Recall bias in the displaced workers survey: Are layoffs really lemons?

This paper examines how the extent of recall bias in the Displaced Workers Surveys affects the often-cited empirical results found by Gibbons and Katz [Gibbons, R., Katz, L.F., 1991. Layoffs and lemons. Journal of Labor Economics 9 (4), 351−380] for the lemons effect of layoffs. Their finding that workers displaced by layoffs experience larger wage losses than do those displaced by plant closings is not due to the stigma attached to the layoff events. Rather it partly stems from recall bias in the 1984 and 1986 DWS, but mostly reflects the fact that workers displaced by layoffs have significantly higher predisplacement wage-tenure profiles than do those displaced by plant closings, while there is no such difference in postdisplacement wage-tenure profiles. A similar analysis using the 2000 and 2002 DWS shows that predisplacement wage losses are not different between workers displaced by layoffs and those displaced by plant closings.     

Use of equal opportunities legislation and earnings differentials: a comparative study

This article traces the number of legal cases concerning gender, race and other forms of discrimination in the US, Canada and Britain where there is now up to a quarter of a century's experience. Substantial differences in the extent to which the legislation is used across countries and by different groups within each country are revealed.     

Sabotage at General Motors’ Van Nuys Assembly Plant, 1975–83

Sabotage is an aspect of industrial behaviour which is both important and under-researched. This case study in a UAW-organised plant is drawn from the author's experience. He suggests that the scope and incidence of sabotage may be much higher than some labour process studies suggest.     

Plant Closings and the Community

A bstract . Over the last 10 years, 10 million jobs have been lost and millions of dollars in capital rendered unproductive from plant closings in New England and the Upper Midwest. Some were weeded out by the discipline of the market but most were moving to cut labor costs and claim subsidies from governments seeking to expand local job opportunities. And some were using the threat of closing to exact concessions from labor and government. In some cases it is possible for municipal governments to buy or condemn the plant and operate it as a public enterprise ; municipal operation is often more efficient and productive. Municipally owned and operated public enterprise should command serious consideration, as an option like cooperative ownership.     

Strategic management,plant closings,and social responsibility: An integrative process model

A process model of the manner by which organizations formulate and implement managerial strategies in response to plant closings is proposed. The model takes into account the overall context of the plant-closing process, identifying different strategic responses an organization may follow and the nature and philosophy of its social responsiveness. The model links the plant-closing process with theoretical underpinnings derived from both the strategic management and social responsibility literature.     

Protection of part-time workers in Irish law

In Ireland, employment protection rights have been extended to regular part-time workers. This article traces the legislation's history, examines arguments of employers and unions and, having discussed the contents of the new legislation, raises the question whether the legislation is compatible with requirements of EC anti-discrimination law.     

The enterprise response to industrial relations legislation

The authors report a study into the impact of the former Labour Government's industrial relations legislation, much of which remains on the statute book. They focus on joint health and safety committees and provide a useful starting point for further research concerned to develop a model of firm response to industrial relations legislation in any particular subject area.     

What Factors Affect the Persistence of an Innovation Advantage?

Factors that affect a firm's ability to achieve an advantage may differ from those that affect its ability to sustain that advantage. Moreover, if advantage is a relative concept then studies that relate resource stocks to ‘absolute’ outcomes say little about how resources contribute to enduring differences among firms. We explore these issues in the global semiconductor industry by analyzing how a firm's resource stocks contribute to the persistence of an innovation advantage (a relative outcome). The findings demonstrate that a firm's own production experience and the experience held by its partners contribute to temporary innovation advantages. The results also show that a firm's own production experience yields a more durable innovation advantage as compared to the experience held by a firm's partners and that the experience held by a firm's partners provides a more enduring advantage than a firm's patent stock.     

Auditing regulation and the statutory auditor's responsibilities in Norway

The first part of the paper gives an overview of the historic development and current auditing regulation in Norway. Although auditing is regulated by legislation, the government has relied on the profession's self-regulation, especially in matters related to the conduct of an audit. In most cases, the Norwegian regulation arrangements and the statutory auditor's responsibilities bear resemblances to those found in other countries, especially the other Nordic countries. The second part of the paper illustrates how government regulation and the profession's self-regulation have affected the auditor's responsibilities related to (1) stewardship verifications (i.e., verification of management's managing and control of the firm's financial affairs), and (2) the mandatory control of the auditee's tax obligations. Both these requirements have raised fundamental questions about the statutory auditor's responsibilities beyond the verification of the annual accounts, and may reflect distinct conceptions of the role of a statutory auditor in Norway. This study shows that it is not evident that the Norwegian auditor's responsibility for stewardship verifications has resulted in professional practice significantly different from common international practice. However, the Norwegian statutory auditor's responsibility for control of the auditee's tax obligations goes beyond the requirements in other countries.     

