Unemployment insurance benefits and income smoothing

Labor unemployment insurance reduces unemployment concerns. We argue that these benefits moderate incentives to smooth earnings to reduce employees’ concerns about unemployment risk. Using exogenous variations in unemployment insurance benefits, we find evidence consistent with this argument. We also find that the link between unemployment insurance benefits and income smoothing is stronger when there is higher unemployment risk and when the firm is likely to employ more low-wage workers, who find unemployment insurance benefits especially useful. Our paper contributes to the literature by showing that public policy decisions such as unemployment insurance have significant, albeit probably unintended, externalities on corporate financial reporting.     

Asymmetric Adjustment Costs, Asymmetric Pricing and Employment: Evidence from the UK

This paper uses an asymmetric multivariate model to investigate asymmetries in employment and pricing behaviour by firms. This generalises the approach of Granger and Lee (1989) and also exploits the cross equation restrictions on the equations for prices and employment implied by a restricted cost function—the dual to a Cobb‐Douglas production function. Our results suggest that both prices and employment respond asymmetrically to shocks to costs and demand.     

Monetary union and the Maastricht inflation criterion: The accession countries*

We model an accession country facing a Maastricht‐type inflation criterion that specifies an inflation ceiling. In addition to deciding whether or not to satisfy this criterion, the country must decide how much costly economic reform to undertake. If the country puts enough weight on the future that it can credibly meet the inflation criterion no matter what the ceiling is, then the inflation criterion benefits the country but lowers reform. If the country puts less weight on the future, then a criterion with a properly chosen inflation ceiling can increase reform. We derive the inflation ceilings that maximize the country's welfare and its reform.     

Preventing wildlife crime with a focus on orangutans: Applying social influence techniques to public education efforts

Orangutans are projected to become critically endangered or extinct this century if humans continue to destroy their habitat. Threats include legal and illegal clearcutting of rain forests to establish palm oil plantations, climate change, and transnational organized crime. This study examines how self-benefit and other benefit appeals, knowledge of threats, concern about habitat loss, and liking orangutans are associated with (a) intent to protect habitat due to licit threats and crimes against wildlife, and (b) seeking information to save habitat. Upon entry to a zoo, 251 (118 men, 128 women, and 5 unknown) persons viewed posters highlighting the benefits of habitat conservation to self or others and completed a survey. Concern, threat knowledge, liking, and self-benefit and other benefit appeals accounted for 28% of the variance associated with intent to take action to protect the habitat. Integrating social influence principles into zoo displays and addressing barriers that prevent conservation behavior are discussed. The ideas in this paper are relevant to many primates and endangered species.     

Operational planning and competitive strategies of male and female retailers

Interest in the managerial practices of females in business has increased over the past decade due to women's increased representation in business. Anecdotal evidence has suggested that women approach decision making differently from men. The purpose of this study is to determine if gender differences regarding managerial strategies exist in the retail setting. Targeted managerial strategies focused on short-term planning processes (personnel, financial, inventory and market planning) and competitive strategies in operation (differentiation, cost leadership and focus). In a sample of 459 retailers from a twelve-state region, MANOVA was used to determine if significant differences in managerial strategies existed between genders. The data on retail competitive strategies suggest that men and women more likely than male business owners to recognize in the importance of differentiation and focus as retail competitive strategies in their business operations. Gender differences were also found in the operational planning areas of market and inventory planning.     

