Why won't managers co-operate? Innovation and productivity in engineering

Drawing from her experience of participant-observation in an electrical engineering factory Caroline White contributes to the debate on Britain's continuing industrial problems. She concludes that the fundamental opposition of capital and labour in the capitalistproduction process explains the failure to tap the workers' reservoir of both commitment and creativity.     

Share-ownership schemes for employees – proposals and prospects

Recent statutory and other developments in the United Kingdom seem to have stimulated the introduction of share-ownership schemes for employees. This article considers the merits of such schemes, and their potential role within companies. The article also points up some weaknesses in the 1978 Finance Act, and suggests the need for caution on the part of those in industry who might contemplate the introduction of share-ownership arrangements.     

Conditional distributions of earnings,wages and hours for blacks and whites

This paper provides new evidence on the conditional distributions of earnings, wages and hours for white and black males in the University of Michigan's Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Conditional hours and ln wages are approximately normal for both races. Conditional earnings are approximately normal for blacks while earnings are well approximated for whites by the product of normal hours and log-normal wages. The distribution of this product is derived here for the first time. Treating the marginal earnings distribution as the average of the conditional distributions, we use these results to predict poverty and affluence rates in our sample.     

Unanticipated money,output, and prices in the small economy

A macroeconomic model for an open economy experiencing both domestic and international monetary disturbances is given. Expectations are assumed to be rational. Particular attention is focused on the reduced form coefficients for unanticipated domestic and foreign monetary disturbances under alternative exchange rate regimes.     

Use of the principal component method in the maximum likelihood estimation procedure of the logit model

The maximum likelihood estimates of a qualitative response market are solved by an iterative procedure. When severe multicollinearity exists among the explanatory variables, this procedure may fail to converge. In this note, using a bank-failure model, we demonstrate how the principle component method can make the iterative procedure converge when it fails to do so in the untransformed model.     

Tests for model specification in the presence of alternative hypotheses: Some further results

In Davidson and MacKinnon (1981), two of the present authors proposed a novel and very simple procedure for testing the specification of a nonlinear regression model against the evidence provided by a non-nested alternative. In this paper we extend their results in several directions. First, we relax a number of the assumptions of the previous paper; we admit the possibility that the nonlinear regression functions may depend on lagged dependent variables, and we do not require that the error terms be normally distributed. Second, we show how the earlier procedure may straightforwardly be generalized to the case where the two non-nested models involve different transformations of the dependent variable. Finally, we propose a simple procedure for testing non-nested linear regression models which have endogenous variables on the right-hand side, and have therefore been estimated by two-stage least squares.     

The Relation Among Targets' R&D Activities, Acquirers' Returns, and In-Process R&D in the US

Abstract:  Using a sample of 129 mergers and acquisitions (M&As) in the US between publicly traded acquirers and targets in research and development (R&D) intensive industries over the period of 1994-2004 and a size- and industry-matched sample, we examine the relation among targets' R&D activities, the probability of acquirers' writing-off in-process R&D (IPRD), and acquirers' returns around the time of M&A announcements. We find that firms acquiring targets with higher R&D investments tend to write off some of the acquired R&D assets upon the completion of the M&As. We also find that the median cumulative abnormal return during the three days around M&A announcements for acquirers with subsequent IPRD write-offs is −2.73% while the return for acquirers without IPRD write-offs is −0.60%. This suggests that acquirers' stock returns around M&A announcements are much lower when investors expect acquirers to expense IPRD. The results are consistent with our conjecture that acquirers tend to write-off IPRD when they acquire overvalued targets. We also find that IPRD write-offs do not increase earnings or stock returns of acquirers after M&As, which is inconsistent with an earnings management hypothesis.     

Strengthening the weak link in strategic executive development: Integrating individual development and global business strategy

The global business environment of the 1990s provides both challenge and opportunity to human resource development to become an integral player in helping implement business strategy. The results of two best practice studies suggest that some leading firms such as 3M and Motorola are doing just that. At these companies current strategic business issues are the drivers of flexible and opportunistic executive development activities. Naturally occurring on-the-job experiences are consciously utilized in such a way that helping executives to develop becomes an integral part of conducting business. The implications of linking executive development to business strategy for practice and for future research are discussed. © 1995 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

The effect of zoning on land value

Two types of zoning are identified: externality zoning, which is designed to achieve a Pareto efficient pattern of land use, and fiscal zoning, which is designed to accomplish some other objective. (The latter, for instance, may be aimed at minimizing the tax rate in a community.) The paper shows that it is not in general possible using a priori theory to predict the sign (positive or negative) of the effect of either of these forms of zoning on aggregate land value in a community. It is shown, however, that under plausible assumption it can be argued that zoning as currently practiced in many U. S. communities probably has the effect of lowering aggregate land values in the communities doing the zoning.