Industrial disputes in France,West Germany,Italy and the United Kingdom: measurement and incidence

In this article the author draws on research commissioned by the European Community into a detailed examination of the difference in the measurement of disputes in all the member countries before Greece's accession. The findings are presented over the period 1970–80 for the four largest members—France, West Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom.     

Primary esophageal lymphoma in AIDS

In a patient with acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) and primary esophageal lymphoma, esophagography and computed tomography (CT) demonstrated a large ulcerated mass involving the distal esophagus. Although rare, the diagnosis of esophageal lymphoma should be considered in patients at risk for AIDS when the radiologic findings are not typical for infectious esophagitis or Kaposi's sarcoma.     

Intra-industry adjustment and the correction of an externality

Conclusion The purpose of this paper is to apply some of the existing microeconomic theory literature on intra-industry adjustment resulting from factor price changes to the use of corrective taxes on externalities. The optimal tax to correct the effects of an externality is one placed directly on the external damage. Such a tax is sometimes not practically feasible, in which case either the inputs or output of firms in the externality-producing industry must be taxed as a proxy for the external damage.When the tax is placed on the input associated with the externality, the tax will only produce the optimal result if all firms produce an equal external damage which is proportional to the amount of the input which is used. If the amount of the externality produced by different firms is different, then an input tax will not satisfy the marginal conditions for optimality; and in some cases, the external damage may actually increase as a result of the input tax. An output tax, on the other hand, will never cause the external damage to increase, but will not in general satisfy the marginal conditions for optimality.When the amount of external damage caused by each firm in an industry is difficult to monitor, input or output taxes are two possible policy alternatives for controlling the externality. This paper has demonstrated that there are a number of problems associated with calculating the optimal input or output tax, and that a tax that is correct under restricted assumptions may actually aggravate the problem when examined in a more general environment. This analysis may explain why policy makers favor direct controls to reduce externalities, rather than taking the economist's frequent advice of using corrective taxes to price the externality.We are indebted to Charles Maurice for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.     

Data mining using a genetic algorithm-trained neural network

Neural networks have been shown to perform well for mapping unknown functions from historical data in many business areas, such as accounting, finance, and management. Although there have been many successful applications of neural networks in business, additional information about the networks is still lacking, specifically, determination of inputs that are relevant to the neural network model. It is apparent that by knowing which inputs are actually contributing to model prediction a researcher has gained additional knowledge about the problem itself. This can lead to a parsimonious neural network architecture, better generalization for out-of-sample prediction, and, probably the most important, a better understanding of the problem. It is shown in this paper that by using a modified genetic algorithm for neural network training, relevant inputs can be determined while simultaneously searching for a global solution. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Taxation and the redistribution of income

Conclusion This paper has offered no empirical evidence, and is not trying to argue that after-tax relative wage rates will not change at all in response to a change in the progressivity of the tax structure.⁸ Rather, the point is that there is a market mechanism that causes changes in progressivity to be at least partially offset by changes in the pretax wage structure. This mechanism is not taken into account by any model of redistribution through taxation that treats labor output as a homogeneous factor of production. Treating labor output as homogeneous eliminates adjustments to relative wages that are certain to occur in response to a change in the progressivity of the tax structure. Thus, progressive taxation has less ability to redistribute income than is commonly realized. Any shortcomings in the paper remain the responsibility of the authors.     

Capital markets and capital allocation: Implications for economies in transition*

Recent work showing that a sounder financial system is associated with faster economic growth has important implications for transition economies. Stock prices in developed economies move in highly firm‐specific ways that convey information about changes in firms’ marginal value of investment. This information facilitates the rapid flow of capital to its highest value uses. In contrast, stock prices in low‐income countries tend to move up and down en masse, and thus are of scant use for microeconomic capital allocation. Some transition economy markets are coming to resemble those of developed economies, others those of low‐income countries. Stock return asynchronicity is highly correlated with the strength of private property rights in general and public shareholders’ rights in particular. Other recent work suggests that small entrenched elites in low‐income countries preserve their sweeping control over the corporate sectors of their economies by using political influence to undermine the financial system and deprive entrants of capital. The lack of cross‐sectional independence in some transition economies’ stock returns may be a warning of such economic entrenchment. Sound property rights, solid shareholder rights, stock market transparency, and capital account openness appear to check this, and thus contribute to efficient capital allocation and economic growth.     

Government subsidy of critical-need occupations: the case of nurses.

This paper undertakes an econometric evaluation of governmental policies aimed at increasing the labor force supply of nurses and at effecting greater hospital substitution among auxilliary health personnel, in times of nurse shortage. The methodology is to employ a simultaneous equation, multi-nurse econometric model which is estimated by a three-stage least-squares procedure incorporating use of logit transformation to deal with limited dependent variables and use of weighted least squares to deal with heteroskedasticity.