Imaginable surprise in global change science

Decisionmakers at all scales (individuals, firms, and local, national, and international governmental organizations) are concerned about reducing their vulnerability to (or the likelihood of) unexpected events, 'surprises.' After briefly and selectively reviewing the literature on uncertainty and surprise, we adopt a definition of 'surprise' that does not include the strict requirement that it apply to a wholly unexpected outcome, but rather recognizes that many events are often anticipated by some, even if not most observers. Thus, we define 'imaginable surprise' as events or processes that depart from the expectations of some definable community. Therefore, what gets labelled as 'surprise' depends on the extent to which what happens departs from community expectations and on the salience of the problem. We offer a typology of surprise that distinguishes imaginable surprises from risk and uncertainty, and develops several kinds of impediments to overcoming ignorances. These range from the need for more 'normal science' to phenomenological impediments (e.g., inherentunpredictability in some chaotic systems) to epistemological ignorance (e.g., ideological blocks to reducing ignorance). Based on the input of some two dozen scholars at an Aspen Global Change Institute Summer Workshop in 1994 *, we construct two tables in which participants offer many possible 'imaginable surprises' in the global change context, as well as their potential salience for creating unexpectedly high or low carbon dioxide emissions. Improving the anticipation of surprises is an interdisciplinary enterprise that should offer a sceptical welcoming of outlier ideas and methods.     

Short reviews

FOUR SHORT REVIEWS ON THE THEME OF MARKETS AND JOBS

Leedale, M. 1988: Working Paper No. 108 — Intervention and the East London Clothing Industry. Oxford Polytechnic School of Planning, £4.00 plus 85p p. & p.

Lemaitre, J. (ed) 1988: Long Term Unemployment: Which Way Out? Brussels: Elise Publications, 10/Ecus/BF440 + BF50 postage.

Stewart A. 1968: Planning Homes and Jobs: The Sheffield Report Sheffield City Council, £10.00 including postage.

Association of County Councils, Association of District Councils, Association of Metropolitan Authorities. Stimulating Local Enterprise, the local authority role. £5.50 including postage.

Anglo German Foundation and Otto-Blume-lnstitut fur Sozialforschung und Gesellschafts politik, 1988, Local Labour Market Policies in Britain and Germany, London: Anglo-German Foundation for the Study of Industrial Society. 17 Bloomsbury Square. London WC1A 1LP, £4.50.

Watson, J. (ed), 1989: An Introduction to Political Economy & Planning: Four Interesting Essays, Anglia Higher Education College.

Report for the Commission of Bishop's Council of Diocese of Birmingham, 1988: Faith in the City of Birmingham. Exeter. Paternoster Press, £3.50.     

"Marie Howland—19th‐Century Leader for Women's Economic Independence

Marie Howland (1836–1921) was an important working‐class figure in the early U.S. women's movement who mounted an inspired challenge to separate spheres and the prevailing domestic ideology. Well before Edward Bellamy and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, she called for domestic work to be respected, paid, and collectively organized. Howland made it her life's work to remove barriers to economic independence for women through the overhaul of social and economic institutions that posited the home as the center of female existence and exploited workers. She wanted women to have the economic freedom to marry for love, not economic necessity, leave a bad marriage, survive widowhood, or not marry at all. By delving into Howland's early years in rural New Hampshire and the Lowell textile mills, her close association with radical bohemians in New York City, and her later participation in experimental communities, the following treatise provides a long overdue, comprehensive account of her life and work. My inquiry reveals how Marie Howland promoted women's freedom within a class analysis, rejecting Marxism and embracing the utopian socialist theory of Charles Fourier. It also offers an in‐depth look at her popular utopian novel, Papa's Own Girl, where a cooperative community of economically independent women and enlightened men replace the patriarchy and individual competitiveness of the emerging, but by no means entrenched, industrial order. In addition, my treatise focuses on Howland's efforts to put ideas into practice. Unwilling to limit her activism to intellectual discussions, she lived in a Fourierist household in New York City, a cooperative settlement in western Mexico, and the single‐tax community of Fairhope, Alabama. She pushed the Grange and the International Workingman's Association to focus on women's issues. She also made sure that her personal relationships with men were based on free love and mutual respect, not economic necessity and legal contract. I also examine how Howland dedicated her life to changing gender and class relations, but made little effort to improve conditions for African Americans. Like many white reformers, she drew on popular scientific theories of biological difference to justify the unequal treatment of African Americans. Besides shedding light on important intellectual and social developments, like phrenology, free love, Fourierism, the Grange, and theosophy, this examination of Marie Howland reveals the complexities, possibilities, and limitations of the women's rights movement before the passage of the 19^th Amendment.