Teamworking: a new dynamic in the pursuit of management control

This article examines the introduction of teamworking in the pharmaceutical industry. It was found that the organisation of work contained a mix of benefits and costs. The balance between the two was not random; employees' response was influenced by and connected to prior experiences and expectations, management's business strategies and approach to industrial relations and HRM. The article argues that there was a new dynamic, but one cast within the familiar terrain of management seeking to maintain control and generate consent.     

Issues for Implementing Phased Retirement in Defined Benefit Plans

Abstract

U.S. society is aging. The nature of work has changed from work that requires physical strength to work based on knowledge. As a result, workers are beginning to phase into retirement rather than going directly from full-time work to full retirement. From a retirement income perspective, many final-average-pay defined benefit plans have features that make phased retirement difficult at best and detrimental at worst. U.S. pension law and regulations present barriers to phased retirement if the phased retiree wants to receive a portion of available pension benefits during phased retirement.

This paper examines private sector options to encourage phased retirement and to eliminate the disincentives that currently affect defined benefit plans. It offers alternative calculations of final average pay that do not penalize the part-time worker. It also demonstrates that the plan’s early retirement reduction and late retirement increase can be set to maintain actuarial equity throughout phased retirement. The paper presents benefit calculations with equal actuarial values for various payout patterns.

The paper discusses the coordination between phased retirement and subsidized early retirement. Finally, the paper notes some of the changes in ERISA that will be needed to facilitate phased retirement in defined benefit plans, especially for participants who want to receive pension distributions while working part time.     

“Skewness and Stock Option Prices”, Hans Gerber and Bruno Landry,July 1997

We determine the optimal amount of life insurance for a household of two wage earners. We consider the simple case of exponential utility, thereby removing wealth as a factor in buying life insurance, while retaining the relationship among life insurance, income, and the probability of dying and thus losing that income. For insurance purchased via a single premium or premium payable continuously, we explicitly determine the optimal death benefit. We show that if the premium is determined to target a specific probability of loss per policy, then the rates of consumption are identical under single premium or continuously payable premium. Thus, not only is equivalence of consumption achieved for the households under the two premium schemes, it is also obtained for the insurance company in the sense of equivalence of loss probabilities.     

Policies for the development of knowledge-intensive local production systems

Starting from the empirical literature concerning the analysisof industrial districts, this paper focuses on the importanceof industrial policies in supporting the development and consolidationof local production systems. Here, institutions and marketsare envisaged as equally important for long-term performance.The objective is to propose a conceptual framework for the formulationof public policies that places organisational learning at thecentre of interest.     

Overtime Work and Overtime Compensation in Germany

Sharing the available stock of work more fairly is a popular concern in the public policy debate. One policy proposal is to reduce overtime work in order to allow the employment of more people. This paper suggests that such a concept faces major problems. Using Germany as a case study, it is shown that the group of workers with the highest risks of becoming unemployed, namely the unskilled, also exhibit low levels of overtime work. Those who work overtime, namely the skilled, face excess demand on the labour market. Since skilled and unskilled workers are largely complements in production, a general reduction in overtime will lead to less production and hence also to a decline in the level of unskilled employment. The paper provides empirical support for this line of argument. It is also shown that paid overtime work has lost relative importance over time.     

Orthogonalized factors and systematic risk decomposition

In the context of linear multi-factor models, this study proposes an egalitarian, optimal and unique procedure to find orthogonalized factors, which also facilitates the decomposition of the coefficient of determination. Importantly, the new risk factors may diverge significantly from the original ones. The decomposition of risk allows one to explicitly examine the impact of individual factors on the return variation of risky assets, which provides discriminative power for factor selection. The procedure is experimentally robust even for small samples. Empirically we find that even though, on average, approximately eighty (sixty-five) percent of style (industry) portfolios’ volatility is explained by the market and size factors, other factors such as value, momentum and contrarian still play an important role for certain portfolios. The components of systematic risk, while dynamic over time, generally exhibit negative correlation between market, on one side, and size, value, momentum and contrarian, on the other side.