Wage inequality and the labor market impact of economic transformation: Croatia, 1970–2008

In this paper, we examine wage inequality and wage differentials in Croatia from 1970 to 2008 using two long aggregate time series on the distribution of income. We focus especially on changing income inequality related to educational and vocational attainment, changing income inequality within those groups, and how these two components of inequality were affected by the economic transformation from socialism to capitalism. We find that income inequality between groups rose moderately post-transformation, while overall inequality increased more sharply. This finding is consistent with a growing importance of individual rather than group productivity in labor market compensation, a change broadly consistent with the economic transformation of the Croatian labor market.     

A hazard rate analysis of Russian commercial banks in the period 1994–1997

The number of commercial banks in Russia increased at a fast pace after the 1988 banking reform. Many of these banks lacked supervision and operated with dangerously low funding capital. After the 1995 liquidity crisis, many of these banks disappeared. In this paper, we investigate the determinants of the hazard rates of banks active on the Moscovian deposits market during the 1994–1997 period. We find that market share and duration have negatively affected the hazard rate, while the deposit interest rate has had a positive effect. The market share and interest rate effects are robust to controlling for ‘financial clans’.     

The consequences of a policy of necessity: Bank regulatory forbearance, 1986–1989

While it is widely recognized that bank regulators choose the policy of forbearance because of an undercapitalized bank insurance fund, a key policy question centers on what were the effects of forbearance. This study uses a survival model to track capital deficient banks from December 1986 to December 1989, a period in which regulators explicitly used forbearance in managing troubled banks. Despite the contention that forbearance returns banks to safe-and-sound practices, this study concludes that forbearance did not enable troubled banks to return to viability. Furthermore, the evidence from the survival analysis provides negligible support, if any, for the interrelationship between forbearance and too-big-to-fail doctrine.     

The impact of government intervention on the stabilization of domestic financial markets and on U.S. banks’ asset composition

The 2007–2009 financial crisis that evolved from various factors including the housing boom, aggressive lending activity, financial innovation, and increased access to money and capital markets prompted unprecedented U.S. government intervention in the financial sector. We examine changes in banks’ balance sheet composition associated with U.S. government intervention during the crisis. We find that the initial round of quantitative easing positively impacts bank liquidity across all bank samples. Our results show a positive impact of repurchase agreement market rates on bank liquidity for small and medium banks. We conclude that banks have become more liquid in the post-crisis period, especially the larger banks (large and money center banks). We show that real estate loan portfolio exposures have reverted to pre-crisis levels for money center banks and remained flat for all other bank samples.     

Financial crisis risk,ECB “non-standard” measures,and the external value of the euro

I study the impact of banking and sovereign debt crisis risk of EMU member states on the external value of the euro. Using a regime switching model, I find that the external value of the euro has significantly responded to financial crisis risk during the period of November 2008–November 2011, while no significant effect is found for the period from February 2006 to October 2008. This suggests that the monetary expansion and interest rate cuts associated with the ECB's “non-standard” measures may have reduced the external value of the euro.     

Savings and investments in the OECD, 1970–2007: A test of panel cointegration with regime changes

In this paper we test for the existence of a long-run relationship between investment and savings (the Feldstein–Horioka puzzle) in a panel of 18 OECD countries, 1970–2007, allowing for heterogenous breaks in the coefficients. For this purpose we develop a bootstrap panel cointegration with breaks robust to cross-section dependence, shown by simulation to enjoy good size and power properties provided that some care is applied in its use. The tests suggest that, even allowing for parameter shifts in the countries where capital control regulations changed in the sample period, there is no evidence of an investment–savings long-run relationship for the panel as a whole.     

After the Storm: Postal Politics and Labor Relations Following the 1970 U.S. Postal Wildcat Strike, 1970–1981

A common misconception of the 1970 United States postal wildcat strike views it as a remarkable grassroots mass activity that nonetheless exhausted itself after 8 days. As the picket lines faded, this master narrative holds, postal unionists returned to work while elected union leadership returned to Capitol Hill to lobby and negotiate, help reorganize the post office and reshape postal policy. In fact, there is much more complexity to the post-strike decade, including localized wildcats; strike threats; contentious collective bargaining; the NALC slapping (then withdrawing) a trusteeship on its largest, most militant branch; and insurgent reformists ascending to national leadership in the NALC and APWU. Far from being a one-off, I argue, the 1970 strike represented the beginning of a new “democratic movement culture” among postal unionists that used historical experience and memory of the strike to maintain pressure on the USPS and its unions to reform themselves.     

