employment adjustment versus hours adjustment is job security desirable firms can adjust to shocks by laying off and hiring workers or by adjusting the hours worked by each worker adjustment of hours provides job security for employed workers adjustment of employment generates higher labor market turnover and thus better job prospects for the unemployed since high turnover lowers the expected cost of being laid off by reducing the expected duration of unemployment there is a strategic complementarity between firms in the provision of job security this gives the possibility of multiple equilibria with different amounts of turnover copyright 1995 by the london school of economics and political science

efficient mechanisms for bilateral trading we consider bargaining problems between one buyer and one seller for a single object the seller s valuation and the buyer s valuation for the object are assumed to be independent random variables and each individual s valuation is unknown to the other we characterize the set of allocation mechanisms that are bayesian incentive compatible and individually rational and show the general impossibility of ex post efficient mechanisms without outside subsidies for a wide class of problems we show how to compute mechanisms that maximize expected total gains from trade and mechanisms that can maximize a broker s expected profit journal of economic literature classification number 026

aspects of labor market adjustments in japan this article discusses some aspects of labor market adjustments in japan that may be relevant to the low unemployment rate there japanese statistics treat kyugyosha persons not at work as being employed but some of these workers would be counted as unemployed in the united states the kyugyosha group appears to increase in size during downturns and decreases during upturns suggesting that temporarily laid off persons are an important part of this group japanese employers evidently rely less on employment adjustments and more on adjustments in hours of work and inventory while employers in the united states rely more on employment adjustments to deal with cyclical changes in product demand japanese manufacturing employment became less sensitive and hours of work more sensitive to demand shocks after the introduction of the employment insurance law in 1975

the heckscher ohlin model with monopolistic competition and general preferences abstract i extend the neoclassical 2 2 2 trade model to general preferences over a variety of goods supplied under monopolistic competition in a sector while the other sector is perfectly competitive non homothetic preferences deliver pricing to market incomplete pass through and market size effects under realistic conditions the differentiated goods are sold at a higher price in the capital abundant country

long run welfare effect of energy conservation regulation we investigate the long run effect of energy conservation regulation which forces firms to raise energy saving investment above the cost minimizing level if pigovian tax is imposed additional regulation always harms social welfare under perfect competition while it can improve welfare under imperfect competition our result under imperfect competition holds regardless of whether strategies are strategic substitutes or complements in contrast to direct entry regulation

does resorting to online dispute resolution promote agreements experimental evidence abstract this paper presents an experiment performed to test the properties of an innovative bargaining mechanism called automated negotiation used to resolve disputes arising from internet based transactions the main result shows that the settlement rule tends to chill bargaining as it creates incentives for individuals to misrepresent their true valuations which implies that automated negotiation is not able to promote agreements however this perverse effect depends strongly on the conflict situation when the threat that a disagreement occurs is more credible the strategic effect is reduced since defendants are more interested in maximizing the efficiency of a settlement than their own expected profit the implications of these results are then used to discuss the potential role of public regulation and reputation mechanisms in cyberspace

the role of free entry in an oligopolistic heckscher ohlin model retaining the basic properties of the heckscher ohlin trade model namely free entry and exit fully integrated international commodity markets and the same number of sectors with that of factors the authors develop a two country model with cournot oligopoly in this economy factor price equalization and the standard heckscher ohlin theorem on comparative advantage hold between two countries which are identical except for size however autarkic prices are different even though the level of trade is zero under the free trade regime nevertheless free trade reduces the oligopoly price and increases welfare copyright 1995 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

trade policy with increasing returns and imperfect competition contradictory results from competing assumptions abstract a number of recent papers derive different results about the effects of trade and industrial policy on imperfectly competitive industries this paper sets out a single model within which policy under different market structures can be examined we consider the four types of market structure generated by oligopoly versus free entry and segmented markets versus integrated markets we conclude that the effects of policy are greater when markets are segmented than when they are integrated and that if transport costs are small policy is more potent when the number of firms is fixed than when there is free entry

