Job Training, New Technology and Labour Turnover

Vocational training incidence for those at work is frequently financed partly or wholly by employers, who then lose part of their investment return if workers migrate to other firms. We investigate the incidence of training and the incidence of job-to-job mobility for a large sample of British workers in 1984 and 1989. We also analyse the role of sectoral technology characteristics in influencing patterns of both training and inter-firm mobility.
Our results demonstrate that job-to-job mobility is highest for the young and higher for those with formal educational qualifications than for the unskilled. These are also characteristics which engender a higher training propensity; so, unavoidably, private gains to training for employers are below social gains for these young people. Public-sector workers have high training rates but low mobility; this perhaps explains the lack of perception of the poaching problem by successive governments. Sectoral R&D activity is associated with more training and less mobility for men; in contrast, women are more likely to train and are less mobile if the rate of adoption of innovation is rapid.     

Why Are Mothers Working Longer Hours in Austria than in Germany? A Comparative Microsimulation Analysis*

Labour force participation rates of mothers in Austria and Germany are similar; however, full‐time employment rates are much higher among Austrian mothers. In order to find out to what extent these differences can be attributed to differences in the tax‐transfer system, we perform a comparative microsimulation exercise. After estimating structural labour supply models for both countries, we interchange two important institutional characteristics of the two countries ‐ namely, (i) the definition of the tax unit within the personal income tax and (ii) the parental leave benefit scheme. As our analysis shows, differences in mothers’employment patterns can partly be explained by the different tax systems: while Germany has a system of joint taxation with income splitting for married couples, Austria taxes everyone individually, which leads to lower marginal tax rates for secondary earners than in the German system.     

Four tigers and the dragon: values differences,similarities, and consensus

This study examines the influence of economic and political factors that contribute to the convergence and/or divergence in value priorities of five East Asian societies—China, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan. We find that political and social-economic factors influence the values orientations of managers within this region. However, economic development level is an insufficient explanation for values convergence without consideration of the societal context and cultural traditions in which that development occurred.

The need for more flexibility in the regulation of smart grids – stakeholder involvement

Energy and climate policy drive large scale integration of distributed generation and demand side management, with massive consequences for distribution grids. New technologies and actors shape the transformation of electricity networks towards smart systems. We argue that future regulation of smart grids needs to allow more flexibility. Firstly, the core of network monopoly starts to weaken allowing for more third party involvement. Secondly, the increasing number and heterogeneity of stakeholders makes “one-size-fits-all” regulation simply less suitable, whilst regulation needs to take account of various interests. In this paper we discuss stakeholder involvement and make policy recommendations to render regulation of smart systems more flexible.     

The Relation Between Market Liquidity and Anonymity in the Presence of Tick Size Constraints

In February 2004, the Sydney Futures Exchange removed broker identifiers from the electronic limit order book for interest rate futures contracts, with the stated objective of maintaining transparency and improving market participation and liquidity. We show how the Exchange's aims were generally met by documenting an increase in volume and frequency of trades and a decline in time‐weighted quoted spreads. Although daily effective spreads do not decline, intraday analysis demonstrates that there are improvements in effective spreads which are concentrated to those points in time where the bid–ask spread is not constrained by the size of the minimum tick, and where information asymmetries are present. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 34:56–73, 2014     

You get what you pay for: the link between price and food safety in Kenya

The lack of a reliably safe food supply in developing countries imposes both health and economic costs. Food safety is one of several dimensions of food quality that are typically unobservable at the time of purchase. Branding can overcome this information problem by allowing firms to build reputations based on the quality of their products. If a reputation for food safety is valued directly by consumers, or if food safety is correlated with other valued attributes, firms producing safer food should be able to use their brand equity to charge higher prices. In addition, firms with stronger brand equity have stronger incentives to meet food safety standards in order to maintain that equity. Using data from more than 900 maize flour samples representing 23 distinct brands in eastern and central Kenya, we explore the relationship between price and contamination with aflatoxin. Aflatoxin is a fungal toxin common in maize, groundnuts, and other crops around the world. We find a strong negative correlation between price and contamination at the brand level, consistent with the hypothesized positive relationship between brand equity and food quality.