 2 its output varies as weather conditions change this warrants the investigation of alternative short term power system operations planning methods capable of better coping with the nature of wind generation while maintaining or even improving the current reliability and economic performance of power systems to this end this paper formulates a short term forward electricity market clearing problem with stochastic security capable of accounting for nondispatchable and variable wind power generation sources the principal benefit of this stochastic operation planning approach is that when compared to a deterministic worst case scenario planning philosophy it allows greater wind power penetration without sacrificing security

employment impact of inner city development projects the case of underground atlanta this paper makes use of a unique data set to explore the issue of whether inner city residents are more likely to be hired by a new inner city development than non residents a selection model with partial observability is specified and estimated this partial observability estimates at the hiring stage we determine holding individual and neighbourhood characteristics constant that while inner city residents are less likely to be considered hireable their greater propensity to apply for jobs at this development means that they were at least as likely as non residents to both apply and be hired we also tentatively conclude that distances between an applicant s residence and the location of the development does not appear to have been an issue in the application decision

job queues and the union status of workers this paper develops a model of the determination of the union status of workers that allows for the possibility of queuing for union jobs the empirical results derived using a sample from the university of michigan panel study of income dynamics are supportive of the queuing hypothesis the no queue model can be rejected using a likelihood ratio test this suggests that a simple probit or logit model for union status is misspecified because it is not based on any consistent behavioral theory an important implication of the model is that because most new entrants to the labor market prefer union jobs but cannot get them and because accrual of nonunion seniority makes workers progressively less likely to desire union jobs the union status of workers is largely determined by their success in being selected from the queue early in their working life

nonunion wage rates and the threat of unionization i investigate how the threat of union organization affects the wage paid to nonunion workers i start by outlining the standard model of wage determination by a nonunion employer when faced with the threat of union organization the model suggests that the nonunion wage will be directly related and the union wage gap will be inversely related to the threat i use repeated cross section data from the cps from 1977 2002 to develop a measure of the threat as the predicted probability of union membership i use this measure to estimate earnings functions that use several sources of variation in the likelihood of union membership to identify the threat effect in a manner that reduces the likelihood of omitted variable bias finally i investigate two cases where there has arguably been a change in the likelihood of union organization that is not correlated with changes in the demand for labor these include the wage changes surrounding the introduction of rightto work rtw laws in two states during the period studied and wage changes surrounding deregulation of key industries in the late 1970s and early 1980s the results are mixed the preferred estimates from the analysis using predicted probability of unionization as the threat measure imply very little relationship between either nonunion wages or the union wage gap and the threat the estimates that rely on the introduction of rtw laws show a significant relationship between nonunion wages and the introduction of rtw laws in one of the two states stronger evidence of threat effects is found in the experience of deregulated industries where regulation was a central factor in union strength

discontinuities and senior management assessing the role of recognition in pharmaceutical firm response to biotechnology despite an increasing emphasis on the role of senior management cognition in shaping organizational action there have been few attempts to link top management mental models to strategic choice in the face of discontinuous innovation this paper uses 23 years of data covering 15 major pharmaceutical firms to explore the degree to which each firm s response to the revolution in biotechnology was shaped by the senior team s recognition of biotechnology s importance controlling for a number of important alternative explanations we show that recognition may be an important predictor of action suggesting that cognition at the most senior level can play a critical role in shaping established firms response to discontinuities copyright 2003 oxford university press

causes and consequences of layoffs using probit analysis this article finds that differential treatment accounts for a substantial portion of the higher layoff rates of blacks in comparison to whites however women are found to be considerably less prone to layoffs than men with similar characteristics among those who obtained subsequent employment taking into account the possible selectivity bias in such a subsample white males are hurt more by layoffs than black males in terms of both short term and long term earnings growth women s earnings are not necessarily affected by layoff at all however whites and males are found to be more likely to be reemployed than blacks and females respectively

the determinants of workers union status evidence from the national longitudinal surveys using data from the 1980 wave of the young men nls sample this paper provides estimates of the queue model developed by farber to explain the process of union status determination the use of nls data largely avoids the censoring problem encountered by farber in estimating his model and permits direct estimation of crucial probabilities associated with the model despite important differences between econometric methodologies and the data sets analyzed the nls results support farber s conclusion that queueing for vacancies in existing union jobs is an important labor market phenomenon in particular supply constraints on the availability of union jobs are found to dominate worker preferences in explaining differences in extent of unionization by occupation and region but not race