the effect of discrimination and of industry segmentation on japanese wage differentials in relation to education abstract the paper investigates japanese wage differentials based on the concept of industrial division the labor market is examined for two sectors separately namely competitive sectors and non competitive sectors the effects of female male difference of human capital and of occupation also are examined and the cost of discrimination is estimated by applying several quantitative methods it was found that worker characteristics such as education length of service and age were treated differently by sector sex and occupation also wage differentials by sex were mostly rooted in differential treatment of worker characteristics while wage differentials by sector were explained largely by firm size component the above general results however are greatly modified by workers occupations and industrial divisions

trade and trade policy with imperfect competition the case of identical products and free entry abstract this paper analyses intra industry trade between economies containing an imperfectly competitive industry in which firms produce a homogeneous output production is subject to increasing returns to scale and there is free entry and exit of firms trade is shown to unambiguously increase welfare by reducing the degree of monopoly in each market and increasing firm size the effects of differences in technology and endowments on the pattern of trade and welfare are examined import tariffs are shown to raise welfare in the country employing the tariff and the welfare implications of various types of industry subsidy are examined

resource allocation in a general equilibrium model of production under uncertainty the case of variable supply of labor abstract this paper examines the effects of a marginal change in uncertainty on resource allocation and factor rewards by relaxing the assumption of factor inelasticity we demonstrate that integrating a variable labor supply into batra s two sector uncertainty model can mitigate or reverse many of the earlier results specifically a marginal increase in uncertainty may trigger the resource to move from the certainty sector to the uncertainty sector in the presence of a backward bending labor supply curve

the information advantage in two person bargaining with incomplete information abstract the sealed bid k double auction is a mechanism used to structure bilateral bargaining under two sided incomplete information in the process of testing whether or not the observed bid and ask functions are in agreement with the bayesian linear equilibrium solution under asymmetric information conditions we find a strong information disparity effect the trader favored by the information disparity whether buyer or seller receives a significantly larger share of the realized gains from trade than that predicted by the theory a reinforcement based learning model is formulated and tested it accounts successfully for most of the variability in the round to round individual decisions

enterprise unionism the japanese system at work trade unions japanese unions at work the japanese labour market has worked quite well over recent decades whereas the european economies have produced more and more unemployment a popular hypothesis is that this difference can be attributed to unions while in europe unions are strong and centralized and do not care about the individual firm the japanese unions are enterprise unions which deal directly with and understand the heal management employers in japan in turn consult unions and employees on all relevant management decisions this corporatism finally ensures that workers are more motivated and have a higher productivity it is the central conjecture of this paper that the presence of unions increases the voice of the employees significantly by using innovative new firm data it is shown that this is actually the case hence japanese enterprise unions are not harmful but foster information sharing and contribute to the performance of the enterprise toshiaki tachibanaki and tomohiko noda

why u s wage and employment behavior differs from that in britain and japan if a poll were to be conducted among american academic economists to select the most mystifying economic phenomenon of our time surely the sticky nominal wage rate would emerge at or near the top of the list the slow and partial response of the nominal wage rate to changes in aggregate nominal spending has been a central postulate of macroeconomic theory for the past 45 years from keynes general theory down to the standard postwar textbook keynesian paradigm to the more modern fixed wage price models of robert barro and herschel grossman i976 and edmond malinvaud i977 unwilling passively to accept nominal wage rigidity as an unexplained assumption many labour market theorists have followed the lead of costas azariadis i975 and martin baily i974 in building models to explain rigid wages and layoff unemployment as the rational outcome of a profit maximising calculus as i pointed out in an early critique of the azariadis baily model i976a their assumptions cannot explain cycles in employment but rather why workers would want fixed incomes i e a fixed wage rate and fixed employment soon thereafter barro i977 went one step further and argued that contract theory is a facade which cannot explain why workers would choose a rigid wage and variable employment in preference to the classical equilibrium quantity of employment that equates the marginal product of labour with the marginal value of time now an examination of the evidence has led me to the realisation that rigid wages cannot provide the underpinnings for a universally valid theory of the business cycle simply because wages are not universally rigid i document below with postwar quarterly data that the share of fluctuations in the manufacturing wage bill taking the form of nominal wage changes as compared to changes in hours worked is five to ten times greater in britain and japan than in

