time out of work and skill depreciation this paper investigates the role of skill depreciation in the relationship between work interruptions and subsequent wages using swedish data from two waves 1994 and 1998 of the international adult literacy survey which included results of tests gauging respondents ability to read and make practical use of printed information the authors are able to analyze changes in individuals skills as a function of time out of work they find statistically strong evidence of a negative relationship between work interruptions and skills the analysis suggests that depreciation of general skills was economically important a full year of non employment for example was associated with a 5 percentile move down the skill distribution

the estimation of x inefficiency in eighteen countries we hypothesize that the substitution mechanism tends to break down in low income countries as a result the input output relationship in low income countries is largely explained by their x inefficiency while the same relationship in high income countries generally reflects their factor prices this hypothesis is consistent with the empirical results calculated from census data for eighteen countries at various stages of development

when not all conflict is bad manufacturing marketing conflict and strategic incentive design researchers and managers broadly agree that coordination and harmony between manufacturing and marketing improve firm performance by eliminating suboptimal practices within the firm in this paper we present a contrasting view of the manufacturing marketing interface we model a duopoly in which the firms compete on price and quality dimensions the manufacturing and marketing managers within each firm are presented with conflicting incentives focused on cost minimization and revenue maximization respectively these managers bargain with each other before arriving at compromise decisions regarding price and quality while frequently encountered in practice this conflicting objectives puzzle is surprising because one expects that centralized coordination by the owners of the firm towards profit maximization would lead to higher profits in this paper we resolve the conflicting objectives puzzle and demonstrate that surprisingly the firm s resulting profits in this setting of conflict can be higher than those obtained when the decisions of the managers are perfectly coordinated we also analyze the equilibrium in incentive plans when the owners can choose between compromise and perfect coordination our results offer a new interpretation of manufacturing marketing conflict as a strategic tool that can enhance firm profits

the prisoners dilemma in the invisible hand an analysis of intrafirm productivity this paper attempts to show that it is useful to view productivity as a prisoners dilemma problem that conventions are alternative solutions to the prisoners dilemma that effort conventions are usually nonoptimal and that a shock is necessary in order to shift from one nonoptimal solution to another within this framework the invisible hand does not produce a pareto optimal result it is consistent with any number of nonoptimal effort conventions

using generalized method of moments to test mean variance efficiency this paper develops tests of unconditional mean variance efflciency under weak distributional assumptions using a generalized method of moments framework these tests are potentially more robust than commonly employed tests which rely on the assumption that asset returns are normally distributed and temporarily i i d using returns for size based portfolios from 1926 to 1988 we show that the conclusion concerning the mean variance effilciency of market indexes can be sensitive to the test considered the application of multivariate statistical techniques in financial economics has become common practice in recent years much of the development has been in the area of testing asset pricing models the assumption that asset returns follow a time invariant multivariate normal distribution permits tests of restrictions on model parameters in a pooled time series cross section framework these tests can be interpreted as tests of the mean variance efficiency of a portfolio or combination of portfolios gibbons 1982 jobson and korkie 1982 stambaugh 1982 shanken 1985 1987 kandel and stambaugh 1987 mackinlay 1987 and gibbons ross and shanken 1989 are examples of work presenting multivariate tests of the capital asset pricing model connor and korajczyk 1988 and lehmann and modest 1988 present multivariate tests of the arbitrage pricing model breeden gibbons and litzenberger 1989 present multivariate tests of the consumption based capm although these papers assume the normality of asset returns little analysis has been conducted to understand the sensitivity of the inferences to violations of this assumption 2 3

organizational efficiency and monopoly power the case of french industrial groups abstract in this paper we examine the respective roles of efficiency and of market power considerations in explaining why industrial groups are the predominant form of organization in specific industries our econometric analysis of french industrial groups suggests that administrative and organizational efficiency is an adequate explanation for the existence of these groups and that rivalry between groups differently integrated and diversified is more likely to be the case than collusion

