Revisiting General and Specific Union Beliefs: The Union‐Voting Intentions of Professionals

We examine how general and specific beliefs about unions influence the union‐voting intentions of professional employees. Previous research, mainly on nonprofessionals, has found that both beliefs are significant in predicting voting behavior, but that specific beliefs have the stronger effect. Using a structural equation model, we found a causal relationship between general and specific beliefs, and that the total effect of general beliefs is nearly three times as strong as that of specific beliefs.     

On the Behavior and Determinants of Risk‐Based Capital Ratios: Revisiting the Evidence from UK Banking Institutions*

Using bank‐level panel data from the United Kingdom, this paper investigates the factors that influence banks' choice of risk‐based capital ratios. The study focuses on evaluating the role of regulatory capital requirements. Findings indicate that such requirements, even when not binding, affect banks' capital management practices and suggest that banks maintain targeted buffers above regulatory thresholds. That behavior differs across several dimensions, including bank size, nearness to regulatory minimum, reliance on core (equity) capital and exposure to market discipline. Capital ratios also vary over the economic cycle. These findings have implications for the ongoing review of international capital standards.     

Framing the Carolingian Economy

This essay argues that the degree of commercialization on Carolingian great estates should not be overstated. Rather, the strategies and ambitions of Carolingian estate managers were primarily determined by a 'domainal' ideology and concerns for good stewardship. Moreover, the structural demands of the Carolingian state may have played a rather more important role in framing economic conditions than is commonly supposed. Here Carolingianists need to learn some of the lessons that have helped to transform the writing of ancient economic history in recent decades.     

Unit Trust Investment Products: Is the rate of return reported by fund managers to investors reliable and comparable?

Funds under management in retail unit trust investment products have grown tenfold in the past decade and now represent the savings of some 1.5 million retail investors. These investors cannot specifically command the infomation they require and consequently rely on what the market provides. This paper provides some evidence that because of a lack of independent verification and mandated standards the investing public cannot be certain that reported rates of return are either reliable or comparable.     

THE LABOUR FORCE DYNAMICS OF THE MARGINALLY ATTACHED*

One of the most important measures of the state of the labour market is the unemployment rate. However, the standard definition of unemployment ignores an important group of people who are not employed but who want to work – the marginally attached workforce. The marginally attached are defined as those who are not employed, want to work but are not actively seeking work and therefore not classified as unemployed. The paper uses longitudinal data from the Survey of Employment and Unemployment Patterns (SEUP) to test whether the marginally attached are behaviourally distinct from the unemployed or those who are not attached to the labour force. We find that the labour force transitions of the marginally attached, on the whole, are between those of the unemployed and the unattached. Another finding is that the length of time over which the labour market dynamics are considered is crucial to our understanding of the labour market dynamics of the marginally attached. An implication of the findings of this paper is that a range of measures of potential labour supply should be considered, and that the measure used should depend on the specific question being asked.     

A Reinterpretation of the CIE Projections of the Long-Run Economic Effects of Immigration*

The 1988 Committee to Advise on Australia's Immigration Policies uses ORANI projections of increasing GDP per head as indicators of the economic benefits of immigration. We show that the projections imply that immigration reduces incumbents' pre-tax real incomes, leaving their post-tax incomes unchanged The rise in GDP per head is due to immigrants' relatively high participation rates. We argue that distributional information is important in assessing the effects of immigration.     

Using Generalized Method of Moments to Test Mean-Variance Efficiency

This paper develops tests of unconditional mean-variance efflciency under weak distributional assumptions using a Generalized Method of Moments framework. These tests are potentially more robust than commonly employed tests which rely on the assumption that asset returns are normally distributed and temporarily i.i.d. Using returns for size-based portfolios from 1926 to 1988 we show that the conclusion concerning the mean-variance effilciency of market indexes can be sensitive to the test considered.     

On the Importance of Measuring Payout Yield: Implications for Empirical Asset Pricing

We investigate the empirical implications of using various measures of payout yield rather than dividend yield for asset pricing models. We find statistically and economically significant predictability in the time series when payout (dividends plus repurchases) and net payout (dividends plus repurchases minus issuances) yields are used instead of the dividend yield. Similarly, we find that payout (net payout) yields contains information about the cross section of expected stock returns exceeding that of dividend yields, and that the high minus low payout yield portfolio is a priced factor.