Business Commons^™

Regional Labour Market Integration In England And Wales, 1850-1913, George R. Boyer, Timothy J. Hatton

George R. Boyer

[Excerpt] This chapter examines the integration of labour markets within the rural and urban sectors of England and Wales during the second half of the nineteenth century. Although there is a large literature on internal migration and emigration in Victorian Britain, historians typically have focused on the direction and causes of migration rather than on its consequences for the labour market. Broadly speaking, the literature has found that workers did indeed migrate towards better wage-earning opportunities, that most moves were short-distance moves, and that once certain patterns of migration were established they often persisted. The studies leave the strong impression, …

Cross-Country Evidence On The Preliminary Effects Of Patent Box Regimes On Patent Activity And Ownership, Sebastien J. Bradley, Estelle Dauchy, Leslie Robinson

Sebastien J Bradley

This paper evaluates the initial impacts of patent box regimes in light of their primary stated objectives: stimulating domestic innovation and retaining mobile patent income to limit base erosion. Despite their lack of nexus requirements, we find that patent box regimes yield a 3 percent increase in new patent applications for every percentage point reduction in the tax rate on patent income. We find no significant impact of these regimes on deterring outward cross-border attribution of patent ownership, or on attracting ownership of foreign inventions. Increased patenting activity hence appears focused on inventions involving co-located (domestic) patent owners and inventors.

Ancillary Revenue And Price Fairness: An Exploratory Study Pre & Post Flight, Blaise P. Waguespack, Tamilla Curtis

Dr. Tamilla Curtis

The growing impact of Ancillary Revenue on consumer choice and shopping behavior continues to be a highly debated issue. In the US, the Department of Transportation (DOT) has stepped into the debate and is investigating the possibility of new rules on how airlines must report and display such ancillary offerings. While the DOT collects data, reports on the amount of ancillary revenue earned by the airlines continue to rise. Examining past research on price fairness from the marketing literature and the impact of revenue management on price fairness from the aviation literature, this article joins new research appearing on the …

Attitude–Behavior Consistency In Tax Compliance: A Cross-National Comparison, Alice Guerra, Brooke Harrington

Brooke Harrington

Reversing Ethiopia's Intellectual Capital Flight, Asayehgn Desta

Asayehgn Desta

Recently, the Ethiopian Government drafted a five year plan (2010 to 2015) to achieve the country’s economic growth. When Ethiopia’s Growth and Transformation plan was analyzed in light of the new growth theory and traced historically in terms of the push and pull factors that contributed to the flight of skilled Ethiopians to more advanced countries, it was found that over the years Ethiopia has funded the education of its nationals only to see them contributing to the growth of developed countries. Being stripped of skilled human capital, leaving it ill prepared to face globalization and survive in the new …

The Informal Sector As A Path To Expanding Opportunities, Colin C. Williams

Colin C Williams

Experimentation And Decentralization In China’S Labor Relations, Eli D. Friedman, Sarosh Kuruvilla

Sarosh Kuruvilla

In this introduction to the special issue ‘Changing work, labour and employment relations in China’, we argue that China is taking an experimental and decentralized approach to the development of new labor relations frameworks. Particular political constraints in China prevent interest aggregation among workers, as the central state sees this as posing a risk to social stability. Firms and local governments have been given a degree of space to experiment with different arrangements, as long as the categorical ban on independent unions is not violated. The consequence has been an increasingly differentiated labor relations landscape, with significant variation by region …

Uk Communications Provider Consumer Switching Experience Report 2015, Lissa Coffey

LissaCoffey

Caveat Emptor: Lessons From Volkswagen's Lemon Purchase, Terence Lau

Terence Lau

This article traces Volkswagen's mis-steps in the botched acquisition of Rolls Royce, and solutions are offered for counsel engaged in international transactions with the hope that the practitioner with little experience in the area can avoid similarly embarrassing and costly errors. The article also offers recommendations on how to draft contract clauses for international licensing use, and provides a brief overview of export control regimes counsel should be aware of when engaging in international transactions.