mitigation of price spike in unit commitment a probabilistic approach abstract during the last decade electricity markets regulators in latin american countries have been concerned about the increasing costs of electrical energy to this end regulatory changes have been introduced to develop new criteria for price sanction which demonstrates the need to study this problem at the fundamental level until now the alternatives proposed and implemented have been aimed at modifying the way in sanctioning short term energy prices moving away from the rigorous application of the marginal cost theory this situation can be considered as the evidence that the characteristics of latin american electricity markets differ significantly from the ideal conditions that are necessary for the application of this conceptual framework this paper presents a methodology for establishing a metric for energy tariff s risk which is used in a procedure to mitigate price spikes in the process of the short term operational planning unit commitment the proposed methodology considers the most widely used mechanisms for the sanction of real time spot market prices in latin america which are based on the variable production costs the results from the application of this methodology to a test power system with hydrothermal and non conventional wind energy resources show an effective reduction of price volatility

a probabilistic reserve market incorporating interruptible load a probabilistic method for a pool based combined energy and reserve market which considers both generators and interruptible loads ils is proposed in this paper we minimize generation production cost together with the cost associated with expected energy not supplied eens due to outages of generating units and failures of ils to supply the reserve when required the proposed settlement scheme allocates equitably cost of reserve among generators and ils given that the method takes into account reliability of individual generators and ils the proposed scheme provides incentives for all market participants to improve their performance a number of case studies are carried out to illustrate the impact of participant s characteristics on the reserve cost allocation

bargaining and regulation with asymmetric information about demand and supply abstract rate regulation is studied as a bargaining process in which consumers and the firm negotiate output and payments under asymmetric information the feasible set of transactions given incentive compatibility and individual rationality constraints is characterized the set of interim incentive efficient mechanisms for the direct revelation game is also characterized sufficient conditions are given for efficient mechanisms to be full information efficient efficient mechanisms are identified which correspond to nonlinear monopoly pricing monosony compensation schedules and the baron myerson regulation model

understanding company r d strategies in agro biotechnology trajectories and blind spots companies innovating in agriculture related biotechnology currently confront a complicated and controversial policy environment using analytical frameworks of technological trajectories and paradigms this paper examines r d strategy in large companies a large research project found that r d related decisions taken by managers reflect company distinctiveness and can be characterised as cumulative in important respects economising and strategising strategies combine in different ways but in many instances managers did not sufficiently recognise the importance of complex interactions between public policy and public opinion and failed adequately to incorporate public policy into strategic r d decision making this blind spot compounded initial difficulties in bringing products to market and has had significant impact on the rate and direction of innovation in this area including contributing to the demise of the idea of an integration of agro and health sectors based on life sciences the paper raises important questions about the relationship between technological paradigms industry and sector level trajectories and decision making in firms

spinning contingency reserve economic value and demand functions spinning contingency reserve is idle capacity connected to the system to ensure reliable operations in the case of equipment outages the reserve has an economic value since it reduces the outage costs in several electricity markets reserve demand functions have been implemented to take into account the value of reserve in the market clearing process these often take the form of a step down function at the reserve requirement level and as such they may not appropriately represent the reserve value the value of spinning contingency reserve is impacted by the reliability and dynamic characteristics of system components the system operation policies and the economic aspects such as the risk preferences of the demand in this paper we take into account these aspects to approximate the reserve value and construct reserve demand functions the results are obtained in closed form illustrative examples show that the demand functions constructed have similarities with those implemented in some markets

