Kathleen Thelen. How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States, and Japan. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2004. xv + 333 pp. ISBN 0-521-83768-5, $75.00 (cloth); ISBN 0-521-54674-5, $29.99 (paper).

Kathleen Thelen has written an incredibly fascinating book thatshould be obligatory reading for anyone interested in the historyof skill formation or the evolution of institutions in general.For those working on the "varieties of capitalism," path-dependency,punctured equilibrium, or historical institutionalism, thistext should feature prominently in their work. Thelen’sgoal in this book is to discover why Germany, Britain, the UnitedStates, and Japan pursued different "paths" of skill formation.She traces the origin of each path     

Rediscovering market segmentation

In 1964, Daniel Yankelovich introduced in the pages of HBR the concept of nondemographic segmentation, by which he meant the classification of consumers according to criteria other than age, residence, income, and such. The predictive power of marketing studies based on demographics was no longer strong enough to serve as a basis for marketing strategy, he argued. Buying patterns had become far better guides to consumers' future purchases. In addition, properly constructed nondemographic segmentations could help companies determine which products to develop, which distribution channels to sell them in, how much to charge for them, and how to advertise them. But more than 40 years later, nondemographic segmentation has become just as unenlightening as demographic segmentation had been. Today, the technique is used almost exclusively to fulfill the needs of advertising, which it serves mainly by populating commercials with characters that viewers can identify with. It is true that psychographic types like "High-Tech Harry" and "Joe Six-Pack" may capture some truth about real people's lifestyles, attitudes, self-image, and aspirations. But they are no better than demographics at predicting purchase behavior. Thus they give corporate decision makers very little idea of how to keep customers or capture new ones. Now, Daniel Yankelovich returns to these pages, with consultant David Meer, to argue the case for a broad view of nondemographic segmentation. They describe the elements of a smart segmentation strategy, explaining how segmentations meant to strengthen brand identity differ from those capable of telling a company which markets it should enter and what goods to make. And they introduce their "gravity of decision spectrum", a tool that focuses on the form of consumer behavior that should be of the greatest interest to marketers--the importance that consumers place on a product or product category.     

Occupational Labour Demand and the Sources of Non‐neutral Technical Change*

This article introduces a two‐step empirical approach for examining both the nature and sources of non‐neutral technical change across multiple occupations. First, conventional labour‐demand parameter estimates and unbiased tests for neutrality are obtained in the context of a flexible cost system. The resulting input‐specific indices of technical change, unconstrained with respect to time path, facilitate subsequent evaluation of proposed sources. In our application to employment decisions of airline firms, we find labour‐saving technical change that is non‐neutral across occupations. We also document occupation‐specific responses to aircraft technology adoption, route system developments and an unprecedented range of technical change elements.

相似文献   

Explaining production inefficiency in China's agriculture using data envelopment analysis and semi-parametric bootstrapping

In this paper we examine more closely the factors associated with production inefficiency in China's agriculture. The approach we take involves a two-stage process where output efficiency scores are first estimated using data envelopment analysis, and then in the second stage, variation in the resulting efficiency scores is explained using a truncated regression model with inference based on a semi-parametric bootstrap routine. Among the results we find that a heavy industrial presence is associated with reduced agricultural production efficiency and may be an indication that externalities from the industrial process, such as air and ground water pollution, affect agricultural production. We also find evidence that counties with a large percentage of the rural labor force engaged in agriculture tend to be less efficient, and suggests that nurturing and promoting growth of non-primary agriculture may lead to more efficient use of labor resources in agriculture.     

Changing Elasticities of Labor Demand in U.S. Manufacturing

This paper provides a link between long-standing labor demand elasticity estimates in U.S. manufacturing and recent studies of wage patterns and labor demand shifts in response to technical change and international trade. We document asymmetric changes in labor demand elasticities including an absolute and relative increase in own-wage elasticity of demand for production workers. Separate estimates of substitution and scale responses imply that skill-biased technical change dominates increased product market competition as a source of the observed changes in labor demand elasticity.     

Organizational Justice and Individuals' Withdrawal: Unlocking the Influence of Emotional Exhaustion

This study examined the relationships between organizational justice and withdrawal outcomes and whether emotional exhaustion was a mediator of these linkages. Data were obtained from 869 military personnel and civil servants; using structural equation modelling techniques, we examined an integrative model that combines justice and stress research. Our findings suggest that individuals' justice perceptions are related to their psychological health. As predicted, emotional exhaustion mediated the linkages between distributive and interpersonal (but not procedural and informational) justice and individuals' withdrawal reactions. Results showed that distributive and interpersonal justice negatively related to emotional exhaustion and emotional exhaustion negatively related to organizational commitment which, in turn, negatively influenced turnover intentions. These findings were observed even when controlling for the presence of contingent‐reward behaviours provided by supervisors and individuals' psychological empowerment.     

DETAILED ESTIMATION OF WORKLIFE EXPECTANCY FOR THE MEASUREMENT OF HUMAN CAPITAL: ACCOUNTING FOR MARRIAGE AND CHILDREN

Abstract Measuring an individual's human capital at a point in time as the present actuarial value of expected net lifetime earnings has a lengthy history. Calculating such measures requires accurate estimates of worklife expectancy. Here, worklife estimates for men and women in the USA categorized by educational attainment, race, marital status, parental status and current labour force status are presented. Race has a much larger impact on the worklife expectancy of men than women. Education is associated with larger worklife differentials for women. The association between marriage and worklife expectancy is significant, but of opposite sign, for men and women: married women (men) have a lower (higher) worklife expectancy than single women (men). Parenthood is associated with a reduction in the worklife expectancy of women; the association is smaller and varies from positive for some education/marital status groups to negative for others for men.     

Dominance testing for ‘pro-poor’ growth with an application to European growth

This article introduces statistical testing procedures to evaluate ??pro-poor?? growth. Our measure of ??pro-poorness?? follows Kakwani (J Quant Econ 16(1):67?C80, 2000), Kakwani and Pernia (Asian Dev Rev 18(1):1?C16, 2000), and Son (Econ Lett 82:307?C314, 2004), who decompose the generalized Lorenz ordinates into a growth effect and an inequality effect. We derive an asymptotic distribution-free covariance matrix for the decomposed generalized Lorenz curves. Using this decomposition (and our standard errors), we test for pro-poor dominance in the growth process. We illustrate our test for the pro-poor dominance by evaluating the degree of pro-poor growth in five European countries.