Women, Power and Trade Union Government in the UK

This paper addresses the under-explored relationship between women's structures and union democracy and argues that women's structural progress is mediated by an enduring gendered oligarchy and an associated struggle to access power resources. It provides, first, an analysis over time of women's structures in UK unions, and second, a case-study analysis of the Manufacturing, Science and Finance (MSF) trade union. The analysis over time demonstrates women's progress in achieving positional power, but conceals the complexity of the way different resources are used to constrain and enable women trade unionists.     

Stimulating high–tech venture creation

This paper explores whether policy makers can successfully encourage high–tech venture creation. We outline some of the policy interventions that have been used to stimulate new venture creation. We then present case evidence of how a new high–tech industrial district emerged in Dublin, focussing on the role of various policy interventions. We conclude by arguing that a range of appropriately timed policy interventions can be pivotal in the development of internationally competitive high–tech new ventures. However the case suggests that it was a combination of sector level and direct firm level interventions that stimulated and facilitated the emergence of a cohort of high–tech new ventures.     

Individualism and collectivism revisited: a study of black and minority ethnic women

This article seeks to add discussion of the intersection of gender and ethnicity to the debates on individualism and collectivism. In doing so, it challenges the prevailing view, in these debates, of the rise of individualism and the decline in collectivism. Through a study of black and minority ethnic women trade unionists, it shows how a differentiated workforce, rather than leading to individualism at work, may contribute to union renewal and inspire more creative forms of collectivism.     

The relative influence of price and non-price factors on short-term retail deposit quantities?

This study explores how price and non-price factors influence change in the quantity of short-term retail deposits held by depository institutions. The analysis is undertaken for a sample of UK building societies over 23 years using a disaggregated data set with a two-stage econometric procedure involving system estimators in a panel framework using seemingly unrelated regression, generalised method of moments and an ordinary least-squares fixed effects estimators to control for contemporaneous correlation and endogeneity concerns. Price factors examined include the policy or base rate and retail deposit interest rates set by individual building societies and non-price factors including the branch network and the number of deposit accounts offered by individual building societies. The cost of funds, one non-price factor and occurrence of mergers are consistently significant influences of retail deposit quantities. We conclude risk assessment of retail deposit quantity and monetary policy transmission would benefit from considering both price and non-price factors, rather than only price factors.     

Transforming union women: the role of women trade union officials in union renewal

The article investigates the nature of the increasing involvement of women in the decision-making structures of the fifth largest UK union through a study of senior women union officials. It is argued that senior union women, operating within a feminist paradigm, balance both transformational and status quo objectives in working towards union survival and renewal.     

Equilibrium participation in public goods allocations

We consider a notion of voluntary participation for mechanism design in public goods economies in which mechanisms select public goods allocations and individuals then choose whether or not to submit their requested transfer to the central planner. The set of allocations that are robust to non-participation is shown to be sub-optimal in a wide variety of environments and may shrink to the endowment as the economy is replicated. When agents become small as the economy becomes large, any non-trivial mechanism suffers from non-participation when agents cannot be coerced to contribute.     

Can the traditional Asian US dollar peg exchange rate regime be extended to include the Japanese yen?

Using daily data for a select set of four Asian exchange rates, namely the Hong Kong dollar, the Singapore dollar, the Taiwan dollar and the Thailand baht, from October 1985 to October 2002, we apply principal components analysis and the O-GARCH model to describe the evolution and persistence in the correlations over time. We also estimate 2-, 3- and 4-variable multivariate GARCH models, without imposing the assumption of constant correlations, to investigate volatility interaction amongst the currencies. To allow for fat tails in the distributions of exchange rate changes, we use the multivariate student-t distribution in maximising our log-likelihood functions. Our results indicate the possibility of designing an Asian exchange rate system involving a number of the region's currencies.     

THE CAUSES OF VOLATILITY IN A SMALL,INTERNATIONALLY INTEGRATED STOCK MARKET: IRELAND,JULY 1975–JUNE 1994

I examine the causes of conditional volatility in a small, internationally integrated stock market using the Irish stock market as an example. I relate Irish stock market conditional volatility to British stock market conditional volatility and business cycle variables from July 1975 to May 1994. Exchange rate volatility is a more significant determinant of volatility in a small, internationally integrated stock market than is interest rate volatility. It follows that a potential benefit of membership in the European Monetary System may be reduced stock market volatility in the smaller member countries.