Employment,technology and industrial relations in the UK clearing banks: is the honeymoon over?

Employment in UK retail banking has begun to decline as all the major institutions shed workers. Technological, organizational and market-driven reasons for the job losses in the major clearing banks are discussed. Irrevocable long-term changes in employers' industrial relations and human resource strategies are identified as necessary accompaniments to pushing the current retrenchment through in the context of a developing general crisis in employment relations.     

Japanese Employees' Attitudes Toward Changes in Traditional Employment Practices

This study examines Japanese employees' attitudinal opposition to changes in such employment practices as nenko (seniority)-based wages and promotions, and implicit long-term employment guarantees for the regular workforce. The study shows that (1) overall, Japanese employees are strongly opposed to placing a cap on senior employees' pay and to mid-career transfers to subsidiary companies, and (2) the level of opposition is a function of their perceptions of unions' past performance and of employers' human resource policies.     

External Churning and Internal Flexibility: Evidence on the Functional Flexibility and Core-Periphery Hypotheses

Functionally flexible systems for organizing work may reduce job instability and insecurity by reducing employers' reliance on job cuts or contingent work to respond to changes in their environments. Related arguments hypothesize that contingent work allows firms to adjust labor while "buffering" their core of permanent workers from job instability. We find evidence that internally flexible work systems are associated with reduced involuntary and voluntary turnover in manufacturing but that contingent work and involuntary turnover of the permanent workforce are positively related regardless of sector, in contrast to the prediction of the core-periphery hypothesis.     

Unnatural Extinction: The Rise and Fall of the Independent Local Union

This article analyzes what happened to independent local unions (ILUs), also known as company unions, since 1935. After providing a statistical analysis of ILU membership since 1935, the article looks at the factors that shaped membership trends: changes in labor law, the characteristics of ILUs, worker attitudes toward ILUs, and employers' industrial relations policies. New evidence is presented that suggests that even those employers who still favored ILUs in the 1950s were orienting them away from collective bargaining and toward the "new nonunion model" of the 1960s and 1970s.     

Small business and online training in Australia: who is willing to participate?

This paper investigates small business employers' willingness to participate in online training based on survey of 716 Western Australian small business employers. The results indicate that those small business employers with aspirations towards business growth and who are existing Internet users are more likely to participate in online training than those without growth aspirations.     

Family-Friendly Management in Great Britain: Testing Various Perspectives

Five main perspectives on family-friendly management are differentiated by their conceptions about the nature of such management and not just by its assumed predictors. Multivariate analysis of the relationships among a set of family-oriented practices shows that some but not all are used in a systematic way. Regression analysis reveals that employers' adoption of family-friendly approaches is explained by factors that span all five perspectives, but overall, the organizational adaptation perspective fares best.     

Australian Employers in the Shadow of the Labor Accords

In recent years, Australian unions and the Federal Government have developed a close working relationship. Employers, by contrast, have remained isolated and divided. This article examines their problems and responses in the context of deteriorating economic circumstances. It argues that the macro level Labor Accords have actually served employers' interests well by providing a stable industrial relations environment and by encouraging greater management control and efficiency at the micro level.     

Low Pay and Wage Regulation in the European Community

The prospect of direct intervention in the process of wage determination as envisaged in the Social Charter has met with considerable criticism. In particular, employers' organizations and certain governments have rejected outright the proposal to require firms to pay an equitable wage. However, in all member-states except the UK and Ireland, arrangements exist to ensure that nearly all workers are covered by minimum wage protection (through national minimum wages or full-coverage collective agreements). In this article the nature of low-paid employment in member-states is examined and different methods of wage regulation are described. After reviewing the economic effects of wage regulation, we discuss possible initiatives on wage regulation at the Community level.     

When Might a Distressed Firm Share Work? Evidence from the Short-Time Compensation Programme in France

This paper analyses the participation patterns of publicly funded short-time compensation benefits (STC) in France. The regression equation directly models the choice of work units facing slack demand to adjust their labour force by declaring redundancies or by implementing an STC agreement. The likelihood of adopting the work-sharing mode is related to certain firm and labour force attributes, labour market institutions and policy parameters. The results suggest that employment protection laws increase the incidence of STC usage and hence decrease employers' recourse to layoffs. Work-forces receiving relatively high levels of pay and exhibiting relatively low levels of labour force attachment are less likely to participate in the STC programme, ceteris paribus . Although the programme is designed to prevent cyclical layoffs, there is preliminary evidence that chronic usage in instances of permanent layoffs is fairly widespread.     

Why Do Employers Give Discretion? Family Versus Performance Concerns

Using a large data set of Western European employees, I examine two sets of reasons behind employers' decisions to give discretion: performance concerns (firms give discretion in order to improve performance) and family concerns (firms wish to improve the employees' work–family balance). I find more support for the former than for the latter. Discretion is positively related to the use of "high-performance" work practices and to employee position and ability, and is smaller in larger establishments, which suggests that loss of control matters to employers. Evidence about family concerns is less compelling. Female participation in the labor force has a positive effect on discretion over work schedules, but women have less discretion than men, and employees with small children do not have more discretion than other employees. Large and governmental organizations, which are expected to care more about work–family balance, do not offer more discretion over work schedules than other types of organizations.     

