Capital Commitment and Cournot Competition with Labour-managed and Profit-maximising Firms

The behaviour of labour managed and profit seeking firms in a Cournot duopoly with capital strategic interaction is analysed. When a pure labour managed duopoly is considered, firms choose their capital commitments according to the level of the interest rate, unlike what usually happens when only profit maximising firms operate in the market. If we consider a mixed duopoly, the profit maximising firm under-invests while the labour managed firm over-invests regardless of the rental cost of capital     

Awkward Classes and India's Development

ABSTRACT

Marx's model of capital and labour, dynamised by contradictions and the compulsion to accumulate, leaves deviations from the polar classes of capital and labour ignored, regarded as outliers or as headed for extinction. But the two considered here, petty commodity production (and trade and services) and merchant’s or commercial capital, persist widely. Here, their structure and dynamics are discussed in general and in the contemporary Indian case. They are argued to be ‘awkward’, both analytically and politically. Petty production overlaps with both wage-labour and small capitalist firms; it reproduces and expands by multiplication, not accumulation; it does not mobilise in a politically coherent way. Commercial capital is in turn suffused with productive activity; it encompasses petty trade and accumulating enterprises that pursue a reactive opportunistic politics that preserves their independence. Further awkwardness results from the disjuncture between analytically useful categories and the policy concepts used by the state.     

How have global financial institutions responded to the challenges of the post-crisis era?

The study examines the largely unexplored effect of changes in the competitive landscape for large, global financial institutions on their ability to take risks, as well as deploy capital and labour in an efficient manner based on a novel measure of inefficiency. The analysis shows during 2001–2013 that inefficiency peaked during the 2008 crisis period and has fallen back to levels close to pre-crisis periods. The model also performs well in out-of-sample forecasts of the financial firms’ future market values. These results suggest that large financial firms have been adjusting to the ‘new normal’ of the post-crisis period and thus are able to use capital and labour more efficiently within the constraints of current market conditions. In addition, a non-linear pattern between inefficiency and a firm’s asset size suggests that there might be an optimal scale for such firms in the $450–650 billion range.     

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.     

Technology and worker coopratives: some UK evidence and a framework for investigation

This paper considers the relationship between cooperatives i n the ‘new wave’ and the technology they use. Data and examples from the UK are presented to show that there is no general support either for the ‘optimistic’ hypothesis that cooperatives are necessarily able to make humanizing choices about technology or for the ‘pessimistic’ hypothesis that they are completely constrained by technology. A framework is developed for analysing the factors which may or may not allow technological choices. The paper goes on to form a new hypothesis in two parts: firstly, that small firms i n general have more freedom to make choices about technology the more they have independence from large firms and the market, and the more they are i n areas of product innovation, particularly IT-based innovation; secondly, given a degree of freedom to make such choices, the choice is more likely to be made successfully in the direction of humanizing uses of technology the more there is potential for identif;cation between job, product and social or political aims. The paper concludes by describing a research project now under way exploring the relative importance of these factors in established UK worker cooperatives.     

PROFIT TAX AND FIRM MOBILITY IN A THREE‐COUNTRY MODEL

We construct a three‐country model that incorporates international relocation by imperfectly competitive firms and examine both the effects of each country's profit tax reduction on the consumption and welfare of all countries, and the incentive for the countries to decrease the profit tax. In such a model, both the terms of trade and international relocation of firms offer the key to understanding the impacts of one country's profit tax policy. In particular, we note that the relocation of firms from the other two countries is positively related to the wage incomes of the third country through a shift in labour demand, and the terms‐of‐trade improvement is not only positively related to the wage incomes, but also negatively related to profit incomes through a shift in world consumption demand. We show that (i) in a three‐country world economy, regardless of the reduction's source, the profit tax reduction of each country leads to relocation of firms away from foreign countries toward its own economy and deteriorates the terms of trade of its economy and (ii) this becomes a ‘beggar‐thy‐neighbour’ policy in the sense that it lowers the welfare of the other foreign countries.     

Managerial capital,occupational choice and inequality in a global economy

This study proposes a simple theory of trade with endogenous firm productivity, occupational choice and income inequality. Individuals with different managerial talent choose to become entrepreneurs or workers. Entrepreneurs enhance firm productivity by investing in managerial capital. The model generates three income classes: low‐income workers facing the prospect of unemployment, middle‐income entrepreneurs managing domestic firms and high‐income entrepreneurs managing global firms. Trade liberalization policies raise unemployment and improve welfare. A reduction in per‐unit trade costs raises top incomes and generates labour‐market polarization. A reduction in fixed exporting costs has an ambiguous effect on top incomes and personal income distribution. Policies reducing labour‐market frictions or the costs of managerial‐capital acquisition create more jobs and improve welfare. The income distributional effects of labour‐market policies depend on which policy is implemented.     

