Die fluktuation der Arbeitskräfte

Zusammenfassung Es konnten vier Typen der Fluktuation isoliert werden, die neben persönlichen Komponenten für die Fluktuation der Arbeitskräfte maßgebend sind. Ein Teil der Fluktuation geht auf das Ausprobieren des Arbeitsplatzes — angesichts der Unvollkommenheit der Information — zurück (Probe-Fluktuation). Die Wechselneigung ist daher bei Personen mit kurzer Betriebszugehörigkeitsdauer sowie jüngeren Arbeitskräften (20 bis 30 Jahre) relativ hoch.Eine weitere Form der Fluktuation ist die Reaktion der Arbeinehmer auf Unterschiede in den Nettovorteilen verschiedener Arbeitsplätze (Lohn-Fluktuation). Die Arbeitskräfte wandern per Saldo aus Niedrig- in Hochlohnbetriebe, aus Klein- in Großbetriebe und aus schrumpfenden in expandierende.Das Bestehen eines dualen Arbeitsmarktes impliziert, daß benachteiligte Arbeitskräfte (Ungeschulte mit geringem betriebsspezifischem Training) häufig kündigen, während begünstigte Arbeitskräfte (Geschulte) relativ selten wechseln (Hilfskräfte-Fluktuation). Tatsächlich ist die Wechselneigung von Ungeschulten und Arbeitern (vor allem im industriell-gewerblichen Sektor) weit überdurch-schnittlich. Die Zahl der Wechselfälle wird neben der Wechselneigung durch die alternativen Beschäftigungsmöglichkeiten bestimmt (Konjunktur-Fluktuation). Die Fluktuation schwankt so deutlich mit der Anspannung auf dem Arbeitsmarkt, daß sie als Anspannungsindikator angesehen werden kann.die Branchenunterschiede in verschiedenen Maßzahlen der Fluktuation lassen sich im wesentlichen auf die dargestellten vier Fluktuationstypen zurückführen. (Zur Messung des Arbeitsplatzwechsels empfiehlt es sich, Verbleibenswahrscheinlichkeiten der betrieblichen Zugänge und dienstalterspezifische Fluktuationsraten zu errechnen.)

---

Summary There are four main features of labour turnover. A substantial part of turnover is due to job shopping in view of imperfect information. Therefore, workers with short job tenure and younger employees (20–30 years) reveal a high propensity to quit. Another type of quit behaviour is the reaction of workers to differences in the net advantages of various jobs. The employed move from the low wage to the high wage sector, from small to largescale enterprises and from shrinking to expanding firms. The existence of a dual labour market implies that disprivileged workers (with low general and specific training) quit frequently and privileged workers rarely change the job. In fact, the turnover rate of white-collar workers and persons with higher formal education is far below average. The actual level of labour turnover does not only depend on the propensity to quit but also on the alternative job opportunities. Voluntary quits are so closely related to the tightness of the labour market that they can be regarded as a labour market indicator. Regression analysis shows that the differences in various measures of turnover are essentially due to these four features of turnover. (For measurement of labour turnover it is recomended to use the probabilities of a batch of entrants to survive certain points in time. as well as job tenure-specific turnover rates.)

     

Mutually Destructive Bidding: The FCC Auction Design Problem

In general, synergies across license valuations complicate the auction design process. Theory suggests that a simple (i.e., non-combinatorial) auction will have difficulty in assigning licenses efficiently in such an environment. This difficulty increases with increases in fitting complexity. In some environments, bidding may become mutually destructive. Experiments indicate that a properly designed combinatorial auction is superior to a simple auction in terms of economic efficiency and revenue generation in bidding environments with a low amount of fitting complexity. Concerns that a combinatorial auction will cause a threshold problem are not borne out when bidders for small packages can communicate.     

From Democratic Dualism to Political Realism: Transforming the Constitution

In the latest volume of Bruce Ackerman's We the People, he sets out to demonstrate that the Constitution has been legitimately amended by unconventional means, or by mechanisms other than the Article V amendment process. In making this argument, Ackerman offers a rich constitutional history of the Founding period, the Reconstruction era, and the New Deal. He successfully demonstrates that unconventional methods were used to alter accepted constitutional meaning and government practices during these periods. Unfortunately, Ackerman does not provide an adequate theory that can demonstrate the legal significance of these historical events for future constitutional practice. Moreover, his effort to legitimate the New Deal's constitutional revolution undermines his own normative theory of dualist democracy and seems to embrace a standard Legal Realist analysis that the Constitution simply is whatever powerful government officials declare it to mean.     

