The transition from paid to self-employment in Canada: the importance of push factors

The share of self-employment in total employment has been growing in Canada throughout the 1990s. Recent research for Canada and elsewhere suggests that some workers may be ‘pushed’ into self-employment as a response to inadequate opportunities in the paid sector. Examining transitions from paid work to selfemployment using the Labour Market Activity Survey, this push hypothesis is tested using a number of indicators of the economic opportunities facing the newly selfemployed. It is found: (i) longer spells of joblessness favour self-employment, (ii) workers who collect unemployment benefits between jobs are less likely to become self-employed than are workers who did not, (iii) workers who left their previous, paid jobs involuntarily - i.e., due to layoff - were more likely to become selfemployed than those who left voluntarily, but less likely than workers who specified personal reasons for leaving, and (iv) self-employment decisions are independent of the health of the labour market as measured by the unemployment rate. These results are generally consistent with the push hypothesis but provide more ambiguous evidence than found in some other studies.     

The influence of calculative (“hard”) and collaborative (“soft”) HRM on the layoff‐performance relationship in high performance workplaces

We investigate the effect of employment systems on the layoff‐performance relationship. We construct a typology of two types of HPWS (Calculative or “hard” HRM and Collaborative or “soft” HRM) and two non‐high performance systems (Traditional HRM and Low HRM). We use attribution theory as a framework from which to draw hypotheses. We examine survey responses from two waves of panel data. We employ cluster analysis to identify distinctive configurations of employment practices used in UK workplaces. We use the cluster outcomes as explanatory variables in moderator regression analysis. Following layoffs, we find that Calculative workplaces experience lower subsequent performance than Collaborative workplaces. Over the next five years, Calculative and Collaborative workplaces experience equivalent amounts of performance change but Calculative workplaces fail to make a full recovery.     

Analytic moments for GJR-GARCH (1, 1) processes

For a GJR-GARCH(1, 1) specification with a generic innovation distribution we derive analytic expressions for the first four conditional moments of the forward and aggregated returns and variances. Moments for the most commonly used GARCH models are stated as special cases. We also derive the limits of these moments as the time horizon increases, establishing regularity conditions for the moments of aggregated returns to converge to normal moments. A simulation study using these analytic moments produces approximate predictive distributions which are free from the bias affecting simulations. An empirical study using almost 30 years of daily equity index, exchange rate and interest rate data applies Johnson SU and Edgeworth expansion distribution fitting to our closed-form formulae for higher moments of returns.