Why does China protect its labour‐intensive industries more?*

China's tariff structure favours labour‐intensive sectors, and this is at odds with traditional theory of comparative advantage. The paper argues that tariffs in China are a mechanism for protecting technology‐backward domestic – especially state‐owned enterprises (SOEs) from competition technology‐advanced foreign enterprises producing in China. With relatively integrated labour markets and cross‐firm technology differences, SOEs’ subsistence is supported by subsidized credit and limited access of foreign firms’ local production to tariff‐protected domestic markets. Labour market integration and capital subsidies increase the relative cost of labour in SOEs compared to their foreign competitors, hurting more domestic firms in industries that use labour more intensively. Restrictions to FIEs’ (foreign‐invested enterprises) access to tariff‐protected product markets, which protect more labour‐intensive industries, compensate for the greater cost disadvantage of SOEs in labour‐intensive sectors.     

Free automotive unions,industrial work and precariousness in provincial Russia

This article draws on ethnographic work carried out since 2009 on workers and automotive unions in Kaluga, Russia. The contrast between secure and temporary contract workers in foreign-owned car plants is a focus of activism among emerging alternative trade unions in Kaluga. Workers in both the ‘new’ production-scape of high-tech foreign-owned automotive assembly, and the ‘old’ low-tech Soviet production contexts articulate similar interpretive understandings of what constitutes ‘precarious’ work: lack of autonomy and the lack of a ‘social wage’ generally in labour. We interrogate this through in-depth interviews with unionised and non-unionised workers in the auto sector and other industries locally. A divide emerges between workers who go to work for the car plants, and those who remain in Soviet-types firms and who reject the labour relations model that it offers and which they understand to contrast with a traditional ‘paternalistic’ Russian model.     

Financial markets,the structure of long-term investments and labour income risks

The paper develops a model to analyse the feedback between financial markets, long-term capital investments and the risk of labour incomes. We study a situation where firms are owned by entrepreneurs, who are able to share and diversify their income risk by trading on financial markets. Workers, in contrast, cannot short-sell the flows from future labour endowments and thus do not have the same opportunities. We derive two central results. Firstly, even if financial markets offer perfect risk-sharing opportunities for entrepreneurs, the participation restriction for labour incomes leads to a constrained inefficient market allocation. The constrained inefficiency arises because the effect of long-term investments on the risk of wages is not internalized by state prices. Secondly, we show that in general it is not true that workers indirectly benefit when we go from a situation with no financial markets to a situation with perfect financial markets for entrepreneurs but restricted participation for workers. The results suggest that a policy solution might require either to close some financial markets or to create new ones. We argue why there is a strong case for the creation of new markets rather than for closing existing ones.     

Employment protection and productivity: evidence from firm-level panel data in Japan

Recent developments in the literature on Employment Protection Legislation (EPL) have revealed that changing the stringency of employment protection can lead to extensive consequences outside the labour market, by affecting firms’ production decisions or workers’ commitment levels. This article provides the first empirical evaluation of the comprehensive effect of restrictions on firing employees in Japan, by exploiting the variations in court decisions. We find that judgements lenient to workers significantly reduce firms’ total-factor productivity growth rate. The effect on capital is mixed and inconclusive, although we obtain modest evidence that an increase in firing costs induces a negative scale effect on capital inputs.     

Testing Böhm-Bawerk’s theory of capital: Some evidence from the Finnish economy

This paper considers the pure labour theory of value and Böhm-Bawerk’s theory of capital as approximations of Sraffa’s model of single production, and tests them with data from the Symmetric Input-output Tables of the Finnish economy. The results show that (i) in comparison with the labour values, the actual Böhm-Bawerkian production prices are ‘equally’ good or even better approximations of the actual Sraffian production prices and market prices; and (ii) the Sraffian production price-profit rate relationship is, by and large, governed by the differences in the Böhm-Bawerkian average periods of production.     

STRATEGIC INVESTMENT IN A LABOUR‐MANAGED DUOPOLY

Developing a Cournot two‐stage game model with strategic capital interaction, we compare two different kinds of equilibrium in a labour‐managed (LM) duopoly. An LM firm's reaction function is negatively sloped when capital and output are simultaneously determined, while the slope of its reaction function in the second stage changes in sign depending on the magnitude of its labour‐expansion elasticity. Hence, whether the LM firms employ more capital and produce greater output at the equilibria in the two‐stage game model than at the equilibria resulting from the simultaneous selection of capital and output depends on the magnitude of their labour‐expansion elasticity.     

Spatial Outcomes of Capital Restructuring: ‘new industrial spaces’ as a symptom of crisis,not solution

This article considers the spatial outcomes of post-Fordist economic developments with particular reference to the flexible specialisation models of the ‘new industrial spaces’. It is argued that greater consideration must be given to the claimed role of these new industrial spaces in developing theory. Furthermore, the concept of transaction costs, which is located at the centre of such theories, must be treated with caution. A more profitable approach lies with a detailed investigation of the power relationships between large and small firms and capital and labour, with a greater emphasis on the institutional aspects of power.     

Perversity without complementarity ∗

It has been shown by Tatsuo Hatta that, in a Wicksellian or dated labour model of production, Hicksian input complementarity is a necessary condition for ‘capital perversity’. It is shown here that Hicksian input complementarity at the more fundamental level of real industries is nota necessary condition for ‘perversity’.     

