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

the accuracy of the tick test evidence from the australian stock exchange abstract in the absence of information regarding whether a trade is buyer or seller initiated many researchers have employed the tick rule as a proxy these researchers have been supported in their endeavours by the work of lee and ready 1991 which suggests that the tick rule is 90 accurate unfortunately the difficulty of securing data on this issue has made lee and ready s paper somewhat unique in that there have been few attempts to confirm their result in us markets and no attempts in other markets the purpose of this work is to test the robustness of their result in the australian securities market using cleaner intra day data we mimic the lee and ready study to cast some doubt upon the robustness of their findings in different markets our results suggest an overall accuracy of approximately 74 as opposed to lee and ready s 90 however accuracy in excess of 90 is documented when zero ticks are excluded further analysis provides evidence that a volatile or trending market will decrease the accuracy of the tick rule it is also demonstrated that the tick rule is less likely to accurately classify seller initiated trades and small buyer initiated trades

allocation of initial public offerings and flipping activity abstract there is a general perception that the large trading volume in initial public offerings is mostly due to flippers that are allocated shares in the offering and immediately resell them on average however flipping accounts for only 19 of trading volume and 15 of shares offered during the first two days of trading institutions do more flipping than retail customers and hot ipos are flipped much more than cold ipos institutions do not quickly flip cold ipos to take advantage of price support activities by the underwriter explicit penalty bids are rarely assessed against flippers

coordination of internal supply chains in vertically integrated high tech manufacturing organizations htmos abstract this paper uses economic mechanisms to coordinate supply chains within high tech manufacturing organizations htmos it models the one shot initial production and allocation decisions involved in the production and marketing of new technologies these decisions are driven by the economic objectives of the firm and of the employees with private information the experts it analyzes and compares the efficiency of three coordination policies centralized command and control centralized revelation and decentralized revelation it shows that decentralized policies introduce an additional cost and it proposes rules of thumb for coordinating supply chains within firms that use many experts

a theory of strategic voting in runoff elections abstract this paper analyzes the properties of runoff electoral systems when voters are strategic a model of three candidate runoff elections is presented and two new features are included the risk of upset victory in the second round is endogenous and many types of runoff systems are considered three main results emerge first runoff elections produce equilibria in which only two candidates receive a positive fraction of the votes second a sincere voting equilibrium does not always exist finally runoff systems with a threshold below 50 percent produce an ortega effect that may lead to the systematic victory of the condorcet loser jel c72 d72

structural and market predictors of corporate labor relations strategies the authors develop a model predicting which of three broad labor relations strategies union avoidance union management collaboration or a mixed strategy combining elements of union avoidance and

price stabilization as a bonding mechanism in new equity issues abstract underwriters have an incentive to overstate investor interest in order to persuade some investors to purchase shares at a price in excess of their initial estimate of the fair value we show that this incentive is eliminated when the underwriter commits to secondary market price stabilization destroying the underwriter s incentive to overstate interest reduces the total surplus captured by initial investors in initial public offerings further efficiency gains are associated with penalty bid systems that permit the underwriter to make the stabilization commitment selectively price stabilization can thus be viewed as a bonding mechanism that improves the efficiency of the primary equity market

employee participation programs group based incentives and company performance a union nonunion comparison this analysis examines whether union representation positively or negatively influences the effectiveness of employee participation programs and group based incentives in improving firm performance examined at the firm level a model of the independent and interaction effects of participation profit and gain sharing and union representation is estimated against data on 841 manufacturing firms in michigan in 1989 the evidence indicates that employee participation programs contributed substantially more to performance in unionized firms than in nonunion firms whereas profit and gain sharing programs contributed substantially more to performance in nonunion firms than in unionized firms

the winner s curse legal liability and the long run price performance of initial public offerings in finland abstract rationing data for initial public offerings ipos in the finnish market make possible a test of rock s 1986 winner s curse hypothesis the evidence from 80 ipos issued between 1984 and 1989 confirms the presence of the winner s curse average returns adjusted for the bias in allocation are lower than average unadjusted returns but the initial returns of these ipos appear unrelated to lawsuit avoidance as the sample firms seem unlikely to incur legal liabilities in the long run consistent with the evidence in the united states the ipo firms substantially underperform the helsinki stock exchange value weighted index