Workers,communities, and industrial property: An emerging language of rights

Out of recent national debates and local struggles over plant closings, an alternative language of industrial property rights has emerged. This language places the rights of workers and communities above, or on a par with, those of owners and managers. While this new language of rights coexists with more traditional conceptions of owner/manager prerogatives, its emergence suggests that rights of property ownership, which are often seen as relatively immutable structural constraints upon the capitalist labor process, may themselves be contested and subject to change.     

The legislation of environmental disclosures in three Nordic countries—a comparison

This paper compares the legislation in Denmark, Norway and Sweden concerning what kind of environmental information firms must disclose. These three Nordic countries have great similarities regarding accounting legislation and standards. However, Denmark has chosen a different way to force firms to disclose their environmental performance compared with Norway and Sweden. Danish firms must deliver separate ‘green accounts’, while Norwegian and Swedish firms are bound to report on environmental issues in the administrative report. The Norwegian and Swedish firms' information mainly addresses the financial consequences of environmental impact and the Norwegian legislation is also found to be more extensive than the Swedish legislation. The information from the Danish firms addresses society in general. The comparison indicates some interesting topics for further analysis, e.g. how the extensive demands in Norway for information about products' impacts when discharged may be fulfilled. As a background for this comparison, an outline of the discussions about voluntary versus regulated environmental information is given as well as an overview of some international standards and recommendations concerning firms' environmental disclosures. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. and ERP Environment.     

Further investigating the influence of personality in employee response to organisational change: the moderating role of change‐related factors

This study investigates factors influencing employees' job satisfaction following an organisational change. Extending previous research on effects of individuals' openness to experience and conscientiousness during organisational change, we posit that aspects of change context, such as the extent to which change impacts the individual worker's job and the extent actions of management are procedurally fair, can account for varying influences of these two global personality traits on employees' job satisfaction following a change. In contrast to earlier studies focusing on change‐related effects on task performance, conscientiousness can play a positive role on job satisfaction following a change along with openness to experience. Results of this study confirm that influences of personality on individual reactions to change are complex. While the positive influences of an individual's openness to experience on job satisfaction tend to occur only when fairness associated with change implementation is high, positive influences of conscientiousness are the highest when both procedural fairness is high and the extent of impact on the individual's job is low. Implications of these findings and further research considerations are discussed.     

The magic of the new: How job changes affect job satisfaction

We investigate a crucial event for job satisfaction: changing one's workplace. For representative German panel data, we show that the reason why the previous employment ended is strongly linked to satisfaction with the new job. Workers initiating a change of employer experience extraordinarily high job satisfaction, though in the short term only. To investigate causality, we exploit the event of plant closure as an exogenous trigger of job switching. In this case, we find no significantly positive effect of job changes on job satisfaction. Our findings complement research on workers’ well‐being and concern labor market policies and human resource management.     

关于物业税税基批量评估体系的版块区片划分的实证探究

物业税的改革立法是我国房地产发展改革的大势所趋。物业税税基的评估体系建立是近年来的正在热议的课题。建立物业税税基批量评估体系,自然地引出了划分评估区域版块及区段的概念。以往对划分版块和区段的研究仅限于对概念描述和理论的分析,对版块及区段划分的实证研究较少。以大连市作为实证研究的对象,通过对大连市区进行板块及区段的划分,为批量评估体系的研究提供基础的理论及数据支持。在进行版块和区段划分的同时,找出了影响房地产价格的各种宏观及微观的影响因素,利用房地产传统的估价方法,评估出版块及区段的基准价格,为批量评估的进一步研究工作提供了一定的实践经验。     

Joint Ventures in the U.S. Steel Industry:

A bstract . In 1958 Daniel Fusfeld examined the role of joint ventures in the U.S. steel industry and concluded that joint ventures served as a substitute for mergers forbidden by the Justice Department. Since the Fusfeld study, things have changed drastically for integrated domestic producers. Competition from imports and domestic mini- mills have forced steel firms into bankruptcies and missive plant closings. The contemporary industry's participation in joint ventures is examined in an attempt to understand steel's restructuring. Today's integrated producers jointly may hold tighter control over raw materials, participate in growing numbers of horizontal Joint ventures , and engage in numerous cooperative enterprises with foreign competitors, particularly the Japanese. Contemporary U.S. producers are becoming increasingly absorbed in the global economy.     