the organizational foundations of x inefficiency a game theoretic interpretation of argyris model of organizational learning abstract this paper addresses the issue why does x inefficiency persist in many organizations when its existence nature and causes are known and when everyone stands to gain from correcting the errors that cause it and why are some organizations able to learn while others appear not to we construct a model of persisting x inefficiency based on argyris concepts of organizational learning it is argued that organizations succeed in eliminating x inefficiency by achieving a critical mass of individuals willing to admit and correct error once achieved this critical mass may lead to a new stable and efficient equilibrium

understanding corporate coherence theory and evidence abstract multiproduct firms are perceived to be coherent in their scope yet there is no strong theoretical foundations to explain coherence in modern industrial organization theory this paper shows that as u s manufacturing firms grow more diverse they maintain a constant level of coherence between neighboring activities this finding runs counter to the idea that firms with many activities are generally more incoherent a framework is then presented which appeals to the nature of enterprise learning path dependencies and the nature of the selection environment to explain the ubiquity of coherent diversifiers

the response of labour effort to falling real wages the mexican peso devaluation of february 1982 abstract this paper reports empirical evidence on the effect of the february 1982 mexican peso devaluation with its concomitant reduction in real income on the output of individual workers using a set of pooled data for 46 workers employed in two textile plants in mexicali over a 22 week period the regression results show a significant increase in average output of about 15 in response to the 25 decrease in wages due to the devaluation the study also finds that there was no significant response in output to the legislated annual increase in money wages of january 1982

equilibrium growth of the hierarchical firm shareholder employee cooperative game approach in recent years an implication of a classic paper by wassily leontief 1946 that is the possible inefficiency of the profit maximization principle within a certain bargaining framework has attracted the attention of economists faced with the increased possibility of such inefficiency due to the emergence of firm specific employment structures in large enterprises explorations into the possible modes of efficient and or equilibrium bargains over wage employment constellations have become a topic of recent research by economists most notably robert hall and david lilien 1979 and ian mcdonald and robert solow 1981 among others this paper investigates a similar and related problem supposing that the firm internalizes its own employment structure organized on the seniority principle is the value maximization rule for investment decision making efficient if it is not can we determine the proper rule for striking a balance between the time preference of the shareholder body and that of the employee body this problem will be dealt with in the framework of the cooperative game model of the firm as developed in my 1980 paper it will be shown that lower investment rationing of new jobs and higher pay rates are the consequences of a shift in the power balance within the firm in favor of the incumbent employees vis a vis the shareholder body this analysis will attempt to provide an integrated micro explanation of a widely observed macro phenomena in the 1970 s that is the negative relationship between the real wage and capital accumulation or between the real wage and employment see for example edmond malinvaud pentti kouri and jeffrey sachs the plan of the paper is as follows section i describes the model of the corporate firm internalizing employment structure hierarchically ordered upon the seniority principle section ii derives the coalitional equilibrium values of the endogenous variables of the model as a cooperative game solution it is shown that in the determination of the equilibrium growth rate of the firm gains from growth of the firm accruable to employees in the form of possible promotions must be taken into account to a degree determined by the power balance between the shareholders and the incumbent employees but under what types of institutional mechanisms can the time preference of employees be incorporated into the corporate policymaking section iii describes three highly stylized institutional models of shareholderemployee manager relationships with a view to their efficiency implications the appendix gives some technical results

asset pricing tests under alternative distributions given the normality assumption we reject the mean variance efficiency of the center for research in security prices value weighted stock index for three of the six consecutive ten year subperiods from 1926 to 1986 however the normality assumption is strongly rejected by the data under plausible alternative distributional assumptions of the elliptical class the efficiency can no longer be rejected when the normality assumption is violated but the ellipticity assumption is maintained many tests tend to be biased toward overrejection and both the accuracy of estimated beta and r2 are usually overstated many asset pricing models predict a linear relationship between the expected return on an asset and the covariance between the asset s return and one or more factors it is this mean variance framework that plays a central role in modern theories of asset pricing however chamberlain 1983 showed that the mean variance analysis is consistent with investor s portfolio decision making if and only if the returns are elliptically distributed moreover in the case of elliptical returns the capital asset pricing model capm of sharpe 1964 and lintner 1965 and multibeta models will remain valid theoretically 1 therefore it is important to test asset pricing models for the case where the returns are elliptically distributed and yet gibbons ross and shanken 1989 among others provide tests that are valid only under the normality assumption a special case of the elliptical distributions affleck graves and mcdonald 1989 and mackinlay and richardson 1991 examine tests without the normality assumption but their approaches are difficult to apply to obtain exact tests in the elliptical case complementing the existing studies we propose exact tests for both the case where the returns are elliptically distributed and the case where the residuals are elliptically distributed when the normality assumption is violated but the ellipticity assumption is maintained our results show that the usual tests can be biased and the widely used beta and r2 estimated