structural adjustment and the japanese textile industry a production theory approach the production theory approach for modelling trade in intermediate goods is applied to dervie export supply and import demand functions for the japanese textile industry the estimated elasticities provide insight into the process of internal adjustment and structural change reflected in the declining international competitiveness of the japanese textile sector estimation issues related to endogeneity tests and the concavity restictions implied by economic theory are highlighted in the econometric results estimated trade balance adjustments are derived from the parameter estimates of the export supply and import demand functionf for the japanese textile sector

bad and good news about the sealed bid mechanism some experimental results this paper surveys a set of experiments conducted by roy radner and myself 1989 and peter linhart radner and myself 1989a b all of which were conducted to investigate the properties of the sealed bid mechanism a mechanism used to structure bargaining under situations of incomplete information what we find is both bad news and good news for the mechanism the bad news is that the behavior of subjects seems quite sensitive to the parameters of the prior distribution of types used and the number of rounds over which the experiment is run as such prior distributions become more skewed in a sense to be defined below and the number of rounds in the experiment are increased to 75 bidder behavior becomes less linear such movements have a regular pattern however and this phenomenon is remarkably consistent the good news is that such behavioral shifts do not seem to interfere with the efficiency of the mechanism this is of course important for the acceptance of the mechanism in the real world since if efficiency were to change dramatically as we change the parameters of the environment adoption would have to proceed on a case by case basis the fact that our results imply robustness of efficiencies indicates that at least on a practical level the sealed bid mechanism may be a viable way to structure bargaining in many large scale economic organizations i the sealed bid mechanism

trends in unemployment wages and productivity the case of japan along with the high savings ratio the functioning of the labour market is one of the most important factors behind the macroeconomic performance of the postwar japan which foreign observers have christened the miracle of the rising sun in the first place the nature of the japanese labour market is important for the long run trend of japanese economic growth because labour and its quality are crucial factors for economic development the high quality of a well disciplined workforce as well as the migration of labour from rural to urban areas has contributed much to the rapid growth of the japanese economy second the nature of the labour market has influenced the pattern of japanese business cycles by buffering demand fluctuations the slow response of firms demand for labour combined with the fast response of the labour force participation ratio has prevented a sharp increase in the unemployment rate during recessions relatively flexible nominal and real wages have also enabled the japanese economy to adjust quite smoothly to supply shocks notably after the second oil crisis in this paper we shall review trends in unemployment wages and productivity in the postwar japanese economy and relate them to its macroeconomic performance we shall also summarize the current literature concerning features of the labour market evaluate quantitative estimates of trends in labour statistics and explore future prospects

trading complex assets we perform an experimental study of complexity to assess its eect on trading behavior price volatility liquidity and trade eciency subjects were asked to deduce the value of a particular asset from information they were given about the composition and price of several portfolios following that subjects traded with each other anonymously in a well dened simple bargaining process portfolio composition ranged from requiring simple analysis to more complicated computation in order to deduce the value of the asset complexity altered subjects bidding strategies decreased liquidity increased price volatility and decreased trade eciency however in follow up experiments we show that uncertainty over private values does not lead to the same changes in trading behavior therefore while complexity induces estimation errors and higher uncertainty this is not what drives our results

