movements towards free trade and domestic market performance with imperfect competition this paper studies the response of a dominant domestic oligopoly to the reduction in the rate of a protective tariff the issue here is whether domestic market performance is improved through a movement toward free trade alone put another way is free trade always a substitute for competition policy we find that the lower tariff may lead to inferior domestic market performance the direction of the change and its magnitude are functions of the shape of the import supply function the degree of competition between oligopolists and whether or not entry is possible thus there is reason to believe that a strong competition policy may in some markets be complementary to freer trade

peer pressure and partnerships partnerships and profit sharing are often claimed to motivate workers by giving them a share of the pie but in organizations of any significant size the free rider effects would seem to choke off

strategy proof exchange we consider the allocation of goods in exchange economies with a finite number of agents who may have private information about their preferences in such a setting standard allocation rules such as walrasian equilibria or rational expectations equilibria are not compatible with individual incentives we characterize the set of allocation rules which are incentive compatible or in other words the set of strategy proof social choice functions social choice functions which are strategy proof are those which can be obtained from trading according to a finite number of pre specified proportions the number of proportions which can be accommodated is proportional to the number of agents such rules are necessarily inefficient even in the limit as the economy grows

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

plant closings and exit behaviour in declining industries the plant closing and exit strategies of firms operating in a declining industry are examined a dynamic game theoretic model is utilized the perfectness criterion is used to restrict the set of nash equilibria there are two key equilibrium results first when firms have the same number of plants high cost plants close before lower cost plants second a larger firm i e a firm operating more plants begins closing plants before a smaller firm as long as cost differences are not large copyright 1988 by the london school of economics and political science

evaluating the evidence on union employment and wages using current population survey data for the years 1973 86 this study tests the hypothesis that the steep decline of union employment shares since 1973 is related to increases in union wages relative to nonunion wages the authors show that although the aggregate union wage premium has changed little since 1973 some industry specific premiums have risen substantially and the industries with the rising premiums are those experiencing declines in union employment shares the increase in the premium explains from 21 to 64 of the decline in union shares depending on the equation specification the paper also presents a detailed set of union wage premiums and employment shares for the sample period

trade liberalisation and plant exit in new zealand manufacturing data on new zealand manufacturing plants are used to examine the impact of trade liberalization on plant exit recent theories suggest that the prospect of a declining market might cause firms to adopt strategic behavior that causes low cost plants to exit first this hypothesis is generally unsupported surviving plants were larger lower cost and were owned by specialized firms with few plants plant costs were more important than firm size for explaining the plant closing behavior of single plant firms diversified multiplant firms were more likely to close plants and were influenced by plant size but not plant costs copyright 1996 by mit press

public goods in networks this paper considers incentives to provide goods that are non excludable along social or geographic links we find first that networks can lead to specialization in public good provision in every social network there is an equilibrium where some individuals contribute and others free ride in many networks this extreme is the only outcome second specialization can benefit society as a whole this outcome arises when contributors are linked collectively to many agents finally a new link increases access to public goods but reduces individual incentives to contribute hence overall welfare can be higher when there are holes in a network

monotone equilibria in bayesian games of strategic complementarities for bayesian games of strategic complementarities we provide a constructive proof of the existence of a greatest and a least bayes nash equilibrium each one in strategies that are monotone in type our main assumptions besides strategic complementarities are that each player s payoff displays increasing differences in own action and the profile of types and that each player s interim beliefs are increasing in type with respect to first order stochastic dominance e g types are affiliated the result holds for general action and type spaces single multi or infinite dimensional continuous or discrete and no prior is assumed we also provide the following comparative statics result the greatest and least equilibria are higher if there is a first order stochastic dominant shift in the interim beliefs we apply this result to strategic information revelation in games of voluntary disclosure