the entrepreneur s reward for self policing the collaboration among people is often subject to shirking the net gain from the collaboration depends on the contract governing it i argue that the entrepreneur assumes the role of the residual claimant because his actions are more costly to monitor than those of the factors with which he collaborates by offering fixed pay contracts to others and himself becoming residual claimant the entrepreneur curtails his incentive to gain at the expense of his partners and the net gain from the collaboration is then maximized costly monitoring applies to both labor and capital and thus the entrepreneur may supply both labor services and capital the entrepreneur s capital serves to guarantee the pay of the other factors

the college to work transition during the 1990s evidence from sweden this article analyses the time it takes for swedish college graduates to start a full time job that lasts for 6 months or more the focus is on the transition over time during the period 1991 to 1999 this period covers both upturns and downturns of the business cycle providing a unique opportunity to consider the importance of the timing of graduation the results show that the risk of unemployment and the unemployment duration have varied considerably with the business cycle both within and between cohorts for example the field of education is of more importance for the outcomes during recessions further the relative risk of unemployment has decreased over time for individuals with the highest degree of education whereas the unemployment duration has increased indicating that the selection into unemployment for this group may have changed over time this is interesting not least in the light of the sharp expansion of the higher educational system during the study period

unemployment duration unemployment benefits and labor market programs in sweden abstract standard search theory as well as some empirical evidence suggest that an unemployed individual s probability of entering employment increases as he approaches the time when unemployment benefits are due to expire this pattern may not carry over to a country like sweden where labor market programs are targeted at the long term unemployed at risk of benefit exhaustion the paper examines transitions out of unemployment using data on unemployed individuals in sweden a semi parametric competing risks model for transitions to employment labor market programs and non participation is estimated there is some evidence that the exit rate from unemployment to employment increases as benefit exhaustion is approached

comparative empirical observations on worker owned and capitalist firms abstract the paper analyzes the available quantitative information on worker owned and capitalist firms in a few industrialized countries in an attempt to draw a comparative profile of their respective sectors the population of worker owned firms is found to be heterogeneous changing over time and significantly different from the population of capitalist firms worker owned firms are smaller concentrate in a few industries and since the mid 1970s have higher birth rates and lower demise rates than capitalist firms these findings are interpreted with the aid of a theoretical framework and in a broad historical context

the new institutional economics and its applicability to development abstract the several remarkable developments in the social sciences which have come to be known as the new institutional economics nie have not yet been fully exploited for analyzing the determinants and effects of institutional change in the context of development this paper identifies two important components of the nie and illustrates both a potential complementarities between them and b their applicability to various problems and policies in the long term development of developing countries

strategic implications of darwinian economics for selling efficiency and choice of integrated or independent sales forces most managers when confronted with a difficult strategic decision would like to know what is the prevailing practice in their industry prevailing practice interests managers in part because it may indicate which decisions are good even best the rationale is darwinian economics which proposes that competitive markets operate to force at least an approximation of optimal behavior because wrong decisions are extinguished by the market mechanism if so the bulk of survivors make good business decisions and their collective practice is worth knowing meaning it should be difficult to improve upon this paper tests whether prevailing practice represents good decisions the context is the decision whether to fill a sales district with a company integrated sales force or with outside agents independents the outcome of the choice is the ratio of sales to the cost of running the sales force i e selling efficiency a model is described which summarizes industry decisions and two propositions are developed proposition 1 a simple version states that efficiency declines as firms depart from the industry rule as to when they should integrate proposition 2 a contingent version states that efficiency declines as firms depart from the industry rule in unpredictable selling environments but that conforming to the rule has no impact in predictable environments the rationale is that firms learn the environment well enough to know when to depart from the rule in predictable settings but not otherwise the relationship between efficiency and conformity to prevailing practice is examined for 93 sales districts of 11 recognized electronic component manufacturers the results support proposition 2 the most efficient sales forces conform to prevailing practice and the least efficient deviate but only in uncertain environments in more certain environments conformity and efficiency are unrelated implications such as when it pays to be different and suggestions for future research are discussed