Accounting for international trade in value added: a comment on the OECD–WTO project

ABSTRACT

In the global economy of today, global value-added chains allow firms and countries to take apart the production process and do the part they are best at. In response to this new reality, OECD and WTO have launched a common statistics project of the ‘OECD–WTO Trade in Value-Added (TiVA) Database’. The database links national input–output tables with bilateral trade data to develop inter-country input–output tables that allow compiling, and revealing such chains. Its data are actual nominal values compiled at current exchange rates. The paper takes issue with that choice. Recalling that elsewhere in the United Nations national accounting figures are transformed to purchasing power parity before being compared internationally the paper suggests to follow suit and compile international value-added chains at real exchange rates, as well, and it sketches an introductory outline of how to do so.     

The effect of mergers on firms’ costs: evidence from the HMO industry

We examine the effect of mergers on firms’ costs, using a national data set that contains information on both pre- and post-merger costs for firms in the Health Maintenance Organization (HMO) industry. By utilizing data on all HMOs that operated in the United States from 1985 to 1997, we observe enough mergers to obtain estimates of both short-run and relatively permanent merger effects. On average, we do not find evidence that mergers allowed HMOs to realize greater economies of scale or that mergers improved efficiency by shifting the cost function. On the other hand, mergers between HMOs that produce Medicare and other products are likely to create dis-economies of scope that increase costs.     

The measurement of the economic performance of the US Nonfinancial Corporate Business Sector 1946–1990: an application of the shareholder value creation concept

This paper is based upon a juxtaposition of the cash flow-market value performance (alias SVC performance) and historic cost accounting (HC) performance of the US Nonfinancial Corporate Business sector 1946–90. It has two principal objectives: 1. To determine whether, judged on return and variability dimensions, the HC accounting model is an operationally acceptable surrogate for a multiperiod market-based accounting model. 2. To analyse the consequences of HC income-based distributions, i.e., corporate tax, interest and dividend payments based on conventionally-measured corporate income. Three principal conclusions are drawn: i. Notwithstanding their common cash flow component, HC performance indices are not reliable surrogates for SVC performance criteria. The former apparently do not accurately capture changes in corporate valuation and generally understate the variability of market-based returns. ii. The multiperiod HC income of a going concern characteristically overstates its coterminous multiperiod cash flows to a considerable degree. Contrary to common supposition, the former does not therefore constitute a ‘normalized’ or ‘smoothed’ version of a firm's ‘primitive’ cash flows in the sense that the cumulative (multiperiod) values of the two measures tend to converge. iii. As a consequence of ii, HC income and its near relation, taxable earnings, are dubious bases for measuring interest-paying, tax-paying and dividend-paying capacities. Corporate income-distribution decisions based on HC accruals-based profit measures frequently trigger external financing which may cause shareholder wealth losses and wealth transfers from shareholders to lenders. However, ‘fiscal drag’ appears to be the most serious consequence of HC accruals-based income distribution decisions.     

Recent evidence on the impact of government budget deficits on the ex ante real interest rate yield on Moody’s Baa-rated corporate bonds

This study provides recent empirical evidence on the impact of the federal budget deficit on the ex ante real interest rate yield on Moody’s Baa-rated corporate bonds. The study is couched within an open loanable funds model that includes the ex ante real short term real interest rate, the M1 money supply, net international capital inflows, and the unemployment rate. Using quarterly data for the period 1973.1–2007.4, two-stage least squares estimation reveals that the federal budget deficit, expressed as a percent of GDP, exercised a positive and statistically significant impact on the ex ante real interest rate yield on these corporate issues.     

Multivariate saddlepoint tests on the mean direction of the von Mises–Fisher distribution

This article provides P values for two new tests on the mean direction of the von Mises–Fisher distribution. The test statistics are obtained from the exponent of the saddlepoint approximation to the density of M-estimators, as suggested by Robinson et al. (Ann Stat 31:1154–1169, 2003). These test statistics are chi-square distributed with asymptotically small relative errors. Despite the high dimensionality of the problem, the proposed P values are accurate and simple to compute. The numerical precision of the P values of the new tests is illustrated by some simulation studies.     

