A Note on the Changes in the Relative Wages of LEP Hispanic Men between 1980 and 2000

Using the Juhn‐Murphy‐Pierce (1993 ) wage decomposition technique, we analyzed changes in the earnings differential between Hispanic and non‐Hispanic white men in the United States between 1980 and 2000. The empirical findings, based on decennial census data, indicate that limited‐English‐proficient (LEP) Hispanic men gained in their relative earnings position compared to English‐fluent Hispanics during the 1990s. Our interpretation is that the relative demand for LEP Hispanic workers has risen in recent years.     

The Extent of Occupational Segregation in the United States: Differences by Race,Ethnicity, and Gender

This paper studies occupational segregation by ethnicity/race and gender by following a new approach that facilitates multigroup comparisons and econometric analyses to take into account group characteristics. The analysis shows that segregation is particularly intense in the Hispanic and Asian populations (the situation being more severe for the former given its higher concentration in low‐paid jobs). A distinctive characteristic of Hispanics is that segregation is higher for men than for women although females are more concentrated in low‐paid jobs. Segregation neither for women nor for African and Native Americans is reduced by taking human capital variables into account.     

English-Language Skills and the Earnings of Self-Employed Immigrants in the United States: A Note

Employing U.S. Census data, this study analyzes how English-language fluency affected the earnings of self-employed immigrant men in the 1980s. Our results suggest that English proficiency became a more important determinant of earnings for foreign-born entrepreneurs in 1990 compared with 1980, even while controlling for factors affecting selection into self-employment.     

English Language and Low‐Skilled Jobs: The Structure of Employment

We use the Bay Area Longitudinal Surveys (BALS) to examine skill requirements, the joint use of English and non‐language skills, and wages in low‐skilled jobs. Results show that low‐skilled jobs—even those open to workers with limited English—require English language skills. Furthermore, most make joint use of English and non‐language skills with the ability of any specific English skill set to enhance varying with the job’s specific non‐language skill required and industry.     

Executive Compensation and Ethnic Minority Status

We examine the compensation of ethnic minority executives in listed U.S. firms. The total pay of African American executives is 9 percent lower than that earned by Caucasians. This is due to lower base salary, lower bonus, and lower restricted stock grants. The lower bonus is due to a lower sensitivity to above‐average firm performance. African Americans also earn significantly less on the exercise of stock options, increasing the pay gap to 17 percent for total ex‐post pay. In contrast to African Americans, the compensation of Hispanic and Asian executives is comparable to Caucasians.     

Beyond universal service: Characteristics of Americans without telephones, 1980–1993

This paper explores the characteristics of Americans who lack home telephone service by drawing on FCC and Census data covering the period 1980–1993. It focuses on groups who have experienced lower than average telephone penetration per household - the elderly, the poor, women and children, blacks and Hispanics, and rural Americans. Income was found to be the single most influential factor in predicting the presence of a telephone in the home, although strong mitigating factors were also identified. Low penetration rates were found among women single heads of households. Low rates were also found among the two minorities studied in comparison with the white majority, even when controlled for income. Finally, the elderly, once thought to suffer from isolation, were found to enjoy higher than average telephone penetration rates. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of lingering questions and proposes considerations for policies that might lead to higher levels of participation.     

English‐Language Proficiency and Occupational Risk Among Hispanic Immigrant Men in the United States

We use data from the Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, the Survey of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses, and the 2000 U.S. decennial census to analyze how occupational risk relates to the earnings of Hispanic immigrant men. Our findings indicate that those with limited English‐language fluency received significantly higher compensating wages in unsafe jobs than their English‐fluent counterparts. The larger occupational‐risk premiums accrued by limited‐English‐proficient (LEP) foreign‐born Hispanic men also hold when further including U.S.‐born Hispanic, non‐Hispanic Black, and non‐Hispanic White men in the sample. These findings are consistent with underlying differences in preferences toward wages versus safety between LEP and English‐proficient workers and/or differences in coverage under formal workers’ compensation programs, perhaps because undocumented workers (many of whom already faced hazardous conditions when migrating illegally to work in the United States) comprise a disproportionate share of the LEP. However, our data and methodologies do not allow us to determine whether these premiums adequately compensate the LEP for the occupational risk they undertake.     

