Market and Welfare Effects of the U.S. Livestock Mandatory Reporting Act

This paper analyzes the market and welfare effects of the United States Livestock Mandatory Reporting Act enacted in 2001. The act mandates meat packers to report their transactions daily to a government agency and requires the agency to make a summary of those transactions available to the public through the Mandatory Livestock Meat Market News Reports. Considering the case of an imperfect packer cartel that uses trigger price strategies, this paper examines the impact of market information provided by the reports on equilibrium livestock slaughter and the welfare of the groups involved and identifies the determinants of the socially optimal level of information. A key result of the paper is that, even when facilitating collusion among packers, increased market information can be social welfare enhancing.     

SIMULATION OF THE GROWTH RESPONSE OF DRYLAND AND IRRIGATED CORN*

This paper studies the complex relationship between plant growth and the variables affecting that growth. The author has developed several growth models, with soil moisture being a primary explanatory variable in the models. The relationship of plant growth to moisture is demonstrated by the sensitivity of a corn plant to moisture at different periods in its growth. Ce papier fail une études des relations complexes entre la croissance des plantes et les variables qui influent cette croissance. ?auteur a construit plusieurs modèles de croissance en se servant de ?humidité du sol comme variable primaire explicalif La connexité entre la croissance des plantes el ?humidilé est démonstée en utilisant une plante de blé d;inde ei en montrant comment sensible à?humidité est cette plante à differentes étapes de sa maturation.     

The 1997 Asian Currency Crisis,Financial Linkages,and the Monetary Policy of Japan

The evidence is examined that excessively liberal monetary policy by the Bank of Japan, before and after the financial collapse of Japan in 1992, may have led other East Asian economies into “over‐borrowing” and speculative investments, prior to the currency crisis in 1997–98. The authors test for cointegration and Granger causality between Japanese money supply M1 and the domestic investment of eight East Asian economies and Australia. US and German money supplies are also used as a benchmark. There is strong evidence that there are long‐ and short‐run causal relationships between the Japanese money supply and the domestic investment of the Asian crisis‐inflicted economies prior to 1997.     

Worker Ownership and Participation in the Context of Social Change

A bstract . A massive volume of literature has been generated over recent years concerning the nature of work organizations and resultant effects upon worker satisfaction and enterprise efficiency. Between extreme radical and conservative views, a good deal of attention has focused on worker ownership and the locus of power in the organization. Worker ownership can lead to beneficial results, but only if carefully structured. Worker participation in decision making is the key, but the transfer from authoritarianism is difficult. Any substantial transfer of enterprise ownership is remote. Even transformation to greater power sharing, short of ownership change, will be slow and fragile.     

A TEST OF THE TWO-TIER CORPORATE GOVERNANCE STRUCTURE: THE CASE OF JAPANESE KEIRETSU

We examine the effect of corporate governance structure on the relation between ownership structure and financial leverage among Japanese firms. Under normal conditions, we find no significant relation between ownership variables and financial leverage. When firms signal financial difficulties, however, keiretsu financial institution equity owners intervene to moderate the use of debt. This evidence reveals the existence of a keiretsu two-tier corporate governance system. In the first stage, the unique corporate cross-shareholding allows mutual monitoring under normal circumstances. In the second stage, when firms get into financial trouble, keiretsu financial institutions assume control by reducing debt levels. The results highlight differences between keiretsu and independent corporate governance structures.     

A conditional version of working's model

Working's (1943) model is shown to imply conditional Engel curves of the Working form when the income elasticity of demand for the group of goods as a whole is about unity.