The new politics of pressure – the Trades Union Congress and new Labour in government

The TUC’s political role has been in the forefront of its function for most of its history and has revived with the election of new Labour. This article argues that the TUC’s current political approach is unlikely to contribute towards significant union resurgence in the workplace or politically.     

Nomic necessity in marketing theory: The issue of counterfactual conditionals

One of the well-established characteristics of lawlike generalizations is nomic necessity, i.e., the quality of universality or inevitability. In turn, the ability to support so-called “counterfactual conditionals” is considered the hallmark of lawlike statements which possess nomic necessity. Unfortunately, there seems to be some inconsistent interpretation of this counterfactual-support requirement, revealed even in some of the most prominent works on the subject in the field of marketing. This paper represents an attempt to clarify the situation.     

On the construction of marginal federal personal and social security tax rates in the U.S

In this article, I correct and extend my earlier series on marginal federal personal income tax rates. I also construct a measure of the marginal Social Security tax rate and add this to the income tax rate to obtain a measure of the effective marginal tax rate on income due to federal taxes. Finally, I compare my series on marginal income tax rates and its method of construction with those of Barro and Sahasakul.     

Trade liberalization, outsourcing, and the hold-up problem

This paper shows that, in a bilateral relationship where a foreign supplier has to make a relationship-specific investment but cannot enforce a complete contract, the standard hold-up problem of underinvestment is aggravated when trade incurs a tariff. In this context, we identify two new channels through which trade liberalization enhances international trade. First, lower tariffs increase the incentives of foreign suppliers to undertake cost-reducing investments. Second, lower tariffs may prompt vertical multinational integration. These indirect effects imply that responses of trade volumes to trade liberalization are greater than standard trade models suggest and help explain current trends toward foreign outsourcing and intra-firm trade.     

Factors influencing the profitability of pharmaceutical research

The output from a pharmaceutical research project is a stream of candidate drugs which may be submitted to clinical trials. The value of this output depends on the characteristics of the stochastic process generating this stream, and on the extent to which the candidate drugs are chemically similar to each other. This paper explores the impact of these factors on profitability, and on the policy which should be followed for selecting candidate drugs.     

Problem based learning: application to technology education in three countries

An increasing variety of professional educational and training disciplines are now problem based (eg, medicine, nursing, engineering, community health), and they may have a corresponding variety of educational objectives. However, they all have in common the use of problems in the instructional sequence. The problems may be as diverse as a mechanical predicament, an unexplained phenomena, or patient symptoms. Technology education in secondary schools is undergoing a period of significant change in many countries. It is therefore imperative that technology teacher education adopt not only the technologies that have been identified as being important, but also incorporate appropriate methodologies for the instruction of these technologies. PBL offers a number of relevant features to technology education and it is because of these that the project outlined in this paper has been developed.