explaining the absence of international factor price convergence abstract as capital markets have become integrated factor prices have not converged as expected this paper provides an explanation the key observation is that non specific output risks are borne by capital making international portfolio diversification a dominant strategy capital market integration can elicit many patterns of factor price response under this circumstance factor prices will move in parallel if countries are identical when countries differ factor prices may diverge or even have their relative sizes reversed the integration of capital markets affects welfare through changes in risk and in overall returns to savings welfare need not improve

a factor endowment theory of international trade under imperfect competition and increasing returns constructing a two good competitive and imperfectly competitive goods two primary factor capital and labor and two country model of international trade where the imperfectly competitive sector is subject to increasing returns to scale we establish an oligopolistic version of the heckscher ohlin theorem jel classification f10 f12

bargaining under incomplete information this paper presents and analyzes a bargaining model of bilateral monopoly under uncertainty under the bargaining rule proposed the buyer and the seller each submit sealed offers that determine whether the good in question is sold and the transfer price the nash equilibrium solution of this bargaining game implies an offer strategy of each party that is monotonic in its own reservation price and depends on its assessment of the opponent s reservation price issues of relative bargaining advantage and efficiency are examined for a number of special cases finally we discuss the appropriateness of the nash solution concept

an analysis of trends in female labor force participation in japan until recently the aggregate female labor force participation rate in japan has shown a secular declining trend throughout the postwar period of economic development participation of paid female employees alone exhibits a steadily rising trend more or less comparable to that in the united states and european countries although the fertility rate dropped drastically shortly after world war ii in the subsequent period increases in female education and a relative improvement of female wages appear to have promoted a substantial increase in paid female employment labor supply equations for paid employees estimated from time series data provide negative income and positive wage elasticities cross sectional analysis gives reasonable results particularly for middle age wives absolute values of estimated wage elasticity notably have almost always been smaller than income elasticity unlike many research findings in the united states

uncertainty and the theory of international trade in long run equilibrium abstract we consider a country with two factors and two industries each of which faces technical and price uncertainty entrepreneurs choose outputs in order to maximize the expected utility of profits they also draw factor payments and purchase consumption goods after the uncertainty isresolved they enter and exit from an industry according to whether participation there increases their expected utility within this model the validity of the propositions of neoclassical trade theory depends on how the entrepreneurs entry decisions are affected by parameter changes via their roles as risk bearers consumers and factor owners

wage distortion and resource allocation under uncertainty the effects of uncertainty on resource allocation have been examined in a two sector general equilibrium model of production constructing a model in which firms are risk indifferent and face uncertainty regarding the use of capital rothenberg and smith 9 considered the implications of uncertainty for welfare resource allocation and income distribution their model was refined by batra 3 to permit uncertainty in production to influence the firms decisions to hire both capital and labor batra s approach appears to be more general in that producers are assumed to be risk averse in lieu of risk neutral the writing of this paper is inspired by batra s contributions 2 3 batra s well known intermediate run equilibrium model is reformulated to allow for wage distortion utilizing the model several issues regarding the effects of changes in factor supplies in commodity prices and in the degree of wage distortion will be examined factor market distortions in the absence of uncertainty have been studied extensively in literature 2 their impacts on resource allocation in stochastic environment have not been explored however we argue that the introduction of the wage differential has a major impact on batra s results first relative value factor intensities generally replace relative physical factor intensities in determining signs of

up the average cost curve inefficient entry and the new protectionism abstract a two country model is developed in which each country produces one good with increasing returns the goods being perfect or imperfect substitutes with cournot nash behavior and free entry certain restrictive trade policies have effects opposite to their favorable effect under noentry assumptions import tariffs and export subsidies lead to inefficient entry that raises rather than decreases the average production cost of and price charge by the domestic industry with negative welfare consequences we argue that these predictions of our model are closely consistent with extensive canadian data on entry exit and firms responses to trade liberalization

