Working Women: A Study of Women in Paid Jobs

First, Veblen's distinction between industrial and pecuniary employments with special regard to speculation is introduced. Second, investment banking as a prime example for pecuniary activities is presented. Third, a dominant fundamentalist, market efficiency and a heterodox speculation paradigm of financial markets are distinguished. Fourth, ten proposals for financial market reform (e.g., decentralization) are proposed. Finally, it is asked why these reforms, which should support a productive-serviceable function of finance, will not be realized. This is due to a capturing of the public sector and the prevailing scientific and ideological habits of thought.     

Regional productivity variation and the impact of public capital stock: an analysis with spatial interaction,with reference to Spain

In this article, we examine whether variations in the level of public capital across Spain's Provinces affected productivity levels over the period 1996 to 2005. The analysis is motivated by contemporary urban economics theory, involving a production function for the competitive sector of the economy (‘industry’) which includes the level of composite services derived from ‘service’ firms under monopolistic competition. The outcome is potentially increasing returns to scale resulting from pecuniary externalities deriving from internal increasing returns in the monopolistic competition sector. We extend the production function by also making (log) labour efficiency a function of (log) total public capital stock and (log) human capital stock, leading to a simple and empirically tractable reduced form linking productivity level to density of employment, human capital and public capital stock. The model is further extended to include technological externalities or spillovers across provinces. Using panel data methodology, we find significant elasticities for total capital stock and for human capital stock, and a significant impact for employment density. The finding that the effect of public capital is significantly different from zero, indicating that it has a direct effect even after controlling for employment density, is contrary to some of the earlier research findings which leave the question of the impact of public capital unresolved.     

Externalities: A Note on Avoiding Confusion

In distinguishing the difference between a genuine externality and a pecuniary externity, Bohanon observes that the latter never enters third-party utility (or production) functions, whereas this is always the case with technical externalities.     

违约责任中适用非财产损害赔偿探讨

非财产损害赔偿有别于精神损害赔偿，其含义国内外学者表述不一，但对违约责任下非财产损害的救济，两大法系的立法与判例均给予了一定认可。伴随着交易的不断复杂，违约产生的非财产损害纠纷在我国日渐彰显。为保证交易的公正，我国有必要在现有合同立法体系中补充完善关于非财产损害赔偿的规定。     

The Determination of Common Law Awards to Injured Workers

Prior to changes in the Western Australian legislation in 1993 an injured worker could sue his or her employer for damages at common law irrespective of the seriousness of injury or size of damages. A common law action is conditional on the personal injury being sustained during the course of employment, and caused by the negligence or breach of statutory duty of the employer. In recent years there has been concern expressed about the efficacy of the common law process in providing injured workers with awards that match their pecuniary and non-pecuniary losses. We address this issue by developing a model of the determination of common law awards in which we assume pre-trial settlement. We find that the economic mechanisms which bring plaintiff and defendant to a pre-trial settlement will not necessarily produce an award settlement consistent with the size of pecuniary and non-pecuniary losses. The model is subjected to an empirical examination using a sample of 384 plaintiffs whose cases were closed in Western Australia in 1990. Our results indicate that in practice the common law process fails to determine an individual assessment of injured workers' losses. In particular, awards represent an inadequate compensation for the losses suffered by severely incapacitated plaintiffs.     

外部性与重工业优先发展

In the framework of a dynamic general equilibrium model, this paper studies how vertical externalities affect the development of heavy industry in a developing economy. The model is comprised of an intermediate and a consumer product sector. The production of both types of goods has pecuniary externalities as they are featured by increasing return to scale. However, the production of an intermediate product has an additional advantage to have externalities through its technological linkage with the production of consumer goods. This is related to the nature of the roundabout production of consumer goods: a larger number of intermediate products lead to higher productivity in the production of consumer goods than do more inputs of a fixed number of intermediate products. Therefore, private investment in the intermediate sector is below the social optimal level. Government subsidies can restore the economy to the social optimum, but they become less needed as the consumer sector grows larger and the advantage of the intermediate good sector diminishes. __________ Translated from Nankai Jingji Yanjiu 南开经济研究 (Nankai Economic Studies), 2007, (2): 3–19     

Multiplier effects in economies with missing risk markets

The paper analyses the impact of pecuniary externalities in a two-sector economy with an incomplete market structure. Agents in each sector choose their proportion of risky investment. Sector specific risks are assumed to be perfectly negatively correlated. It is shown that the economy is more volatile if risk markets do not exist. With a complete set of risk markets, shocks in one sector will be dampened on the aggregate level. In contrast, when risk markets are absent, pecuniary externalities arising from higher risky investment in one sector can create feedback effects in the other sector. When agents are sufficiently risk averse (their coefficient of relative risk aversion being greater than one), an individually optimal response to the increased riskiness of the price distribution will result in an even riskier price distribution: an increase in risky activity in one sector will lead to an increase in risky activity in the other sector, and this gives multiplier effects.Part of this work has been done while I was visiting assistant professor at the University of Western Ontario, London, Canada.I am grateful to Hans-Werner Sinn for helpful comments. The suggestions of the two referees have contributed to improve the paper considerably.     