determinants of the incidence of group incentives evidence from canada we use canadian data on four group incentive schemes to examine the deter minants of the probability that a firm offers each scheme to its non managerial workers and to production workers alone we find that unionization lowers the incidence of group incentives except for productivity gainsharing larger firms are more likely to offer share purchase plans to all non managerial employees and profit sharing to production workers cash bonuses are less common in larger firms we find little indication that group incentives are either discouraged by machine paced production or more common in firms with good industrial relations

worker participation and productivity in labor managed and participatory capitalist firms a meta analysis using meta analytic techniques the author synthesizes the results of 43 published studies to investigate the effects on productivity of various forms of worker participation worker participation in decision making mandated codetermination profit sharing worker ownership employee stock ownership or individual worker ownership of the firm s assets and collective ownership of assets workers collective ownership of reserves over which they have no individual claim he finds that codetermination laws are negatively associated with productivity but profit sharing worker ownership and worker participation in decision making are all positively associated with productivity all the observed correlations are stronger among labor managed firms firms owned and controlled by workers than among participatory capitalist firms firms adopting one or more participation schemes involving employees such as esops or quality circles

information technology and the changing workplace in canada firm level evidence recent advances in information and communication technology ict have had dramatic effects on both individual and workplace performance use of computers and the internet as general purpose technologies has spread rapidly across all sectors of the economy transforming business organization increasing competition and fostering innovation understanding the influence of ict on the dynamics of the workplace requires information on both demand and supply sides of the labor market but it is only recently that the study of both sides of the market has become feasible using linked employer employee data in this article we investigate the effects of new technology on firm productivity using the rich canadian workplace and employee survey for the period 1999 2003 we apply a mixed regression model which includes both firm and employee characteristics as well as their interactions with computer use our model allows us to control for unobserved heterogeneity at higher levels along many dimensions our findings indicate that computer use by employees has a positive and significant effect on the productivity of firms that the effect has not lost its momentum and that spillover effects are not significant moreover human capital enhances the effect of computer use on productivity but organizational changes do not interact with computer use in our sample period copyright 2011 the author 2011 published by oxford university press on behalf of associazione icc all rights reserved oxford university press

stabilization syndication and pricing of ipos we argue that in the after market trading of an ipo the underwriting syndicate by standing ready to buy back shares at the offer price price stabilization compensates uninformed investors ex post for the adverse selection cost they face in bidding for ipos this domi nates ex ante compensation by underpricing the reason is that stabilization exploits ex post information about investor demand whereas underpricing must be based on ex ante infor mation however liquidity and syndication costs constrain the use of stabilization which in equilibrium generates some underpricing as well we develop a model that formalizes this intuition and generates several empirical implications

a theory of the syndicate form follows function we relate the organizational form of investment banking syndicates to moral hazard in team production although syndicates are dissolved upon deal completion membership stability across deals represents a barrier to entry that enables the capture of quasi rents this improves incentives for individual bankers to cultivate investor relationships that translate into greater expected proceeds reputational concerns of lead bankers amplify the effect we derive conditions under which restricted entry and designation of a lead banker strictly pareto dominate in which case it is also strictly pareto dominant for the syndicate s fee to be greater than members cost of participation copyright the american finance association 2001

a direct test of rock s model of the pricing of unseasoned issues unique data availability and institutional arrangements for new issues in singapore allow a direct test of the empirical implications of rock s model of pricing unseasoned new issues our empirical results are consistent with the model specifically we find that the unseasoned new issues anomaly disappears when the rationing associated with new issues is incorporated into the analysis the winner s curse is evident in allocation patterns used in singapore

