An analysis of non-insurance work incentives

The paper analyzes work incentives which may be competitive, individualistic, or collective and where the firm does not insure worker income. Although competitive schemes reduce shirking, the collective scheme is shown to be optimal for sufficiently small workgroups.     

Allow yourself to be surprised!

Excellence in management and leadership is determined by how successfully the unexpected is handled. Health care is never in a state of equilibrium. Health care is the most complicated business that anyone can imagine and has many dynamic forces that are always at work to create chaos and uncertainty. It is impossible to eliminate the element of surprise in our work. Instead, we should be judged on our ability to welcome surprise and astonishment and to help ourselves and our organizations grow and learn from the unexpected.     

Individual incentives by adjusting work hours: Bellamy's egalitarian economy

Edward Bellamy proposed an ideal egalitarian economy in which production is carried out as a nonprofit government service, income is shared equally by all individuals independently of work exertion, and relative work hours are used as incentives to allocate labor to different jobs. This economy is shown to possess an equilibrium consistent with full freedom of individual choice of occupation and consumption, to be achieved through a fully decentralized titonnement process. However, individuals have an obligation to work which deprives them of their freedom to choose between income and leisure, so that the scale of output is indeterminate and may be nonoptimal unless a social-welfare function is introduced.     

Wage subsidies, work incentives, and the reform of the Austrian welfare system

We analyze the employment and income effects of a needs-based minimum benefit system (“Bedarfsorientierte Mindestsicherung”) which has recently been introduced in Austria. The aim of this reform was to reduce poverty as well as to increase work incentives for recipients of social assistance. On the basis of a behavioral microsimulation model we show that this new system slightly increases employment but reduces incomes for the poorest households remaining unemployed. As an alternative, we analyze a budgetary neutral reform proposal which reduces financial incentives for marginal employment and provides a wage subsidy rewarding working longer hours. This alternative reform would yield larger positive employment effects, but more households would suffer from income losses. Overall, income inequality and poverty are affected little, however, both under the new social welfare system and the alternative reform proposal.     

Strive to be first or avoid being last: An experiment on relative performance incentives

We utilize a laboratory experiment to compare effort provision under optimal tournament contracts with different distributions of prizes which motivate agents to compete to be first, avoid being last, or both. We find that the combined tournament contract incorporating both incentives at the top and at the bottom induces the highest effort, especially in larger groups. Avoiding being last produces the lowest variance of effort and is more effective at motivating employees compared to competing for the top.     

Technical change: It should be positive and make sense!

We present the results of eight models that differ with respect to the time behavior of technical inefficiency and the presence of country heterogeneity. When taken into account, heterogeneity raises average technical change estimates, however technical progress rankings become counter-intuitive.     

When financial work incentives pay for themselves: evidence from a randomized social experiment for welfare recipients

This paper summarizes early findings from a social experiment that provided financial incentives for new welfare recipients to leave welfare and work full time. The financial incentive was essentially a negative income tax with a requirement that people work at least 30 h/week. Early results show that the financial incentive increased full-time employment, earnings, and income, and reduced poverty. Furthermore, at the end of the period discussed in this paper, the program was paying for itself through increased tax revenues.     

价格听证制度急待完善

《价格法》实施两年多来,各地对《价格法》中规定的实行价格听证制度的领会与执行过程中确实存在着各自理解上的差异。本文拟结合两年来漳州物委实际操作情况,对以上问题作若干探索。 一、要兼顾政府、企业和消费者三者的利益 社会主义市场经济是法制经济,客观上要求进入市场的主体,在平等的条件下参与竞争。而这一原则所指的就是在程序上必须公正,而程序的公正首要考虑的必须是三者利益得到兼顾的情况下,给予各方     

Indian export incentives

This paper analyses Indian export incentives within the framework of piecemeal ‘second-best’ welfare economics, taking the extant import control system as a binding constraint. It provides a condensed account of recent Indian export incentives together with some quantitative estimates (based on firm level data for some engineering good exporters) of their likely effects on feasible second-best welfare levels.     

基金专家经验谈

<正> 前不久,普华永道的全球基金业主席Jeffreys从伦敦来到北京,刚拜会完中国证监会,本刊记者即对其进行了采访。普华永道为全球基金业提供咨询服务并占据较大市场份额,是否传统的会计、审计业务仍占收入的主要比例? 我们为全球基金业提供咨询服务业务,目前已在全球占据了50％的市场份额。我们为这些基金提供的服务包括正常的审计、会计、税务咨询服务。还包括风险管理及个人所得税的处理等方面。从普华永道收入来说,约有50％的收入来自审计、会计的服务,另外50％的收入来自咨询和顾问服务。在咨询方面一个很重要的内容是对公司发展战略方面提供服务。     

Pensions and fertility incentives

Abstract.  This paper discusses the welfare implications of a pay‐as‐you‐go pension reform by introducing a child benefit in an endogenous fertility setting. In the model of a small open economy, higher fertility is associated with a reduction of lifetime labour supply. The optimum share of fertility‐related pensions is always below unity, but generally positive. The former is true, since individuals do not take into account the impact of their labour supply choice on the parent generation. It is demonstrated that child allowances are equivalent to fertility‐related pensions as instruments to achieve the optimum allocation. JEL classification: H23, H55, J13     

浅谈财务人员如何管家理财当好参谋

企业会计是企业经济管理的一个重要组成部分,它是以货币为主要计量单位对企业经济过程中进行反映和监督,并运用会计信息参与预测、决策活动,发挥管理作用。财务人员必须熟悉企业的全部经济状况,掌握经济规律,按照经济规律办事,这样,财会工作才能认真贯彻财政经济方针政策,主动为经济活动提供优质的服务。     

R&D incentives in compatible networks

Network externalities describe the phenomenon that a good becomes more valuable to each user the more other consumers use the same or a compatible troduct. Whereas most of the recent literature on network effects has focused on the adoption of products, this paper shows that network externalities can have important feedback effects on the incentives to carry out R&D and develop new products. Even if the products are compatible, network effects can lead to strategic overinvestment or underinvestment. The firms' R&D decisions are compared with the socially optimal ones.     

Strategic incentives in dynamic duopoly

We compare steady states of open loop and locally stable Markov perfect equilibria (MPE) in a general symmetric differential game duopoly model with costs of adjustment. Strategic incentives at the MPE depend on whether an increase in the state variable of a firm hurts or helps the rival and on whether at the MPE there is intertemporal strategic substitutability or complementarity. A full characterization is provided in the linear-quadratic case. Then with price competition and costly production adjustment, static strategic complementarity turns into intertemporal strategic substitutability and the MPE steady-state outcome is more competitive than static Bertrand competition.     

Cartel formation and managerial incentives

We study the formation of cartels within two different contexts. First, we consider internal–external stability based models which, due to firms’ free-riding incentives, lead to the inexistence of stable cartels. Second, we introduce the dynamic aspect of coalition formation. That is, when considering a cartel we consider also any cartel that can be reached through a succession of moves. Despite firms’ free-riding incentive, the dynamic process predicts that the collusion of the whole industry can occur with some regularity. We show that free-riding incentives decrease and incentives to merge increase when firms’ owner delegate production decisions to managers.