Do members' services packages influence trade union recruitment?

This article details a study of selected new members who joined a white collar professional trade union between 1st January and 30th September, 1988. The study examined the factors which motivated applications to join, especially with reference to a Members' Services Package.     

Knowledge management capabilities in R&D: a UK‐‐Japan company comparison

This paper uses a 'knowledge‐based' approach to compare the management of R&D in two leading chemicals companies, one British (ICI plc) and one Japanese. It describes key differences in the ways they integrate the 'near‐market' knowledge of business units and the scientific knowledge and technical expertise of R&D personnel in central R&D facilities. It shows that the same management practices that underpin superior 'integrative capabilities' in the Japanese firm, including central funding of R&D, job‐rotation and career structures and multidisciplinary project teams, also result in significant R&D weaknesses. The comparison demonstrates that different organisational mechanisms are needed to support (1) the development and (2) the leveraging of specialist knowledge within different innovation contexts . Firms must be able to strike a balance between integrative and specialist capabilities to get the most from their R&D. Moreover, the above characteristics which underpin these capabilities are often 'embedded' in the broader organisation making them difficult to emulate when they represent 'best‐practice' but also making them difficult to change in response to new threats and opportunities.     

The Monday effect revisited: An alternative testing approach

This paper questions traditional approaches for testing the Monday effect of stock returns. We propose an alternative, multiple hypothesis testing approach based on the closure test principle which controls the multiple type I error. We consider the US, the UK and the German stock markets and test Monday related pairwise comparisons of daily expected stock returns, while the probability of committing any type I error is always kept smaller than a prespecified level α, for each combination of true null hypotheses. Overall, the new testing approach supports previous findings of a Monday effect for the 1970s and 1980s, in particular for the US and Germany, while it suggests that the Monday effect has vanished in the 1990s and 2000s in all three markets. The comparison of the closure test procedure, the traditional multiple t-test and the Bonferroni test, a classical multiple test procedure, shows that traditional testing may result in spurious significance while the Bonferroni test may sometimes be too conservative.     

Can Banks in Emerging Economies Benefit from Revenue Diversification?

This paper investigates the effect of revenue diversification on bank performance and risk. Using a panel dataset of 226 listed banks across 11 emerging economies and a new methodological approach, System Generalized Method of Moments estimators (System GMM), the results in this paper provide empirical evidence of the impact of the observed shift towards non-interest income generating activities on insolvency risk and bank performance. The core finding is that diversification across and within both interest and non-interest income generating activities decrease insolvency risk and enhance profitability. The results also show that these benefits are largest for banks with moderate risk exposures. By extension, these results have significant strategic implications for bank managers, regulators and supervisors who share a common interest in boosting bank performance and stability.     

The contribution of stock repurchases to the value of the firm and cash holdings around the world

Using corporate payout data from 33 economies, this study investigates the contribution of stock repurchases to the value of the firm and cash holdings in different country-level investor protection environments. We find that stock repurchases contribute more to firm value in countries with strong investor protection than in countries with weak investor protection. We also report that dividends contribute approximately 60% more to firm value than repurchases in countries with weak investor protection. Furthermore, as the proportion of repurchases in total payouts increases, the marginal value of cash increases in countries with strong investor protection, whereas it declines in countries with weak investor protection. In a poor investor protection environment, the marginal value of cash for a firm that makes 100% of its payouts via repurchases is 12 cents lower than that for a firm that distributes 100% of its payouts via dividends. Overall, our findings highlight that stock repurchases are less effective than dividends in mitigating agency problems associated with free cash flow in countries with poor investor protection.     

What Does Privatisation Achieve?—A Comment on Quiggin

Abstract John Quiggin's ‘Does Privatisation Pay?’ is critically assessed in this short article. The following issues are specifically addressed: un-derpricing, sovereign risk, the equity premium, fiscal illusion, welfare considerations, and the efficiency of private and public enterprises. The article concludes that privatisation need not be a poor economic bargain for the community and that it ought to be considered on a case-by-case basis.     

An Ordered-Probit Analysis of Price and Performance in Competitively Tendered Contracts

Abstract
This article adopts an ordered-probit estimation procedure to investigate the influence of competitive tendering on contract price and performance. Using a two-equation recursive system the findings of Domberger, Hall and Li (1995) turned out to be robust to the ordered-probit methodology which confirmed the strong negative effect of competitive tendering on contract price. The evidence also suggested that performance was either enhanced or remained the same in the presence of competition. Overall, the results of this investigation support the view that competitive tendering generates efficiency gains without adverse effects on quality of service .     

SOCIAL CHANGE AND ECONOMIC LIFE IN BRITAIN IN THE 1980s

Books reviewed in this article:
Duncan Gallie, Catherine Marsh, and Carolyn Vogler (eds.) (1994) Social Change and the Experience of Unemployment.
Jill Rubery and Frank Wilkinson (eds.) (1994) Employer Strategy and the Labour Market.
Alison McEwan Scott (ed.) (1994) Gender Segregation and Social Change: Men and Women in Changing Labour Markets.
Roger Penn, Michael Rose, and Jill Rubery (eds.) (1994) Skill and Occupational Change.
Michael Anderson, Frank Bechhofer, and Jonathan Gershuny (eds.) (1994) The Social and Political Economy of the Household.
Duncan Gallie, Roger Penn, and Michael Rose (eds.) (1996) Trade Unionism in Recession.     

Endogenous Games and Mechanisms: Side Payments Among Players

We characterize the outcomes of games when players may make binding offers of strategy contingent side payments before the game is played. This does not always lead to efficient outcomes, despite complete information and costless contracting. The characterizations are illustrated in a series of examples, including voluntary contribution public good games, Cournot and Bertrand oligopoly, principal–agent problems, and commons games, among others.     

Forecasting employment : The role of forward-looking behaviour

Manufacturing output per head rose at an unprecedented rate in the UK in 1981/2, and conventional econometric relationships failed to forecast the associated falls in employment. In this paper we estimate manufacturing employment equations in which output expectations play a central role. These compare fabourably with alternative models, and are able to predict most of the large falls in employment over this period.