a direct test of methods for inferring trade direction from intra day data this study directly tests the ability of several competing methods to identify market buy and sell orders using intra day quote and trade prices and identifies factors that affect the accuracy of the methods lee and ready s 1991 algorithm performs about the same as the tick test but the performance of both methods is worse than expected the results show that the use of either algorithm to classify trades can lead to significantly biased estimates of effective spreads and signed volume but the tick test provides better estimates of effective spreads and signed volume than lee and ready s method i introduction the use of intra day prices in empirical studies of securities markets is increasingly common and studies frequently require trades be identified as buyer or seller initiated unfortunately most data sets do not identify trade direction methods have however been proposed that allow trade direction to be inferred from adjacent prices and quotes the accuracy of these methods and the implica tions for microstructure research are still unresolved issues in large part because trade direction is unobservable in most financial data sets this study directly tests the ability of several competing methods to iden tify market buy and sell orders using intra day quote and trade prices the tests are conducted using the torq database a unique data set the new york stock exchange makes available to researchers that contains information on trades quotes and orders using the tick tests and lee and ready s lr hereafter 1991 method to classify trades as buys or sells and comparing the results to the direction of the actual orders i directly test the accuracy of the classification algorithms the tests also identify the factors that affect the accuracy of the clas sification methods additional tests demonstrate that using these algorithms can lead to biased inferences in two of their most common applications estimating effective spreads and signed volume trading test results also show that the tick

productivity effects of worker participation in management profit sharing worker ownership of assets and unionization in u s firms abstract in this paper we provide our first econometric estimates of the effect of worker participation in decision making ownership and profits on productive efficiency participation has the potential for exerting several conflicting influences on firm performance simultaneously as a result both the direction and magnitude of its impact are empirical issues previous studies have empirically measured the impact of each of these forms of participation however no prior study has controlled for the influence of the other forms because of the potential for correlation among these forms of participation it is possible that omitted variables bias has affected the previous results using a new panel data set with simultaneous measures of all four types of participation in u s manufacturing establishments we model participation as disembodied technical change and estimate production function coefficients for each type while controlling for the others we use both ols and instrumental variables in order to guard against potential simultaneity the iv results indicate that participation in decision making has a large positive productivity effect while the impacts of unionization and profit sharing depend upon regression specification moderate amounts of indirect worker ownership affect productivity positively while the estimated effect of direct worker ownership is negative however this last result may reflect the industrial concentration of the direct ownership firms in our sample

price stabilization in the market for new issues abstract this study examines price stabilization in new equity issues stabilizationtruncates the distribution of post issue prices at a floor price lowering the risk of adverse price moves and hence in a competitive dealer market reducing the bid ask spread using 1 523 nasdao traded firm commitment initial public offerings issued between 1982 and 1987 we find that spreads narrow when the market price is close to the offer price and stabilization is most likely moreover significant negative returns are documented after the hypothesized termination of stabilizing activities suggesting that stabilization and its cessation affect market prices

internal promotion and external recruitment a theoretical and empirical analysis we present a theoretical and empirical analysis of internal promotion versus external recruitment using a job assignment model involving competing firms with heterogeneous productivities and two level job hierarchies with one managerial position the model predicts that controlling for the number of managers increasing the number of lower level workers is associated with 1 greater internal promotion as opposed to external recruitment 2 higher profit and 3 more general training empirical analysis of a large cross section of british employers is consistent with these predictions

who benefits from secondary market price stabilization of iops abstract initial public offerings that receive secondary market price support from their underwriters are characterized by severely attenuated selling by small quantity presumably retail traders and more aggressive selling by large quantity presumably institutional traders the increase in institutional trading is concentrated in the first day of trading while the attenuation of retail trading persists this pattern exists in spite of the likelihood that retail investors receive relatively large initial allocations of fully priced stabilized offers thus the evidence is consistent with institutional investors being the primary beneficiaries of price stabilization efforts and with the use of penalty bids to constrain retail selling activity

