Matching processes in the labour market an econometric study

This paper presents empirical results on matching in the labour market in Marseilles (France). Using a sample of meetings between employers and workers organized by a local employment office, we infer from estimation results that selection among applicants is on the basis of their level of education. The strength of this selection bias is substantially caused by the poor quality of the screening performed by the employment office. Employers appear also to discriminate against the youngest applicants, the long-term unemployed and applicants of North-African extraction. These effects are alleviated when employers face a labour supply constraint in the labour market.     

Social exclusion and labour market transitions: a multi-state multi-spell analysis using the BHPS

In this empirical paper, we assess how social exclusion arises in the context of labour market transition behaviour. We estimate a multi-state multi-spell competing risks model and identify five states: high skilled employment, intermediate skilled employment, low skilled employment, unemployment and out-of-the-labour market. Using data from the first seven waves of the British Household Panel Survey, we show that a substantial number of workers were trapped in a vicious circle of low-skilled employment, unemployment and inactivity in the 1990s. Workers who are part of the so-called flexible workforce are more likely to suffer social exclusion.     

Firms' investments in general training and the skilled labour market

An adverse selection model is analysed, where firms can train or hire a skilled worker. In equilibrium, the market wage is determined by supply and demand. The quality of the supplied skilled labour is negatively biased, because workers stem from firms that shut down and from firms that observed their trainee's bad quality during the training. If fewer firms were to shut down, then the supplied average quality deteriorates and the incentive to train increases. The incentive is inefficient, because firms must share the informational rent and they free-ride. Ex ante workers may wish to increase the firms' bargaining power.     

Immigration and occupational status: A study of Bangladeshi and Turkish fathers and sons in the London labour market

This paper examines the labour market experience of 300 fathers and 300 of their sons in the Bangladeshi and Turkish immigrant communities in various London boroughs in 1988. Probit estimates are made in relation to employment and unemployment, self-employment and employment, and upward mobility or lack of it. Human capital regressions are also run for each of the four groups and for the combined sample. The evidence is consistent with distinctive labour market experience among the various groups.     

Breeding one's own sub-prime crisis: The labour market effects on financial system stability

Crisis may spread through economy via the propagating mechanisms of the labour market - households becoming delinquent due to an initial unemployment shock may be unable to continue servicing obligations versus the financial system. With large debts - e.g. mortgages - such defaults pose a threat to financial system stability. In this paper we use the Polish household budget surveys to simulate the impact of changes in the labour market status of household members on the ability of the household to service its mortgage payments. The simulation results are subsequently aggregated to facilitate a macro-level interpretation of the findings. We simulate various scenarios of labour market deterioration. Finally, we also introduce a policy instrument into the simulations providing, in a fiscally neutral manner, additional stability to the financial system. Based on robustness checks, the findings seem to be reliable. The results suggest that even with shares of debtors among consumers as low as in Poland, the propagation mechanism may indeed result in a considerable threat, while the fiscally neutral instrument is effective and well-suited to be addressed in providing additional stability to the financial system.     

Employment relations and labour market indicators in ten industrialized market economies: Comparative statistics

The acceleration of the internationalisation of business and the division of labour has been led by improvements in technologies and communications, decreased barriers to trade, increased competition and the growth of multinational enterprises (MNEs). Employers, government organizations and unions, practitioners and academics are increasingly concerned with locating comparable statistics. This article reviews employment relations and labour market data for ten major industrialized market economies (IMEs) and discusses some of the challenges in the measurement and interpretation of such data. For a fuller discussion of such data, and of the ten IME, see Greg J. Bamber and Russell D. Lansbury (eds) International and Comparative Employment Relations 3rd edn, to be published by Sage, London, and Allen & Unwin, Sydney, in mid-1998.     

上市公司产品市场竞争与资本结构选择的实证分析

本文通过对2001￣2003年我国沪深两地上市公司的实证研究表明,产品市场竞争程度是资本结构决定的重要影响因素,产品市场竞争程度与资本结构的选择高度正相关,认为这种经营风险与财务风险不匹配现象与我国上市公司的股权融资效率低下和上市公司的竞争性战略选择有关。     

Platform market competition with endogenous side decisions

This paper develops a framework to analyze platform competition in two‐sided markets in which agents endogenously decide on which side of a platform to join. We characterize the equilibrium pricing structure and perform a comparative statics analysis on how the distribution of agents’ preferences affects the platforms’ profits. We also show that the market equilibrium under profit‐maximizing platforms leads to the first best social surplus, which illustrates the importance of the price mechanism to induce more balanced participation across the two sides. This framework can be applied to analyze market competition for “rental” or “sharing” platforms. In addition, we extend our analysis to consider an initial investment stage, which makes participants the owner of some durable goods to rent out.     

Deregulation and labour earnings: Three motor carrier industries in Japan

We empirically examine the effect of product market deregulation on wages. The difference-in-difference approach is used with wage data from three motor carrier industries (the taxi, bus and trucking industries) in Japan to obtain the following findings. First, deregulations in the 1990s and 2000s caused the relative wages of taxi and bus drivers to decline, but this was not the case for truck drivers. Second, the large decline in the relative wages of taxi drivers can be explained by the deterioration of economic conditions; their wages are more sensitive to labour market conditions than those of drivers in other industries.     