the economic effects of multiple unionism evidence from the 1984 workplace industrial survey establishment level data from the 1984 workplace industrial relations survey are used to investigate the relationship between the presence of multiple recognized unions and wages financial performance and the incidence of industrial action where multiple unions are present it is found to be important to distinguish between whether they bargain separately or jointly and the most important effects are isolated where separate bargains occur the results suggest that plants with multiunionism and separate bargaining arrangements pay higher wages have lower financial performance and are more prone to strike action lasting at least one day copyright 1993 by the editors of the scandinavian journal of economics

equilibrium characterization of networks under conflicting preferences in this work we characterize equilibrium introduced in configurations for networks with conflicting preferences we use the model hernandez et al 2013 to study the effect of three main factors the strength of individual preferences the level of integration in the network and the intensity of conflict in the population our aim is to understand how likely is it that social outcomes are either those in which preferences dominate choices or those in which some individuals sacrifice their preferences to achieve consensus with others our results show that the stronger individual preferences the harder to achieve consensus in choices however in cases where the payoff ratio is less extreme full coordination consensus is always an equilibrium finally if the level of conflict is low individual preferences become less relevant and all players choosing what they prefer is not an equilibrium anymore

multifirm unions and the incentive to adopt pattern bargaining in oligopoly abstract this paper develops a model of wage bargaining between an industry wide trade union and firms in an oligopoly and considers the circumstances under which the union prefers pattern bargaining that is negotiating contracts in a sequential manner to simultaneous bargaining with the firms the paper goes on to consider the importance of the bargaining order in pattern bargaining when the firms are asymmetric the analysis shows that the union gains by first targeting a firm which is in a relatively weak bargaining position i e impatient to settle or a firm with relatively large profits

cost differences and survival in declining industries a case for picking winners abstract in this paper we examine the relationship between firms cost structures and the order of exit from declining industries we distinguish between two fundamental causes of demand decline namely a shrinkage of the consumer base and a decrease in consumers willingness to pay we show that it is not necessarily best to be small and flexible the order of exit in a market driven outcome depends on the manner in which demand shrinks we find that from a welfare perspective the order of exit determined by market forces is not necessarily desirable however simple rules for picking winners based on current unit cost profitability or productive efficiency do not provide sound guidance for policy

an investigation of the determinants of profitability in new zealand manufacturing industries in 1986 87 the empirical investigation of the structure condust performance relationship has had to grapple with the problem that higher than usual profitability might arise from superior production efficiency or alternatively from markets subject to lower competitive pressures as such the nature of investigation has evolved over time to include the market power efficiency debate and the new industrial organisation emphasis on the joint determination of profitability and market structure the purpose of this paper is to present some new zealand evidence with a unique feature being to include a measure of firm level efficiency in a disaggregated model estimated using firm level data the results suggest both market power and efficiency play a role in determining profitability although efficiency dominates

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

unionism and gross employment flows considerable research interest exists in the measurement and analysis of the gross employment flows that underlie industry and regional net employment growth studies by armington and odle 4 leonard 25 davis and haltiwanger 12 and dunne roberts and samuelson 15 examine the relative importance of plant openings plant expansions plant contractions and plant closings as sources of labor demand fluctuations all of these studies find that the individual components of gross employment flows are substantially larger than the net employment change this paper extends this literature in three ways first it examines the correlations between sectoral unionism and sectoral measures of job loss due to plant closings and contractions and employment gains due to plant expansions previous research indicates that unionism lowers firm and industry profits if this is the case then unionism would be expected to affect the growth and failure of plants and firms as well the results will also shed some light on whether previous estimates of the negative effect of unionism on profits are understated since only surviving firms are examined in these studies

