Fact‐Finding Effectiveness: Evidence from New York State Fact‐Finding Effectiveness

In a collective‐bargaining environment characterized by increasing fiscal and taxpayer pressures, this article examines the continued viability of fact‐finding as a dispute‐resolution mechanism in New York State's public sector. This is an important question because fact‐finding is the final dispute‐resolution procedure for most unionized employees in New York and many other states. Whether fact‐finding effectiveness was measured by the proximity of fact‐finder recommendations to the final settlement or by outright acceptance of the fact‐finder report, regression results show that New York fact‐finding has successfully met the challenges of the intensified environmental pressures in the 1990s. No significant decline was found in its ability to move parties toward the compromise outcome. Part of the fact‐finding's continued success can be attributed to the policy shift by New York's Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) in 1991 in the role of the fact‐finder from an accommodative to a more adjudicative function. The well‐reasoned adjudicative fact‐finding report has more potential to bring public pressure to bear on the extreme positions of the parties. Mediation was better left to the professional PERB mediators. Finally, it also was found that fact‐finders who were full‐time neutrals were more effective under this more adjudicative style.     

Are Losers Picked? An Empirical Analysis of Capacity Divestment and Production Reallocation in the Japanese Cement Industry

As demand in an industry shrinks, pressure for the reduction of capacity arises. A key issue is whether plants which, from an efficiency perspective, should reduce output in fact do so. Focusing on the Japanese cement industry, we examine whether less efficient plants reduce capacity. We find that less efficient firms are not more likely to reduce capacity than more efficient firms; however, less efficient plants within a multi‐plant firm are more likely to reduce capacity than more efficient plants. In addition, we find that this divestment pattern has led to a substantial drop in industry‐wide allocative efficiency.     

德尔福归来

四年前，这家全球最大的汽车零部件公司申请破产保护，成为当时最具爆炸性的新闻。他不为外界所知的教训，以及奇迹般复苏的真实原因。     

亚太地区炼油工业发展现状与前景展望——兼论亚太地区炼油工业对石油市场及油品贸易的影响

2009年增幅达到历史高点后,亚太地区炼油能力增速明显放缓。预计在2015-2017年间,亚太和中东地区会迎来新一轮炼油能力扩建浪潮。亚太地区不仅原油蒸馏能力激增,同时二次深加工转换能力也在大幅提高,并较原油蒸馏能力增速更快。亚太地区的运输燃料,包括汽油、柴油和航煤将面临过剩。迄今为止,中国和印度大部分的炼油规划项目并没有被取消,但日本、中国等部分国家与地区有关闭炼厂的计划。如果出口型炼厂还能继续拓展市场,预计未来亚太炼厂利用率将会回升。预计亚太地区在未来仍将是液化石油气（LPG）、石脑油、燃料油、沥青、石油焦等石化产品的净进口地区,同时成为包括汽油、柴油、煤油在内的交通燃料的净出口地区。该地区交通燃料出口国家的炼油商不仅要争夺本土的市场份额,还要争夺国际市场的份额。中国、日本、印度、马来西亚、越南、澳大利亚、菲律宾的油品贸易未来会发生一些变化。     

Firm‐Size Wage Gaps along the Formal‐Informal Divide: Theory and Evidence

Observationally equivalent workers are paid higher wages in larger firms. This fact is often called the “firm‐size wage gap” and is regarded as a key empirical puzzle. Using microlevel data from Turkey, we document a new stylized fact: The firm‐size wage gap is more pronounced for informal (unregistered) jobs than for formal (registered) jobs. To explain this fact, we develop a two‐stage wage‐posting game with market imperfections and segmented markets, the solution to which produces wages as a function of firm size in a well‐defined subgame‐perfect equilibrium. The model proposes two explanations. First, taxes on formal employment generate a wedge between formal and informal size wage gaps. Thus, government policy can potentially affect the magnitude of the firm‐size wage gaps. The second explanation features a market‐based framework with strategic interactions. Relative to small firms, large firms typically post higher wages for both formal and informal jobs. A high‐wage formal job attracts a larger pool of applicants than a high‐wage informal job. The larger pool of applicants for the formal job, in turn, allows the firm to somewhat lower the initial wage offer, while this second‐round effect is negligible for informal jobs. As a result, size differentials are lower in formal jobs than informal jobs. We argue that the observed patterns in the use of social connections in job search and heterogeneity in job preferences can be used to justify the validity of this second mechanism.     

