Labour markets, welfare, and the personal scope of employment law

The issues which confront those concerned with employment law,about the types of workers to whom employment laws apply, arehighly relevant to the subject of labour markets and welfare.The formulation and application of the personal categories ofemployment law is or involves a welfare allocation, often seenas a trade-off between welfare and efficiency. This articledescribe the basic legal framework for determining the personalscope of employment law in the UK, considers some recent adaptationsto that framework, engages in comparison with some continentalEuropean legal systems, examines empirical evidence about theworking of the personal categories of employment law, describesthe debate within the ILO about employment status and 'contractlabour', canvasses some ideas about the growth of complex workrelationships, and concludes by assessing a remaining task offurther refinement of theory in this area.     

The Effect of Tax Treaties on Multinational Firms: New Evidence from Microdata

This paper uses affiliate‐level data from Swedish multinationals to examine the impact of tax treaties on both overall affiliate sales and the composition of those sales. In line with previous results, we find little evidence for an effect of treaties on the level of total sales. We do, however, find that a tax treaty increases the probability of investment by a firm in a given country. In addition, we find that a treaty reduces exports to the parent but increases imports of intermediate inputs from the parent. This is consistent with treaties increasing the effective host tax. This suggests that tax treaties impact the behaviour of multinationals along some dimensions but not along others.     

The dynamics of US bank profitability

We examine the determinants of profitability for a large sample of US banks over the period 1984–2010. Specifically, we assess the extent to which short-run profits persist, and whether such persistence is affected by changes in regulation and the recent financial crisis. Our findings suggest that the competitive process reduces positions of abnormal profitability, albeit this is not immediate. There is also evidence that changes in regulation enacted during the 1990s affected both the level and persistence of bank profitability. The financial crisis of 2007–2010 appears to have resulted in an increase in the persistence of bank profitability.     

Technologically Reflective Individuals as Enablers of Social Innovation*

This paper identifies technologically reflective individuals and demonstrates their ability to develop innovations that benefit society. Technological reflectiveness (TR) is the tendency to think about the societal impact of an innovation, and those who display this capability in public are individuals who participate in online idea competitions focused on technical solutions for social problems (such as General Electric's eco‐challenge, the James Dyson Award, and the BOSCH Technology Horizon Award). However, technologically reflective individuals also reflect in private settings (e.g., when reading news updates), thus requiring a scale to identify them. This paper describes the systematic development of an easy‐to‐administer multi‐item scale to measure an individual's level of TR. Applying the TR scale in an empirical study on a health monitoring system confirmed that individuals' degree of TR relates positively to their ability to generate (1) more new product features and uses, (2) features with higher levels of societal impact, and (3) features that are more elaborated. This scale allows firms seeking to implement co‐creation in their new product development (NPD) process and sustainable solutions to identify such individuals. Thus, this paper indicates that companies wishing to introduce new technological products with a positive societal impact may profit from involving technologically reflective individuals in the NPD process.     

The Oecd Model Tax Treaty: Tax Competition And Two‐Way Capital Flows*

Model tax treaties do not require tax rate coordination, but do require that either credits or exemptions be applied to repatriated earnings. This contradicts recent models with a single capital exporter where deductions are most efficient. I incorporate the fact that capital flows are typically bilateral. With symmetric countries, credits by both is the unique and efficient treaty equilibrium. This equilibrium weakly dominates the nontreaty equilibrium. With asymmetric countries, the treaty need not offer improvements without tax harmonization. With harmonization, it is always possible to reach efficient capital allocations while increasing both countries' welfares only if neither uses deductions.     

The Interaction between a Most-Favored-Customer Clause and Price Dispersion: An Empirical Examination of the Medicaid Rebate Rules of 1990

This paper examines the effect of the MFC rules adopted by Medicaid on both price dispersion and price levels in the wholesale pharmaceutical market. Theory suggests that the regulations should reduce price dispersion and increase the average price for those products with a high initial level of price dispersion. Using data which can only measure some dimensions of price discrimination, I find that discrimination falls for products sold to hospitals, but not drugstores. Branded drugs facing generic competition have the most dispersion ex ante . Prices of these brands rise with dispersion at the implementation of the new rules. The last two results are consistent with Scott Morton (1997), where I look only at price changes due to the law. The results of this paper confirm that part of the mechanism of action for the price increase is the high level of price dispersion for some products combined with the MFC.     

Fast Kernel Smoothing of Point Patterns on a Large Network using Two‐dimensional Convolution

We propose a computationally efficient and statistically principled method for kernel smoothing of point pattern data on a linear network. The point locations, and the network itself, are convolved with a two‐dimensional kernel and then combined into an intensity function on the network. This can be computed rapidly using the fast Fourier transform, even on large networks and for large bandwidths, and is robust against errors in network geometry. The estimator is consistent, and its statistical efficiency is only slightly suboptimal. We discuss bias, variance, asymptotics, bandwidth selection, variance estimation, relative risk estimation and adaptive smoothing. The methods are used to analyse spatially varying frequency of traffic accidents in Western Australia and the relative risk of different types of traffic accidents in Medellín, Colombia.