Agency in a market setting

This paper examines a market in which a continuum of principals and agents interact in a game. Principals offer contracts while agents decide on sets of acceptable contracts. A mechanism from a class satisfying efficiency, unbiasedness, and continuity properties then matches principals and agents. With risk neutral agents, when the contribution of principals and agents to the total gains from trade in a pairing are additively separable, the equilibria of the game coincide with the competitive equilibria for the market. In particular, all contracts used in Nash equilibrium induce first-best effort levels. Both principals and agents have exogenous opportunities outside this market. In equilibrium, agents have endogenously determined outside opportunities available from employment by another principal, and this may be the binding participation constraint in a principal-agent pairing. The results are extended to special non-separable cases and to the case of identical risk averse agents.We are grateful to seminar participants at Indiana University, the University of Kentucky, and Vanderbilt University for comments on earlier versions of this work. Referees' comments led us to generalize the model and to more clearly specify the point of the paper.     

Nachfragesysteme für österreich

Summary This paper gives an empirical reexamination of the Linear-Expenditure-hypothesis for Austria. It starts with a brief theoretical discussion of the principal properties and restrictions of the Linear-Expenditure-System (LES). To obtain empirical estimates of the parameters of the LES two different estimation procedures are applied, i.e. the original method used byStone and a simplified version of the Systems-Least-Squares-approach (following theMarquardt-algorithm). There are no essential differences between these estimates. They all seem plausible and satisfy the theoretical restrictions.Usually the stability (i.e. time-invariance) of the parameters is accepted without proof. Using the Moving-Window-Regression-technique, however, most of the estimates vary significantly in time. To obtain a direct proof of the time-dependence of the parameters the LES is reestimated now including trend-factors. Especially results considering time-dependent marginal-budget-shares are considerably better than the static-model results.The conclusion of this paper is that the static version of the LES does not explain the consumer behaviour in Austria and that much more effort should be spent on the estimation of dynamic demand systems.     

The “Dorfman Steiner” rule

Conclusion When this research was started, it was guessed that the Dorfman-Steiner rule would lose its relevance in an intertemporal setting. This belief has turned out to be false: along the optimal paths ofp (t) ands (t), and must be equal. The only difference with the Dorfman-Steiner result is that they will be different from unity.The author is chargé de cours at the Faculté Universitaire Catholique de Mons (Belgium). He has greatyl benefited from comments by M. Beuthe and J. J. Lambin.     

From “tax state” to “debt state”

The paper is motivated by Joseph A. Schumpeter's The Crisis of the Tax State. It inquires whether the buildup of government debt in peacetimeprosperity is a threat to the stability, existence or creation of viable tax states. The paper begins by setting out Schumpeter's conception of the tax state and the nature of recent political-economic events which have reinvigorated the concept. Next the paper sets out some simple debt dynamics and sketches a debt-induced business cycle arising from heavy reliance on debt finance in peacetimeprosperity. Finally, the paper assesses threats to the tax state in light of recent work on path dependence and positive feedback. An attempt is made to throw some light on whether the plethora of new, and often small, states spawned by the demise of communism can be viable tax states.Essay on Government, the Tax State and Economic Dynamics submitted to the Third Schumpeter Prize Competition.     

Economics as mechanism: The mind as machine in Hayek's sensory order

InThe Sensory Order, Friedrich A. Hayek describes the human mind as an apparatus of classification that evolves through experience and that reaches decisions by modeling the alternative courses of action that are available to it. Hayek's mechanistic conception of mind argues aginst the possibility of central planning and against the cogency of any rule that denigrates subjective decision making by employers or other economic agents. As implied by Gödel's proof, no brain, human or mechanical, can ever be sufficiently complex to explain itself. There will therefore always be certain knowledge and rules that cannot be articulated to the satisfaction of a central planner or tribunal.     

Public-Choice Analysis of a New International Organization: The International Sea-Bed Authority

The usefulness of the public-choice approach for a better understanding of international organizations can be demonstrated by applying it to the analysis of the structure and functions of a new international organization, the International Sea-Bed Authority, established in 1994, after two decades of negotiations under the auspices of the United Nations, with the aim to control the oceans' mineral resources beyond the limits of national jurisdictions (which have been proclaimed by the U.N. Assembly common heritage of mankind). First, the reasons for establishing this organization, whose basis is the common heritage of mankind nature of ocean resources, are examined under two aspects: 1) definition and protection of property rights; 2) environmental control of sea-bed mining activities. Secondly, the organization's decisionmaking system is presented, including such features as the assembly, council with chamber voting, finance committee with decision by consensus, features that balance the voting power of members and protect those countries that bear the financial responsibility for the budget. Finally, some comments are offered about more general aspects of the theory of international organizations: the bureaucracy (and diplomacy) of these organizations as well as the interdependence among international organizations, which opens the way to forms of international logrolling and makes it advisable for countries not to exit from these organizations, even when they have no primary interest in them.     

