Modeling Mexican agricultural production

Results of time series tests (including unit root and deterministic and stochastic cointegration tests) imply that a mixture of differenced and cointegrated model specifications are warranted for econometric models of Mexican agricultural supplies and input demands. Test results are sensitive to choice of functional form and the set of regressors. For example, share equations should be estimated using differenced data, but output supply and input demand equations generally should not. Generalized Leontief and quadratic functional forms are preferred over the translog. Symmetry and curvature of a restricted profit function are rejected. Short-run output supplies and input demands are generally inelastic. First version received: February 1998/Final version received: November 1998     

Budget deficits, capital flows, and long-term interest rates: Cointegration findings for the united kingdom

This study uses cointegration tools to decide whether a long-term relationship exists between budget deficits and nominal long-term interest rates in the United Kingdom, as previous regression estimates have implicitly assumed. Based on maximum eigenvalue, trace, and likelihood ratio tests, as well as two cointegrating vectors, this study finds that a long-term positive relationship exists between the nominal 20-year government bond rate and the central government budget deficit.     

Determining market power exertion between buyers and sellers

Empirical techniques commonly used in industrial organization to measure market power exertion typically assume imperfectly competitive behaviour by firms on only one side of the market. Firms on the other side are assumed to be perfectly competitive. In this paper we extend traditional NEIO methods by developing a method to estimate market power exertion when firms on both sides have potential market power. Using Monte Carlo simulations, we find that the model correctly estimates market power exercised by firms on either or both sides of a market and also correctly estimates firms' technology parameters. When applied to the US leaf tobacco market, findings indicate that cigarette manufacturers exert some monopsony power in purchasing leaf tobacco while producers, organized as a cartel, exhibit no countervailing monopoly market power. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Research on unionized grievance procedures: Management issues and recommendations

This paper critically reviews research on unionized grievance procedures to identify key issues for human resource/labor relations executives and to provide recommendations for dealing with these issues. The review covers psychological, sociological, economics, and industrial relations‐based research. Specifically, the authors recommend that senior human resource/labor relations executives and their staffs conceptualize the grievance procedure as a high involvement human resource practice, distinguish between the presence and use of grievance procedures, use grievance data to determine whether grievants or their supervisors suffer management reprisals, assess supervisors' dominant orientation toward employees, determine employee perceptions of grievance procedure fairness, and monitor the effects of work force composition and supervisor selection on grievance activity. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Regulatory competition and forbearance: Evidence from the life insurance industry

Regulatory separation theory indicates that a system with multiple regulators leads to less forbearance and limits producer gains while a model of banking regulation developed by Dell’Ariccia and Marquez (2006) predicts the opposite. Fragmented regulation of the US life insurance industry provides an especially rich environment for testing the effects of regulatory competition. We find positive relations between regulatory competition and profitability measures for this industry, which is consistent with the Dell’Ariccia and Marquez model. Our results have practical implications for the debate over federal versus state regulation of insurance and financial services in the US.     

Real Estate Brokerage Earnings: The Role of Choice of Compensation Scheme

One of the more interesting characteristics about the real estate brokerage industry is that workers are presented with a choice regarding the sort of compensation scheme under which they want to work. An overwhelming majority of workers choose what is referred to as a commission split scheme in which the salesperson splits any commission that they earn with a supervising broker that they generally are required to work under. In this case the firm provides office support and administrative services to the salesperson and, in return, the salesperson must split any commissions that they earn with the firm. Under the alternative compensation scheme, workers pay a substantial up-front “desk” fee to the firm and then are allowed to keep 100% of any commissions that they earn. In spite of the large volume of research on the determinants of real estate salesperson earnings, to our knowledge there are no studies analyzing the choice of compensation scheme and its impact on the earnings of real estate salespersons. This study uses data from the 2001 and 2003 Membership Surveys of the National Association of REALTORs® to analyze the impact of the real estate salespersons’ choice of compensation scheme on their earnings.     

Discussion of: “Flattening the organization: the effect of organizational reporting structure on budgeting effectiveness”

This paper is a discussion of Hannan et al. (Rev Account Stud, 2010), wherein subordinate-participants are endowed with private information, and superior-participants can potentially affect budget requests through their ability to reject them. Their findings are of interest to research on both the design of budgeting systems and span of control. I discuss the relevance of HRT to these literatures and comment on their implementation and experimental design. Also, I offer suggestions for future research, one of which is to explicitly introduce monitoring into experiments on span of control.     

Voluntary agreements for environmental performance improvement: perspectives on the chemical industry's responsible care programme

Responsible Care is perhaps the best known voluntary agreement programme world-wide. It is an initiative of the chemical industry. Under it, participating companies publicly commit themselves to seek continuous improvement in their performance in all aspects of safety, health, protection of the environment, product safety, distribution, emergency response and relations with the public. Under the initiative, company commitments are generally made by Chief Executive Officers (CEOs), who then are responsible for ensuring actions by their company under the initiative, and for reporting back to on progress to the national and/or regional chemical industry association running Responsible Care programmes. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.