Sticky wages,efficiency wages,and market processes

Work on this article was supported by a grant from the Research Committee of the College of Business Administration, University of South Florida.     

The role of organizational justice in organizational citizenship behavior

This special issue highlights the relationships between the concepts of organizational justice and organizational citizenship behavior. The articles advance our understanding of these concepts and their relevance to organizational behavior by describing the theoretical and empirical relationship between them. The present article sets the stage for the papers that follow by providing background on the concepts of organizational justice and organizational citizenship behavior and explaining various connections between them.     

Mutual fund distribution fees: An empirical analysis of the impact of deregulation

The Securities and Exchange Commission's Rule 12b-1 ended a 40-year prohibition on the payment of distribution fees by mutual funds. The fees have the potential to create conflicts between fund managers and shareholders. This study examines the characteristics of funds implementing the plans, and assesses costs and benefits. Findings reveal that there is a growing tendency of funds, particularly load funds, to adopt the plans. The costs have begun to increase dramatically in recent years though some load funds with plans have begun reducing their loads. However, 12b-1 plans do not seem to contribute to the expense ratios of funds oriented toward capital gains. The plans offer the intangible benefit of spreading load charges across time, thus increasing a fund's attractiveness to a broader range of investors.Various versions of this article have been presented at seminars at the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Universities of Colorado, Connecticut, Michigan State, Pittsburgh, Kentucky, South Carolina, and Missouri, and at the Financial Management Association.     

Replacing the U.S. income tax with a progressive consumption tax: A sequenced general equilibrium approach

This paper examines the welfare consequences of changing the current U.S. income tax system to a progressive consumption tax. We compute a sequence of single period equilibria in which savings decisions depend on the expected future return to capital. In the presence of existing income taxes, the U.S. economy is assumed to lie on a balanced growth path. With the change to a consumption tax, individuals save more and initially consume less. As the capital stock grows, consumption eventually overtakes that of the original path, and the economy approaches the new balanced growth path with higher consumption and a greater capital stock. Both the transition and the balanced growth paths enter our welfare evaluations. We find the discounted present value of the stream of net gains is approximately $650 billion in 1973 dollars, just over 1 percent of the discounted present value of national income. Larger gains occur if further reform of capital income taxation accompanies the change. We examine the sensitivity of the results, both to the design of the consumption tax and to the values of elasticity and other parameters. The paper also contains estimates of the time required to adjust from one growth path to the other.