nonnormalities and tests of asset pricing theories the robustness of the multivariate test of gibbons ross and shanken 1986 to nonnormalities in the residual covariance matrix is examined after considering the relative performance of various tests of normality simulation techniques are used to determine the effects of nonnormalities on the multivariate test it is found that where the sample nonnormalities are severe the size and or power of the test can be seriously misstated however it is also shown that these extreme sample values may overestimate the population parameters hence we conclude that the multivariate test is reasonably robust with respect to typical levels of nonnormality in traditional hypothesis testing a nonrandom test maps the values of a random variable into a sample space dichotomized into regions where a hypothesis is either accepted or rejected there are three possible outcomes from this process 1 a correct decision 2 a false rejection type i error or 3 failure to reject the hypothesis when it is false type ii error of the latter two types of error an error of the first kind is usually considered less desirable so typically a level of significance is selected with low probability of type i error e g 0 05 or 0 01 and a test is chosen so as to maximize power minimize probability of type ii error for the specified level of type i error knowledge of the relative level of these two errors is critical in assimilating the results of an experiment for example if the power of a test is equal to its significance level i e a weak test rejection of the null contains zero information 2 additionally in constructing parametric tests of hypotheses it is necessary to assume some distribution for the underlying data consequently when using parametric tests rejection of the null is only equivalent to rejection of at least one of the underlying hypotheses i e the null hypothesis or the distributional assumption interestingly the size significance level and power of procedures used to test

is advertising a signal of product quality evidence from the compact disc player market 1983 1992 abstract we study panel data on advertising and pricing in the compact disc player market during 1983 1992 controlling for product features firm heterogeneity and aggregate effects i advertising increases after the player is introduced but at a decreasing rate and ii price falls from the outset and at an accelerating pace these patterns are inconsistent with both the perfect learning in papers by kihlstrom and riordan j polit econ 92 1984 427 and milgrom and roberts j polit econ 94 1986 796 and the imperfect learning in horstmann and macdonald j econ manag strat 3 1994 561 versions of paper by nelson j polit econ 82 1974 729 model of advertising extensions having persistent consumer uncertainty and learning can explain these profiles

unemployment duration and competing risks evidence from sweden the determinants of unemployment duration are studied in the presence of multiple exits out of unemployment the results indicate that state aggregation may be a severe problem in empirical analysis of a labor market such as the one in sweden estimating a joint model for all transitions out of unemployment leads to biased estimates since different transitions are governed by different mechanisms the results also indicate positive duration dependence in both transitions to regular employment and transitions out of the labor force but no duration dependence in transitions to public labor market programs i introduction during the last decade we have witnessed a rapidly expanding literature on the determinants of unemployment duration the main motivation for this development is that a large share of the increasing unemployment rates in most western economies since the mid 1970s may be attributed to increased unemployment duration see e g the survey by lofgren and engstrom 1988 most empirical studies formulate an estimating equation for the determinants of the outflow from unemployment in terms of the hazard function which describes the conditional probability of leaving unemployment these studies are typically based on an explicit or implicit assumption that the only relevant transition out of unemployment is reemployment in this paper it is argued that such an assumption which amounts to assuming that all transitions from unemployment are governed by the same mechanism may lead to state aggregation bias we have no a priori reason to believe that e g increased education has the same effect on transitions from unemployment to employment as on transitions from