The Effects of Changes in Property Tax Rates and School Spending on Residential and Business Property Value Growth

In this article, we examine the effects of changes in property tax rates and school spending on residential and business property value growth in southeast Michigan. We use panel data for 152 communities in the five counties surrounding Detroit between the years 1983 and 2002, a period during which state government mandated major changes to school finance. Using the mandated changes to identify causality, we find that: (1) residential property values are more responsive to school spending changes than property tax rate changes; (2) business property values are more responsive to tax rate changes than school spending changes; and (3) business property values are more sensitive to changes in tax rates as compared to residential property. We also examine tax competition effects on property value growth, showing that tax competition plays an important role in property value growth in the southeast Michigan region.     

How sensitive is executive compensation to organizational size?

Prior empirical research has documented a large cross-sectional correlation between the level of executive pay and firm size. In contrast, this paper examines the association between percentage changes in executive compensation and percentage changes in organizational size. We analyze compensation and size data for executives at several levels of the corporate hierarchy for a sample of 303 firms. Our results indicate that the correlation between compensation and size is much smaller, although still statistically significant, in changes than in levels. This suggests that changes in an executive's compensation are not primarily driven by changes in organizational size.     

Testing for a Structural Change in U.S. Wage Determination

Previous tests for structural changes (slope changes) and shifts (intercept changes) in the Phillips curve and union wage determination specify the date of structural change a priori. This article tests for structural changes and shifts without specifying the change point ex ante . The results support the belief that structural changes occurred in the early 1980s. Contrary to some previous research, however, the results do not support a structural shift in the Phillips curve.     

Short and long run movements in U.S. merger activity

This paper uses the NPV approach to merger decisions to select variables which are expected to explain changes in the aggregate number of mergers of US manufacturing and mining firms over time. We test for and estimate a cointegrating relationship between such variables. We find that in the long run the number of mergers and acquisitions is positively related both to the level of manufacturing production and to the level of the nominal bond yield. A short run dynamic model is also presented. Annual changes in merger and acquisition activity were found to be positively related to current changes in Tobin's Q and changes in Q lagged one, two and four years; positively related to changes in the current bond yield but negatively related to changes in the yield in the previous year; and finally that changes in merger activity were related to the degree to which the number of mergers differed from the long run or equilibrium value in the previous year.     

Turnover as a Measure of Demand for Existing Homes

Changes in the turnover of existing homes are often equated with changes in housing demand, but it is not clear if, or why, this linkage exists. This paper documents the positive correlation between changes in turnover and changes in housing demand and develops a search model that explain the linkage. One implication of the analysis is that, for high frequency data, turnover is superior to price as an indicator of change in housing demand.     

我国能源强度、电力强度变化及因素分析

运用对数平均迪氏指数法对2000---2008年我国能源强度、电力强度变化的情况及因素进行了分析,结果表明：行业能耗变化对能源强度的变化起主导作用,符合这段时期我国重化工业化的特征;行业电耗变化和结构变化同时引起电力强度的变化,但行业电耗变化起主导作用,这与电能在终端能源消费的比重不断提高密切相关。     

Supply Elasticity and the Housing Cycle of the 2000s

There is no evidence that differences in supply elasticity caused cross‐sectional variation among U.S. housing markets in the severity of the 2000s housing cycle. This is true in three sets of empirical specifications: a first that assumes identical demand changes in the 2000s across markets, a second that proxies for supply elasticity and demand changes in the 2000s with estimates based on price and quantity changes in the 1980s and a third that uses physical and regulatory constraints to proxy for supply elasticity and uses state fixed effects to capture variation in demand conditions.     

Decomposing the Sources of Earnings Inequality: Assessing the Role of Reallocation

This study exploits longitudinal employer–employee matched data from the U.S. Census Bureau to investigate the contribution of worker and firm reallocation to changes in earnings inequality within and across industries between 1992 and 2003. We find that factors that cannot be measured using standard cross‐sectional data, including the entry and exit of firms and the sorting of workers across firms, are important sources of changes in earnings distributions over time. Our results also suggest that the dynamics driving changes in earnings inequality are heterogeneous across industries.     

Code and conduct in French cuisine: Impact of code changes on external evaluations

We study the effects of organizational code‐preserving and code‐violating changes on external evaluations by third parties—an essential but under‐studied strategic outcome. We define code‐preserving changes as a variation in the firm's product range that preserves the social code within which the firm positions its offering. By contrast, a code‐violating change corresponds to a variation in the product range that breaks with past codes and embraces another social code. Our analyses of French haute cuisine restaurants show that code‐preserving changes and code‐violating changes have positive effects on external evaluations. Both effects decline with prior evaluations received by the organization, but only the effect of code‐violating changes is reduced with age. Moreover, external evaluations improve when restaurants undertake more code‐preserving changes than their direct competitors but decline when they make more code‐violating changes than competitors. These results enable us to derive implications for research on strategic change, strategic groups, and strategic social positioning. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

CEO DUALITY AND FIRM PERFORMANCE: WHAT'S THE FUSS?

Rising shareholder activism following poor corporate performance and a subsequent drop in shareholder value at many major U.S. corporations had rekindled interest in duality and corporate governance. Despite limited empirical evidence, duality (chairman of the board and CEO are the same individual) has been blamed, in many cases, for the poor performance, and failure of firms to adapt to a changing environment. In examining the relationship between duality and firm performance, this study considers the announcement effects of changes in duality status, accounting measures of operating performance for firms that have changed their duality structure, and long-term measures of performance for firms that have had a consistent history of a duality structure. Our results suggest that: (1) the market is indifferent to changes in a firm's duality status; (2) there is little evidence of operating performance changes around changes in duality status; and (3) there is only weak evidence that duality status affects long-term performance, after controlling for other factors that might impact that performance.