Cartel Attributes and Cartel Performance: The Impact of Trade Associations

This paper employs a cartel policy experiment, the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, to examine whether industries that have trade associations in place prior to cartelization were better able to attain collusive outcomes than otherwise. Trade associations could potentially help industries better formulate effective cartel rules and could help with monitoring. We find that industries with trade associations were more successful in achieving collusion–proxied by either reductions in industry output or increases in industry prices–than those without. In fact, industries without trade associations were generally unable to successfully collude under the NIRA.     

家庭承包制下的农村投资低效率及其自救机制

自农村实行家庭承包制以来,家庭分工模式与季节性农业生产之间的冲突导致农民对机械总动力的过度投资及其低效率。对此,一种可行的自救机制是构筑基于专业化合作组织而非分散农户的新分工体系。但是,通过应用1952年-1956年的合作化数据发现,专业化合作组织的规模并不是越大越好,而是存在一个最优规模水平。     

Innovation: A data-driven approach

A newly introduced product or service becomes an innovation after it has been proven in the market. No one likes the fact that market failures of products and services are much more common than commercial successes. A data-driven approach to innovation is proposed. It is a natural extension of the system of customer requirements in terms of their number and type and the ways of collecting and processing them. The ideas introduced in this paper are applicable to the evaluation of the innovativeness of planned introductions of design changes and design of new products and services. In fact, blends of products and services could be the most promising way of bringing innovations to the market. The most important toll gates of innovation are the generation of new ideas and their evaluation. People have limited ability to generate and evaluate a large number of potential innovation alternatives. The proposed approach is intended to evaluate many alternatives from a market perspective.     

Performance and consensus

Top management consensus on corporate objectives and on the competitive weapons employed to attain them was studied in 12 non-diversified public corporations. It was found that while agreement on both is associated positively with economic performance, agreement on means is significantly more important—in fact, agreement on goals without agreement on means correlates with poor performance. This suggests that strategy makers should concentrate on reaching consensus concerning means rather than ends (corporate goals) when formulating strategies for single-mission enterprises.     

Corporate Governance and Performance: The REIT Effect

Real estate investment trusts (REITs) offer a natural experiment in corporate governance due to the fact that they leave little free cash flow for management, which reduces agency problems. We exploit a unique and leading corporate governance database to test whether corporate governance matters for the performance of U.S. REITs. We document for a sample including governance ratings of more than 220 REITs that firm value is significantly related to firm-level governance for REITs with low payout ratios only. Repeating the analysis with the complete database that includes more than 5,000 companies and a control sample of firms with high corporate real estate ratios, we find a strong and significantly positive relation between our governance index and several performance variables, indicating that the partial lack of a relation between governance and performance in the real estate sector might be explained by a REIT effect.     

Root Metaphor in Industrial Relations: A Reply to Tom Keenoy

Where Keenoy takes liberties, I try to correct him. I did not say that the 'old' industrial relations has been superceded by the 'new'. Nor did I suggest a Kuhnian paradigm shift. Nor did my argument hinge upon these things happening. Quite the opposite, in fact. The root metaphors are a problem precisely because little is scientifically decided between 'old' and 'new'. Once such wrinkles have been ironed out, Keenoy and I seem to agree on a great deal. His conclusion, however, is more comforting than mine.     

A Note on Inflation and Relative Tenure Prices

This article develops a simplified model of housing costs to analyze the effects of the expected rate of inflation on residential tenure choice. Inflation, working though the Federal Tax Code, affects a number of the components of housing costs in ways which vary between tenure modes. On net, the tax subsidy to owner-occupancy is more positively leveraged with respect to expected inflation than are tax preferences for rental residential real estate. In fact, it is likely that higher expectations of inflation will reduce the after-tax cost of owner-occupied housing.     