Viewdata—a product in search of a market?

One of the classic marketing fiascos of the pasr decade was the $200 million boondoggle project hatched at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, known as Picturephone® service. Heralded as the new telephone of the 1980s, rosy sales projections suggested that as many as 1 000 000 Americans would have Picturephone® sets in their homes and offices by the mid 1980s. Wile these figures look delightfully quaint today, the shareholds of AT&T must not have felt so amused by that $200 million expenditure on engineering a system that no one wanted. Through the year 2000, MBA students at Harvard will be able to rediscover in case study form just how dangerous it can be for an organization to allow its engineering department to dictate new product development to the marketing staff. Of course in the Picturephone® case, AT&T could proffer a legitimate excuse: the Vice President of Marketing position at Bell had lain dormant and abandoned for almost a quarter of the century. After all, who needs to sell telephone service?     

How Do Land Auction Formats Influence the Market Structure and Aggregate Surplus of Real Estate Development?

This article proposes a duopoly dynamic game theoretic model to investigate the market structure and aggregate surplus of real estate development when land is sold in a sealed‐bid first price auction vis‐à‐vis an open English auction. It relaxes the assumption of symmetric bidders. The land values have common value and private value components. We find that the sealed‐bid first price auction introduces competition in the real estate development market. The open English auction leads a monopoly market. State agencies are recommended to increase the aggregate surplus of real estate development by publishing past bidding information under the sealed‐bid first price auction and reducing information asymmetry between bidders.     

Who Is Affected by the Minimum Wage?

Prior surveys of empirical research on the minimum wage have been organized around the question “What does the minimum wage affect?” This survey is organized around the question “Who is affected by the minimum wage?” We review the consequences of the minimum wage for teens and young workers, men and women, African Americans and Hispanics, the less educated, workers in low‐wage industries, and low‐wage/low‐income populations. Although there is almost universal agreement that the minimum wage boosts earnings, evidence for a negative employment effect varies between mixed and nonexistent. An important gap in the literature is the paucity of research on low‐wage/low‐income groups.     

First‐Price Sealed‐Bid Tender versus English Open Auction: Evidence from Land Auctions

This article compares whether the first‐price sealed‐bid tender or the ascending English open auction generates higher revenue for the seller. Using a unique set of data for land sales and accounting for the presence of an endogenous discrete mechanism choice variable, our results show that the first‐price sealed‐bid tender generates a lower land price, in the range of 1.2–9.6%, than the English open auction. Our results validate the theoretical prediction that open auctions result in higher prices because bidders can infer other bidders’ information by observing their bids in the common value auction paradigm.     

U.S. House Prices over the Last 30 Years: Bubbles,Regime Shifts and Market (In)Efficiency

This paper studies U.S. house prices across 45 metropolitan areas from 1980 to 2012. It applies a version of the Gordon dividend discount model for long‐run “fundamentals” and uses Mean Group and Pooled Mean Group estimation to estimate long‐run and short‐run determinants of house prices. We find great similarity across cities in that the long‐run house prices are largely explained by the same fundamentals; the long‐run rent to price ratio is approximately 5% plus 0.75 times the real interest rate (which is on the order of 2%). However, adjustments to deviations from the fundamentals are slow, in the long‐run, closing the gap at a rate of around 10% per year. We find sharp differences in short‐run adjustments (momentum) away from the fundamentals across cities, and the differences are correlated with local supply elasticities (more momentum with lower elasticity). Analysis of residuals suggests strong cyclical deviations, which are mean‐reverting.     

Interests, Institutions and Industrial Relations

In the comparative politics literature there are two main approaches to the impact of international economic change on national policy patterns. The first — new institutionalism — has been very influential in comparative industrial relations scholarship. The second, which focuses on the role of interests, has been less prominent. Comparing industrial relations reform in Australia and New Zealand during the 1980s and 1990s, this paper argues that there are a number of limitations to an institutionalist approach and outlines a framework for the comparative study of the impact of international economic change on national patterns of industrial relations which integrates both institutionalist and interest‐based approaches.     