organizational culture and performance abstract organizations are all around us culture is trickier to analyze and even to see we consider both the effect of management on culture and the effect of culture on performance we begin by describing an intervention that dramatically improved outcomes and conspicuously included a culture change component we then use details from this intervention to describe potential empirical analyses of the association between organizational culture and performance in this and similar settings finally we describe opportunities for theoretical models to explore how and why organizational culture might influence organizational performance

organizational economics and institutions as missing elements in economic development analysis abstract the main objective of this paper is to apply x efficiency theory to the analysis of organizations and state enterprises with special reference to developing countries in particular the black box relating to the internal operation of organizations is opened up to understand better the decision mechanisms operating within firms and institutions intrafirm conventions are explored as they relate to the impact of external and internal pressures on the decision making process implications are drawn to improve the internal efficiency of institutions in developing countries

privatization technical efficiency and welfare consequences the case of the cote d ivoire electricity company cie abstract in 1990 cote d ivoire privatized the management of its electric power company lease contracting in this paper we are interested in identifying the economic effect of this institutional change by estimating a stochastic production frontier we have found that productive efficiency improved after privatization thanks to organizational innovations total factor productivity gains have been closely associated with a cost reduction strategy the way these gains have been distributed in a monopoly context suggests that consumers have been the main beneficiaries through a significant decrease of the relative price of electricity

technical efficiency measurement within the manufacturing sector in cote d ivoire a stochastic frontier approach this article analyses the productive performance in four manufacturing sectors of the ivorian economy textiles and garments metal products food processing wood and furniture to appraise the productive performance econometric production frontier models are estimated illustrating the maximum output attainable from a given quantity of inputs the frontier and firm efficiency scores are derived from stochastic production functions estimated on cross sectional data the stochastic specification of the models allows for the decomposition of the error term into two components one the normal random effect and the other to account for technical inefficiency that we explain by various exogenous variables describing the economic and institutional environment firm size proves to be a statistically significant determinant of the productive performance across the four sectors the positive impact of being large compensates the negative effect of a formal institutional status in an environment where government

ownership versus competition efficiency in public enterprise certainly the introduction of product market competition into potentially competitive or at least contestable markets can improve performance to take just one example morrison and whinston 1986 1986 estimate that even in the imperfectly contestable u s airline industry the annual u s welfare gains from deregulation have been around 6 billion

the neglect of society in the theory of the firm a systems theory perspective the prevailing theories of the firm acknowledge the importance of trust and loyalty but neglect such behaviour in the substance of their analyses the present paper unravels this paradox by drawing on niklas luhmann s ground breaking insight that the complexity reducing function of social systems leads them to neglect their critical environmental dependencies thereby compromising their own sustainability if the firm is conceived as a social system luhmann s theory implies that the neglect of social behaviour by the predominant theories of the firm can be explained as reflecting the neglect of society by actual firms this argument promises to not only furnish the theory of the firm with a concern for sustainability but also render it more amenable to unconventional institutions such as cooperatives and non profit organisations that help compensate for the damage inflicted by conventional firms on the social environment

ownership concentration and the theory of the firm a simple game theoretic approach a model of the shareholder constraint is described in terms of the relationship between shareholding concentration and corporate control a unified perspective including takeovers as a special case is developed whereby leading coalitions are costly to form and possess power in a shareholder voting game control is defined in terms of power indices for simple games a static theory of the firm is developed in terms of the optimal formation of controlling coalitions a dynamic theory of an owner controlled firm is described which explains increasing shareholding dispersion accompanying growth i introduction capital market constraints on managerial discretion are usually described in terms of two mechanisms i the ability of large shareholders to organise their voting power to enforce wealth maximisation and ii the threat of takeover following a fall in the share price most writers have tended to emphasise the takeover mechanism on the assumption that the capacity of shareholders to organise voting coalitions is weak however as aoki 1983 has recently argued the trend towards greater shareholding concentration with the growing importance of institutional shareholders gives a greater role to the first mechanism large shareholders cannot easily sell their holdings without adversely affecting the share price and therefore become locked in to dealing directly with management despite its central role the treatment of share concentration has usually been ad hoc most writers have taken low concentration as implying a loose constraint or management control by making it difficult for shareholders to organise by contrast a tight constraint ownership control prevails where there is at least a sizeable minority holding however little attention has been this paper and leech 1987 are based on warwick economic research paper no 262 ownership concentration and the theory of the firm a simple game theoretic approach applied to us corporations in the 1930s july 1985 i wish to thank peter law for helpful discussions of the ideas contained in them i am also grateful for comments to john cable keith cowling paul geroski donald hay two anonymous referees and participants in a staff seminar at warwick university aoki concludes that the tendency toward a managerial revolution in the sense of wider dispersal of shareholders control is now definitely reversed he suggests that the takeover mechanism is losing its role in disciplining management which fails to maximise share values rather it is becoming a means for large acquisition minded corporations to take over well managed small and medium firms

