Employee participation and contemporary labor law in the US

Employee participation has commonly been seen, in US conditions, as in potential conflict with the maintenance and development of collective bargaining. Since labor law seeks to protect the collective bargaining rights of employees, an important current debate is concerned with to what extent, if at all, the law needs to be changed to encourage employee participation schemes without weakening this protection.     

Charity Accounting Rules and Annual Reports in Hong Kong: A Note

The perceived professionalism of charities is diminished when there is a great diversity in financial reporting practices. In addition, there may be additional regulatory pressure if present reporting practices continue. The purpose of this research was to gather information about the financial reporting practices for charitable organizations in Hong Kong. A brief review of international accounting practices for charities is also provided.     

The influence of primary task on R&D laboratory evaluation: a comparative bibliometric analysis

Abstract
After reviewing the various approaches to R&D evaluation, the author concludes that a taxonomic approach combining organizational and bibliometric indicators offers a valid option to assess the quality of research. Fifty-three laboratories around the world in 17 technical fields were investigated using organizational, publication and bibliometric variables.
A taxonomy of six clusters of laboratories with distinct primary tasks, organizational attributes and outputs emerged. Scientific publications are by-products of research outputs. Within each cluster of laboratories, a wide range of bibliometric indicators make it possible to identify high and low performers in terms of research quality.
Bibliometric indicators, it is concluded, gain by being associated with comparative organizational assessments to evaluate laboratories with similar primary tasks and scientific fields.     

The structural and environmental correlates of business strategy

An attempt is made to relate several common dimensions of business-level strategy to their organizational contexts. A model is developed that predicts the structural and environmental correlates of a strategy on the basis of the number and uncertainty of its contingencies. It is shown that strategies of complex product innovation, marketing differentiation, market breadth and conservative cost control each have pronounced but very different relationships with bureaucratic and organic structural devices of uncertainty reduction, differentiation and integration, and with environmental dynamism, heterogeneity and hostility.     

The Burden of Unemployment on Family Units: An Overview

This article proposes several measures of the burden of unemployment on family units. It is shown that one in 13 couple families had at least the husband or wife unemployed in 1994. Almost one-quarter of the total unemployment among couple families in 1994 was in families where both husband and wife were unemployed. The analyses presented show that the burden of unemployment on family units differs according to the characteristics of the family. It is particularly intense in couple families with young dependents and among immigrants from non-English-speaking countries. Of particular concern is the finding that there are many families where there are multiple family members unemployed and no member employed. This will have major implications where knowledge of employment opportunities is obtained primarily through family contacts.     

A Two-Factor Model for Low Interest Rate Regimes

This paper derives a two-factor model for the term structure of interest rates that segments the yield curve in a natural way. The first factor involves modelling a non-negative short rate process that primarily determines the early part of the yield curve and is obtained as a truncated Gaussian short rate. The second factor mainly influences the later part of the yield curve via the market index. The market index proxies the growth optimal portfolio (GOP) and is modelled as a squared Bessel process of dimension four. Although this setup can be applied to any interest rate environment, this study focuses on the difficult but important case where the short rate stays close to zero for a prolonged period of time. For the proposed model, an equivalent risk neutral martingale measure is neither possible nor required. Hence we use the benchmark approach where the GOP is chosen as numeraire. Fair derivative prices are then calculated via conditional expectations under the real world probability measure. Using this methodology we derive pricing functions for zero coupon bonds and options on zero coupon bonds. The proposed model naturally generates yield curve shapes commonly observed in the market. More importantly, the model replicates the key features of the interest rate cap market for economies with low interest rate regimes. In particular, the implied volatility term structure displays a consistent downward slope from extremely high levels of volatility together with a distinct negative skew. 1991 Mathematics Subject Classification: primary 90A12; secondary 60G30; 62P20 JEL Classification: G10, G13     

The ‘laissez faire’ bias of managed floating

The government of a small open economy trying to manage its exchange rate faces a ‘time consistency’ problem. If markets expect implementation of the optimal linear intervention rule, the government will be tempted to ‘defect’: knowing this, markets will expect less activism; and, in the discretionary equilibrium, this is what they get. How far this credibility problem can shift discretionary policy towards a free float is shown in two popular models of floating rates. One way of offsetting the ‘laissez faire’ bias of discretionary policy is to appoint a relatively ‘conservative’ central banker: but, as the time period of policy action and precommitment shrinks towards zero, the required conservative bias is found to go towards infinity. Other institutional features — such as central bank reputation, contracts and intermediate targets — may be crucial for successful exchange rate management.     

The effect of nonstationarity on combined forecasts

Previous research on the combination of forecasts has, for the most part, implicitly assumed a stationary underlying process so that parameters could be estimated from historical data. While some models weight recent data more heavily in the estimation process in an attempt to provide more accurate parameter estimates in a nonstationary environment, no research to date has specifically examined the effects of nonstationarity on the performance of combining methods. This paper reports the results of a simulation study of the effects of nonstationarity (a shift in the process) on a range of forecast combination methods. Special attention is given to the relative performance of the methods in the time periods around the shift.     

the soviet empire – did it fall or was it pushed?

Following the downfall of the Soviet Union, Robert Miller speculates on why it disintegrated when it did. If Hitler had won the war, would the Third Reich have suffered the same fate?