Union Voice Effects in Mexico

This paper utilizes establishment survey data from Mexico to explore the impact of union voice on fringe benefits, turnover, job training and productivity. Mexican unions have a significant effect on these outcome measures for workers and firms. Unions increase both the value of fringe benefits per worker and the ratio of fringe benefits to total compensation, increase job training and raise productivity per worker. However, contrary to the broader literature on union voice effects, unionized establishments in Mexico appear to possess greater worker turnover.     

Minimum Wages,Employer‐Provided Health Insurance,and the Non‐discrimination Law

This article exploits cross‐state variation in minimum wages to investigate the impact of minimum wage changes on employer‐provided health insurance. In contrast to the existing empirical literature, this article considers an environment where some firms are constrained by non‐discrimination laws that govern the provision of health insurance. For these firms, minimum wage changes do not reduce the probability that workers will receive employer‐provided health insurance. For firms not covered by the non‐discrimination law, and free to tailor their fringe benefits, low‐skilled workers experience a disproportionate reduction in the availability and generosity of health insurance after a minimum wage increase.     

Immigration and Access to Fringe Benefits: Evidence from the Tobacco Use Supplements

We examine the extent to which assimilation and residential ethnic enclaves are associated with immigrant access to smoking‐related fringe benefits. In particular, we consider access to office smoking bans and employer‐sponsored smoking cessation programs. We first document differences in access to these benefits between immigrant and native workers. Second, we show that assimilation is positively associated with smoking‐related fringe benefit access while enclave residence does not predict access. These findings broaden our understanding of immigrant employment.     

The Wage–Health Insurance Trade‐off and Worker Selection: Evidence From the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey 1997 to 2006

Key provisions within healthcare reform will likely further increase the cost of employer‐sponsored insurance. Theory suggests that workers pay for their health insurance through a wage offset. We investigate this issue using data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey. GMM estimates aimed at correcting for endogenous worker mobility reveal evidence of a trade‐off for workers who are offered health insurance as the only fringe benefit. On the other hand, employees in establishments with a more comprehensive set of benefits enjoy higher wages relative to employees in establishments that offer no benefits. Health also affects the wage–health insurance trade‐off.     

Bidder Asymmetry in Infrastructure Procurement: Are There any Fringe Bidders?

Asymmetric auctions are among the most rapidly growing areas in the auction literature. The potential benefits from intensified auction competition could be enormous in the public procurement context. Entrant bidders are considered a key to enhance competition and break potential collusive arrangements among incumbent bidders. Asymmetric auction theory predicts that weak (fringe) bidders would bid more aggressively when they are faced with a strong (incumbent) opponent. Using data from official development projects, this paper shows that entrants actually submitted aggressive bids in the presence of incumbent(s) in the road sector and to a certain extent in the water sector. For electricity projects, the general competition effect is found to be particularly significant, but the entrant effect remains unclear. The results suggest that auctioneers should foster competition in public procurement, including fringe bidders, to contain public infrastructure investment costs.     

The Influence of Regular Work Systems on Compensation for Contingent Workers

Using data from a nationally representative survey of U.S. establishments, this article explores how features of regular work influence outcomes for contingent workers. The results show that firms combine regular and contingent work in varied ways: Some managers design contingent work to achieve performance objectives not possible with the regular workforce, whereas managers in other cases create contingent jobs to reinforce the same goals as regular work. In the latter case, contingent workers are more likely to be integrated with regular workers and to receive benefits. Benefit provision for contingent workers is also influenced by traditional internal labor market rules and by spillover effects in which efficiency or regulatory requirements lead benefits to be extended to contingent staff once offered to regular workers.     

Compensation Structure and Establishment Quit and Fire Rates

Despite the claims of efficiency wage theory, there is surprisingly little direct evidence that firms that pay higher wages have lower turnover rates than otherwise similar firms. This study uses data on 205 child care establishments to examine the influence of wages, fringe benefits, and the dispersion of wages within a skill class on establishment quit and fire rates. We separately examine one high-skill group (teachers) and one lowskill group (teacher aides). While we find that wages (alone) significantly reduce establishment quit and fire rates, the effect seems too small to be consistent with the efficiency wage hypothesis.     

The Employment Contract: From Collective Procedures to Individual Rights

The article analyses the institutional basis and form of the employment contract in Britain using the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey. It assesses the extent to which collective bargaining still regulates pay and non‐pay aspects of employment. While collective procedures have declined in importance, there has been an increase in legal governance of the employment relationship. Logistic regression analysis establishes that both contractual formalization and legal compliance are greater in larger organizations and where trade unions are present. Trade union activity is also associated with superior fringe benefits. Collective bargaining thus appears to facilitate both access to and improvement on statutory rights.     

Living at Work: Management Control and the Dormitory Labour System in China

The paper is based on a review of the literature on the use of dormitory labour, in the past and currently within parts of China, especially the Southern Pearl River Delta. It compares the provision of dormitories by firms with provision of housing under paternalist management practices. It explores the benefits that flow from having labour available on tap, as against the potential disadvantages of having short tenure circulating labour as firms aim to move up the value chain which may require the retention of skilled labour with the firm for longer periods.     