Are not-for-profits different? Theory and evidence on the pricing of health services in Uganda

Public provision of health and education in developing countries is often insufficient and inefficient. There is thus a call for a greater involvement of private providers to supply affordable and high-quality services to the population. In particular, it is often suggested that not-for-profit institutions should play a larger role, given their social mission. But do not-for-profits really behave differently from for-profit institutions? The literature does not provide a clear answer to this question. The present contribution offers evidence based on a simple theoretical model and price data from health care providers in Uganda with different governance structures. Using differences in market structure as source of variation, we find that not-for-profits indeed behave differently from for-profit institutions, with a pricing behavior that is consistent with an emphasis on health impact and not just profit maximization. Our results thus provide an argument for a policy trying to attract not-for-profit health clinics to fill the gap of an inefficient public health provision.     

Convergence in Transition Countries – Focus on Investment: Central and Eastern Europe, 1970–1996

Our data on investment in Central and Eastern European economies reveal that, though investment rates were typically high in the 1970s, the marginal efficiency of investment was low. Investment shares begun to decline in the 1980s, before the collapse of the communist system, but there was some recovery in most countries after transition. We use the Kalman filter framework to test for convergence in investment rates. We find some evidence of convergence in Central European countries – former Czechoslovakia, Poland and the countries of the former Yugoslavia. For the remainder of the socialist bloc, however, we were unable to isolate convergence in investment shares. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Predicting job satisfaction and workers’ intentions to leave at the bottom of the high value agricultural chain: evidence from the Ethiopian cut flower industry

While there is a large body of research focusing on working conditions in labour-intensive industries, none has yet considered how workers themselves perceive their own working conditions. This paper draws on a sample of workers from the cut flower sector industry in Ethiopia to examine the extent to which workers are satisfied with their jobs and to explore the relationship between job satisfaction and intention to leave. Results suggest that a positive evaluation of extrinsic organizational rewards (wage, job security and healthy environment) contributes to workers’ job satisfaction. Dissatisfied workers report higher intentions to leave their job in the flower farms. In addition to low levels of job satisfaction, having alternative livelihood strategies is a key determining factor in the intention to leave. Interestingly, being a member of an informal savings net organized at the work floor mitigates the intention to leave. The paper ends with some implications for managers and policy-makers, along with limitations and suggestions for future research.     

Regression evidence of safety-net support in Canada and the U.S., 1893–1992

Using annual deviations between the stock market and accounting valuations of major banks, this paper constructs synthetic century-long time series for the intangible safety-net capital generated by reporting and supervisory policies in Canada and the U.S. The credibility of the modeling exercise that produces these synthetic time series is supported by evidence that, in each country, all sustained surges in the value of estimated safety-net capital correlate in appropriate ways with regulatory events and crisis pressures. We invite others to test the qualitative usefulness of our framework by applying the method to data from other countries.     

Is the liberalization policy effective on improving bivariate cointegration of current accounts, foreign exchange, stock prices? Further evidence from Asian markets

This paper fist examines three set of bivariate cointegrations between any two of current accounts, stock markets, and currency exchange markets in 10 Asian countries. Furthermore, this work examined the effect of country characters on this bivariate cointegration. Our findings suggest that for three sets of cointegration test, each sample country at least exists one cointegration. India consistently exhibited a bi-directional causal relationship between any two of three indicators. Unlike Pan et al. (Int Rev Econ Financ 16:503–520, 2007 and Phylaktis and Ravazzolo (J Int Money Financ 24:1031–1053, 2005), this study found that such cointegration is influenced by three characteristics: capital control; flexibility in foreign exchange rates; and the ratio of trade to GDP. These characteristics are the result of liberalization in each Asian country. This implies that liberalization policies are effective on improving the cointegration between any two of financial markets and current account for 10 Asian countries.     

The intellectual structure of human resource management research: a bibliometric study of the international journal of human resource management, 2000–2012

The purpose of this study is to analyze the existing literature on human resource management (HRM) from all the research papers published in The International Journal of Human Resource Management between 2000 and 2012. The authors apply bibliometric methods to identify the main research lines within this scientific field; in other words, its ‘intellectual structure’. Social network analysis is also used to perform a visualization of this structure. The results of the analysis allow us to define the different research lines or fronts which shape the intellectual structure of research on HRM.