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

exit with multiplant firms using an extension of ghemawat and nalebuff s 1985 model i analyze the outcome of industry decline when firms have multiplant operations the analysis reveals that no natural generalization of their strong empirical prediction that the larger of two single plant duopolists exits first holds in a multiplant setting the results also highlight a number of factors that affect the pattern of capacity removal during industry decline and lead to a discussion of the strategic implications of firms plant size choices in general the factors determining the pattern of capacity reduction can be quite complex and prediction in such settings often requires intimate knowledge of industry structure

peer effects and social networks in education this paper studies whether structural properties of friendship networks affect individual outcomes in education we first develop a model that shows that at the nash equilibrium the outcome of each individual embedded in a network is proportional to her katz bonacich centrality measure this measure takes into account both direct and indirect friends of each individual but puts less weight to her distant friends we then bring the model to the data by using a very detailed dataset of adolescent friendship networks we show that after controlling for observable individual characteristics and unobservable network specific factors the individual s position in a network as measured by her katz bonacich centrality is a key determinant of her level of activity a standard deviation increase in the katz bonacich centrality increases the pupil school performance by more than 7 percent of one standard deviation

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

heterogeneous network games conflicting preferences abstract in many economic situations a player pursues coordination or anti coordination with her neighbors on a network but she also has intrinsic preferences among the available options we here introduce a model which allows to analyze this issue by means of a simple framework in which players endowed with an idiosyncratic identity interact on a social network through strategic complements or substitutes we classify the possible types of nash equilibria under complete information finding two thresholds for switching action that relate to the two player setup of the games this structure of equilibria is considerably reduced when turning to incomplete information in a setup in which players only know the distribution of the number of neighbors of the network for high degrees of heterogeneity in the population the equilibria is such that every player can choose her preferred action whereas if one of the identities is in the minority frustration ensues

robust implementation in direct mechanisms a social choice function is robustly implementable if there is a mechanism under which the process of iteratively eliminating strictly dominated messages lead to outcomes that agree with the social choice function for all beliefs at every type profile in an interdependent value environment with single crossing preferences we identify a contraction property on the preferences which together with strict ex post incentive compatibility is sufficient to guarantee robust implementation in the direct mechanism strict ex post incentive compatibility and the contraction property are also necessary for robust implementation in any mechanism including indirect ones the contraction property requires that the interdependence is not too high in a linear signal model the contraction property is equivalent to an interdependence matrix having all eigenvalues smaller than one

union wage differentials in the face of changes in the economic and legal environment this paper examines changes in union wage differentials in britain between 1980 and 1984 on the basis of two comparable establishment level data sets this period saw considerable economic and legislative change with potential effects on the outcomes of collective bargaining despite these changes the mean differential has little change between these two years and what there is is attributable to compositional changes such as the shift away from the manufacturing sector and the downward shift in the establishment size distribution the impact of the changes in unemployment and union coverage that took place is found to be minimal copyright 1991 by the london school of economics and political science

diffusion of behavior and equilibrium properties in network games situations in which agents choices depend on choices of those in close proximity be it social or geographic are ubiquitous selecting a new computer platform signing a political petition or even catching the flu are examples in which social interactions have a significant role while some behaviors or states propagate and explode within the population e g windows os the hiv virus others do not e g certain computer viruses our goal in this paper is twofold first we provide a general dynamic model in which agents choices depend on the underlying social network of connections second we show the usefulness of the model in determining when a given behavior expands within a population or disappears as a function of the environment s fundamentals we study a framework in which agents face a choice between two actions 0 and 1 e g whether to pursue a certain level of education switch to linux os etc agents are linked through a social network and an agent s payoffs from each action depend on the number of neighbors she has and her neighbors choices the diffusion process is defined so that at each period each agent best responds to the actions taken by her neighbors in the previous period assuming that her neighbors follow the population distribution of actions a mean field approximation steady states correspond to equilibria of the static game under some simple conditions equilibria take one of two forms some are stable so that a slight perturbation to any such equilibrium would lead the diffusion process to converge back to that equilibrium point other equilibria are unstable so that a slight change in the distribution of actions leads to a new distribution of actions and eventually to a stable steady state we call such equilibria tipping points we analyze how the environment s fundamentals cost distribution payoffs and network structure affect the set of equilibria and characterize the adoption patterns within the network the paper relates to recent work on network games and network diffusion including work by stephen morris 2000 pastor satorras and vespignani 2000 mark e j newman 2002 dunia lopez pintado 2004 jackson and brian w rogers 2007 jackson and yariv 2005 and andrea galeotti et al 2005 henceforth ggjvy its contribution is in characterizing diffusion of strategic behavior and analyzing the stability properties of equilibria and employing methods that allow us to make comparisons across general network structures and settings given that social networks differ substantially and systematically in structure across settings e g ethnic groups professions etc understanding the implications of social structure on diffusion is an important undertaking for a diverse set of applications

