Share-ownership schemes for employees – proposals and prospects

Recent statutory and other developments in the United Kingdom seem to have stimulated the introduction of share-ownership schemes for employees. This article considers the merits of such schemes, and their potential role within companies. The article also points up some weaknesses in the 1978 Finance Act, and suggests the need for caution on the part of those in industry who might contemplate the introduction of share-ownership arrangements.     

Conditional distributions of earnings,wages and hours for blacks and whites

This paper provides new evidence on the conditional distributions of earnings, wages and hours for white and black males in the University of Michigan's Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Conditional hours and ln wages are approximately normal for both races. Conditional earnings are approximately normal for blacks while earnings are well approximated for whites by the product of normal hours and log-normal wages. The distribution of this product is derived here for the first time. Treating the marginal earnings distribution as the average of the conditional distributions, we use these results to predict poverty and affluence rates in our sample.     

Tests for model specification in the presence of alternative hypotheses: Some further results

In Davidson and MacKinnon (1981), two of the present authors proposed a novel and very simple procedure for testing the specification of a nonlinear regression model against the evidence provided by a non-nested alternative. In this paper we extend their results in several directions. First, we relax a number of the assumptions of the previous paper; we admit the possibility that the nonlinear regression functions may depend on lagged dependent variables, and we do not require that the error terms be normally distributed. Second, we show how the earlier procedure may straightforwardly be generalized to the case where the two non-nested models involve different transformations of the dependent variable. Finally, we propose a simple procedure for testing non-nested linear regression models which have endogenous variables on the right-hand side, and have therefore been estimated by two-stage least squares.     

On the choice of immediate monetary targets

This paper studies the control problem of a stochastic monetary system. The Central Bank has the choice of two targets: the size of its portfolio of assets or the level of interest rate on that class of assets. If its objective is to minimize the variance of a monetary aggregate or of private sector interest rate, the conditions under which one or the other of the targets should be used are analyzed. However, if the ultimate objective is a minimum variance in a desired GNP level the effect of the immediate target is the same whether the central bank employs a money stock or a private interest rate target.