Pathways to a Good Job: Perceived Work Quality among the Machinists in North America

This paper examines the perceived quality of jobs held by a sample of members of the International Association of Machinists, a large union in North America. It is argued that useful insights can be obtained by examining the relationships between global and specific measures of job quality. We then compare two ways of linking them: the regression or correlational‐causation approach and the configurational approach that regards jobs as ‘bundles’ of various characteristics. Our results suggest that there are various pathways by which workers may consider jobs to be ‘good’ but that job quality among the machinists is related especially to satisfaction with benefits, interesting work and autonomy.     

The 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics to Oliver E. Williamson: Recognition of the Influence of Transaction Cost Economics on Business Research

This article provides an introduction to the Journal of Retailing Special Issue dedicated to Oliver Williamson and transaction cost economics. The paper briefly outlines transaction cost economics contributions to marketing and related social sciences.     

On the economics of the longevity risk transfer market

We present a model of a longevity risk transfer market with different market players (primary insurers, reinsurers, and capital market investors) and investigate how market dynamics and the market players' roles evolve with progressing market saturation. We find that reinsurers' appetite for longevity risk is the key driver in the early stage of market development. Since diversification benefits with other businesses decrease with every transaction, the reinsurance market is intrinsically antimonopolistic. With the increasing saturation of the reinsurance sector as a whole, its competitiveness shrinks leading to rising expected risk-adjusted returns for capital market investors. We show that in a saturated market, reinsurers should assume the entire longevity risk from primary insurers, diversify it within their business mix, and subsequently pass on only specific (nondiversifiable) components of the longevity risk to the capital markets. Our findings provide valuable suggestions on how to make the best use of the market's limited risk absorption capacity.