unemployment insurance job queues and systematic job search an equilibrium approach the labor market effects of unemployment insurance ui have been viewed in several contexts by economists on the one hand the ui system of jobless benefits and experiencerated taxation of firms is seen as influencing firms decisions to lay off workers 9 10 24 2 key in such analyses is the degree to which firms layoffs are subsidized by an imperfect experience rating a tax system in which employers ui taxes increase by less than their workers benefits increase on the other hand many other studies of ui place primary focus on the worker although employer concern for worker well being plays a role even in the work on the impact of ui on firm layoff decisions each of these worker based studies is concerned with one of two issues 1 ui and compensating wage differentials 14 24 or 2 u i and the job search process first hutchens assumes that workers face a choice in the labor market between high wage high layoff probability firms and low wage low layoff probability firms 14 by reducing the cost of being laid off ui increases one s likelihood of choosing the former kind of job along these lines topel finds evidence that ui generosity substitutes for wages and therefore lowers the compensating differential associated with a high layoff job 23 second several authors have studied the effect of ui on job search this work recognizes that ui lowers the cost of searching and therefore raises the reservation wage expected unemployment duration and expected post unemployment wages 2 previous work on the impact of ui on firm layoff decisions has assumed either a layoff subsidy 9 or demand uncertainty 2 in order to generate layoffs and therefore a u i impact on layoffs in contrast to such work this paper views layoffs in an equilibrium context they occur in our model even with no layoff subsidy and or with no demand uncertainty layoffs are of value to the firm in our model since they correspond to workers rejected from a queue of potential trainees from the firm s point of view a queue of applicants may be desirable in order to lower

new estimates of union wage effects in the u s abstract we present new estimates for union wage effects using a unique dataset with information on job skill requirements we find the union wage premium to be smaller at higher skill levels consistent with the view that unions work to decrease skill differentials

optimal scheduling of spinning reserve effective control of spinning reserve can provide substantial cost reductions in large power systems this paper suggests that this goal can he achieved by tightly integrating a probabilistic reserve assessment with the unit commitment uc function this enables the reliability of individual units and the uncertainty of the load forecast to be considered for short term scheduling the generation can then be scheduled to meet a given risk index it is further argued that the optimal value of this risk index should be selected on the basis of a tradeoff between the total schedule cost obtained from the uc solution and the expected cost of energy not served which can be derived from the probabilistic reserve assessment finally the problem of over commitment of reserve in lagrangian relaxation based uc is reduced by means of a new unit decommitment technique incorporating a look ahead feature

mapping technological trajectories of the green revolution and the gene revolution from modernization to globalization abstract the dynamics of technology development along the technological trajectories of the green revolution and the gene revolution could be explicated by the social morphologies of modernization and globalization the green revolution was shaped by the exigencies of modernization while the gene revolution is being shaped by the imperatives of neo liberal economic globalization innovation development and diffusion of technologies followed different trajectories in these two realms because of being part of different innovation systems considerations of private gain and profit in the form of high returns to shareholders of agro biotech corporations of global reach largely determine the dynamics of technological innovation in the gene revolution technology transfer and local adaptive work in the green revolution was carried out in the international public domain with the objective of developing research capacity in post colonial third world agriculture to increase food production to avert hunger led political insurrection during the cold war differentiating these two trajectories is important not only due to the normative implications inherent in comparing the impacts of these two revolutions but also due to the important lessons we learn about how different contexts of innovation in the same technology cluster could evolve into contrasting research policy regimes

internet start ups access to the bank loan market evidence from italy the analysis of the bank sector s ability to efficiently fuel the birth of new italian business ventures in internet related services is studied in particular through the specification and the estimate of a series of econometric models this paper aims at investigating which characteristics of a large sample of internet start ups and their relative founders facilitate access to the loan market more precisely the role played by founders human capital as a possible significant signal used by banks to evaluate investment projects is addressed estimation results suggest that highly qualified human resources possessed by internet founders do not represent an important driver for gaining access to bank credit and they do not affect the amount of the incurred debt

the demand for labor market structure an economic approach this paper formulates and estimates a model for the determination of employer and union demand for multiemployer vs single employer bargaining units utility maximizing risk averse firms and unions are both assumed to weigh the impact of each type of bargaining unit on the expected level and variability of profits and wages respectively the model is tested on a 1975 sample of 3 486 individual collective bargaining agreements because either party can generally leave a multiemployer unit without the other party s consent a partially observed bivariate probit model is used to estimate demand for structure it is found that the forgone profits due to a multiemployer unit relative to a single firm unit lower firm demands for this type of unit while forgone wages in a multiemployer unit relative to a single firm unit lower union demand for this type of unit