dynamic stability and international trade under uncertainty in the presence of output or price uncertainty the heckscher ohlin samuelson h o s model with incomplete risk markets has been shown to exhibit a wide range of perverse comparative statics responses which contradict the predictions d la stolper samuelson and rybczynski and opens up the possibility of perverse price output responses this paper revisits the question raised by neary 1978 and examines the dynamic stability properties of an h o s model under uncertainty in relation to the conditions under which these perverse responses emerge the findings suggest that once the risk attitudes of the representative entrepreneur is appropriately accounted for in the specification of value factor intensities dynamic stability with respect to a marshallian adjustment process is necessary and sufficient for the normality of all of the standard comparative statics responses except for the rybczynski result the basic analytics are then applied to various existing setups of the h o s model under uncertainty in each case the applicability of the stability condition in precluding comparative static responses that violate standard predictions is examined

labour supply and unemployment in japan abstract the paper investigated the relationship between labour supply and unemployment employment in japan the paper focused on the discouraged worker effect which specifies that a large number of workers in particular female labour forces retire from the labour market in a recession this lowers the rate of the published unemployment the paper estimated the labour supply function and presented the estimated figures of the modified or adjusted rate of unemployment finally the okun s coefficient was re estimated by using this modified rate of unemployment

input choices and uncertain demand the theory of the firm under demand uncertainty has to date assumed that the firm s input decisions are unaffected by the stochastic nature of demand this assumption is not usually made explicitly but it is implied by the assumption that the firm s cost function presumably derived by finding the minimum cost combination of inputs for any given level of output is unaffected by the uncertainty however if firms must choose some of their inputs before the uncertainty regarding demand is resolved then different input decisions may involve different levels of risk since firms decisions regarding price and output are affected by demand uncertainty and non linear risk preferences as previous authors have shown it seems reasonable to suspect that their input decisions will also be affected but if input decisions are affected then firms cost functions are not invariant to uncertainty and the results of previous studies must be reexamined three different types of firms are considered in this paper the competitive firm the quantity setting imperfect competitor and the price setting imperfect competitor input decisions of the competitive firm and the quantity setting imperfect competitor are shown to be unaffected by demand uncertainty and hence the assumption of an unchanging cost function is appropriate in these cases for the price setting imperfect competitor however input decisions are influenced by demand uncertainty and an unchanging cost function is therefore not appropriate this case is considered in some detail and conditions under which results can differ from those previously reported in the literature are examined

relative prices and the demand for labour in british manufacturing the existence of an aggregate demand for labour schedule derived from profit maximization of the individual firm and giving a negative relationship between the labour capital ratio and the real wage is central to most traditional theoretical macroeconomics even though such a relationship is typically not embodied in macroeconomic models but beginning with the work of dunlop 1938 and tarshis 1939 the negative relationship could not be found in the data a more modern reference is bodkin 1969 this evidence led naturally to disequilibrium analysis notably that of barro and grossman 1971 more recently sargent 1978 has attempted with some success to rehabilitate the demand for labour schedule by showing that costly adjustment of the workforce obscures the current relationship between the wage and labour demand while leaving it essentially intact that paper and the related one by neftci 1978 was criticized by geary and kennan 1979 because it had used retail prices to represent output prices and they showed that for a number of countries employment could not be explained satisfactorily by the real product wage however geary and kennan failed to allow for the simultaneous effect of the real prices of raw materials and capital services in this paper we shall see that allowing for the effects of other relative prices notably the price of inputs relative to output and the real interest rate the real wage has a powerful but slow acting negative effect on the demand for labour the long run elasticity is about 2 and the mean lag is over 18 months we also find that the price of inputs has a long run elasticity of about 2 and that high values of the real interest rate have a powerful depressant effect on the level of employment in manufacturing the most striking implication for policy of our analysis is that measures of demand output money government spending do not have a significant influence on manufacturing employment controlling for the effects of relative prices thus government macroeconomic policy can affect the level of employment in manufacturing if and only if it can affect relative prices