coalitional strategy proofness in economies with single dipped preferences and the assignment of an indivisible object we study two allocation models in the first model we consider the problem of allocating an infinitely divisible commodity among agents with single dipped preferences in the second model a degenerate case of the first one we study the allocation of an indivisible object to a group of agents our main result is the characterization of the class of pareto optimal and coalitionally strategy proof allocation rules alternatively this class of rules which largely consists of serially dictatorial components can be characterized by pareto optimality strategy proofness and weak non bossiness in terms of welfare furthermore we study properties of fairness such as anonymity and no envy journal of economic literature classification numbers d63 d71

tobin s q and the structure performance relationship comment the exchange of comments between william shepherd and michael smirlock thomas gilligan and william marshall this review december 1986 raised two key points that remain unresolved the first point is whether tobin s q ratio a firm s financial market value divided by replacement cost of its assets is a better measure of firm performance than accounting rates of return the second point of contention is whether superior performance however measured can be attributed to efficiency rather than market power this paper offers further clarification on both of these points in section i the performance measure choice is shown to be influenced by fundamental differences between finance and economics in section ii the structure performance model employed by smirlock gilligan and marshall hereafter sgm and shepherd is shown to be a special case of a more general model allowing for a dependence of the market share performance relationship on the concentration ratio the same data from the original study by sgm 1984 are used in section iii to provide a comparison of sgm s findings with empirical results from an alternative specification of the structure performance model this comparison suggests that attributing superior firm performance exclusively to efficiency is not well founded concluding remarks are found in section iv

technology use and plant closure abstract this paper aims to contribute to the empirical literature on industrial demography it analyzes a stratified sample of the italian metalworking industry composed of 810 plants with more than 10 employees it considers plant closure over the period 1989 1997 probit type econometric models are estimated in order to provide evidence on the explanatory factors of the likelihood of closure with special attention being devoted to technological variables the paper extends previous empirical results along a number of directions first in spite of the fact that use of advanced technologies especially in the design and engineering sphere favors survival remarkable differences do emerge between different individual technologies ceteris paribus plants having adopted technologies characterized by sizable product specific investments turn out to be less likely to be shut down in addition the ownership status of plants is found to influence the probability of closure likelihood of survival is lower for plants that belong to multi unit organizations than for those owned by single plant firms even though the difference between the two plant categories decreases with plant size altogether such results point to the relevance of irreversibility and sunk costs for understanding exit behavior

r d networks we develop a model of strategic networks that captures two distinctive features of interfirm collaboration bilateral agreements and nonexclusive relationships our analysis highlights the relationship between market competition firms incentives to invest in r d and the architecture of collaboration networks in the absence of firm rivalry the complete network where each firm collaborates with all others is uniquely stable industry profit maximizing and efficient by contrast under strong market rivalry the complete network is stable but intermediate levels of collaboration and asymmetric networks are more attractive from a collective viewpoint this suggests that competing firms may have excessive incentives to form collaborative links

worker substitutability and patterns of unionisation a strategic three party bargaining model is developed in which one distinguished party the firm has to reac h agreements with the other two each of which is a group of workers in the prebargaining stage the two worker groups decide whether to organize jointly or separately the main observation relates the equi librium pattern of unionization to the substitutability in production between the two groups the outcome is joint or separate unions acco rding to whether the two groups are substitute or complementary facto rs of production the analysis also considers possibilities for firm s strategic intervention in the unionization process copyright 1988 by royal economic society