Growth and Agglomeration

This article presents a model in which growth and geographic agglomeration of economic activities are mutually self-reinforcing processes. Economic agglomeration in one region spurs growth because it reduces the cost of innovation in that region through a pecuniary externality due to transaction costs. Growth fosters agglomeration because, as the sector at the origin of innovation expands, new firms tend to locate close to this sector. Agglomeration implies that all innovation and most production activities take place in the core region. However, as new firms are continuously created in the core, some relocate their production to the periphery.     

Managerial Efficiency in German Top League Soccer: An Econometric Analysis of Club Performances On and Off the Pitch

Abstract. This study applies stochastic frontier analytic techniques in the estimation of sporting production functions. As ex-ante input factors, we use pre-seasonal estimates of wage bills of players and coaches that are transformed during the production process of a season into ex-post pecuniary revenues and sporting success. In the case of athletic output we find a robust pattern of technical efficiency over subsequent seasons. Estimates based on economic output, however, do not support an efficiency model. A significant inter-seasonal change in overall technical productivity rather highlights the economic instability of the German soccer industry.     

Incentives and teacher effort

Few would contest that teachers are a very important determinant of how much students learn in school, and how to improve teacher performance has been the focus of lively policy debate in both rich and poor countries. This paper examines how teacher incentives, both pecuniary and non‐pecuniary, correlate with teacher effort. Using school survey data from Lao PDR, we estimate measures of teacher effort, including the number of hours that teachers spend preparing for classes and teacher provision of private tutoring outside of class hours, which are not the typical measures used in previous research. Estimation results fit well under the standard labour supply framework and indicate that greater teacher effort is associated with non‐pecuniary incentives such as more teacher autonomy over teaching materials and monitoring as measured by the existence of an active parent – teacher association and the ability of school principals to dismiss teachers. Methodologically, this paper provides a detailed derivation of a simultaneous OLS‐probit model with school random effects that can jointly estimate teacher work hours and tutoring provision.     

The war mentality

An investigation of the war mentality must include an analysis of the habitual forms behavior and modes of thoughts of the business sector, the military, and the civilian sector. Thorstein Veblen analyzed these behaviors and modes of thought through the dichotomy between the industrial function and the pecuniary function. Lloyd J. Dumas employs a special treatment of the Veblenian dichotomy. Dumas demonstrates that not all economic activity recorded into GDP is productive. He divides activity into contributive (that which adds to the quality of life and economic well-being) and noncontributive (that which does not add and/or diminishes the quality of life and well-being). The study of militarization also facilitates the understanding of the war mentality. John Gillis notes the difference between militarization and militarism. The purpose of this paper is to explore the war mentality from an evolutionary perspective.     

An agency model of search for alternatives

The agency model of organization is augmented by a sampling process in which the agent continues search as long as the expected marginal benefit exceeds the marginal cost. It is shown that even if the agent is risk neutral in money due to the form of compensation, he may behave either like a risk averter or a risk preferrer. Sufficient conditions are given for the rent contract to be Pareto-optimal in this environment; if the ‘dominant’ factor in the agent's utility function is his pecuniary income then the rent contract dominates all the fee functions for which the principal's income is not negatively correlated with the agent's effort.     

Thorstein Veblen’s Financial Macroeconomics

The purpose of this article is to provide an exposition of Thorstein Veblen’s contribution to financial macroeconomics. I argue that Veblen conceptualizes and contextualizes how the financial structure of effective demand is predisposed to endogenous non-sustainable leverage processes, manipulation, and speculation. I stress that Veblen advances a cultural-financial theory of investment and brings forward the role that pecuniary and emulation instincts play in institutionalizing predatory and fraudulent activities which destabilize the macroevolution of monetary production economies. I underline that Veblen patterns financial macroeconomic fragility and instability within the institutions of the business enterprise system.     