contestable markets an uprising in the theory of industry structure presents a transcript of the presidential address delivered at the 94th meeting of the american economic association on december 29 1981 discussion of developments in the theory of industry structure welfare attributes of contestable markets behavior characteristics of oligopoly equilibrium intertemporal vulnerability to inefficient entry ebsco

factor income function and an oligopolistic heckscher ohlin model of international trade abstract this paper introduces a new duality concept factor income function in order to establish the factor price equalization theorem and the heckscher ohlin theorem in an oligopolistic heckscher ohlin model with increasing returns to scale

the relationship between production and unemployment in japan okun s law in comparative perspective abstract this paper studies the question whether the celebrated okun s law a relation between excess capacity and unemployment applies to the postwar japanese economy though the fitness of estimation is weak the coefficient that measures the responsiveness of the output gap to the unemployment rate is very large reaching 28 this large coefficient can be attributed to the elastic response in the female participation ratio to flexible working hours to the slow adjustment in employment and to changes in industrial structures the results are compared with those in the united states

entry barriers and economic welfare the relationship between economic welfare and the number of firms in a quasi cournot market is examined in the first place we presuppose the existence of a strong first best government that can enforce the marginal cost principle to the firms along with regulating the number of firms it is shown that there exist excessive number of firms at the free entry quasicournot equilibrium vis a vis the first best welfare maximizing number of firms the thrust of this result essentially survives even if we replace a utopian first best government by a secondbest government that leaves the firms to pursue their respective profit maximization freely and engages solely in regulating the number of firms it can be shown that the excess entry prevails again in this second best world recent studies in the theoretical industrial organization literature have uncovered several instances which cast serious doubt on the reasonableness of a widespread belief that increasing competition will increase welfare stiglitz 1981 p 184 it has been shown that there are cases which are not altogether unreasonable where social welfare will be increased by strengthening rather than weakening the protection of incumbent firms from the threat of potential entry this is in sharp contrast with the traditional belief 2 what is not known however is how robust these pathologies in fact are we intend to settle this problem by proving two excess entry theorems in the quasi cournot parametric conjectural variations homogeneous oligopoly model seade 1980a b in the first place we presuppose the existence of a strong first best government that could costlessly enforce the marginal cost pricing principle by firms in an oligopolistic market and regulate entry in pursuit of first best social welfare optimization it is shown that the number of firms at the free entry equilibrium exceeds the first best welfare optimizing number of firms the result has already been noted by von weizsacker 1980a b and others in terms of numerical examples our theorem 1 asserts that this phenomenon always holds true for the family of quasi cournot models at hand an implication of this result is that the existence of entry barriers which protect incumbent firms from potential competitors is not necessarily welfare decreasing in sharp contrast with the traditional belief a problem remains with theorem 1 however in that an omnipotent first best government does not exist in reality and the first best ideal is unrealizable in the actual economy therefore even if the intervention by a first best government with a view to restricting the number of firms within an industry may be welfare improving it does

neoclassical demand for labour functions for six major economies can real factor prices and in particular the real wage explain the level of employment over the business cycle the question is of fundamental importance for macroeconomic policy and is of course the subject of longstanding controversy dunlop i938 failed to find the expected negative relationship between employment and the wage in the data and the subsequent debate is summarised in bodkin i969 crudely the data seemed to refute the competitive model of the labour market for if product markets are competitive and firms operate on their demand curves employment should be explained by real factor prices relative to product prices the capital stock and the state of technology to explain the lack of relationship barro and grossman i97i suggested that at times mutuality reinforcing quantity constraints could emerge in labour and output markets so that firms employed fewer workers than one would predict from the level of real wages and other relative prices however recently sargent i978 has attempted with some success to rehabilitate the demand for labour function by showing that costly adjustment of the workforce obscures the current relationship between the wage and labour demand while leaving it essentially intact in his account firms adjust slowly towards an employment level which is influenced by future expected real wages which might themselves reflect the past history of real wages his paper and the related one by neftci i978 was criticised by geary and kennan i979 for using retail prices to represent output prices and they showed for a number of countries that employment could not be satisfactorily explained by the real product wage taken on its own however geary and kennan failed to allow for the simultaneous effect of the real price of raw materials in symons i 982 one of us showed that allowing for this effect the real wage has a powerful elasticity about 2 but slow acting two year mean lag negative effect of the demand for labour in british manufacturing this was strong evidence but it was not completely conclusive the model fitted well only over subperiods and whereas the various breakdowns of the model could be ascribed to firms discounting certain transient shifts in the real wage there still seemed to be scope for reasonable doubt about the results however recently andrews and nickell i 982 a b working with annual rather than quarterly data and for the british economy as a whole have developed a demand for labour function with similar dynamics and with signifi

