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Articles 1 - 4 of 4
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Power, Luck And Ideology In A Model Of Executive Pay, Peter Skott, Frederick Guy
Power, Luck And Ideology In A Model Of Executive Pay, Peter Skott, Frederick Guy
Economics Department Working Paper Series
The microprocessor and related technologies have transformed corporate and industry structure; applied in a neo‐liberal environment, the technologies have had profound effects on the relative power of different groups. Skott and Guy (2007) and Guy and Skott (2008) formalized one aspect of this process of power‐biased technical change: firms' increased ability to monitor low‐paid employees and the resulting changes in inequality and employment at the low end of the income distribution. This paper addresses power biases and income inequality at the high end. Increasing firm‐level financial volatility has intensified the agency problem and increased the power of corporate executives. These …
Technology, Power And The Political Economy Of Inequality, Frederick Guy, Peter Skott
Technology, Power And The Political Economy Of Inequality, Frederick Guy, Peter Skott
Economics Department Working Paper Series
Technology can affect the distribution of income directly via its influence on both the bargaining power of different parties and the marginal product of different factors of production. This paper focuses mainly on the first route. The role of power is transparent in the case of medieval choke points but modern network technologies have similar features. There is also substantial evidence ‐‐ from truckers and retail clerks to CEOs ‐‐ that power affects the determination of wages. But power relations inevitably have institutional dimensions; regulatory frameworks influence industry structures and the market power of large companies as well as the …
Labor Heterogeneity, Inequality And Institutional Change, Peter Skott
Labor Heterogeneity, Inequality And Institutional Change, Peter Skott
Economics Department Working Paper Series
US earnings inequality has increased dramatically since the 1970s, and the prospect of a reversal depends on what caused the trend. The standard explanation emphasizes skill-biased technical change. This paper briefly considers some aggregation issues and then proceeds to outline two alternative perspectives .power biased technical change and the effects of induced mismatch in the labor market .and their implications.
Information And Communications Technologies, Coordination And Control, And The Distribution Of Income, Frederick Guy, Peter Skott
Information And Communications Technologies, Coordination And Control, And The Distribution Of Income, Frederick Guy, Peter Skott
Economics Department Working Paper Series
We consider the links between information and communications technologies (ICTs) and the distribution of income, as mediated by problems of coordination and control within organizations. In the large corporations of the mid-twentieth century, a highly developed division of labor was coordinated and controlled with the aid of relatively underdeveloped ICTs. This created a situation in which the options of top management were constrained while the individual and collective power of lower paid workers was enhanced. Only in the late twentieth century, when the microprocessor and related technologies transformed the information systems of organizations, did improvements in the tools of coordination …