working part time by choice or by constraint the selection of workers into part time jobs and the wages they earn are analysed using the 1989 labour market activity survey we focus on the distinction between voluntary and involuntary part time workers since involuntary part time workers earn substantially lower wages than other workers we find that the selection of individuals into involuntary part time work is more closely tied to job characteristics than personal or human capital characteristics the lower wage earned by involuntary part time workers is largely due to differences in returns and selection effects rather than differences in endowments

minimum wages and labor market prospects of women in recent years the field of labor economics has witnessed growth of interest in causes and consequences of female labor force participation principal areas of research include determinants of female wages and labor supply many empirical issues remain unresolved and research continues to focus on the likely ranges of such parameters as the own wage elasticity of hours supplied the cross elasticity with respect to spouse s income the rate of return to female schooling and the issue of self selection in observed earnings of working women one area which remains relatively unexplored is the impact of minimum wage legislation on employment prospects of females the issue of minimum wages is of special interest in the case of women first the proportion of labor force nonparticipation by females exceeds that of males consequently institution of an effective minimum wage plays to a larger audience of nonparticipating females than males it is likely that a significant portion of the positive labor supply response to minimum wages is in the form of previously nonparticipating females second as is well known female wages tend to be lower than those of males owing in part to 1 lower levels of female schooling and experience 2 intermittent life cycle patterns of labor supply and human capital accumulation 3 sorting of females into occupations that are conducive to intermittent behavior and 4 as several researchers suggest gender discrimination consequently women are more likely than men to experience wages that fall short of the legal minimum this study examines the consequences of minimum wages on female employment prospects of special interest is the likelihood of successful job search for women whose wages in the absence of legislation would be below the minimum it is commonly argued that minimum wages in competitive labor markets have the effect of hindering employment prospects of low wage workers this study based on a sample of microdata from the public use sample of the 1980 census proposes a simple framework in which this issue can be addressed in the context of a conventional model of labor supply

expanding the behavioral foundations of labor economics the author examines critiques and suggests modifications to the psychological assumptions of the rational choice model of the human agent that underlies much of the theoretical work in modern neoclassical labor economics he analyzes the rational choice model in terms of three psychological constructs motivation cognition and emotion in the context of a five step model of the human behavioral process examples from the empirical and theoretical labor economics literature illustrate both problems with the current theory and new or improved insights and predictions that can be gained by incorporating additional psychological theories and concepts in economic analysis the author concludes that although the rational choice model is a powerful and productive conceptual device in many cases it cannot adequately explain behavior in the world of work and labor economic theory would be improved by a more interdisciplinary approach that integrates conceptual and empirical research from the behavioral sciences abstract courtesy jstor

operating reserve model in the power market most of the current research on operating reserve markets assumes that the required capacity is predetermined which means that the demand of operating reserve capacity is inelastic this paper considers that operating reserve capacity in a power system is flexible and that one should optimize it by cost benefit analysis based on the reliability evaluation of the generation system a clearing model of the operating reserve market is proposed to determine the optimal reserve capacity and simultaneously clear the operating reserve market the model is discussed on both uniform price and pay as bid auction mechanisms by using a heuristic method we suggest an efficient algorithm to solve the model case studies for reliability test system rts96 demonstrate the usefulness and efficiency of the proposed model

social exclusion and transgenic technology the case of brazilian agriculture many argue that transgenic technology will have wide ranging implications for farmers in developing nations a key concern is that competencies may be destroyed by predominantly foreign multinational transgenic technologies exacerbating problems of social exclusion in the case of subsistence farmers conversely those that fail to adopt the technology may become uncompetitive particularly in commodity based export markets drawing on interview data conducted in brazil and supporting data collected in north america europe and china we found that the impact of transgenic technology varies it has less impact on farmers that adapt the products to their crop systems and environment and greater negative implications for less formally educated subsistence farmers in consequence of both complexity and compatibility earlier attempts at industrializing agriculture through technological innovation led to vastly improved agricultural output and exports but the benefits of productivity was not equitably distributed d lee 2005 american journal of agricultural economics 87 5 1325 1334 nor was it designed to meet specific local environmental and socioeconomic farmer conditions exacerbating social exclusion multinationals attempting to introduce transgenic technology without considering the broader social and ethical implications will invite resistance we discuss the implications for policy makers multinationals and small scale farmers

