Book reviews

Book reviewed in this article: The Decline of Trade Union Organisation, P.B. Beaumont Improving Industrial Relations – the Advisory Role of ACAS, Eric Armstrong and Rosemary Lucas The State of the Unions, Barrie Sherman The Trade Unions and the Labour Party, Andrew J. Taylor New Technology at Work, Arthur Francis Dictionnaire Canadiert des Relations du Travail, Gérard Dion Socialist Enterprise: Reclaiming the Economy, Diana Gilhespy, Ken Jones, Tony Manwaring, Henry Neuburger, Adam Sharpies     

BOOK REVIEWS

THE SOCIAL ORGANISATION OF STRIKES: by Eric Batstone, Ian Boraston and Stephen Frenkel EXECUTIVE EASE AND DISEASE: by Dr. Beric Wright THE INDUSTRIAL TRIBUNALS HANDBOOK: by Bowes Egan TRADE UNIONISM UNDER COLLECTIVE BARGAINING: A Theroy based on comparisons of six countries: by H. A. Clegg INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY IN WESTERN EUROPE: A North American perspective PERSONNEL AND INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS: A MANAGERIAL APPROACH: J. B. Miner and M. G. Miner POLICY ISSUES IN CONTEMPORARY PERSONNEL AND INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS: M. G. Miner end J. B. Miner “PENSIONS AND INDUSTflIAL RELATIONS”: Harry Lucas     

Market games with differential information and infinite dimensional commodity spaces: The core

Summary We provide an alternative proof of the existence of core allocations in exchange economies with differential information and infinite dimensional commodity spaces. We also identify a critical feature of information sharing rules that ensures nonemptiness of the core. In essence, the only condition we require on the sharing rules is that profitable insider trading be prohibited. In the absence of insider trading, balancedness is guaranteed and core nonemptiness follows.I thank Dan Arce, Erik Balder, Myrna Wooders, and Nicholas Yannelis for helpful comments. This paper is a greatly revised version of my paper entitled. A Variational Problem Arising in Market Games with Differential Information, written in August of 1991.     

Decomposing Redistributive Effects of Taxes and Transfers in Australia: Annual and Lifetime Measures

This paper decomposes the redistributive effect on annual and lifetime inquality of a range of taxes and transfers in Australia, using a dynamic cohort lifetime simulation model. The redistributive effect is decomposed into vertical, horizontal and reranking effects. Horizontal inequities in the tax and transfer system are found to be negligible. The extent of reranking is greater in the lifetime than in the annual context and is affected by the equivalence scales used to adjust household incomes. If no adjustment is made to household incomes, reranking is about nine per cent of the reduction in lifetime inequality. However, if each child is counted as equivalent to one-third of an adult, reranking is found to be less than one per cent.     

Timing and Commitment of Environmental Policy,Adoption of New Technology,and Repercussions on R&;D

We investigate the interplay between environmental policy, incentives to adoptnew technology, and repercussions on R&D. We study a model where a monopolistic upstream firm engages in R&D and sells advanced abatement technology to polluting downstream firms. We consider four different timing and commitment regimes of environmental tax and permit policies: ex post taxation (or issuing permits), interim commitment to a tax rate (a quota of permits) after observing R&D success but before adoption, and finally two types of ex antecommitment before R&D activity, one with a unique tax rate (quota of permits), the other one with a menu of tax rates (permit quotas). We study the second best tax and permit policies and rank these with respect to welfare. In particular, we find that commitment to a menu of tax rate dominates all other policy regimes.     

On the timeliness of tax reform

This paper analyzes efficient government reactions to unanticipated tax avoidance. Quickly reforming tax laws to reduce the effectiveness of new tax avoidance techniques prevents widespread adoption, but indirectly encourages the rapid development of new avoidance methods if prior users are permitted to retain their tax benefits. Tax reforms that immediately prevent new avoidance mean that innovators need not fear imitation by competitors, and cannot rely on copying the innovations of others. Such an activist reform agenda diverts greater resources into tax avoidance activity, and might thereby lead to a faster rate of tax base erosion, than would a less reactive government strategy. Efficient government policy therefore entails either the retroactive elimination of tax savings, with possible associated costs, or else a deliberate pace of tax reform in response to taxpayer innovation.     

BOOK REVIEWS & NOTES

FINANCING STRIKERS John Gennard INDUSTRY AND LABOUR: Class Struggle at Work and Monopoly Captalism Andrew L Friedman THE INEQUALITY OF PAY Henry Phelps-Brown THE PSYCHOANALYSIS OF ORGANISATIONS Robert De Board PROPHECY AND PROGRESS: THE SOCIOLOGY OF INDUSTRIAL AND POST-INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY Krishan Kumar COMMON SENSE INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS Dennis D Hunt     

All politics is local: The effect of fiscal and monetary constitutions on economic policy

The rules of behavior for the monetary authorities changed in 1933 and 1947 and the Fed temporarily changed its operating procedures in 1979, but these changes did not alter the fact that the monetary authorities serve as the agent of the fiscal authorities. On the fiscal side, a shift from a centralized process to one where Congress was composed of a set of individual entrepreneurs altered the fiscal focus from the national economy to one of localized interests. This change led to a more autoregressive and deficit-prone federal budget and changed the interaction between monetary and fiscal policy. It also elevated the status of monetary policy to the extent where financial markets react to every utterance from the monetary authorities.