The Wage Structure of Latino‐Origin Groups across Generations

We analyzed in detail the wages of Latinos of Mexican origin, Central/South Americans, and Puerto Ricans. The wage structure facing second and third‐ and higher‐generation Latinos is very similar to the wage structure of third‐ and higher‐generation White workers. Unlike African American workers, more than half of the native Latino/White wage gap can be accounted for by the lower educational attainment and potential experience of native Latino workers.     

Changes in the intellectual structure of strategic management research: a bibliometric study of the Strategic Management Journal, 1980–2000

The aim of this paper is to identify the works that have had the greatest impact on strategic management research and to analyze the changes that have taken place in the intellectual structure of this discipline. The methodology is based on the bibliometric techniques of citation and co‐citation analysis which are applied to all the articles published in the Strategic Management Journal from its first issue in 1980 through 2000. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Dynamics of Homeownership: Eliminating the Gap Between African American and White Households

This article uses a sample of young renters from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and a continuous‐time econometric model to explore not only the initial tenure transition to first‐time homeownership, but also subsequent possible tenure transitions to a second owned home, back to rental tenure and, indirectly, to a second owned home from rental tenure. Once estimated, the predicted probabilities of these transitions are used to calculate the probability of homeownership at various times for households in the sample. These estimates are done separately for African Americans and whites for two different 11‐year time intervals, 1987–1997 and 1993–2003. A primary result is that if African American education, income, net wealth and savings behavior could be brought in line with that of white households the majority of the racial gap in homeownership could be eliminated in either time period.     

Annual Income, Hourly Wages, and Identity Among Mexican-Americans and Other Latinos

This article examines heterogeneity and income inequality among Hispanic Americans. Two processes that influence Hispanic heterogeneity include acculturation and labor market discrimination because of skin shade/phenotype. I focus on Hispanics because of their variation in phenotype, color, nativity, and language usage and also because of their recent large-scale integration into a society that historically has been characterized by bipolar racial categories that are putatively based on phenotype. This process provides a natural experiment for appraising the relative importance of acculturation, discrimination, and income inequality. I use data from two periods, 1979 and 1989, to determine the stability of identity formation among Mexican-Americans and other Hispanics. I find strong incentives favoring acculturation among Mexican- and Cuban-Americans. Americans of Mexican and Cuban descent but less so Puerto Ricans are able to increase annual income and hourly wages by acculturating into a non-Hispanic white racial identity. However, neither the abandonment of Spanish nor the abandonment of a specifically Hispanic racial self-identity is sufficient to overcome the penalties associated with having a dark complexion and non-European phenotype.     

Research Note: Injunctions as a Legal Weapon in Industrial Disputes in Britain, 1995–2005

This research note examines the frequency, nature and context of employers seeking legal injunctions in collective industrial disputes between 1995 and 2005. The number of actual and threatened applications continues to be relatively frequent compared with much of the period from 1980 to 1995, with employers overwhelmingly gaining successful outcomes. However, usage is increasingly concentrated in a small number of industrial sectors such as parts of the public sector and semi‐state industries.     

Fixed‐Term Contracts: Short‐Term Blessings or Long‐Term Scars? Empirical Findings from the Netherlands 1980–2000

Using a comprehensive longitudinal dataset of prime‐age Dutch workers over the period 1980–2000, we examine how a previously held job with a fixed‐term contract influences both the likelihood and the duration of a future spell of unemployment. Analyses show that Dutch workers with fixed‐term contracts experience higher risks of future unemployment and have no shorter spells of unemployment compared to workers with regular contracts. Results also reveal that swifter employment re‐entries among men with fixed‐term contracts can be explained by their job search efforts before unemployment. Our study (partly) invalidates theoretical positions that claim that fixed‐term contracts foster employment security by shortening unemployment durations; suggesting that fixed‐term contracts are a short‐term blessing that could end, for some workers, in a recurrent unemployment trap.