a reexamination of the neoclassical trade model under uncertainty abstract this paper presents a model that pinpoints the exact places and reasons that the propositions of the heckscher ohlin samuelson model break down under uncertainty within the model if preferences exhibit decreasing absolute risk aversion i a capital poor country tends to obtain lower revenues from its resources than the same resources would yield in capital rich countries ii if there is one riskless and one risky sector a capital abundant country tends to have a comparative advantage in the risky sector and iii the pattern of trade depends on the intra national as well as the inter national distribution of endowments

the importance of lifetime jobs in the u s economy though the u s labor market is justly notorious for high turnover and consequent high unemployment it also provides stable near lifetime employment to an important fraction of the labor force this paper investigates patterns of job duration by age race and sex with the following major conclusions 1 the typical worker today is holding a job which has lasted or will last about eight years over a quarter of all workers are holding jobs which will last twenty years or more sixty percent hold jobs which will last five years or more 2 the jobs held by middle aged workers with more than ten years of tenure are extremely stable over the span of a decade only twenty to thirty percent come to an end 3 among workers aged thirty and above about forty percent are currently working in jobs which eventually will last twenty years or more three quarters are in jobs which will last five years or more 4 the duration of employment among blacks is just as long as among whites even though the jobs held by blacks are worse in almost every other dimension they are no more unstable than those held by whites 5 women s jobs are substantially shorter than men s on the average only about a quarter of all women over the age of thirty are employed in jobs which will last over twenty years whereas over half of men over thirty are holding these near lifetime jobs this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

excess labour and the business cycle a comparative study of japan germany the united kingdom and the united states against the background of firm specific human capital theory this paper investigates empirically the relative propensity of manufacturing industries in japan germany the united kingdom and the united states to hold excess labour over the business cycle both stock and utilization dimensions of the labour input are integrated into the study throughout discussion is linked to earlier research that has analysed the relative international performance of the japanese labour market

wage rigidity and unemployment in oecd countries real wage rigidity is often blamed for causing unemployment in the wake of adverse real shocks like changes in productivity or the terms of trade likewise nominal wage rigidity is blamed for causing unemployment in the wake of adverse nominal shocks like falls in nominal demand 1 however there has been relatively little systematic discussion of how these concepts should be defined some authors e g sachs 1979 have defined real wage rigidity as the opposite of nominal wage rigidity with the us nominally rigid and europe really rigid 2 the rigidity of european real wages has then been used to explain why europe has experienced a greater increase in unemployment since 1973 than the us but in this discussion real wage rigidity has not been measured in a way which would in fact predict how much unemployment would result from a given real shock the discussion has focused on the degree of nominal inertia in the system but the unemployment cost of real shocks does not depend primarily on the degree of nominal inertia but rather on the effect of unemployment in the phillips curve