Aggregate profitability and income distribution in the UK corporate sector, 1963–1985

This paper analyses the secular and cyclical behaviour of the rate of profit for the UK corporate sector from 1962 to 1985, using the growth accounting framework developed by Weisskopf (1979) for the USA, and the labour share decomposition of Henley (1987). The results show that the five per cent per annum decline in net profit rate in the UK over the period is explained in part by each of the three factors of declining profit share, declining capital productivity and, to a lesser extent, declining capacity utilization. As in the USA profitability peaks prematurely in each business cycle as a result of distributional pressure. Further decomposition of these components points to the importance of inadequate growth of real labour productivity as an explanatory factor, and to the inability of firms to protect profit share from the effect of the pre-1979 growing employer labour tax burden. The post-1980 profit revival in the UK is not explained by a ‘breakthrough’ in terms of an improved growth rate of labour or capital productivity but rather by the sheer length of the sustained business upswing and, as yet, absence of the usual midcycle upward pressure on labour share.     

A model of the free-entry producer cooperative

One of the most frequent criticisms of the Illyrian model of the labour-managed firm is that it does not take into account key institutional factors which are likely in practice to eliminate the perverse short-run supply and degeneration results well known in the literature. This paper presents a new model of the labour-managed firm, incorporating several of the most significant institutional factors actually in evidence in Western cooperative sectors. The free-entry producer cooperative model includes differing member and nonmember compensation methods, free access to membership, and special capital financing and shutdown rules. The new model's results differ from Ward's Illyrian firm model in a number of ways: first, capital is always variable for these firms, so the perverse short-run supply response does not apply; second, free-entry producer cooperatives do not degenerate into capitalist firms as Illyrian firms do; and third, such cooperatives will always have higher survival rates than both Illyrian and conventional firms.     

Marx,Lenin and the Cooperative Movement

Drawing upon the writings of Marx and Lenin, this article refutes the widely shared but incorrect assumption that Marx and Lenin rejected cooperation even as a mode of production for the transitional period. It reviews Marx's belief that cooperatives would gradually supplant capitalistic firms, and that the generalised growth of cooperation would give rise to a new mode of production; the article also analyses Lenin's 1923 article on cooperation in which not only is cooperation described as a major step in the transition to socialism, but even equated with socialism at large. The hypotheses of this article are supported through a close reading of these works and also shed light on numerous implications arising from this reading.     

Joan Robinson as a teacher

Sraffa's construct, the standard commodity, responds to Ricardo's search for an ‘invariable’ measure of value, since it is a measurement unit invariant to changes in distribution. But Sraffa suggests that there is no ‘counterpart,’ no analogous search or needed construct, for the ‘problem’ of ‘difference’ as distinct from change (‘why two commodities produced by the same quantities of labour are not of the same exchangeable value’). Difference in this sense is crucial to Marx, who distinguishes value and surplus-value from capitalist price and profit in part in order to theorize differences as systematic value transfers. In that effort, Marx repeatedly poses commodities and capitals as ‘aliquot parts’ of the whole, so that profit is a redistributed share of aggregate surplus-value. This paper shows that, when Marx's aliquot part imagery is formalized, the resulting hypothetical system represents a meaningful ‘counterpart,’ a construct with a function in Marx's analysis of difference comparable to that of Sraffa's standard commodity in analyzing distributional change. A Marxian ‘standard system’ posing each commodity as an aliquot part of the social capital (a) defines the needed labor-time unit of social account by homogenizing heterogeneous concrete labors as socially average (‘abstract’) labor while simultaneously (b) allowing the derivation of exchange-value (e.g., capitalist production price) on that scale via summation of directly and indirectly embodied labor. Indeed, Marx's approach to production prices as resulting from an inter-industry redistribution of aggregate surplus-value is shown to be algebraically identical to the calculation of labor-embodied under ‘aliquot part’ production conditions.     

COMPARATIVE EFFICIENCY OF AGRICULTURAL COOPERATIVES AND CONVENTIONAL FIRMS IN A SAMPLE OF QUASI‐TWIN COMPANIES

The resilience of cooperatives and their positive contribution to employment in times of crisis is well established. However, their overall economic performance relative to conventional firms is still controversial, casting doubt on the ability of this alternative organizational form to govern the fundamental drivers of productivity. To shed new light on the issue, we study the comparative technical efficiency of agricultural cooperatives (ACs) and conventional firms (CFs), drawing on a unique data set comprising all wine‐producing companies in Sardinia (Italy) from 2004 to 2009. Due to the similarity of the habitats in which the firms operate and the careful measurement of several key inputs, the observed units are ‘twins’ in all non‐organizational respects, providing an ideal setting for comparison. Having generated efficiency scores through Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), we regressed the scores on external covariates and ownership type using a pooled truncated maximum likelihood formulation. Our findings, which survive correction for spatial correlations, indicate that cooperatives are less technically efficient than their capitalist counterparts and struggle more to adapt to extreme weather fluctuations. Both results are particularly worrying in light of the main challenges facing the wine industry in the near future: liberalization of EU planting rights and climate change.