china s economic system reform underlying factors and prospects abstract three important determinants of economic growth in the chinese context are the motivation of economic units the absorption of foreign technology and its diffusion and agricultural productivity the stalin model of the 1950s served china well especially when sustained by chinese sub models such as ties of trust with rural brigades workers innovation etc after that investment effectiveness declined and today the structural changes necessary point to the need to alter existing institutions which have become obsolete in agriculture the use of cash inputs is more common now and a sense of economic efficiency is increasingly required care should be taken in comparing china with east european countries given that china s per capita gross domestic product is much lower as is the percentage of agricultural output reaching the market the comprehensiveness of the economic reform likely in china means that it will only be possible to judge it over a time horizon longer than five years for such economic reforms to be wholly successful they need to continue to incorporate chinese sub models mentioned in the paper and must develop a network of supplying industries and inter dependent factories

deregulation and governance plight of japanese banks in the 1990s the governance structure of public corporations is determined by the agency relationship between shareholders and managers and the agency theory predicts that deregulation of an industry leads to governance adaptation deregulation of the japanese banking business in the 1980s offers an interesting case study in this framework as japanese banks fell into serious solvency problems in the post deregulation 1990s this paper investigates whether ineffective governance was responsible for the plight of japanese banks the sample is 384 corporations that were listed on the tokyo stock exchange between 1983 and 1990 which includes 59 banks one of the findings is that bank shareholders allowed more diffuse ownership structure after deregulation which demonstrates that the agency theory did not hold for shareholders of japanese banks

age effects in swedish local labor markets abstract the paper studies age structure effects on local labor market performance results show that young workers benefit from large youth cohorts and that a one standard deviation increase in the share of workers aged 50 60 years raises overall unemployment by 1 1 percentage points

managerialism revisited in the light of bargaining game theory abstract this lecture proposes to view the modern firm as a coalition of shareholders employees and business partners rather than to identify it with a single maximizer such as an entrepreneur this view may be thought of as a revival of the original thought of managerialism but tries to go further by analyzing implications of the interactions of those agents on the behavior of the firm in a bargaining game theoretic framework the lecture reviews the literature on game theoretic approaches to the theory of the firm and discusses a few important theoretical and institutional issues

effects of manpower policies on duration dependence in re employment rates the example of sweden in contrast to the evidence from other countries swedish studies of the transition from unemployment to employment have consistently reported a non negative duration dependenice in the hazard this study examines the extent to which this results from large scale labour market programmes a limited duration of unemployment benefits or differences among available jobs the labour market programmes are here found to be the primary factor behiind the earlier swedish results the programmes thus pick up those with the worst employment prospects thereby postponing a decrease in the re employment probability among job searchers this in turn generates an on average constant duration dependence

privatization and economic growth an empirical investigation from a sample of developing market economies this paper explores the economic determinants of privatization programmes and the macroeconomic impact of this institutional reform on the growth rate of the gdp a sample of thirty five developing market economies is considered over the 1988 92 period probit and tobit models are used to identify the determinants of successful privatization programmes then regressions are run where probabilities probit and expected values tobit are successively included as additional regressors beside the potential influence of other economic policy variables a significant positive effect is highlighted giving evidence of the importance of divestiture the economic effect is found to be stronger when this institutional reform took place in industry or infrastructure