Personal Attachment to the Union in Small Bargaining Units

Union member attachment research has generally examined large unions organizing large employers. The present study presents a conceptual model and related data concerning various aspects of the union attachment expressed by individuals in small bargaining units. The results show differences among individuals in commitment based on their union experiences and demographic characteristics. Résumé Les études traitant de la loyatué qu'éprouvent les membres envers leur syndicats examinent généralement des syndicats importants au sein d'entreprises de taille. La présente étude offre un modèle conceptuel et les données relatives aux divers aspects de la loyauté exprimée par des individus appartenant à de petites unités de négociations. Les résultats démontrent les différences de loyauté chez les membres selon leur experience syndicale et les caractéristiques démographiques.     

‘I lose,but that’s not the point’: Situated Economic and Social Rationalities in Horserace Gambling

ABSTRACT

This article compares ethnographic observations of horserace gambling in two UK spaces – the betting shop (remote) and the racecourse (proximal). The paper identifies the emerging, situated rationales that attract gamblers to these leisure spaces, and that motivate them to integrate their gambling activities as an ongoing, sustainable feature of their lives. Doing so, it is observed that, for the vast majority of punters, gambling on the horses is neither ‘addictive’ nor is it ‘irrational’, except in narrowly defined zweckrational terms. The article thus argues for a shift in current gambling research, away from an overwhelming preoccupation with pathological gambling, towards a broader consideration of the more representative and socioeconomically significant activities of leisure gambling.     

Permanent and Temporary Components of Stock Prices: Evidence from Assessing Macroeconomic Shocks

This paper outlines a simple macro model with overlapping wage contracts to investigate how the temporary and permanent components of stock price movements may be related to aggregate macro-economic supply and demand disturbances. In the content of the model, we show that aggregate demand shocks have only temporary effects on real stock prices, while supply shocks may affect the level of real stock prices permanently. Moreover, the temporary component in U.S. stock prices, identified by placing appropriate structural restrictions on a vector autoregressive system estimated for the postwar period, is statistically significant. This evidence supports the mean-reversion hypothesis that stock prices are not pure random walks. The finding is robust to the choice of variables used in the vector autoregressive system and periodicity.     

Die Bestimmung von individuellen Effizienzvorgaben — Alternativen zum Best-of-Four-Verfahren

The setting of the individual X-factor is a core element of every incentive regulation system. The problem faced by the regulator is the choice among a wide variety of methods for setting the individual efficiency objectives. So far no single method could achieve acceptance as best-practice in both scientific research and regulatory practice. The German incentive regulation, which started in January 2009, uses the so called “Best-of-Four Method” to define individual X-factors. The regulator, the Bundesnetzagentur, announced an in-depth evaluation of this method, because it potentially leads to an unacceptable downward bias in setting the individual efficiency objectives. This article illustrates the problems of the Best-of-Four Method and offers alternatives. The author additionally develops a new approach which is based on a multi-stage process, using economical and engineering methods. Finally all alternatives are compared according to various criteria.It can be shown that the complementary usage of Data Envelopment Analysis and Stochastic Frontier Analysis is a reasonable approach to efficiency analysis. But this raises the question how to transform the resulting efficiency scores into individual X-factors. The Best-of-Four Approach is not appropriate because it distorts the X-factors, offers possibilities for strategic behaviour and cannot guarantee comparability of the efficiency objectives. Comparing alternatives shows that no approach clearly dominates all others taking into account all considered criteria. The multi-stage approach offers a possibility of transforming a “Nordic Walking” into an ambitious fitness program while also setting appropriate and comparable individual X-factors.     

The Evolution of Health Insurer Costs in Massachusetts, 2010–2012

We analyze the evolution of health insurer costs in Massachusetts between 2010 and 2012, paying particular attention to changes in the composition of enrollees. This was a period in which Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs) increasingly used physician cost control incentives but Preferred Provider Organizations (PPOs) did not. We show that cost growth and its components cannot be understood without accounting for (1) consumers’ switching between plans, and (2) differences in cost characteristics between new entrants and those leaving the market. New entrants are markedly less costly than those leaving (and their costs fall after their entering year), so cost growth of continuing enrollees in a plan is significantly higher than average per-member cost growth. Relatively high-cost HMO members switch to PPOs while low-cost PPO members switch to HMOs, so the impact of cost control incentives on HMO costs is likely different from their impact on market-wide insurer costs.     

Noise Trading and the Management of Operational Risk; Firms,Traders and Irrationality in Financial Markets*

abstract Efficient market models cannot explain the high level of trading in financial markets in terms of asset portfolio adjustment. It is presumed that much of this excessive trading is irrational ‘noise’ trading. A corollary is that there must either be irrational traders in the market or rational traders with irrational aberrations. The paper reviews the various attempts to explain noise trading in the finance literature, concluding that the persistence of irrationality is not well explained. Data from a study of 118 traders in four large investment banks are presented to advance reasons why traders might seek to trade more frequently than financial models predict. The argument is advanced that trades do not simply occur in order to generate profit, but it does not follow that such trading is irrational. Trading may generate information, accelerate learning, create commitments and enhance social capital, all of which sustain traders' long term survival in the market. The paper treats noise trading as a form of operational risk facing firms operating in financial markets and discusses approaches to the management of such risk.