Zero Hours Contracts and Their Growth

This article studies the prevalence and nature of zero hours contracts (ZHCs) in the UK labour market. It is widely argued that the headline count of ZHC workers based on the Labour Force Survey historically underestimated the number of workers in ZHC jobs. Here, we argue that this likely continues to be the case, particularly if one considers other, similar, no-guaranteed-hours jobs alongside ZHCs. ZHC jobs and workers are heterogeneous, but ZHCs have become increasingly concentrated among young workers, full-time students, migrants, black and minority ethnic workers, in personal service and elementary occupations, and in the distribution, accommodation and restaurant sector over time. Compared to other forms of employment, median wages in ZHC jobs have also fallen. The most common prior labour market state for ZHC workers is non-ZHC employment, particularly part-time employment, with part of the reported growth in ZHCs driven by reclassification of existing employment relationships. Finally, we show that growth in public awareness of ZHCs contributed substantially to recent growth in reported ZHCs, particularly over the period 2013/14.     

Manipulation of profits in Italian publicly-funded healthcare trusts

ABSTRACT

This paper examines earnings management in state-funded Italian healthcare trusts. Italy is unique in requiring trusts to have balanced budgets by law. Small negative and positive deviations from a balanced budget had quite different consequences. The authors found no evidence of accounting manipulation when trusts posted small losses. However, trusts were found to manipulate discretionary accruals, provisions and non-operating expenses to reduce small positive deviations from zero-profit.     

The distribution of technological progress

The size distribution of the domains of US-patented technological knowledge obeys an exponential law, revealing a disproportionable concentration of progress among larger domains. Our analyses suggest that this phenomenon is explained by a combination of two factors. First, domains’ trajectories of growth have inherently different potentials. Second, differences in domains’ potentials are magnified by a mechanism—domains’ self-hybridization—endogenous to the process of knowledge growth. Our results show that in addition to being stable, the observed distribution of technological progress is likely to arise under very general conditions.     

Studying governance within the British public sector and without

Abstract

In the critical arena of public management and policy debates several schools currently try to make sense of governance structures and processes, although one has so far had the strongest impact in terms of academic and policy influence in particular in the United Kingdom: network governance.

Network governance has been associated with Stakeholder Capitalism – as represented for instance by the European (usually German) social-democratic settlement – and as the direct opposite of the New Public Management (as the epitome instead of Shareholder Capitalism). In this essay it will be argued that the alleged novelty of the reforms being currently implemented under the aegis of the ‘modernization’ or (network) governance rhetoric (by the Blair government, for instance) must be questioned, since they are the direct inheritors of the NPM tradition. Through the development of a multiparadigmatic model of ethical and organization theories it will be shown that alternatives to network governance are not only thinkable but also (institutionally) practicable.     

The Financial Resource Curse*

In this paper, we present a model of the financial resource curse (i.e., episodes of abundant access to foreign capital coupled with weak productivity growth). We study a two‐sector (i.e., tradable and non‐tradable) small open economy. The tradable sector is the engine of growth, and productivity growth is increasing with the amount of labor employed by firms in the tradable sector. A period of large capital inflows, triggered by a fall in the interest rate, is associated with a consumption boom. While the increase in tradable consumption is financed through foreign borrowing, the increase in non‐tradable consumption requires a shift of productive resources toward the non‐tradable sector at the expenses of the tradable sector. The result is stagnant productivity growth. We show that capital controls can be welfare‐enhancing and can be used as a second‐best policy tool to mitigate the misallocation of resources during an episode of financial resource curse.     

Emission permits and the dynamics of clean and dirty firms in an evolutionary competition model

Emission Trading Systems (ETSs) are today regarded as the pillar of market‐based environmental policies in many countries. This paper studies the impact of an ETS on the dynamics of the market made up of two types of firms: clean and dirty. Using an evolutionary context, we study how the share of clean firms evolves at different parameter values, such as increasing values of the permits’ price floor, and show that an ETS can have positive effects on the diffusion of the clean technology. However, numerical simulations show that under specific parameter values the opposite result may emerge with clean firms leaving the market.     

Deep Integration and Production Networks: An Empirical Analysis

This paper investigates the two‐way relationship between deep integration and production networks trade. We capture deep integration with a set of indices constructed in terms of policy areas covered in preferential trade agreements. We estimate an augmented gravity equation to investigate the impact of deep integration on production networks trade. The results show that on average, signing deeper agreements increases production networks trade between member countries by almost 12 percentage points. In addition, the impact of deep integration is higher for trade in automobile parts and information and technology products compared with textile products. To analyse whether higher levels of network trade increase the likelihood of signing deeper agreements, we follow the literature on the determinants of preferential trade agreements. The estimation results show that, after taking into account other PTA determinants, a ten percentage increase in the share of production network trade over total trade increases the depth of an agreement by approximately 6 percentage points. In addition, the probability of signing deeper agreements is higher for country pairs involved in North–South production sharing and for countries belonging to the Asia region.