The Australian Accord

The Austrialian Labor government that came to power in 1983 based its economic policy on an ‘Accord’ with the trade union movement. The Accord was a wide-ranging agreement built around an incomes policy which was designed to simultaneously tackle unemployment and inflation. This article seeks to assess the success of the Accord as an economic strategy. But it also seeks to assess the claim that it is a socialist economic strategy. The article considers whether the Accord fosters class solidarity, an interventionist economic programme, the opportunity for workers to intervene and a more political unionism.     

Harnessing the Creative Potential among Users*

User involvement in the development of new products may offer a novel approach to improved methods of meeting customer needs. These users are considered to offer possibilities for generating original, valuable, and realizable ideas leading to successful innovation. However, the merit of users' ideas compared to ideas generated by the company itself has not been investigated empirically. In the present study, advanced users, ordinary users, and professional product developers were given the task of creating ideas for future mobile phone services. The main purpose was to examine the benefit of involving users in suggesting new product ideas in an innovation project. An experimental three‐group design was used in order to assess the output in terms of its original, valuable, and realizable merit. The results indicated that ordinary users create significantly more original and valuable ideas than professional developers and advanced users. Professional developers and advanced users created more easily realizable ideas, and ordinary users created the most valuable ideas. The results were discussed from the viewpoint of divergent thinking. It was suggested that divergent thinking was facilitated through the opportunity to combine different information elements that appeared separate at the outset, such as personal needs coupled with the functionality of mobile phone services.     

Measuring the Importance of Location in House Price Appreciation

This paper examines the variation in the rates of price appreciation within an individual metropolitan market. A methodology is developed to examine the locational variation in house price changes in Dade County (Miami) Florida, from 1971 to 1992. House price appreciation appears to be somewhat spatially related; that is, it varies by municipality, with distance from the CBD, with local changes in population and housing units, and by ethnic mix. However, these relationships have minimal explanatory power. Controlling for the census tract group location of each home explains only around 12% of the (residual) variation in the appreciation of individual homes that is not explained by metropolitan-wide changes in house prices. The effect of tract group location appears to be dominated by the idiosyncratic influences of individual homes and their immediate environments.     

Choosing Children’s Environmental Risk

A model of endogenous risk provides a foundation to study a parent’s child care decisions when the child could be exposed to an environmental hazard (e.g., toxic substance, foodborne pathogen). The parent invests in childcare quality and quantity to reduce the likelihood of a hazard exposure occurring and to reduce its severity if the exposure is realized. We supply conditions to sign unambiguously the effects on a child’s hazard exposure of an increased probability a parent fails to access or have command over a technique of exposure prevention or that a technique is ineffective in preventing exposure. Also, we consider these effects when the parent is unsure what a technique can do to reduce the child’s probability of exposure. We conclude public policies designed to encourage use of a particular childcare technique, if childcare quality and quantity are stochastic substitutes, can reduce parental use of other techniques. The net impact of the policy could increase the chance the child suffers. Although the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency provided financial support through Grant #R82871601, this research has not been subjected to the Agency’s required peer and policy review and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Agency. Thanks to the Economic Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture for their funding support as well. Thanks to David Finnoff, Michael Caputo, the reviewers, and participants at the conference on Risk Perception and Valuation at University of Central Florida for their helpful comments. All views remain our own.