A competitive general equilibrium model of technology transfer,innovation, and obsolescence

A general equilibrium production model is developed where technologies are embodied in capital goods of different vintages indexed in a continuum. A difference in the extent of existing knowledge determines a wage gap between a developed (north) and a developing region (south). With free flow of technology, relatively backward technologies move to the south. With innovation in the north, a technology cycle is created by which some of the technologies are pushed out of the north into the south. This also tends to widen the wage gap between the regions.     

On designing economic agents that behave like human agents

This paper explores the idea of constructing theoretical economic agents that behave like actual human agents and using them in neoclassical economic models. It does this in a repeated-choice setting by postulating artificial agents who use a learning algorithm calibrated against human learning data from psychological experiments. The resulting calibrated algorithm appears to replicate human learning behavior to a high degree and reproduces several stylized facts of learning. It can therefore be used to replace the idealized, perfectly rational agents in appropriate neoclassical models with calibrated agents that represent actual human behavior. The paper discusses the possibilities of using the algorithm to represent human learning in normal-form stage games and in more general neoclassical models in economics. It explores the likelihood of convergence to long-run optimality and to Nash behavior, and the characteristic learning time implicit in human adaptation in the economy.     

An Austrian Theory of the Firm

The modern Theory of the Firm uses the concept of rent and makes implicit assumptions about equilibrium. An Austrian (Market Process) Theory of the Firm should have something to say about each of these. Two strategic perspectives are analyzed, the neoclassical microeconomic perspective (using the Ricardo-Marshall approach to rent) and the Market Process perspective (using the Fetter approach to rent). In a neoclassical world, rents indicate unsolved or unexploited inefficiencies as every hypothetical outcome is viewed against the standard of perfect competition. By contrast, in the Market Process world there is no single ideal standard by which to measure any particular outcome. All action takes place in an open ended universe in which the future is continually being created, in which competition is a discovery process.     

Augmented serial rules for an excludable public good

Summary. We present a new class of rules named augmented serial rules for the provision of an excludable public good. First, we characterize this class by the four axioms of strategy-proofness, envy-freeness, access independence, and nonbossiness. Second, we identify two important subclasses by imposing an additional axiom: (i) anonymous augmented serial rules by anonymity, and (ii) Moulins serial rule by individual rationality.Received: 31 December 2002, Revised: 9 June 2004, JEL Classification Numbers: D71, D82, H41.This paper is a substantial revision of Serial cost sharing with simple games. I would like to thank Hervé Moulin, Yoshikatsu Tatamitani, an associate editor, and three anonymous referees for helpful suggestions and detailed comments. This research was partially supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology in Japan (Grant-in-Aid for 21st Century COE Program Microstructure and Mechanism Design in Financial Markets).     

Artificial worlds and economics,part II

This paper continues the discussion of artificial worlds (AWs) begun in Lane (1993b). Here, the focus is on two kinds of AWs. The first, classifier systems, can be used to represent agents that are capable of generating complex behaviors in response to intermittent rewards from an environment of which they are a part. A collection of such agents, engaging in economic interactions with one another, produces another kind of AW, in which such interesting aggregate behaviors as the formation of bubbles and crashes and technical trading in an artificial stock market, may arise. The second kind of AW considered in this paper is artificial economies. These AWs can provide a dynamic, nonequilibrium, microfounded account of such aggregate-level or macroeconomic phenomena as stable growth paths, business cycles, and Pareto firm-size distributions.     

Marktstruktur und Preisverhalten in der österreichischen Industrie

Summary Being part of a larger investigation concerning forms and intensity of competition in the Austrian economy this paper deals with the characteristics of market structure and pricing behaviour in the industrial sector. Mainly based on a detailed questionnaire this study is representative for the group of larger Austrian industrial enterprises (sales of more than 100 Mill. AS) which produced more than two thirds of total industrial ouput. According to this study the dominant market structure of the Austrian industry is that of a close oligopoly. The subjective estimation of the price elasticity of demand by the firms participating in our survey was generally very pessimistic, being the lower the larger the market share of the respective firm.The most common principle of price formation for new products in the Austrian industry is a system of flexible full cost pricing, meaning cost orientation plus variable profit margins. Our study also shows that a large majority (60% resp. 80%) of the enterprises under investgation use discount, i.e. price differentiation in their pricing policies. These aspects indicate that-in line with marginalistic theories — demand situations obviously exercise a substantial influence on pricing behaviour. Considering the causes for price changes, however, cost oriented influences were clearly dominating. This stresses the great importance of the Austrian pricecontrol mechanism, the Paritätische Kommission, the institutionalized form of incomes policy in Austria.An econometric analysis of the process of price formation in the Austrian industry showed that the main factors of price changes were changes in labour costs and in international price levels, especially in the level of export prices. Our investigation also dealt with the question, whether differences in market-structure result in different, responses to demand fluctuations. Considering both the concepts of actual and potential competition it can be shown that enerprises in a more competitive situation react towards changes in demand conditions in a more stabilizing way that monopolistic firms: The reduce prices earlier in recession and they react to boom periods by expanding their capacities rather than by raising prices. Market structure and the intensity of competition thus seem to influence the position of the Phillips-curve in an economy.     

