Hysteresis in Unemployment

After two decades of ratcheting unemployment in Europe, most economists agree that structural changes associated with higher equilibrium rates of unemployment have occurred. But the direction of causality is a matter of controversy: Have the structural changes caused the long-lasting increases in actual unemployment? Or have the increases in actual unemployment caused the structural changes? The latter possibility is often referred to as hysteresis. During the past decade, a distinct research program has evolved around the idea that equilibrium employment tracks actual unemployment. This survey reviews the various hysteretic explanations offered in the literature and evaluates their empirical standing.     

The Influence of Stock Market Listing on Human Resource Management: Evidence for France and Britain

We use data from the Relations Professionnelles et Négociations d'Entreprise survey of 2004 and the Workplace Employment Relations Survey of 2004 to analyse how far approaches to human resource management differ according to whether an establishment is part of a company with a stock exchange listing. In both countries we find that listing is positively associated with teamworking and performance‐related pay, while in France, but not in Britain, it is also linked to worker autonomy and training. Our findings are inconsistent with the claim that shareholder pressure operates as a constraint on the adoption of high‐performance workplace practices. The pattern is similar in the two countries, but with a slightly stronger tendency for listing to be associated with high‐performance workplace practices in France.     

Perennial grain crops in the West Soudanian Savanna of Mali: perspectives from agroecology and gendered spaces

Perennial grain crops may play an important role in environmentally sound and socially just food systems for Africa. We study the future possibility of integrating perennial grains into Malian farming systems from the perspective of agroecology, and more specifically using a gendered space approach. We interviewed 72 farmers across the sorghum-growing region of Mali. We found that perennial grains offer a vision for transforming human relations with nature that mirrors the resource sharing of customary land tenure, including patterns of extensive and intensive land use in time and space. Women interviewees identified a broad set of potential advantages and challenges to perennial grain production. Advantages include reduced labour, saving seed, and improving food security. Women farmers were concerned about livestock, water access, and resource limitations. We argue that perennial grains may increase access to land and natural resources for women farmers. Perennial grains may improve soil quality, reduce labour early in the rainy season, and provision more resources from fallow lands. Pastoralists stand to benefit from improved pastures in the dry season. We conclude that investments are needed to develop viable crop types in consideration of the complexity of West African farming systems and the local needs of women farmers and pastoralists.     

Entrepreneurship: Origins and returns

We examine the origins and outcome of entrepreneurship on the basis of exceptionally comprehensive Norwegian matched worker-firm-owner data. In contrast to most existing studies, our notion of entrepreneurship not only comprises self-employment, but also employment in partly self-owned limited liability companies. Based on this extended entrepreneurship concept, we find that entrepreneurship tends to be profitable. It also raises income variability, but the most successful quartile gains much more than the least successful quartile loses. Key determinants of the decision to become an entrepreneur are occupational qualifications, family resources, gender, and work environments. Individual unemployment encourages, while aggregate unemployment discourages, entrepreneurship.     

Boardroom Diversity and its Effect on Social Performance: Conceptualization and Empirical Evidence

In this paper, we seek to answer two questions: (1) what does boardroom diversity stand for in the strategic management literature? And, (2) is there a significant relationship between boardroom diversity and corporate social performance. We first clarify the boardroom diversity concept, distinguishing between a structural diversity of boards and a demographic diversity in boards, and then we investigate its possible linkage to social performance in a sample of S&P500 firms. We find a significant relationship between diversity in boards and social performance. This relationship is moderated by diversity of boards. Our results also reveal the effects of the specific variables that make up the diversity of boards and diversity in boards constructs. In particular, gender, and age have a significant effect on corporate social performance. Some important measurement issues are raised and discussed.     

Influence of family ownership on small business growth. Evidence from French SMEs

The performance implications of family ownership have been studied extensively. However, studies that investigate the influence of family ownership on small business growth remain scarce and suffer from several shortcomings. To remedy these shortcomings, this paper uses a very large sample of French SMEs to explore the relationship between family ownership and small business growth. First, this study shows that there is a negative, although non-monotonic, relationship between family ownership and small business economic growth. Second, it explores the channel through which family ownership affects firm growth. Results suggest that firms with greater family ownership are prone to below-potential rates of economic growth, given their internal financing resources. Overall, the results suggest that small family businesses have a propensity to deliberately limit their growth (i.e., they adopt conservative growth behavior).     

Escaping the Resource Curse and the Dutch Disease?

Abstract . In the 1960s, Norway lagged behind its Scandinavian neighbors in the aggregate value of economic production per capita, as it had for decades. By the 1990s, Norway had caught up with and forged ahead of Denmark and Sweden. When and why did Norway catch up? The discovery and extraction of oil in the early 1970s is usually suggested as the explanation. But oil alone cannot explain Norway’s growth, since Sachs and Warner (2001 ) show that resource gifts often reverse growth, making oil a curse, not a blessing. Moreover, there is the possibility of contracting the Dutch Disease, which involves a rapid and substantial contraction of the traded goods sector. This article explains how deliberate macroeconomic policy, the arrangement of political and economic institutions, a strong judicial system, and social norms contributed to let Norway escape the Resource Curse and the Dutch Disease for more than two decades. Intriguingly, it appears that Norway in the late 1990s may show some symptoms: Norway has experienced reversed relative growth compared to Denmark and Sweden and a contraction of industrial activity. This article explores the political economy behind this recent slowdown.     

Wage Formation,Regional Migration and Local Labour Market Tightness*

Empirical studies of regional wage formation and interregional migration routinely include the regional unemployment rate as indicator of local labour market tightness. However, these studies are usually motivated by economic theories that emphasize transition probabilities between unemployment and employment, and the unemployment rate is an imperfect proxy for these probabilities. We use a large micro data set to compute estimates of the rate of outflow from unemployment for 90 Norwegian travel‐to‐work areas. The outflow rates perform better than traditional measures of regional labour market tightness in panel data analyses of regional wages and interregional migration.     

Strong stability in a two-dimensional classical risk model with independent claims

In this paper, we study the strong stability of ruin probabilities in risk models. The question of stability naturally arises in risk theory since the governing parameters in these models can only be estimated with uncertainty. Moreover, in most cases there are not explicit expressions known for the ruin probabilities. Our objective is to present the applicability of the strong stability method to the bivariate classical risk model with independent claims. After clarifying the conditions to approximate the two-dimensional risk model with disturbance parameters by the two-dimensional classical risk model, we obtain the stability inequalities with an exact computation of the constants.     

Morphogenesis Of Social Networks And Coexistence Of Technologies ∗

The aim of the article is to relate the formation of influence networks to the coexistence of technologies in the long run. In the spirit of Plouraboue et al. (1998), we postulate that potential adopters of a technology are situated in a social network. In our model, initial relations are partly negative and all the expected utilities are revised in parallel. In the case of an exogenous network, opinions can fluctuate endlessly. When agents reallocate their relationships, this reinforces trust in agents whose opinion is close to theirs. As a result of this process, the network stabilizes in the long run, generating diversity in expected utilities.