Hierarchies of beliefs and the belief-invariant Bayesian solution

The belief-invariant Bayesian solution is a notion of correlated equilibrium in games with incomplete information proposed by Forges (1993), and hierarchy of beliefs over conditional beliefs is introduced by Ely and Peski (2006) in their study of interim independent rationalizability. We study the connection between the two concepts. We partially characterize the correlations embedded among type spaces with the same set of hierarchies of beliefs over conditional beliefs with partially correlating devices, which send correlated signals to players in a way that preserves each player’s belief about others’ types. Since the belief-invariant Bayesian solution is also implemented by such correlating devices, we then establish that it is invariant on equivalent type space.     

Incomplete regulation, market competition and collusion

Regulators often do not regulate all firms competing in a given sector. Due to product substitutability, unregulated competitors have incentives to bribe regulated firms to have them overstate their costs and produce less, thereby softening competition. The best collusion-proof contract entails distortions both for inefficient and efficient regulated firms (distortion ‘at the top’). But a contract inducing active collusion may do better by allowing the regulator to ‘team up’ with the regulated firm to indirectly tax its competitor. The best such contract is characterized. It is such that the unregulated firm pays the regulated one to have it truthfully reveals its inefficiency. We finally compare those contracts.     

打破垄断促进市场有效竞争

行业性行政垄断的存在,严重阻碍着我国市场化的进程.引进竞争、打破垄断是当前我国继续深化改革、实行全面开放的一项紧迫而又艰巨的任务.我们要按照现代社会经济与公共管理的演进趋势认识垄断问题,并从多方面寻求打破垄断的思路与措施.     

Labour flexibility and job market segmentation in Spain: a perspective from the labour demand side

The aim of this research is to conduct a quantitative analysis of the factors leading Spanish companies to adopt certain forms of organization that are typical of flexible businesses and high performance organizations. Despite the supposed inflexibility of the Spanish labour market, the results both point towards the high capacity of Spanish companies to select the form of work organization that best suits them and show the key role that competitive strategy plays when it comes to differentiating or segmenting types of work or workers, over and above the rigid working regulations that, purportedly, standardize labour relations in Spain.     

The impact of equity markets and corporate governance on labour market flexibility

Drawing from various literatures, this article explores links between equity markets and labour market flexibility. Various data sources are used to test relationships for a set of OECD countries, controlling for other likely influences on flexibility such as government and industrial relations institutions. The results are generally supportive as regards employment flexibility: equity market trading activity is associated with shorter job tenure, higher activity rates, and greater employment change over the cycle. However, the relationship between equity markets and pay flexibility is less statistically robust to the addition of controls.     

Potential competition and quality disclosure

This study presents a model of quality disclosure in which an incumbent, through its quality and disclosure choices, influences the potential that a new entrant enters the market. In this regard, we consider a sequential framework in which the incumbent chooses its quality and decides whether to disclose it to the market; subsequently, the entrant makes the same decisions, if it enters the market. We show that the potential competition can create strategic incentives for the incumbent to choose nondisclosure, because the availability of information about the incumbent's quality promotes entry by enhancing the entrant's expected profit from the market. In addition, an analysis of the effects of mandatory disclosure laws suggests that they can be effective in encouraging new market entrants and in improving the product quality of established firms.     

Dynamic competition with consumer inertia

We study a framework where two duopolists compete repeatedly in prices and where chosen prices potentially affect future market shares, but certainly do not affect current sales. This assumption of consumer inertia causes (noncooperative) coordination on high prices only to be possible as an equilibrium for low values of the discount factor. High discount factors increase opportunism and aggressiveness of competition to such an extent that high prices are no longer sustainable as an equilibrium outcome. Moreover, we find that both monopolization and enduring market share and price fluctuations (price wars) can be equilibrium path phenomena without requiring exogenous shocks in market or firm characteristics.     

Intermodal competition in the London-Paris passenger market: High-Speed Rail and air transport

This paper studies inter- and intramodal competition in the London-Paris passenger market during the period 2003-2009. We identify the degree to and conditions under which High-Speed Rail is a viable substitute for airline travel. Using pooled cross-sectional data we estimate multinomial and mixed logit models to examine actual travel behaviour. Our model allows us to analyse the reaction of passenger behaviour on the withdrawal of aviation alternatives and the completion of the High-Speed Rail link between the two cities in November 2007. The results show that travel time and frequency are the main determinants of travel behaviour. The valuation of total travel times changes over the years following the opening of the High-Speed Rail link. Furthermore, we show that the direct elasticity of market share with respect to frequency for a number of aviation alternatives is above 1, indicating that these alternatives are not able to maximise profits. These alternatives subsequently left the market in our sample period. For the remaining aviation alternatives, except for easyJet, we find elasticities of market share with respect to frequency close to 1. Therefore, we conjecture that competition in this market will decline in the long run.     

竞争条件下公司投资策略的期权博弈

文章认为在未来不确定的条件下投资主体可以通过推迟投资获取新的信息,减少部分关于投资的不确定性,因此,未来的不确定性隐含着推迟的期权,文章运用博弈理论分析了竞争条件下公司间的投资策略的期权博弈。     

基于竞争力理论的中小企业快速成长模式及策略

文章根据竞争力理论的有关原理,结合中小企业发展的实际提出了中小企业快速成长的创新模式、制度安排模式、要素整合模式,并就实施这3种模式提出相关的策略。     

Managing Challenging Organizational Change: Introducing active labour market policies in Italian public employment agencies

Abstract

Managing organizational change in the public sector is extremely challenging when adverse conditions hamper the introduction of novel organizational practices. This study builds on the case of the implementation of active labour market policies in in Italy, in an attempt to help explain the process of managing organizational change in the public sector. The case study shows how, despite contrary conditions that originate from the political context, the interplay between designed policy interventions, initial conditions, and features of the policy process can result in effective change of employment service practices.