market implications and pricing of dynamic reserve policies for systems with renewables static reserve policies are used within security constrained unit commitment scuc and security constrained economic dispatch sced to ensure reliability a common policy is that 10 min reserve must exceed the largest contingency however this condition does not guarantee reliability because voltage and thermal limits can hinder reserve deliverability many operators use zonal reserve markets to ensure reserves are dispersed across the grid such zonal models attempt to anticipate transmission bottlenecks which is a difficult task when the future system state is uncertain this paper examines the market implications of dynamic reserve policies used to mitigate uncertainty from renewable resources and contingencies we study the market implications of policies recently proposed in the literature such as hourly zones within day ahead scuc and an algorithm that formally disqualifies reserves that are expected to be undeliverable a locational reserve pricing scheme is also proposed in connection with scenario based reserve disqualification analysis on the rts 96 test case shows that dynamic zones and reserve disqualification along with the proposed compensation scheme help direct reserve payments toward resources that more effectively respond to contingencies

impact of the worker s employment probability on wage rates the employment probability is a significant determinant of the worker s wage rate expecially in the presence of employers hiring discrimination several tests suggest that the omission of this variable in the wage regression may lead to misspecification

systematic and random search a synthesis this paper synthesizes two models of search in the labor market systematic and random we construct and test a theoretical model in which the searcher is endowed with information on some possibly zero or all individual firms in the labor market as well as the overall wage offer distribution we test the model using a special wave of the 1976 current population survey the major theoretical results of our model are as follows searchers with lower stocks of knowledge about individual firms higher discount rates or having lower coverage by unemployment insurance are more likely to engage in random search activities

a selectivity model of employer size wage differentials this article investigates wage differentials for employees of different size firms utilizing an econometric methodology that allows the size of employer to be treated as endogenous in the context of discrete ordered employer size data as a result we are able to estimate i employer size wage gaps which are corrected for selectivity bias and ii the magnitude and direction of the selection bias decompositions of the resulting wage differentials are computed with comparisons of the conditional on sorting across employer size and unconditional wage gaps

whose wages do unions raise a dynamic model of unionism and wage rate determination for young men we estimate the union premium for young men over a period of declining unionization 1980 87 through a procedure which identifies the alternative sources of the endogeneity of union status while we estimate the average increase in wages resulting from union employment to be in excess of 20 we find that the return to unobserved heterogeneity operating through union status is substantial and that the union premium is highly variable we also find that the premium is sensitive to the form of sorting allowed in estimation moreover the data are consistent with comparative advantage sorting our results suggest that the unobserved heterogeneity which positively contributes to the likelihood of union membership is associated with higher wages we are unable however to determine whether this is due to the ability of these workers to extract monopoly rents or whether it reflects the more demanding hiring standards of employers faced by union wages 1998 john wiley sons ltd

what occupational safety tells us about political power in union firms this article tests hypotheses on the distribution ofpower within unionized firms by measuring which workers preferences determine the level offirm supplied occupational safety an egalitarian model in which all workers have equal impact can be easily rejected as can a medianworker model the dominant groups appear to be the most senior workers with more than ten years of seniority and recently hired workers with three or fewer years of seniority this suggests that unions pursue the objectives of the most senior workers while management tries to set a safety level that is attractive to the more mobile workers

the effect of unions on wage inequality in the u s labor market this study uses current population survey micro data for 1973 74 and 1993 to evaluate the effect of changing union membership on trends in male and female wage inequality unionization rates of men fell between the two sample periods with bigger declines among lower skill groups these trends account for 15 20 of the rise in male wage inequality union membership rates of low wage women also declined while unionization increased among higher wage women on balance shifting unionization accounts for very little of the rise in female wage inequality economy wide trends in unionization mask a sharp divergence between the private sector where unionism was declining and the public sector where it was rising comparisons across sectors suggest that unionization substantially slowed the growth in wage inequality in the public sector

