Employers' hiring practices,employment protection,and costly search: A vacancy-level analysis

An employer with a vacancy may respond to high search costs by lowering hiring requirements. While such an adjustment increases the employer's chances of filling the vacancy, it also more likely results in a match that terminates when the match is hit by match-specific productivity shocks. Drawing on a novel Slovenian vacancy dataset, we find that employers who are searching to fill temporary positions are more likely to hire underqualified workers when search costs are high. We find that search costs are taken into consideration when employers are searching to fill permanent positions in some specifications but not all. These findings suggest that for employers who are searching to fill a permanent position, the benefits of lowering hiring requirements when search costs are high are likely outweighed by: a) high firing costs if an under-qualified worker is hired on a permanent contract or b) the costs of undertaking a new search later if an under-qualified worker is hired on a temporary contract. These are novel findings about the employers' hiring practices in the presence of employment protection laws and costly search.     

Detecting changes in a multivariate renewal process

Some recent extreme value asymptotics for multivariate renewal processes are used to derive an asymptotic changepoint test. This test is proven to be consistent in the multivariate framework where we assume that at most one change (AMOC) occurrs in any of the component renewal processes. Since the actual covariance structure is often unknown, we also suggest an appropriate estimate. This research was partially supported by an Auckland University Research Grant and by a travel grant of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.     

Evolution of Female Labor Force Participation in the United States: 1967 to 2003

This paper describes the changes in the employment choices of prime working-age women from 1967 to 2003. A neoclassical labor market participation model is presented and applied to data from the March Current Population Surveys (CPS). The paper provides a new insight: It highlights the different patterns of labor force participation by family-status categories. Also, the paper introduces the average annual unemployment rate at the state level as an explanatory variable to capture the demand-side constraint of the labor market. The results of the paper support the finding that since 1990, the increase in the participation of women in the labor force has slowed from previous decades.An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the 59th International Atlantic Economic Conference, London, England, March 9–13, 2005.     

Earnings Reported under IFRS Improve the Prediction of Future Cash Flows? Evidence from European Banks

This paper examines the relative costs and benefits of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) adoption in the European Union by testing the ability of earnings computed under IFRS to predict future cash flows. The study considers the contribution of net income, comprehensive income and other comprehensive income to the usefulness of earnings to predict cash flows, and it compares IFRS with domestic Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP). Evidence from a sample of Continental European banks shows that IFRS improve the ability of net income to predict future cash flows. Comprehensive income, too, provides relevant information to predict future cash flows, although with a measurement error which is higher than that in net income for greater lags of time. In our interpretation, these findings are consistent with unrealised gains and losses recognised in other comprehensive income being more transitory and volatile in nature. Overall, our results are relevant to academics and standard setters debating the merits of IFRS adoption and to those who use financial statements and adopt reported earnings to form expectations about future cash flows.     

Race: China’s Question and Problem

Race poses a challenge to the ruling Communist Party of China. Contemporary news reports about China’s relationship with various African states warn of a reestablishment of 19th century colonial relations, with China standing in the shoes of England or France. When indictments of neo-colonialism are promoted, China recalls a historical brotherhood with African states under the banner of Third World solidarity. This paper attempts to shed light on both sides of this argument, demonstrating that for China, the issue of race in foreign relations poses both a question of motives and a problem of national identity.     

Capital injection,restructuring targets and personnel management: The case of Japanese regional banks

A case study of the Japanese bank recapitalization by Hoshi and Kashyap (2005) identified a bank that overstated the progress of required personnel downsizing by shifting employees to subsidiaries. This paper asks if the recapitalization program had a design flaw. We focus on regional banks with a unique panel dataset of 81 banking groups that allows us to observe the employment levels of subsidiaries, in addition to those of parent banks, over fiscal 1994–2006. We estimate a labor-demand equation with sluggish adjustment to compare the employment patterns of public capital recipients and other banks. The result indicates that the shuffling of personnel to subsidiaries was a common response among banks that received large capital injections. Our finding highlights a tension between a reconstruction program and labor law when a country has a tight law on dismissal.     

Changes in the banking system and small business lending

Since small businesses typically rely on small banks as their primary source of financing, there are concerns that the wave of bank consolidation of the 1990s may have reduced the availability of loans to small businesses in the US. Using a panel of state-level banking information over 1993–2002, this paper shows that the Riegle–Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act of 1994 reduced the number of small banks, but not the amount of small business lending. We also show that small banks are participating less in small business lending. These results imply that the bank-lending channel of the monetary transmission mechanism became less important in the US in the late 1990s as a result of more firms borrowing from large banks that are less sensitive to monetary shocks.     

Bargaining Over Environmental Budgets: A Political Economy Model with Application to French Water Policy

In decentralized water management with earmarked budgets financed by user taxes and distributed back in the form of subsidies, net gains are often heterogeneous across user categories. This paper explores the role of negotiation over budget allocation and coalition formation in water boards, to provide an explanation for such user-specific gaps between tax payments and subsidies. We propose a bargaining model to represent the sequential nature of the negotiation process in water districts, in which stakeholder representatives may bargain upon a fraction of the budget only. The structural model of budget shares estimated from the data on French Water Agencies performs well as compared with reduced-form estimation. Empirical results confirm the two-stage bargaining process and provide evidence for systematic net gains from the system for agricultural water users.