From Governance To Political Economy: Insights From A Study Of Relations Between Corporations And Workers, Harry W. Arthurs, Claire Mumme

Harry Arthurs

This study explores four postwar attempts to re-imagine the role of workers within the corporation and especially their relation to the processes of corporate governance. Employees have been variously conceptualized as "citizens at work," whose rights of association, speech, assembly, and due process can be secured through collective bargaining; as "stakeholders," whose interests are entitled to consideration analogous to those of corporate shareholders; as "human capital," worth preserving and enhancing through enlightened employment policies and practices; and as "investors"-actual holders of corporate equity through pension funds and other vehicles. Despite the descriptive power and normative appeal of these approaches, each …

Two Paths To The High Road: The Dynamics Of Coalition Building In Seattle And Buffalo, Ian Greer, Barbara Byrd, Lou Jean Fleron

Ian Greer

[Excerpt] Labor-community coalitions are not a new concept. Unions approach such coalitions now, as in the past, as one way to enhance their bargaining power with an employer. Such coalitions are temporary and often issue-based. In recent years, however, some local labor movements have begun to look at coalitions in a broader way – as a means of improving their public image and building power in the political arena. This broad-based approach requires the development of coalitions for the longer run, not just for temporary expediency. This paper develops the notion of a high road social infrastructure as a way …

Beyond National “Varieties”: Public-Service Contracting In Comparative Perspective, Ian Greer, Ian Greenwood, Mark Stuart

Ian Greer

[Excerpt] In this chapter, we will explore how work in contracted-out public services, including that in the voluntary sector, maps onto the broader international political economy of work. Comparative scholars often write about society correcting the excesses of the market, and it is hard to imagine a more relevant phenomenon to this than the voluntary sector. Yet this sector is itself subject to market forces, ironically perhaps, due to its ever-closer relationship with the state. Our study of employment in welfare-to-work services in the UK and Germany, whose findings are summarised below, shows how this relationship works and what its …

Welfare Reform, Precarity And The Re-Commodification Of Labour, Ian Greer

Ian Greer

While welfare reform matters for workers and workplaces, it is peripheral in English-language sociology of work and industrial relations research. This article’s core proposition is that active labour market policies (ALMPs) are altering the institutional constitution of the labour market by intensifying market discipline within the workforce. This re-commodification effect is specified drawing on Marxism, comparative institutionalism, German-language sociology, and English-language social policy analysis. Because of administrative failures and employer discrimination, however, ALMPs may worsen precarity without achieving the stated goal of increasing labour-market participation.

Decomposing Ldc Inequality, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

[Excerpt] At the present time, there is great interest among development economists in the problem of economic inequality in less developed countries (LDCs). Studies of the determinants of inequality follow either of two general approaches. The more traditional approach is associated with names like Kuznets (1963), Chenery and associates (1960, 1968, 1975), Adelman and Morris (1973), Ahluwalia (1976) and Chiswick (1971). These studies share a common methodology, consisting basically of looking at a cross-section of countries, and (1) measuring the degree of inequality in each, (2) measuring other characteristics of each country (e.g., level of GNP, its rate of growth, …

Changing Labor Market Conditions And Economic Development In Hong Kong, The Republic Of Korea, Singapore, And Taiwan, China, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

In the newly industrializing economies (NIEs) of Hong Kong, the Republic of Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan (China), the entire working population has benefited from labor market institutions. The East Asian NIEs attained and maintained generally full employment, improved their job mixes, raised real earnings, and lowered their rates of poverty. This article reaches two principal conclusions. First, labor market conditions continued to improve in all four economies in the 1980s at rates remarkably similar to their rates of aggregate economic growth. Second, labor market repression was not a major factor in the growth experiences of these economies in the 1980s. …

Higher Education And Income Distribution In A Less Developed Country, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

