Balancing Work and Family Life during the Life Course

This paper discusses how work and family obligations can be better reconciled in EU countries by adopting a life-course perspective. It stresses that longer and deeper involvement in paid employment allows people to exploit their longer life to reconcile the two ambitions of, first, investing in the next generation as a parent and, second, pursuing a fulfilling career in paid work. Greater flexibility of working time over the life course requires more individual responsibility for financing leave. Moreover, rather than shielding older insiders through employment protection, labor-market institutions should enable parents of young children to easily enter and remain in the labor market. Finally, more activating social assistance and in-work benefits should replace passive income support for breadwinners. This paper is a revised draft of a paper prepared for high-level expert conference on the Social Policy Agenda for the European Union on October 28/29 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The author thanks Evert Jan van Asselt, Peter Cuyvers, Henk Don, Bas Jacobs, Ruud de Mooij, Wouter Roorda, Martijn de Wildt and two anonymous referees for helpful comments on earlier drafts, and Peter Cuyvers, Laura Thissen, and Wouter Roorda for research assistance.     

The Policy Challenge with Floating Exchange Rates: Turkey’s Recent Experience

This paper evaluates the developments in the Turkish economy in light of the Central Bank of Turkey’s (CBT) policies during a recent period of floating exchange rate system (March 2001–July 2003). It is found that the CBT was effective in containing volatility and reducing the average inflation rate while there was a strong recovery of output. However, there are accumulated risks in the economy. Particularly, the extreme appreciation of the Turkish lira during this period and the record level of real interest rates give the impression that the current state of the economy is fragile. Unless the government accelerates the structural reform process and pursues sound fiscal policies to reduce the public sector borrowing requirement and the debt ratio, an adverse shock to the system may trigger a reversal of fortune.     

Asymmetric Effect of Currency Union for Developing Countries

The large effect of currency union on trade volume has been well documented by Rose (2000). However, the effect of currency union on trade balance has hardly been previously reported. In this study, the effect of currency union is found to differ substantially across imports and exports when a developing country trade with developed country that anchors the currency. To ensure that the asymmetric effect does not come from the specific nature of countries that have adopted a common currency or endogeneity of currency union, we test the same hypothesis using nominal exchange rate volatility and real exchange rate level.     

A Theoretical Inefficiency in the International Marketing of Tradable Global Warming Emission Permits

When the disutility of global pollution is measured in units of a numeraire good that is polluting in consumption, the marginal rates of substitution in consumption are generally weighted differently in each countrys calculation of marginal damages. In that case, it is inefficient to control global warming by tradable emission permits, which in theory trade at a unique international equilibrium price. This conclusion is derived from a model of Shibata (1996) in which consumption is pervasively polluting in global warming gases. Shibata dubiously based the inefficiency he discovered on the reciprocal external damages of global warming emissions rather than on the nullibicity he posed for a non-polluting numeraire good.JEL Classification Numbers: F02, Q4, Q25     

Safeguarding Jobs? Acquisition FDI and Employment Dynamics in U.K. Manufacturing

This paper applies a difference-in-differences methodology based on matched firms to isolate the direct employment effect of recent acquisition FDI in U.K. manufacturing. Our analysis indicates that acquisition FDI has led to a reduction in the inefficiency with which labour had been used, but this was not associated, on average, with any significant downsizing. However, by allowing for heterogeneity in the causal effect of foreign take-overs, we uncover detrimental employment effects amongst larger take-over targets, and beneficial impacts amongst smaller ones. JEL no. F23, J23     

The Disciplinary Effect of the Single Market on Swedish Firms

In the 1980s it became increasingly clear that the European Community market was still segmented by national borders because of non-tariff barriers to trade. A major objective of the Single Market Program in 1992 was to remove these barriers, thereby enforcing intra-union competition. In this paper, a panel of Swedish firm-level data is used to evaluate whether domestic market power has been curtailed as a consequence of the SMP and of the Swedish membership in the European Union in 1995. Evidence of increased competition emerges, as price-cost margins have declined in industries with high non-tariff barriers prior to 1992. JEL Classification Numbers: F15, L11, C33     

Micromultinationals: Some Preliminary Evidence on an Emergent ‘Star’ of the International Entrepreneurship Field

This paper provides some preliminary evidence on the behaviour of the micromultinational, an emergent player in the international entrepreneurship field. Using survey data from the Scottish Council for Development and Industry, it found that mMNEs originate from a mixture of high and low technology sectors and employ Foreign Direct Investment as well as international contractual approaches in servicing their foreign target markets. It also concluded that micromultinationals overseas market selection decisions were mainly influenced by market- and knowledge-seeking factors rather than considerations of psychic proximity. The implications of these summary findings for policy, theory and future research are discussed in the paper.     

Assessing Industrial Buyer Preferences: Using the Swait-Louviere Test to Test the Key Informant Assumption

When using professional buyers to study an organizations buying behavior an important consideration is whether their preferences reflect those of the organization. Since this is a key informant problem, the present article focuses on the issue of the degree to which key informants can be used to provide insights into their own organizations preferences. We conduct a direct test of the key informant assumption using the Swait-Louviere test. In this test preferences from a choice experiment using actual buyers, and from market decisions made by the organization, are estimated separately, then jointly in multinomial logit models. We found that buyers experimental preferences were similar to estimates obtained from the market decisions. Buyers preferences were closer to the intuitive preferences of the organizations top executives than the estimates based on past market decisions, although a model based on the combined data outperformed either. We discuss the implications of these results for industrial buying research.This revised version was published online in May 2005 with a corrected cover date.     

Contracting Under Endogenous Risk

Agents make decisions by trading off cost, return and risk. The literature, however, does not consider the impact of risk on action choice. We show that this tradeoff has important implications for the firm. First, the firm may provide no insurance in the salary. Since the agents action choice will determine her risk, the salary cannot compensate her for it. Second, the firm may not be able to design an incentive scheme to implement particularly risky actions. Finally, the firm may not be able to design a scheme in which the agent splits her effort across multiple tasks. This is particularly problematic for tasks that are technological substitutes.     

Leaders,Values, and Organizational Climate: Examining Leadership Strategies for Establishing an Organizational Climate Regarding Ethics

This paper examines the critical role that organizational leaders play in establishing a values based climate. We discuss seven mechanisms by which leaders convey the importance of ethical values to members, and establish the expectations regarding ethical conduct that become engrained in the organizations climate. We also suggest that leaders at different organizational levels rely on different mechanisms to transmit values and expectations. These mechanisms then influence members practices and expectations, further increase the salience of ethical values and result in the shared perceptions that form the organizations climate. The paper is organized in three parts. Part onebegins with a brief discussion of climates regarding ethics and the critical role of values. Part two provides discussion on the mechanisms by which leaders and members transmit values and create climates related to ethics. Part three provides a discussion of these concepts with implications for theory, research, and practice.