Rural traffic management: The Burrator Reservoir experiment

The introduction of traffic management schemes has been one response of the National Parks to the problem of ever-increasing car-borne visitors and the consequent damage caused to the rural environment. By reviewing these schemes and by determining and explaining attitudes towards one particular traffic management experiment, the paper aims to deduce lessons for future policy. The analysis, based on two visitor surveys, suggests that the likelihood of success is improved when schemes are integrated, containing both ‘carrot’ and ‘stick’ elements. Since public perceptions are also found to be pivotal to its success, appropriate marketing of a scheme is vital. The paper concludes, however, that to achieve the fundamental objective of greater accessibility with less mobility, a more wide-ranging marketing effort is required intended to engender a sea change in attitude towards both the car and public transport.     

Is the Optimal Labor Income Tax Progressive in a Unionized Economy?*

This paper concerns optimal nonlinear labor income taxation in an economy with union wage setting and endogenous hours of work. The purpose is to study the determinants of tax progression. We show that the optimal degree of progression of the labor income tax depends on the extent to which the government can influence the wage rate via tax policy as well as on its ability to redistribute income across individuals. In addition, the argument for progressive labor income taxation depends on whether hours of work are chosen by the employed themselves or the union.     

Relative risk aversion, relative prudence and comparative statics under uncertainty: The case of (μ, σ)‐preferences

From the expected‐utility approach, relative risk aversion being smaller than one and relative prudence being smaller than two emerge as preference restrictions that fully determine the optimal responses of decisions under uncertainty to certain shifts in probability distributions. We characterize the magnitudes of relative risk aversion and relative prudence in terms of the two‐parameter, mean‐standard deviation approach. We demonstrate that this characterization is instrumental in obtaining comparative static results in the two‐parameter setting. We further relate our findings to the results in the expected‐utility framework.     

Price Changes and Some Underlying Aspects of Measurement of Poverty

The paper deals with effects of price changes on measurement of poverty. It is shown that there are situations, when prices and nominal incomes change, a higher nutritional intake or an increase in commodity consumption of the poor can be associated with higher poverty gaps and a higher poverty index of the society. A positive relationship of this kind is quite counter-intuitive in the context of poverty measurement. This is caused by the adjustment of the poverty line and/or incomes of one situation by the prices of the other for the purpose of comparison.

     

The distributional impact of unification and the 1992–93 recession on West German households

The 1992–93 recession in the western states of Germany has been attributed, in substantial measure, to the macroeconomic consequences of policies to finance unification. Studies of the costs of unification have not attempted to measure the burden of the recession. We estimate a dynamic, panel model of household incomes using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) and use it to forecast what these incomes would have been in 1992–94 without a recession. Using a ratio of actual to forecast incomes, we compare the relative burden of the recession across households. Our findings suggest that western households below the median income bore the brunt of the combined impact of unification and the recession of 1992–93.
JEL classification: P3, D3, E3.     

Substance, Form and PFI Contracts

The Private Finance Initiative (PFI) was launched by the United Kingdom Government in 1992 in order to encourage the private sector in the UK to become more involved in public sector development projects. A key theme of the initiative was that the public should receive 'value for money'. This article investigates the accounting issue as to whether or not the private or the public sector should record any property related to PFI projects on balance sheet. It argues that although both HM Treasury and the Accounting Standards Board (ASB) might agree on the accounting principles, the practical impact is that in order for related properties to stay off the public sector's balance sheet, substantial risk needs to be transferred to the private sector. As a consequence of this, the objective of providing value for money to the public may not be achieved.     

Worker separations in a nonstationary corporate environment

Assessing ten years of unique personnel data from a large firm, this paper investigates how determinants of worker turnover differ between periods of corporate expansion and decline. Performance and career progress considerably reduce the hazard of job separation during downsizing for blue-collar workers, but are less important for white-collar workers. Effects of firm-tenure, occupation, education, training, part-time status, and gender are largely in accordance with the implications from existing models. But no model generates all patterns observed in the data. Age effects are sensitive to retirement options and discontinuous, dropping in response to the anticipation of becoming eligible for early retirement during downsizing and jumping at the actual retirement age.