almost all equilibria in dominant strategies are coalition proof abstract we prove that almost all equilibria in dominant strategies of finite strategic games are coalition proof also we investigate existence of coalition proof equilibria of separable games and strategyproof mechanisms in particular we give an example of a strategyproof mechanism which is defined for strict orderings and which is coalition proof but not coalitionally strategyproof

strategyproof assignment by hierarchical exchange we give a characterization of the set of group strategyproof pareto optimal and reallocation proof allocation rules for the assignment problem where individuals are assigned at most one indivisible object without any medium of exchange although there are no property rights in the model the rules satisfying the above criteria imitate a trading procedure with individual endowments in which individuals exchange objects from their hierarchically determined endowment sets in an iterative manner in particular these assignment rules generalize gale s top trading cycle procedure the classical rule for the model in which each individual owns an indivisible good

individual versus group strategy proofness when do they coincide a social choice function is group strategy proof on a domain if no group of agents can manipulate its final outcome to their own benefit by declaring false preferences on that domain there are a number of economically significant domains where interesting rules satisfying individual strategy proofness can be defined and for some of them all these rules turn out to also satisfy the stronger requirement of group strategy proofness we provide conditions on domains guaranteeing that for all rules defined on them individual and group strategy proofness become equivalent we also provide a partial answer regarding the necessity of our conditions

noisy contagion without mutation in a local interaction game agents play an identical stage game against their neighbours over time for nearest neighbour interaction it is established that starting from a random initial configuration in which each agent has a positive probability of playing the risk dominant strategy a sufficiently large population coordinates in the long run on the risk dominant equilibrium almost surely our result improves on blume 1995 ellison 2000 and morris 2000 by showing that the risk dominant equilibrium spreads to the entire population in a two dimensional lattice and without the help of mutation as long as there is some randomness in the initial configuration

the effects of corporate strategy and workplace innovations on union representation this paper explores the decline of union membership within partially organized firms using data from two conference board surveys of labor relations practices 1977 and 1983 the authors test a series of propositions concerning the effects of corporate industrial relations values and strategies and workplace innovations on union representation and membership the results show that whereas the average firm reduced the number of workers represented by unions by approximately 977 from 1977 to 1983 firms that placed a high priority on union avoidance reduced union representation by an average of 2 647 workers over the same period moreover the typical firm that emphasized union avoidance reduced the probability that its new facilities would be organized from approximately 15 percent to less than 1 percent

market structure and price cost margins in a paper that has become a standard reference in the structure conductperformance approach to industrial economics cowling and waterson 1976 developed a theoretical rationale for expecting industry profitability to be positively correlated with the level of concentration their model based on a simple algebraic description of oligopoly behaviour has been interpreted as providing a justification for the common empirical practice of cross industry regression analysis of price cost margins in terms of concentration levels in the present paper we show that on further examination this model implies a joint determination of margins and concentration this provides some interesting comparative static results of relevance to inter industry differences in concentration levels equally however it leads to various cautionary insights concerning the meaning of price cost margin versus concentration regressions

unionization and plant closure in canada this paper examines for the first time the role of unionization as a determinant of plant closings in canada using the 1999 to 2001 canadian workplace and employee survey the paper contributes to the north american evidence by showing that the share of a plant s workers covered by collective bargaining has a robust positive partial correlation with the probability of larger plants closing for smaller plants the extent of unionization tends to be much lower and its variation plays no role in plant closure the study highlights the theoretical and statistical importance of examining closure separately for large and small plants ce memoire examine pour la premiere fois le role de la syndicalisation en tant que determinant de la fermeture d usines au canada a l aide des resultats de l enquete sur le milieu de travail et les employes de 1999 et de 2001 emte le texte contribue a enrichir le dossier qui montre qu il y a correlation positive partielle robuste entre la portion des travailleurs d usines couverts par une convention collective et la probabilite de fermeture des grandes usines pour les plus petites usines le degre de syndicalisation tend aetre plus faible et sa variation ne joue pas de role dans le processus de fermeture d usines cette etude montre l importance theorique et pratique qu il y a aetudier separement les fermetures des grandes et des petites usines