unions wages and skills studies uniformly conclude that union wage effects are largest for workers with low measured skills longitudinal analysis using 1989 90 1994 95 cps matched panels produces union premium estimates equivalent across skill groups following appropriate sample restrictions and control for worker specific skills nlsy evidence on aptitude scores confirms that union workers with high measured skills have relatively low unmeasured skills differential selection by skill class and skill homogeneity in union workplaces result from employer and employee sorting in response to wage standardization union organizing where skills are homogeneous and unionized employers reluctance to hire the most as well as least able workers

a switching regression model of public private sector wage differentials in peru 1985 86 this article examines the combined impact of the employment guarantee for graduates and public sector compensation policies on the egyptian labor market besides contributing to an unsustainable rate of growth in the government labor force these

multiunit bargaining in oligopolistic industries a model of wage determination in unionized oligopolistic industries is developed and used to compare the outcome of collective bargaining under two different bargaining structures one in which the workers of each firm are represented by separate and independent unions local bargaining and one in which a national union represents all workers in the industry in both cases the bargaining problem has a unique outcome with industrywide bargaining resulting in higher wages in addition industrywide unions are inherently stable in that there are no incentives for independent unions to attempt to cheat on the collusive agreement

sluggish institutions in a dynamic world can unions and industrial competition coexist during the 1930s and 1940s collective bargaining emerged as the workplace governance norm in much of the u s industrial sector following its peak in the 1950s union density in the u s private sector fell steadily to only 7 4 percent in 2006 governance shifted from a formalized union norm to one of constrained managerial discretion in competitive and dynamic economic environments a union tax on company earnings and slow response to economic shocks combine to produce poor performance by union companies two industries automotives and airlines are used to illustrate these points if worker based institutions are to flourish they must add value and permit companies to perform at levels similar to those obtained under evolving nonunion governance norms

the effect of unions on the employment of blacks hispanics and women to investigate whether unions have helped or hindered the employment prospects of minorities and women the author analyzes data on 1 273 california manufacturing plants for the period 1974 80 the

reliability and reserve in competitive electricity market scheduling power systems are typically scheduled at least cost subject to operational and security constraints generally no account is taken of generator reliability when scheduling units also the security criteria which include reserve are usually deterministic in nature this paper proposes a method to consider generator reliability explicitly in the scheduling problem a competitive structure is proposed which includes a market for reserve this is formulated as an augmented lagrangian dual function and is solved using a new recurrent neural network the price for reserve is used along with the unit reliability to find a balance between the cost of reserve and the risk of not providing it

longitudinal analyses of the effects of trade unions but union members are different from nonmembers in unobserved ways biasing your estimates y ou should make a selectivity bias correction simultaneously determine union status and economic outcomes develop an unobservables model use longitudinal data archetypical comment on virtually any study of the economic effects of umomsm or suitably modified on any other empirical subject

wage differentials and moonlighting by civil servants evidence from cote d ivoire and peru as part of their efforts to reduce fiscal deficits many governments have allowed public sector salaries to erode often on the assumption that government workers are overpaid vis a vis those in the private sector that assumption is tested by analyzing public private pay differentials in cote d ivoire and peru switching regressions models are estimated using full information maximum likelihood fiml and the results are compared to those obtained using ordinary least squares ols techniques the ols yields seriously biased estimates of the pay structure suggesting that public wages are higher than private wages the fiml estimates show the opposite our probit analysis also shows that the wage disadvantage of civil servants is a determinant of the greater prevalence of moonlighting among public than private employees the evidence suggests that reductions in employment rather than pay while being less palatable in the short term will be more effective in the long run

wage effects of unionization and occupational licensing coverage in the united states recent estimates in standard models of wage determination for both unionization and occupational licensing have shown wage effects that are similar across the two institutions these cross sectional estimates use specialized data sets with small sample sizes for the period 2006 to 2008 the authors analysis examines the impact of unions and licensing coverage on wage determination using new data collected on licensing statutes that are then linked to longitudinal data from the national longitudinal survey of youth nlsy79 from 1979 to 2010 they develop several approaches using both cross sectional and longitudinal analyses to measure the impact of these two labor market institutions on wage determination the estimates of the economic returns to union coverage are greater than those for licensing statutes