[Excerpt] The primary purpose of this paper is to empirically test among both the intra- and the inter-generational version of these three hypotheses for higher (i.e. post-secondary) levels of education for one less developed country, Kenya. A secondary purpose is to investigate other economic aspects of spending on higher education, most notably the question of horizontal equity in school finance. Before proceeding, a methodological point is in order. There is no consensus in the public economics literature on what is a suitable criterion for assessing the equitability of a fiscal programme. At least three criteria may be distinguished (the terminology …

Private Returns And Social Equity In The Financing Of Higher Education, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

[Excerpt] A widespread phenomenon in developing countries has been the rapid growth of schools and institutions of higher learning resulting in a so-called ‘education explosion’. One possible explanation for the education explosion is that education is a profitable personal investment, as evidenced by high private rates of return. The high private returns are translated into demands on politicians for additional schooling spaces. To gain or maintain public favour, each politician uses his influence to try to increase the number of schools in his constituency. By this chain of events, growth of educational systems might be anticipated as long as private …

The Dynamics Of Poverty, Inequality And Economic Well-Being: African Economic Growth In Comparative Perspective, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

Two hundred and fifty million Africans (about 45% of the population) are poor. In rural areas, where most Africans live, there is, alas, a 'poor majority'. Rural poverty rates range from 37% in Madagascar and 41% in Kenya to 88% in Zambia and 94% in Ghana (Table 1). It is hard to imagine an issue in development economics that is of greater importance to humankind than the effects of economic growth on poverty and economic well-being. Yet there is remarkably little consensus on this vitally important issue, as illustrated by the following two polar positions: New patterns of growth will …

Changes In Poverty And Inequality In Developing Countries, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

This paper presents new data on poverty, inequality, and growth in those developing countries of the world for which the requisite statistics are available. Economic growth is found generally but not always to reduce poverty. Growth, however, is found to have very little to do with income inequality. Thus the "economic laws" linking the rate of growth and the distribution of benefits receive only very tenuous empirical support here.

Income Distribution In Developing Economies: Conceptual, Data, And Policy Issues In Broad-Based Growth, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

[Excerpt] The aim of economic development is to raise the standard of living of a country's people, especially its poor. Economic growth, particularly when broadly based, is a means to that end. 'Underdevelopment' can be defined as a state of severely constrained choices. When one is choosing from among an undesirable set of alternatives, the outcome will itself be undesirable. Standards of living will be low. If standards of living are to be improved, people must have a better set of alternatives from which to choose. 'Economic development' is the process by which the constraints on choices are relaxed. Based …

Cynicism In Negotiation: When Communication Increases Buyers’ Skepticism, Eyal Ert, Stephanie J. Creary, Max H. Bazerman

Stephanie J. Creary

The economic literature on negotiation shows that strategic concerns can be a barrier to agreement, even when the buyer values the good more than the seller. Yet behavioral research demonstrates that human interaction can overcome these strategic concerns through communication. We show that there is also a downside of this human interaction: cynicism. Across two studies we focus on a seller-buyer interaction in which the buyer has uncertain knowledge about the goods for sale, but has a positive expected payoff from saying “yes” to the available transaction. Study 1 shows that most buyers accept offers made by computers, but that …

Ports And Ladders: The Nature And Relevance Of Internal Labor Markets In A Changing World, Paul Osterman, M. Diane Burton

M. Diane Burton

[Excerpt] Many believe that the nature of careers has changed dramatically in the past twenty years. One scholar writes that internal labor markets have been 'demolished', while a human resources manager at Intel comments that, in contrast to the past, today, 'You own your own employability. You are responsible' (Knoke 2001: 31). The idea of the 'boundaryless career' seems increasingly popular (Arthur and Rousseau 1996). If it is in fact true that the old rules for organizing work have disappeared, this would represent a fundamental change for employees. It would also have major implications for how scholars think about the …

The Existence And Perception Of Redundancy In Consumer Information Environments, Michael D. Johnson, Jerome M. Katrichis

Michael D. Johnson

Two studies are reported which examine the existence of attribute redundancy as well as consumers' ability to perceive attribute redundancy in consumer information environments. The results of the first study suggest that attribute redundancy varies widely from product category to product category. The results of the second study suggest that consumers' ability to perceive attribute relationships improves with product knowledge. Unexpected was an observed U-shaped relationship between consumers' perceptions of attribute redundancy and attribute knowledge. Together the results suggest a number of policy implications regarding the value of consumer information programs.