Product compatibility as a signal of quality in a market with network externalities

In this paper, I consider the compatibility decision as a signaling device of the quality of a newly introduced technology of which users are not informed. Provided that firms are located sufficiently far apart in Hotelling’s [0,1] interval, I find separating equilibria where low compatibility signals high quality. This possible separation is due to the fact that low compatibility is more advantageous to the high-quality entrant than to the low-quality entrant, since it can prevent users of the established technology from enjoying network benefits from the new technology very much.     

Efficiency in Second-Price Auctions: A New Look at Old Data

Experiments on second-price sealed-bid private value auctions have established that subjects typically bid more than their value, despite the fact that value bidding is a dominant strategy in such auctions. Moreover, the laboratory evidence shows that subjects do not learn to bid their values as they gain more experience. In the present paper, we re-examine the second-price auction data from Kagel and Levin’s (Econ J 103:868–879, 1993) classic paper. We find that auction efficiency increases over time, even though the frequency of overbidding is unchanged. We argue that the rise in efficiency is due to a decline in the variability of overbidding. This is consistent with subjects’ learning to bid more like each other.     

FUNDAMENTALS OF ACCOUNTING/ECONOMIC/FINANCIAL EVALUATION

A major assumption in inventory theory in general and in the area of price changes in particular is that the demand for an item is fixed. It is possible that the reduction in price may result in an increase in demand. In fact this is a reason for the sale offered by many organizations. In this paper we use the familiar net present value approach commonly used in financial decision making to analyze and formulate optimal inventory ordering policies. This approach is more accurate and straight-forward than the average annual cost method that is usually used for comparison of alternative inventory policies.     

谁能成为互联网上的IBM

当互联网公司强大的内部IT系统及计算能力成为中小企业的外骨骼时,万亿美元级的市场便成形了。这时,谁会在这个市场里充当类似于IBM这样的企业IT架构师的角色呢?     

A conceptual framework for public-private interplay in the telecommunications sector

Public activity in the telecommunications industry has experienced important transformations in the last decade: “reinvolvement” in infrastructure deployment, “innovative” boosting measures, and decentralisation of some decisions. Conceptually, even more important than the measures themselves is the fact that private agents often participate in their realisation and execution. This paper reviews how justifications for public action that would apply to any economic activity area have modelled the public-private relationship in the telecommunications sector. Subsequently, it focuses on the analysis of the new spaces for public-private collaboration that are currently opening up.     

我国进出口贸易的内涵碳对他国的气候补偿效应

日益严峻的气候变化问题导致气候资源不再免费使用而将其纳入经济体系,由此催生了碳交易。我国贸易的低端环节导致出口产品中的内涵碳长期处于总量巨大且加速增长的态势,形成了在贸易环节我国补贴他国气候资源的事实。文章应用投入产出法测算了我国出口产业内涵碳及其波及效果,应用碳市场对气候资源的补偿价格,得出了我国无论是某些产业还是出口总体,在贸易中对他国气候资源的补贴都已经超过了从贸易中所获经济利益的事实。     

New Home Affordability, Equity, and Housing Market Behavior

Recent analyses have reported quite different estimates of the percentage of American families who can afford to buy new homes. However, the differences in the levels of affordability have obscured two more important similarities between the studies: most measures of affordability are closely correlated over time, and none correlate at all with what in fact is occurring in the housing market. One important reason for the latter phenomenon is that affordability measures concentrate on income and ignore wealth. Newly available data from the Annual Housing Survey makes it possible to estimate the equity of current homeowners, which is one important component of wealth. With this data, it is possible to compute a new measure of affordability, which more closely corresponds to the actual market behavior of households. This new measure shows a much higher level of affordability than those previously published, and also shows that young families, who have been the subject of particular concern among housing policy-makers, appear to be slightly better off in the housing market than older families.     

How much do CEOs really matter? Reaffirming that the CEO effect is mostly due to chance

How much of the variance in firm performance can be attributed to CEOs? This question has been the focus of a long debate in management research. In a recent study, I showed that a large portion of the performance differences that are often attributed to CEOs might in fact be due to chance. In a recent article, Quigley and Graffin argue that my conclusions can be avoided if more advanced methodological approaches are applied. Here I show that this is not the case, in fact if more realistic assumptions of how chance can affect firm performance are made, the effect of CEO leadership is almost indistinguishable from the effect of chance, independent of the estimation methodology. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.