Potential for competition and the role of PTTs

The author considers the potential benefits and problems of deregulation in the telecommunications sector. He discusses competition (a) in terminal equipment supply and (b) in network provision. Assessing both areas in the light of US experience, he draws up recommendations for liberalized policies in European countries.     

地源热泵辅助太阳能采暖系统的研究

介绍了一种将太阳能技术与建筑物的地板辐射采暖技术结合起来,采用地源热泵作为辅助热源的高效、节能的采暖方式。实验结果表明,地源热泵辅助的太阳能系统在地板采暖中的应用,可全天候节能地提供地板采暖所需的低温热水,可以充分利用太阳能,有效地提高一次能源利用率,达到节约高品位能源和减少环境污染的目的,从而带来很好的社会效益和经济效益。     

An Evaluation of the One-Time Capital Gains Exclusion for Older Homeowners

This paper provides an evaluation of the one-time capital gains exclusion for older homeowners. This provision was largely intended to prevent large capital gains tax liabilities from locking older households into current, and possibly inappropriate, housing. We find the exclusion facilitates a modest number of moves, through not entirely of the downscaling type intended by Congress. Among beneficiaries, the distribution of benefits appears to be highly regressive. Modest benefits are also found to be enjoyed by the real estate and mortgage industries. Revenue losses are estimated and found to be significantly larger than estimates provided by the Treasury Department.     

Regional aid for telecommunications in Europe: A force for economic development

This article reviews research work on telecommunications and economic development which can be applied to the problems faced in the less favoured regions of Europe. The authors draw on work carried out under the auspices of the Commission of the European Communities into the disadvantages these regions face in telecommunications supply and use, and the benefits which would accrue from investment. The priorities for regional aid and recommended actions for a European programme are also discussed. The authors conclude that the emphasis should be on the provision of advanced business services and the stimulation of demand for those services, in order to encourage economic growth. General network infrastructure digitalization should be left to PTTs to undertake as part of their normal investment programme.     

Temporary Employment and Strategic Staffing in the Manufacturing Sector

While prior research has identified different ways of using temporary workers to achieve numerical flexibility, quantitative analysis of temporary employment has been limited to a few key empirical indicators of demand variability that may confound important differences. Our analysis provides evidence that many manufacturers use temporary workers to achieve what we call planned and systematic numerical flexibility rather than simply in a reactive manner to deal with unexpected problems. Although temporary work may provide many benefits for employers, a key function appears to be the provision of numerical flexibility not to buffer core workers but to externalize certain jobs.     

Public Employee Compensation and the Efficacy of Privatization Alternatives in US State and Local Governments

This article investigates the evidence used in the debate over public‐sector collective bargaining and privatization as US states attempted to resolve their budget problems. Specifically, the article evaluates the research on whether US state and local government workers are overpaid and whether privatization provides a cost‐effective alternative to the provision of public services by public employees. All recent studies find that state and local public employees earn on average lower wages than comparable private‐sector workers and on average receive better health benefits and pensions than private‐sector employees. Most studies find that the better benefits offset lower wages on average, and there is no state and local public employee compensation premium. The research on privatization in the USA indicates that it has reached something of an equilibrium with approximately one‐quarter of municipal public services being provided by private organizations. The major costs of privatization include overhead costs of competitive bidding, monitoring, oversight, and evaluation, which if done properly can often offset any privatization cost advantage, while if privatization is done without adequate controls, it can result in corruption, poor quality services, and then demands for reverse privatization.     

Closing information asymmetries: A scale agnostic approach for exploring equity implications of broadband provision

A persistent challenge for telecommunications policy is the determination of broadband provision footprints in both space and time. In the United States, Form 477 data from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) provide a valuable snapshot of broadband provision at the block level, but there are often inconsistencies with the underlying data. These inconsistencies include overly-optimistic self-reports from providers, requirements to report broadband provision within inflexible census administrative units, and a modest temporal reporting schedule (biannual) with a significant, one year temporal lag. These uncertainties are often compounded by telecommunications providers refusing to disclose any information on service footprints, geographic expansion plans or the characteristics of populations served by broadband. This type of obfuscation drastically limits the ability of policy analysts to evaluate outcomes (both positive and negative) associated with service provision and the digital divide, more generally. With the recent entry of Google Fiber to several metropolitan markets in the United States, many of the broadband reporting and evaluation challenges have re-emerged. The purpose of this paper is to leverage basic data mining techniques, a scale agnostic geographic framework and exploratory spatial data analysis (ESDA), to uncover the geographic intricacies of Google Fiber (Fiber) service for both Provo, Utah and Austin, Texas and compare them to Form 477 reports. In addition, we use basic statistical approaches to explore issues of broadband access and equity, accounting for the differences in socio-economic and demographic status of the populace served/not served for both cities, as well as basic pricing within and between communities.     