The Effects Of Fatigue On Judgments Of Interproduct Similarity, Michael D. Johnson, Donald R. Lehmann, David A. Horne

Michael D. Johnson

Similarity scaling often requires subjects to produce such a large number of judgments that fatigue may become a problem. Yet it remains unclear just how respondent fatigue affects similarity perceptions and resulting judgments. The present study uses a categorization perspective to examine the effects of fatigue on similarity judgments. The results suggest that subjects rely increasingly on category membership as they progress through a similarity judgment task.

Attribute Abstraction, Feature-Dimensionality, And The Scaling Of Product Similarities, Michael D. Johnson, Donald R. Lehmann, Claes Fornell, David A. Horne

Michael D. Johnson

This paper examines the attributes that consumers use when making product similarity judgments and their effect on similarity scaling. Previous research suggests that concrete brands are judged using dichotomous features while more abstract product categories are judged using continuous dimensions. This, in turn, suggests that the appropriateness of spatial scaling increases relative to tree scaling as one moves from brands to product categories. The results of two studies support an increase in the fit of spaces relative to trees from brands to categories. However, the abstractness of the judgments appears to be driving the effect, not the use of features …

Designing Survey Methods To Evaluate The Undeclared Economy: A Review Of The Options, Colin C. Williams

Colin C Williams

This Working Paper is part of the GREY project which is developing capacities and capabilities in tackling undeclared work. In this Working Paper, the various options available to researchers when designing surveys to tackle undeclared work are evaluated. These issues include the unit of analysis used, the data collection methodology, an array of questionnaire design issues (including the reference period, whether to define the phenomenon for participants, a direct versus gradual approach to sensitive issues, whether to do a supply- and/or demand-side survey; whether to examine the relationship between purchasers and sellers, how to discourage social desirability bias), sample size, …

Parity And Non-Parity Determinants Of Exchange Rates In Latin American Economies, Catherine S.F. Ho, Mohamed Ariff

Mohamed Ariff

This paper reports how non-parity fundamental factors together with parity factors are correlated with exchange rate movements. Seven Latin American countries were included in this study using a selection criterion that for a pair of countries to be included, the pair must have more than 50 per cent of trade with the group chosen. The econometric methods applied are appropriate to this topic and include pooled time series regression and seemingly unrelated regression. The findings show that there is support for short and long-run effects on exchange rates from inflation and interest rates. We entered non-parity factors suggested in recent …

App Newsletter 3, Riccardo Pelizzo

Riccardo Pelizzo

third issue of the APP newsletter where we discuss the results of the Nigerian elections, the consequences of falling oil price, and the costs of instability

Experimentation And Decentralization In China’S Labor Relations, Eli D. Friedman, Sarosh Kuruvilla

Eli D Friedman

In this introduction to the special issue ‘Changing work, labour and employment relations in China’, we argue that China is taking an experimental and decentralized approach to the development of new labor relations frameworks. Particular political constraints in China prevent interest aggregation among workers, as the central state sees this as posing a risk to social stability. Firms and local governments have been given a degree of space to experiment with different arrangements, as long as the categorical ban on independent unions is not violated. The consequence has been an increasingly differentiated labor relations landscape, with significant variation by region …

Getting Through The Hard Times Together? Chinese Workers And Unions Respond To The Economic Crisis, Eli D. Friedman

Eli D Friedman

How do post-socialist unions respond to market crisis? And what are the implications of this response for labor representation? Drawing on literature on post-socialist labor and union democracy, I argue that economic crisis affects not just labor – capital and labor – state relations, but also the relationship between union representatives and workers. Such a dynamic is highlighted by an empirical account of the divergent activities of workers and All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) unions in China following the economic crisis of 2008. While the union responded to mass unemployment with an administrative and policy-oriented strategy, workers took to …