A Labour win would be a roll of the dice for the economy

• ? “It depends”, the classic economist's answer, is apt in assessing the economic outcome of a Labour government. Looser fiscal policy and shifting income from capital to labour could be GDP positive. But a loss of faith in Labour's commitment to Bank of England independence could offset those gains in a mix of lost confidence, spiking interest rates and currency depreciation .
• ? We attach a 20% probability to a general election being held within the next year. The Government's precarious parliamentary position leaves it vulnerable to rebellions, particularly in passing Brexit‐related legislation. But the Fixed‐term Parliaments Act makes it difficult to force a new election, even if the Government is complicit.
• ? In the event of an election in the near term, Labour would require a significant swing in support to gain a majority. Opinion polls show little evidence of this happening, so we put the chances of a majority Labour government at no more than 10%. But the odds of either a Labour‐led coalition or minority government are around 50%.
• ? The consequences of Labour's plans for sterling are ambiguous. A looser fiscal stance should prompt the MPC to tighten monetary policy more aggressively, boosting the pound. But the Party's approach to the Bank could have the opposite effect. A rise in gilt yields is a safer prediction. But with more than half of the gilt stock held by the public sector and “captive” buyers, the scope for a major sell‐off is limited.
• ? The experience of the EU referendum suggests that a Labour victory is unlikely to cause a sudden collapse in confidence. But the drag on profitability from Labour's policies and an activist approach to foreign takeovers could cut FDI inflows, which may be bad for productivity, though it would imply a more competitive pound.
• ? Our modelling suggests that a looser fiscal stance could boost the level of GDP by 2% above our baseline view after three years, if Labour sustains market confidence. But in a “bad” Labour scenario, with central bank independence compromised, the hit to confidence, market rates and sterling would offset the gains from looser fiscal policy.

     

Team leader experience in improvement teams: A social networks perspective

In this research, we disentangle the relationship between several key aspects of a team leader's experience and the likelihood of improvement project success. Using the lens of socio-technical systems, we argue that the effect of team leader experience derives from the social system as well as the technical system. The aspects of team leader experience we examine include team leader social capital (a part of the social system) and team leader experience leading projects of the same type (a part of the technical system).We examine four different, yet related, dimensions of a team leader's social capital, which we motivate based on the social networks literature. One dimension, team leader familiarity, suggests that social capital is created when team leaders have experience working with current team members on prior improvement projects, and that such social capital increases the likelihood of improvement project success. We develop three additional dimensions, using social network analysis (SNA), to capture the idea that the improvement team leader's social capital extends beyond the current team to include everyone the leader has previously worked with on improvement projects. Contrasting our SNA-based dimensions with team leader familiarity enables us to better understand the impact of a team leader's social capital both inside and beyond the team. We also examine the effect of a team leader's experience leading prior projects of the same type, and consider the extent to which organizational experience may moderate the impact of both team leader social capital and same-type project experience.Based on analysis of archival data of six sigma projects spanning six years from a Fortune 500 consumer products manufacturer, we find that two of our SNA-based dimensions of team leader social capital, as well as experience leading projects of the same type, increase the likelihood of project success. In addition, we show that organizational experience moderates the relationship between team leader same-type project experience and project success. However, this is not the case for the relationship between the dimensions of team leader social capital and project success. These results provide insights regarding how dimensions of team leader experience and organizational experience collectively impact the operational performance of improvement teams.     

MORE PENSIONS MIS‐SELLING AHEAD: BY GOVERNMENT OF COURSE1

Not only was the infamous Pensions Mis‐selling episode of the 1990s caused directly by government legislation; government has continually mis‐sold on an enormous scale its own pension creations, the state pension schemes. The history of state pensions is a history of broken promises, yet today's pension establishment welcomes the Pension Commission's recommendation for a higher state pension. With this mindset it is hardly surprising that similar approval is given to the Commission's other main recommendation – a National Pensions Saving Scheme, which has all the hallmarks of a fiasco in the making. Furthermore to the extent there is a savings crisis, government is a clear culprit, regularly resorting to low interest rates and the printing press to favour borrowing and not saving. Nor is it surprising that government itself will retain its gold‐plated pension arrangements and in all likelihood will be exempt from these proposals.     

The Unintended Consequences of Italy's Labour Laws: How Extensive Labour Regulation Distorts the Italian Economy

Simple solutions to complex problems often have unintended and undesirable consequences. An example is Italy's approach to combating unemployment. Rigid laws designed to protect the employed perversely discourage businesses from hiring and people from working. They also encourage precarious temporary employment among young people, informal work, and under‐the‐table deals that compromise worker benefits. The numbers of Italy's unemployed and of those outside the workforce are much higher than official estimates suggest. Italy's employment protection legislation – arguably the most restrictive in Europe – creates that which it seeks to prevent: the insecurity of unemployment.     

The Sorting of Female Careers after First Birth: A Competing Risks Analysis of Maternity Leave Duration

A number of contributions have found evidence that motherhood is a critical life event for women's employment careers. This study presents a detailed analysis for the duration of maternity leave in which young mothers can make a transition into different types of employment, unemployment as well as the next birth. We provide a comprehensive picture of the sorting mechanisms that lead to the differentiation of women's employment careers after birth. Our empirical evidence is derived from large‐linked administrative individual labour market data from Germany for a period of three decades. We obtain unprecedented insights into how women's skills, the quality of the previous job match, firm level characteristics, labour market conditions and leave legislation are related to the length of maternity duration. Expansionary leave policies, e.g. are found to be a key factor for the rising share of women who have their second child out of inactivity.