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

group strategy proofness in private good economies many salient rules to allocate private goods are not only strategyproof but also group strategy proof in appropriate domains of definition hence diminishing the traditional conflict between incentives and efficiency that is so for solutions to matching division cost sharing house allocation and auctions in spite of the substantive disparity between these cases in a general framework encompassing all of them we prove that the equivalence between the two forms of strategy proofness is due to an underlying common structure that transcends the many differences between the contexts and the mechanisms for which it holds jel c78 d44 d63 d71 d82

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

exit from the hospital industry we study the exit of hospitals from the market for inpatient services more generous hospital reimbursement significantly reduces the probability of exit throughout the 1990s conditional on reimbursement levels hospital efficiency was not a significant determinant in the early 1990s but in the mid to late 1990s less efficient hospitals were significantly more likely to exit throughout the period high tech services increased the probability of survival and for profit hospitals were more likely to exit the role of medicare as a determinant of exit became less important in the latter half of the 1990s

investment and union certification using data on union certification elections we estimate the impact of unionization on firms investment behavior employing both a standard q model and an investment surprises technique we find that union certification significantly reduces investment in the year following the election we find that a winning certification election has on average about the same effect on investment in the year following the event as would given the elasticity measures taken from the public finance literature a 33 percentage point increase in the corporate tax the magnitude of the response in years further away from the election is less certain

investigating the cause of death industrial relations and plant closures in australia this is the first study to focus on how unions affect the likelihood of plant closures in australia australia is of special interest in this connection the authors argue because of its unique industrial relations institutions which at the time of the study 1990 95 limited the capacity of established unionized firms to remove unions except through plant closure an analysis of australian workplace industrial relations survey data shows that two of three measures of unionization had a robust positive influence on the probability of plant closure and the third had a weaker positive influence depending on the specification for example a 10 percentage point increase in union density one of the two measures found to have strong influence was associated with a 1 3 1 7 percentage point increase in the probability of plant closure representing a substantial increment since the mean closure probability among these plants was about 16

explaining the decline in the offer rate of employer retirement plans between 2003 and 2012 workplace retirement plans deferred compensation plans dcs and deferred benefit plans dbs help workers save for retirement conveniently consistently and automatically but the percentage of

efficient use of information and social value of information this paper analyzes equilibrium and welfare for a tractable class of economies games that have externalities strategic complementarity or substitutability and heterogeneous information first we characterize the equilibrium use of information complementarity heightens the sensitivity of equilibrium actions to public information raising aggregate volatility whereas substitutability heightens the sensitivity to private information raising cross sectional dispersion next we define and characterize an efficiency benchmark designed to address whether the equilibrium use of information is optimal from a social perspective the efficient use of information reflects the social value of aligning choices across agents finally we examine the comparative statics of equilibrium welfare with respect to the information structure the social value of information is best understood by classifying economies according to the inefficiency if any in the equilibrium use of information we conclude with a few applications including production externalities beauty contests business cycles and large cournot and bertrand games

unionism and employment behaviour although there exists a large literature on the effects of trade unions upon wages there is no published work that uses microeconomic data on establishments to examine the employment consequences of unionism this paper addresses this issue with a recent british data set and shows that even after the addition of a substantial set of control variables there is a strong association between poor employment performance and the presence of trade unions the union employment growth differential is estimated at approximately 3 percent per annum copyright 1991 by royal economic society

on strategy proofness and symmetric single peakedness we characterize the class of strategy proof social choice functions on the domain of symmetric single peaked preferences this class is strictly larger than the set of generalized median voter schemes the class of strategy proof and tops only social choice functions on the domain of single peaked preferences characterized by moulin 1980 since under the domain of symmetric single peaked preferences generalized median voter schemes can be disturbed by discontinuity points and remain strategy proof on the smaller domain our result identifies the specific nature of these discontinuities which allow to design non onto social choice functions to deal with feasibility constraints

