Incomplete regulation, market competition and collusion

Regulators often do not regulate all firms competing in a given sector. Due to product substitutability, unregulated competitors have incentives to bribe regulated firms to have them overstate their costs and produce less, thereby softening competition. The best collusion-proof contract entails distortions both for inefficient and efficient regulated firms (distortion ‘at the top’). But a contract inducing active collusion may do better by allowing the regulator to ‘team up’ with the regulated firm to indirectly tax its competitor. The best such contract is characterized. It is such that the unregulated firm pays the regulated one to have it truthfully reveals its inefficiency. We finally compare those contracts.     

Employer Penalties for Failure to Provide Individual Employee Notification Under the Family and Medical Leave Act: “Clarifications” Following Ragsdale v. Wolverine Worldwide, Inc.

This article examines the Supreme Court's ruling in Ragsdale v. Wolverine Worldwide, Inc. (2002) and considers its implications for employer and employee rights and responsibilities relative to implementing the FMLA policies. We provide an overview of the pre-decision regulatory environment including the general leave provisions of the FMLA and DOL's regulations requiring employer notification of leave designated as FMLA leave. We also identify those provisions that the decision did not alter and provide a broader consideration of the issues and implication of this decision for employers and employees.     

Towards a Theory of Organizational Improvisation: Looking Beyond the Jazz Metaphor

abstract This paper calls for research on organizational improvisation to go beyond the currently dominant jazz metaphor in theory development. We recognize the important contribution that jazz improvisation has made and will no doubt continue to make in understanding the nature and complexity of organizational improvisation. This article therefore presents some key lessons from the jazz metaphor and then proceeds to identify the possible dangers of building scientific inquiry upon a single metaphor. We then present three alternative models – Indian music, music therapy and role theory. We explore their nature and seek to identify ways in which the insights they generate complement those from jazz. This leads us to a better understanding of the challenges of building a theory of organizational improvisation.     

The Geopolitics of Protected Areas

ABSTRACT

The conservation enterprise is embedded in ideas of the environment through which it promotes a vision of the world and the relations between the non-human and human. The papers in this forum analyse conservation from various vantage points to draw the links between geopolitics and conservation. The authors use three themes to demonstrate these links. The first theme draws on the concept of environmentality to show the mobilization of ecological rationalities and power towards the creation of protected areas. The second pays attention to networks formed across the distance, and how they influence the location and governance of protected areas. The third focuses on the strategies the conservation lobby uses to align local identities with global conservation ideals and goals. Collectively, these themes highlight features of conservation geopolitics.     

Evolution of harvesting strategies: replicator and resource dynamics

Abstract. Economic theories of managing renewable resources, such as fisheries and forestry, traditionally assume that individual harvesters are perfectly rational and thus able to compute the harvesting strategy that maximizes their discounted profits. The current paper presents an alternative approach based on bounded rationality and evolutionary mechanisms. It is assumed that individual harvesters face a choice between two harvesting strategies. The evolution of the distribution of strategies in the population is modeled through a replicator dynamics equation. The latter captures the idea that strategies yielding above average profits are demanded more than strategies yielding below average profits, so that the first type ends up accounting for a larger part in the population. From a mathematical perspective, the combination of resource and evolutionary processes leads to complex dynamics. The paper presents the existence and stability conditions for each steady-state of the system and analyzes dynamic paths to the equilibrium. In addition, effects of changes in prices are analyzed. A main result of the paper is that under certain conditions both strategies can survive in the long-run. Correspondence to: J. Noailly     

Aggregation of Directional Distance Functions and Industrial Efficiency

Three main objectives are pursued in this paper. First, we intend to analyze the aggregation problem of directional distance functions from a constructive viewpoint. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions concerning the structural properties of the production technology and of the nature of groups of firms. Indeed, exact additive aggregation holds for a linear technology and for a direction solely defined in the output space. Second, since these conditions are somewhat restrictive, we are interested in providing a measure for the aggregation bias through the relationship between industrial and structural technical efficiency. Finally, we show that this aggregation bias is a lower bound for industrial allocative efficiency.     

Modeling Cyclical Asymmetries in European Imports

This paper applies smooth transition models to capture the nonlinear behavior in the imports data of six major European economies and to assess whether such nonlinearities are related to business cycle asymmetries. Two classes of switch between regimes are considered: endogenously determined transition that assumes nonlinearities are generated by idiosyncratic components specific to foreign trade, and exogenous transition based on GDP growth as a more direct indicator of the cyclical state of the economy. The results support the proposition that the dynamics of imports are nonlinear. In Belgium, France, Spain, and the United Kingdom, regimes change over the business cycle, while in Germany and Italy the switch between regimes is endogenous. National characteristics play a role in defining the position of extreme regimes, the smoothness of the transition, and local dynamics within each state.Previous versions of this article have been presented at the 57th International Atlantic Economic Conference (Lisbon, Portugal, March 10–14, 2004) and at the VII Encuentro de Economía Aplicada (Vigo, Spain, June 3–5, 2004). The authors thank the conference participants and an anonymous referee for their comments.     

Banks’ non-traditional activities under regulatory changes: impact on risk,performance and capital adequacy

Using the big six Canadian chartered banks quarterly financial statements and daily stock market data from 1982 to 2018, we examine the impact of non-interest income on Canadian banks’ risk, performance and capital under the different major regulatory changes made to the Bank Act of Canada. Our results show that Canadian banks’ expansion into non-traditional activities had slightly decreased their risks and significantly improved their performance benefitting from income diversification. Moreover, while adhering to capital adequacy regulation, reshuffling banks’ portfolio towards non-traditional activities did not reduce Canadian banks’ capital ratio. In spite of the re-regulation towards universal banking against ring-fencing, this feature buttresses the effectiveness of capital adequacy regulation in Canada in linking banks capital allocation with their risk taking.     

Sample attrition and labor force dynamics: Evidence from the Spanish labor force survey

In this paper we examine a number of issues that arise in investigating labor force dynamics using the Spanish Labor Force Survey (EPA). These issues are by no means specific to the Spanish case and apply to most European-style labor force surveys. Our main conclusions may be summarized as follows. First, survey nonresponse cannot be neglected. Second, the EPA tends to underestimate employment and participation of high-educated young people, and to overestimate those of the low-educated elderly. Finally, we find little evidence that attrition causes important selection biases in estimating quarterly transition probabilities.