Job preferences of students and new graduates in nursing

This article investigates the preferences of student and newly graduated nurses for pecuniary and nonpecuniary aspects of nursing jobs. It is the first study applying methods based on discrete choice experiments to a developed country nursing workforce. It is also the first to focus on the transition through university training and into work. This is particularly important as junior nurses have the lowest retention levels in the profession. We sample 526 individuals from nursing programmes in two Australian universities. Flexible and newly developed models combining heteroscedasticity with unobserved heterogeneity in scale and preference weights are estimated. Overall, salary remains the most important feature in increasing the probability that a job will be selected. ‘Supportive management/staff’ and ‘quality of care’ follow as the most important attributes from a list of 11 nonpecuniary characteristics. However, the subset of new graduates rank ‘supportive management/staff’ above salary increases, emphasizing the importance of a supportive workplace in the transition from university to the workplace. We find substantial preference heterogeneity and some attributes, such as the opportunity for clinical rotations, are found to be attractive to some nurses while seen as negative by others. Nursing retention could be improved by designing different employment packages to appeal to these different tastes.     

Trade liberalization and the Mexican steel industry

The impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on the competitive positions of Mexican and U.S. steel producers is investigated employing a translog cost function with four inputs (capital, labor, domestic intermediate goods, and foreign intermediate goods) to examine scale characteristics and input substitution in Mexican steel production. Results are consistent with diseconomies of scale at high levels of output and with substitute relationships between all input pairs except labor and domestic intermediate goods. Thus, output growth will likely result in cost reductions for Mexican producers only if the industry reaps significant benefits from substitution of foreign inputs for domestic. Recent increases in Mexico's imports of finished steel have much exceeded those of steel industry inputs, and it therefore does not seem likely that a Mexican cost advantage over steel producers in the United States will soon emerge as a result of economies of scale.     

Trade taxes and international investment

Abstract .  This paper demonstrates that international investment disturbs the conventionally understood equivalence between import tariffs and export taxes. Fundamentally, remittances to foreigners introduce an additional pecuniary channel between countries so that two-good Lerner Symmetry generally will not hold. Moreover, because tariffs subsidize investors in the local import competing sector while export taxes can extract rent from foreign investors in the export sector, the pattern of international investment will influence government preferences over trade policy  instruments  as well as levels. Notably, trade tax symmetry is restored by introducing a third policy tool in the form of a direct a tax on international remittances.     

我国商业银行规模经济评价方法研究

现有的关于银行规模经济评价的理论,要么基于参数法,要么专注于非参数法,很少有将二者兼顾考虑的评价方法.本文在充分考虑参数法和非参数法利弊的基础上,针对我国商业银行的特点提出了分类规模经济评价的思想.同时在利用DEA方法获得生产可能性集前沿面的基础上,建立了通过拟合生产函数获得各种规模经济评价指标的方法.     

Property Rights in Work: Capitalism,Industrialism, and Democracy

Insulating people from the effects of the crisis has left intact the habits of thought and the basic institutional structure. The continued reign of pecuniary values leaves intact the Goldman Rule: pursue profitable opportunities regardless the effects on others. Within a culture dominated by pecuniary values, profitable opportunities present a coercive force. Laissez-faire policies allow profitable pursuits without restraint. Subprime mortgages offered an opportunity to tap a new source of profits, namely, the increase in housing prices. Many financial institutions engaged in unscrupulous actions to convert household wealth into corporate profits. Efforts to reign in the industry remain wanting.     

Effects of Tightening Smoking Regulations on Take‐up and Cessation of Smoking

We use a nationally representative Australian panel survey that allows us to track individuals’ smoking behaviour from 2001 to 2003, a period during which new tobacco regulations came into effect in four of the eight state and territory jurisdictions. We exploit this variation in regulations over time and across jurisdictions to produce estimates of the effects of tighter smoking regulations on smoking behaviour within the year the regulations were introduced. Although increased (non‐pecuniary) costs of smoking will almost certainly have some negative effects on smoking, our analysis suggests that effects on smoking rates in the short term are negligible.     

From production networks to geographical economics

Although standard economics textbooks are seldom interested in production networks, modern economies are more and more based upon supplier/customer interactions. One can consider entire sectors of the economy as generalised supply chains. We will take this view in the present paper and study under which conditions local failures to produce or simply to deliver can result in avalanches of shortage and bankruptcies and in localisation of the economic activity. We will show that a large class of models exhibit scale free distributions of production and wealth among firms and that regions of high production are localised.