Anonymous sequential games: Existence and characterization of equilibria

Summary In this paper we consider Anonymous Sequential Games with Aggregate Uncertainty. We prove existence of equilibrium when there is a general state space representing aggregate uncertainty. When the economy is stationary and the underlying process governing aggregate uncertainty Markov, we provide Markov representations of the equilibria.Table of notation Agents' characteristics space ( ) - A Action space of each agent (aA) - Y Y = x A - Aggregate distribution on agents' characteristics - (X) Space of probability measures onX - C(X) Space of continuous functions onX - _X Family of Borel sets ofX - State space of aggregate uncertainty ( ) - x _t=1 aggregate uncertainty for the infinite game - = (₁,₂,...,_t,...) - ^{t t} (₁, ₂,..., _t) - L₁(^t,C ×A),v _t Normed space of measurable functions from ^t toC( x A) - 8o(^t,( x A)) Space of measurable functions from ^tto( x A) - X^t X^t= x _s=1 ^t X - _X ^t Borel field onX ^t - v Distribution on - v_t Marginal distribution of v on ^t - v(^t)((¦^t)) Conditional distribution on given ^t - v^t(^s)(v_t(¦^s)) Conditional distribution on ^t given ^s (wheres) - _t Periodt distributional strategy - Distributional strategy for all periods =(₁,₂,...,_t,...) - _t Transition process for agents' types - ( _t,^t,y)(P _t+1(, _t , ^t ,y)) Transition function associated with _t - u _t Utility function - V _t (, a, , ^t) Value function for each collection (, a, , ^t ) - W _t (, , ^t ) Value function given optimal action a - C() Consistency correspondence. Distributions consistent with and characteristics transition functions - B() Best response correspondence (which also satisfy consistency) - E Set of equilibrium distributional strategies - x _t=1 ( ^t , (x A)) - S Expanded state space for Markov construction - (, a, ) Value function for Markov construction - P( _t ^* , _t y)(P(, _t ^* , _t , _y )) Invariant characteristics transition function for Markov game We wish to acknowledge very helpful conversations with C. d'Aspremont, B. Lipman, A. McLennan and J-F. Mertens. The financial support of the SSHRCC and the ARC at Queen's University is gratefully acknowledged. This paper was begun while the first author visited CORE. The financial support of CORE and the excellent research environment is gratefully acknowledged. The usual disclaimer applies.     

Knowledge Questions: Hayek,Keynes and Beyond

This paper discusses the knowledge problem in terms of both the use and generation of knowledge. This is analyzed in the context of Hayek's failure to respond to the Keynes Challenge—the claim that markets fail to produce relevant knowledge—by suggesting that in the aftermath of The General Theory he was not well-positioned to address that problem. Ironically, his post-World War II work in cognitive psychology, The Sensory Order, offers a theory of the generation of knowledge which can provide a useful analogy for understanding the generation of market-level knowledge.     

Incentive compatibility and the quantity-setting competitive firm under demand uncertainty

This paper examines the tie between the popular black box neoclassical quantity-setting firm under demand uncertainty and a firm with a rudimentary but explicit employee relation organizational structure in which workers are offered fixed wages for following management directives. Surprisingly, the quantity-setting firm unambiguously mimics optimal employment relation hiring and work rules when the contract is incentive-compatible ex post. The attitude toward risk is shown to be the key determinant of whether or not the quantity-setting firm replicates the optimal employment relation contract when ex post incentive-compatibility is relaxed.     

Robust Institutions

I propose to show how to translate the economic analysis of institutions developed in the tradition of worst case political economy into the lingua franca of robust statistics. An institution will be defined as contingent upon a design theory and the difficulty we consider is the use of the institution by the designer.The technical bridge between institutional robustness and statistical robustness is the the possibility of exploratory data analysis [EDA] with respect to the design theory. In an institutional context with EDA comes the recognition that the model is not completely specified, that we do not fully understand the structure of world before studying it. In a statistical context with EDA comes a non-normal error distribution.The relationship between evolutionary institutions and robust institutions is discussed. A conjecture that rule utilitarianism can be thought of as robust utilitarianism is defended with the historical example of William Paley's discussion of the utility of murder.     

Operational Research and the environment

The discipline of Operational Research (OR) is primarily concerned with improving the effectiveness and efficiency of decision processes. These processes take place everywhere in society: industry, banking, agriculture, government, politics. Frequent use of mathematical optimization models is typical of OR. Since the early '80s these models are increasingly packaged in a user-friendly way, as Decision Support Systems. In the following we will illustrate how OR can be used to describe and solve a number of environmental problems.