The Dominant Firm Model Revisited

This paper extends the standard Forchheimer dominant firm model by making more explicit shifts in the fringe supply when the market price set the dominant firm deviate from its limit price. It demonstrated how, when a dominant firm engages in short-run profit maximization, the market price it sets in the long run will equal its limit price and that, in certain situations, increased production cost for fringe lead to an increase in the number of fringe firms in the long run.     

经济政策不确定性与银行贷款损失准备计提

银行贷款损失准备计提的顺周期特征加剧金融系统的不稳定,受到学界和业界的广泛关注,监管机构逐步要求银行采取前瞻性的计提策略以应对贷款损失准备的顺周期特征,经济发展越来越受到宏观经济政策不确定性的影响,银行是否考虑当前经济政策不确定性,对贷款损失准备进行前瞻性计提?本文选取2004—2017年中国126家商业银行数据,研究经济政策不确定性对银行贷款损失准备计提的影响。实证分析发现,经济政策不确定性与贷款损失准备计提显著正相关,经济政策不确定性越大,贷款损失准备计提越多,在考虑地级市领导人更替、银行高管更替、宏观经济层面遗漏变量,以及使用工具变量的内生性分析后,结果保持稳健。异质性分析发现,这一效应在上市银行、外资持股比例较高、中小银行中表现更为明显。从银行风险管理角度的机制分析发现,不良贷款越多、风险储备越少的银行,经济政策不确定性增加时,计提的贷款损失准备越多,说明风险预防动机是其主要目的。进一步的分析发现,银行在经济政策不确定性较高时增加计提,有助于稳定银行收益、降低银行破产风险。本文的研究从经济政策不确定性的视角,为中国银行贷款损失准备计提的理论和实践提供了新的解释。     

Efficiency in broadband service provision: A spatial analysis

With the 2008 Federal Communications Commission (FCC) order amending both the definition of broadband and its data collection practices, the problems associated with data integrity and ZIP code aggregations in the United States will soon be forgotten. However, between 1999 and 2007, FCC Form 477 data remain the only viable, nationwide database of broadband provision in the United States. While broadband data from 1999–2004 and 2005–2007 are not directly comparable due to a modification in collection procedure, there is an absence of objective empirical analysis for the latter time period. Interestingly, although the FCC made the 2005–2007 data publically available on the Internet, password protected files largely prevented analysts from accessing, manipulating and analyzing these data. The purpose of this paper is three-fold. First, the process utilized for liberating these data from their protected format and integrating them into a geographic information system (GIS) is outlined. Second, the spatial distribution of broadband provision in the United States for 2005–2007 is explored. A mathematical programming approach is also utilized for comparing the relative efficiencies of ZIP code areas in acquiring broadband service given their demand-side socio-economic and demographic determinants. Finally, implications for public policy, particularly those associated with developing local and regional benchmarks for broadband provision, competition and access, are addressed.     

Resource Dependency,Innovative Strategies,and Firm Performance in BOP Markets

Low‐income markets have attracted the interest of academics, politicians, and business leaders alike. In recent years, numerous companies such as Unilever, Cemex, Tetrapak, and Vodafone have provided evidence that low‐income markets offer commercial business opportunities and that private companies can realize profitable business activities while simultaneously contributing to the alleviation of poverty. However, companies are challenged by constraining conditions such as poor infrastructure, nonexistent distribution channels, illiteracy, corruption, lack of enforceable legal frameworks, and violent conflicts when entering those markets. In order to succeed, companies develop new strategies, introduce innovative business models, and develop novel capabilities. Three innovative practices are commonly named in the literature that should enable companies to operate successfully in low‐income markets: (1) integrating the local population and local entrepreneurs to cocreate products; (2) cooperating with nontraditional or fringe stakeholders; and (3) building local capacity, which means improving the market conditions of low‐income markets. This study applies a resource dependence perspective as it provides valuable explanations on the interaction between companies and their environment, how companies cope with environmental constraints, and how the environment and different strategies affect business outcomes. By integrating a resource dependence perspective, the study theoretically frames the strategic recommendations of the literature and answers the underlying research question of whether environmental conditions of low‐income markets cause the execution of innovative practices and whether such practices influence the outcome of companies operating in low‐income markets. The research hypotheses are tested in a structural equation model against data of 103 firms operating in low‐income markets. The study reveals that companies integrate local actors to cocreate products and cooperate with nontraditional and fringe stakeholders to reduce resource dependency. Local capacity building, which means improving the local environment, is only applied by companies when strong partnerships with nontraditional and fringe stakeholders are established. Finally, the study shows that partnerships with nontraditional and fringe stakeholders as well as local capacity building have a positive effect on organizational performance. Thus, when companies aim to enter low‐income markets, they should not follow the recommendation of the transaction cost theory and internalize resources, but rather cooperate with nontraditional partners and invest in the local environment. Moreover, the study shows that market entries into low‐income markets require long‐term commitments to engage in partnerships with regional authorities, local community groups, and nongovernmental organizations. Without these partnerships, it is not possible to reduce high resource dependencies and to establish successful businesses in low‐income markets. Thus, governments should create general conditions that facilitate the creation of partnerships between nontraditional actors and companies, and assist them to improve environmental conditions in these markets.