Logistics: The nuts and bolts of moving products

Donald F. Wood, Anthony P. Barone, Paul R. Murphy, and Daniel L. Wardlow. 2002. International Logistics (2nd ed.). New York: AMACOM Books. ISBN: 0814406661. Kent N. Gourdin. 2000. Global Logistics Management. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, ISBN: 1557868832.     

Worker voice,managerial response and labour productivity: an empirical investigation

This article investigates the relationship between worker voice practices, employee perceptions of managerial responsiveness and labour productivity. It argues that managerial responsiveness is a critical but under‐investigated variable in the study of the relationship between worker voice, human resource management and performance. Our results suggest that managerial responsiveness to worker voice does lead to superior labour productivity. However, this relationship is only found in non‐union workplaces and there is little relationship between formal voice regime and productivity. One important implication of this finding is that more responsive management will result in improved productivity, so policy interventions should focus on how to motivate managers to become more responsive to their employees.     

Rent Control with Matching Economies: A Model of European Housing Market Regulation

Housing markets are thin, and consumer search for housing is costly, time consuming, and risky. Mismatches between tenants and dwellings are common in a laissez-faire market. There are scale economies in accumulating tenants and houses and then matching them up to improve welfare. In many European countries, some housing is rent controlled and rationed by public centralized matching. Waiting time, risk in rationing, and risk in matching are costs that arise from such regulation. We show that welfare improvements over laissez-faire occur if gains from centralized matching can offset the decrease in housing quality, the possible increase in waiting times, and the risks in rationing induced by rent controls. Under regulation, there is a welfare maximizing partition of the stock into free and controlled markets; and contrary to observed practice, it is often welfare improving to set controlled rents above (not below) laissez-faire, which increases the supply offered for centralized matching and the opportunity for a better match.     

Money and economic activity,inventories and business cycles

Incomplete information is a necessary condition for any real effects produced by monetary impulses. An alternative to the local-global inference problem is explored in this paper. Agents are confronted with permanent and transitory shocks. Even with full knowledge about the stochastic structure their best perception at any particular time will usually be erroneous. Prices for each period are set at the beginning of the period on the basis of market conditions. The realization of the shock process thus creates a short-run ‘disequilibrium’ absorbed by inventory adjustments. This adjustment translates perceived transitory monetary shocks into serially correlated output movements. The analysis proceeds within the context of rational expectations It offers a generalization of equilibrium analysis in two respects. Prices are always in equilibrium relative to perceived conditions, but they do not reflect all ongoing shocks. Quantity adjustments reflect the perceived transitory shocks. The framework used involves moreover a stock-flow interaction operated by inventory adjustments. The stock-flow interaction imposes at any time a future expected adjustment path (for price-level and quantities) to the system's unique stock equilibrium. A major implication of the analysis resolves a puzzle experienced in a recent paper by Robert Hall. It reconciles intertemporal substitution with lagged effects of monetary impulses. It also reconciles small and inconclusive cyclic movements in real wages with the occurrence of production function and large variations in unemployment. Lastly, the nature of the inference problem determined by the pattern of incomplete information produces serially correlated movements conditioned on large permanent shocks.     

Modelling public expenditure: empirical evidence from five countries

This artice considers the trends in the public expenditure/GDP ratio over the last 28 years or so, in five countries: Cyprus, France, Greece, the UK and the USA. An empirical investigation incorporating both economic and political variables is conducted into the observed pattern of the ratio for the five countries. Our results suggest that whilst some of the host of factors advanced as explanations for the size and growth of the public sector exert a significant influence, the ‘relative price effect’ tends to dominate. The results also suggest strongly that the notable short-run fluctuations in the ratio are explained in terms of political displacement effects and economic crises considerations. Moreover, the contrasting political and economic climates of the countries in question serve to help highlight the role which political cultures play in the determination of public expenditure.     

Hedonic analysis of a housing market in disequilibrium

This paper tests the hypothesis that information about housing market activity and about specific dwellings becomes capitalized into single family dwelling prices through a disequilibrium adjustment process. A dynamic price adjustment model, which is an extension of the standard hedonic model widely used in the literature, is derived, specified, and tested with both micro and aggregated data from the city of Chicago and for the period 1972–1976. The results show that from 32 to 75% of the variance in dwelling prices, unexplained by the standard hedonic attributes under assumptions of equilibrium, is explained by market activity signals such as mortgage interest rates and neighborhood transaction rates of the preceding period. Dwellings about which there is less information, making comparison pricing difficult, are shown to command a price premium. The standard equilibrium hypothesis appears readily rejectable and better predictions are obtained from the disequilibrium specifications. Several directions for extending this line of research are discussed.