introduction do compensation policies matter excerpt the papers in this volume should give the reader a sense of the exciting empirical research that has recently taken place on compensation related issues as a set these papers considerably expand our empirical evidence on the effects of compensation policies several papers show that executive compensation is structured in a way that at least implicitly ties executive compensation changes to measures of corporate performance and crucially that doing so leads to improved corporate performance leonard murphy gibbons abowd others show that compensation systems that pay workers for performance in the sense of providing explicit or implicit incentives for high levels of performance can motivate individuals to increase their effort levels ehrenberg bognanno hamermesh asch kahn sherer still others show that high wage policies do have some of the effects that proponents of efficiency wage theories claim for them krueger groshen holzer finally one shows that profit sharing plans appear at least weakly to increase employment stability chelius smith

unionism and productivity in west virginia coal mining this study presents econometric estimates of the effects of unionism on productivity in 83 west virginia coal mines in the early 1920s the size detail and panel structure of the data set permit investigation of many possible links between unionism and productivity in contrast to the summary measures reported by most studies the results show that the union effect was not uniform across mines and cannot be represented by a simple shift parameter rather unionism significantly reduced productivity at small mines but not at large mines drawing on historical evidence the author ascribes this differential effect to systematic differences between small and large operations in the quality of management and union leadership

the flotation of companies on the stock market abstract in some countries the size of the stock market and the number of listed companies have persistently lagged behind the growth of the economy trading externalities can help explain this fact an entrepreneur who goes public increases risk sharing opportunities for others this externality can lead to an inefficiently low number of listed companies and also generate multiple equilibria when flotation decisions are positively correlated across entrepreneurs this happens if these face borrowing constraints and lack liquidity and thus cannot diversify their portfolios unless they go public it also happens if trading shares is costly so that a sufficient number of issues must be listed to lure investors into the market

the ability of unions to adapt to innovative workplace arrangements the 1980s have witnessed considerable experimentation in compensation practices worker participation labor management cooperation and the organization of production collectively such practices at the local or plant level have become known as workplace innovations one concern that has been raised repeatedly both within the academic community and within the labor movement is how and in fact whether such innovations can coexist with unions and collective bargaining as currently constituted see for example charles heckscher 1988 thomas kochan harry katz and robert mckersie 1986 profit sharing gainsharing and other compensation changes pose certain issues for unions how to define profits or gains to protect workers and minimize management finagling for instance but these probably require mainly increased access to financial information and the technical sophistication to deal with that information labor management cooperation programs that involve union leaders or activists in joint problem solving with management could create the perception that the union is cozying up with management and is unwilling to push worker demands or grievances but as with profit sharing and gainsharing the union sector has long experience with cooperation committees and can presumably make the necessary political adaptations innovations that establish a second channel of communication between workers and managers are more problematic according to some observers insofar as they possibly could lead to less worker interest in unionism some could preempt the union s expansion into new areas of collective bargaining or might threaten to supplant bargaining over traditional issues and they might exacerbate existing divisions within the workforce or the union donald wells 1987 further issues arise with the more extensive innovations like team production systems that combine the radical reduction of separate production job classifications team decision making in work or overtime assignments and pay by knowledge experience in some auto plants indicates teams can lead to fundamental changes in the operation of the grievance system and the union s day to day role in the plant katz 1985 indeed it has been argued that team production systems require a modification of the system of job control unionism management manages and the union grieves kochan et al p 161 which has predominated in the united states since world war ii the concerns discussed above do not mean that these programs offer no benefits to workers and unions benefits such as increased job security enhanced job satisfaction reduced alienation and greater control over the work environment may result from many of these programs in fact it is the differential weighting of these potential benefits and costs that has in part led to the variety of union responses to workplace innovations

union effects on productivity profits and growth has the long run arrived this article interprets literature examining union effects on economic performance production function studies indicate small overall union impacts on productivity positive effects where they exist appear to result from management response to decreased profit expectations and from a natural selection process lower profitability among unionized firms is well established more interesting is the possibility that unions appropriate quasi rents deriving from long lived tangible and intangible capital the connection between unions investment behavior and productivity growth emerges as a particularly fruitful line of empirical inquiry although it does not encourage a sanguine view of unionism s long run impact