innovation market structure and welfare many writers subscribe to joseph schumpeter s view that while perfectly competitive firms allocate resources efficiently in a static sense they perform poorly when it comes to innovation from this point of view the optimal form of market structure is unlikely to be perfect competition but some other type of dynamic competition which includes significant elements of monopoly recently considerable effort has been focused on modelling schumpeter s notion of competition perhaps best exemplified by the 1980 work of partha dasgupta and joseph stiglitz hereafter d s 2 this approach views free entry to the rd see nelson and winter 1977 3readers will recognize a similarity of this approach with the notion of contestable markets discussed most recently by william baumol 1982 and by baumnol john panzar and robert willig 1982 for an interesting comparison of the schumpeterian with the marxian notion of competition see john elliott 1980 4this was noted for example by robert wilson 1975 5in such industries the long term gains from dynamically efficient innovation become of paramount importance consequently the optimal market structure would consist of a small number of firms the driving force behind such a result is what scherer 1972 has called the lebensraum effect firms performing r d must at least break even they derive their profits from

regional inflation spatial locations and the balassa samuelson effect evidence from japan we empirically analyse regional inflation using data from japan where there is no regulation to impede the free movement of labour capital goods and services across regions in particular our analysis will focus on the geographical location of regions and the productivity known as the balassa samuelson bs effect as explanations for the dynamics of regional inflation based on a spatial model which is consistent with the theoretical specification of the bs we have confirmed that while it is a relatively small country in terms of land area both spatial location and productivity are important determinants of regional inflation

international r d rivalry and industrial strategy this paper presents a theory of government intervention which provides an explanation for industrial strategy policies such as r d or export subsidies in imperfectly competitive international markets domestic net welfare is improved by the capture of a greater share of the output of rent earning industries although the subsidy ridden noncooperative international equilibrium is jointly suboptimal behaviour of governments and firms is modelled as a three stage subgame perfect nash equilibrium the assumption that the government is the first player in this game allows it to influence equilibrium outcomes by altering the set of credible actions open to firms

bilateral trade with the sealed bid k double auction existence and efficiency for k in the unit interval the k double auction determines the terms of trade when a buyer and a seller negotiate transfer of an item the buyer submits a bid b and the seller submits an offer s trade occurs if b exceeds s at price kb 1 k s we model trade as a bayesian game in which each trader privately knows his reservation value but only has beliefs about the other trader s value existence of a multiplicity of equilibria is proven for a class of trader s beliefs for generic beliefs however these equilibria are shown to be ex ante inefficient

how many firms should be leaders beneficial concentration revisited we investigate how the number of stackelberg leaders and followers aects economic welfare first we discuss the model with m leaders and n m followers compete in a homogeneous good market daughety 1990 nds that under constant marginal costs the stackelberg model m2 0 n yield a higher welfare than the cournot model m 0 or

an investigation of the determinants of manufacturing employment in the united kingdom in this paper we present and estimate an adjustment cost model of industry employment which takes explicit account of both expectations and aggregation over different labour types the resulting model is subject to a large number of tests and is a highly robust representation of the data finally forecasts are produced for manufacturing employment up to 1990

constant returns to scale and competitive equilibrium under uncertainty abstract this paper considers the implications of the assumption of constant returns to scale in expected utility maximizing models of the competitive firm or industry in which markets for risk are absent under widely used assumptions about risk preferences it is shown that with constant returns to scale average profits are more than necessary to cover the implicit costs of risk bearing when the free entry of identical firms is possible this assumption about technology is shown to be incompatible with the assumption that entrepreneurs are risk averse

the returns to labour services in west german manufacturing industry production functions distinguishing between the stock and utilisation dimensions of factor labour and capital inputs are critically surveyed an extension to the existing literature is suggested whereby normal and overtime hours are separated within an appropriate non linear functional specification the econometric performance of this model is then compared with the main alternatives from the existing literature the empirical work is based on pooled cross section time series data which refer to west german manufacturing industries 1968 1978 estimates of the returns to labour services are also discussed in the light of related theoretical aspects of factor demand functions