unionization incomplete contracting and capital investment this article examines empirically the hypothesis that incomplete contracts and resulting opportunistic behavior over the return to sunk assets reduces investment union firm contracts are incomplete because they 1 do not prevent all actions aimed at changing the existing contract 2 cover a relatively short time period and 3 do not extend to union members yet to be hired the primary response of firms is to reduce investment in specific durable assets and also to reduce employment growth and increase debt the authors find fairly strong evidence of these effects in a sample of large publicly traded firms using firm specific measures of unionization copyright 1993 by university of chicago press

on the contract curve a test of alternative models of collective bargaining the traditional model of collective bargaining confines unions to settlements constrained by the employer s labor demand curve but an alternative model places wage employment outcomes on a contract curve that extends beyond the labor demand curve this paper derives a multidimensional hedonic contract curve model in which employment security provisions are used to maintain efficient bargains outside the employer s demand curve and distinguishes empirically between the contract curve and demand constraint models using data for public school teachers in new york state estimates clearly support the contract curve model over the demand constraint model by linking the gap between compensation and the value of the marginal product to the strength of employment security provisions

the role of market forces in assuring contractual performance the conditions under which transactors can use the market repeat purchase mechanism of contract enforcement are examined increased price is shown to be a means of assuring contractual performance a necessary and sufficient condition for performance is the existence of price sufficiently above salvageable production costs so that the nonperforming firm loses a discounted steam of rents on future sales which is greater than the wealth increase from nonperformance this will generally imply a market price greater than the perfectly competitive price and rationalize investments in firm specific assets advertising investments thereby become a positive indicator of likely performance

profit sharing employment stability and wage growth the authors conjecture that profit sharing reduces turnover and thus increases expected returns to firm specific human capital investments so that the optimal levels of skill acquisition and investment in firm specific skills rise and ultimately increase productivity empirical evidence from nlsy data on white men in nonunion jobs between 1988 and 1994 supports this hypothesis employees participating in profit sharing plans were less likely than non participants to separate from their jobs they also received training more frequently and for longer durations finally the authors show that profit sharing was related to higher wage growth indicating a faster rate of skill accumulation

the effect of wage bargains on the stock market value of the firm the author estimates the change in the value of common stock resulting from an unexpected change in collectively bargained labor costs using bargaining unit wage data and nyse stock returns he estimates a dollar for dollar trade off between these variables this result is consistent with stock valuations based on present value maximizing managerial decisions that is the results are consistent with hotelling s lemma the author also finds support for the hypothesis that collective bargains maximize the sum of shareholder and union member wealth that is the results are consistent with strong efficiency in the contracting environment copyright 1989 by american economic association

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

new evidence on unions and plant closings britain in the 1990s in this paper we exploit the longitudinal element of the 1990 and 1998 workplace employee relations surveys for britain to investigate the effect of unionism on establishment closings contrary to both recent u s research and long standing british work we find a strong positive association between two measures of unionism union recognition for collective bargaining purposes and union coverage and plant closings this association is robust to the inclusion of highly detailed industry controls but is driven by plants that are parts of multiestablishment entities no such relationship obtains in the case of single plant enterprises in explaining our findings we address their consistency with the widely perceived reduction in the disadvantages of british unionism in recent years

the dynamics of company profits an international comparison 1 profits and the process of competition dennis c mueller 2 modelling persistent profitability paul a geroski 3 the persistence of profits in the united states dennis c mueller 4 the persistence of profits in us manufacturing industries ioannis kessides 5 the persistence of profitability in canada r shyam khemani and d m shapiro 6 persistence of corporate profits in the federal republic of germany joachim schwalbach and talat mahmood 7 the persistence of profits in france frederic jenny and andre paul weber 8 the persistence of profits in japan hiroyuki odagiri and hideki yamawaki 9 the persistence of profits in the uk john cubbin and paul a geroski 10 the persistence of profits international comparison hiroyuki odagiri and hideki yamawaki 11 the persistence of profits in perspective paul a geroski and dennis c mueller