Managerial Responsiveness to Union and Nonunion Worker Voice in Britain

Over the last two decades, there has been a switch in British workplaces away from union voice and representative worker voice more generally toward direct employee involvement and nonunion representative forms of voice. This article assesses the implications of this switch for the effectiveness of worker voice, as measured by employee perceptions of managerial responsiveness. In general, perceptions of managerial responsiveness are better among employees with nonunion voice than they are among employees with union voice.     

Money and economic activity,inventories and business cycles

Incomplete information is a necessary condition for any real effects produced by monetary impulses. An alternative to the local-global inference problem is explored in this paper. Agents are confronted with permanent and transitory shocks. Even with full knowledge about the stochastic structure their best perception at any particular time will usually be erroneous. Prices for each period are set at the beginning of the period on the basis of market conditions. The realization of the shock process thus creates a short-run ‘disequilibrium’ absorbed by inventory adjustments. This adjustment translates perceived transitory monetary shocks into serially correlated output movements. The analysis proceeds within the context of rational expectations It offers a generalization of equilibrium analysis in two respects. Prices are always in equilibrium relative to perceived conditions, but they do not reflect all ongoing shocks. Quantity adjustments reflect the perceived transitory shocks. The framework used involves moreover a stock-flow interaction operated by inventory adjustments. The stock-flow interaction imposes at any time a future expected adjustment path (for price-level and quantities) to the system's unique stock equilibrium. A major implication of the analysis resolves a puzzle experienced in a recent paper by Robert Hall. It reconciles intertemporal substitution with lagged effects of monetary impulses. It also reconciles small and inconclusive cyclic movements in real wages with the occurrence of production function and large variations in unemployment. Lastly, the nature of the inference problem determined by the pattern of incomplete information produces serially correlated movements conditioned on large permanent shocks.     

Hedonic analysis of a housing market in disequilibrium

This paper tests the hypothesis that information about housing market activity and about specific dwellings becomes capitalized into single family dwelling prices through a disequilibrium adjustment process. A dynamic price adjustment model, which is an extension of the standard hedonic model widely used in the literature, is derived, specified, and tested with both micro and aggregated data from the city of Chicago and for the period 1972–1976. The results show that from 32 to 75% of the variance in dwelling prices, unexplained by the standard hedonic attributes under assumptions of equilibrium, is explained by market activity signals such as mortgage interest rates and neighborhood transaction rates of the preceding period. Dwellings about which there is less information, making comparison pricing difficult, are shown to command a price premium. The standard equilibrium hypothesis appears readily rejectable and better predictions are obtained from the disequilibrium specifications. Several directions for extending this line of research are discussed.     

Heterogeneous inflationary expectations,Fisher's theory of interest and the allocative efficiency of the bond market

This letter considers the consequences of heterogeneous inflationary expectations for Fisher's theory of interest. It is further shown that divergent and erroneous expectations cause welfare losses which increase when either the variance of expectations or of actualinflation increase.