Codetermination and technological change in the German automobile industry*

This article examines how works councils in the West German automobile industry have influenced management approaches to technological change in three firms. The authors argue that while the post-war industrial relations consensus in Germany can be increasingly questioned, car-makers in the English speaking countries have important lessons to learn from their German counterparts.     

Doubts Regarding the Human Capital Theory of Racial Inequality

Using wage data developed by Smith (1984), this paper compares human capital and institutional explanations of trends in the racial wage gap since 1890. While a regression including daily schooling variables is consistent with the human capital theory, so is an institutional model which omits schooling variables but adds the influences of isolation in the rural South, discriminatory hiring and promotion practices, unemployment, and government policy. Including schooling and institutional variables together casts doubt on the relative importance of schooling compared to labor market demands and political variables.     

Demand relationships and pricing decisions for related products

This paper presents in terms of price changes the theoretical conditions for optimal pricing when products are demand-related. It then suggests an approach which could be used by companies to provide guidance in the pricing of such products over time.     

Analysis of conflicts in dynamical environmental systems via catastrophe theory

This paper addresses itself to long-term conflicting issues in environmental policy analysis. After a brief discussion of the ‘new scarcity’ and its subsequent potential perturbations of our economic system in the long run, attention will be paid to some elements of catastrophe theory which may be helpful in gaining insight into the future impacts of inertia and conflicts in environmental management. Next, a fairly simple model for integrating natural resources and production will be constructed so as to illustrate the usefulness of catastrophe theory in economic-energy-environmental systems. The paper will be concluded with a brief judgement of using catastrophe notions in the social sciences.     

On testing separability restrictions with flexible functional forms

In this paper, we examine the implications of imposing separability on the translog and three other flexible forms. Our results imply that the Berndt-Christensen ‘nonlinear’ test for weak separability tests not only for weak separability, but also imposes a restrictive structure on the macro and micro functions for all currently known ‘flexible’ functional forms. For example, testing for weak separability using the translog as an exact form is in fact equivalent to testing for a hybrid of strong (additive) separability and homothetic weak separability with Cobb-Douglas aggregator functions. Our results show that these ‘flexible’ functional forms are ‘separability-inflexible’. That is, they are not capable of providing a second-order approximation to an arbitrary weakly separable function in any neighbourhood of a given point.