Ethnicity and Job Tenure in a Segmented Labour Market: The Case for New Zealand

The labour market experience of 1984–1992 turned on end the prevailing notion of 'personal security' within New Zealand, founded as it was upon guaranteed employment (and full-employment in the aggregate). This study examines, in a systematic fashion and within a dynamic setting, why job tenure varied consistently over this period between two ethnic groups, the first comprised of European/Pakeha workers, and the second New Zealand Maori and Pacific Islanders.
Econometric analyses of total, voluntary and involuntary separations indicate that the low relative job security of Maori/Pacific Islanders cannot be attributed solely to differential attributes that, on the one hand represent such individuals' gender/age distribution, qualifications, and conditions of employment, and on the other provide controls for the relative competitive positions of their employers. Rather, other factors, such as worker segmentation, are likely operative within the New Zealand labour market, conditions that, on net, work to the disadvantage of non-Europeans.     

The sunk-cost effect and optimal two-part pricing

This paper examines how the sunk-cost effect on consumers’ purchasing behavior may reset the optimal two-part pricing. It shows that the sunk-cost effect of a membership fee provides the firm an incentive to raise the unit price and/or to increase the market coverage by charging a lower membership fee.     

Environmental Regulations Under Simple Negligence or Strict Liability

We use negligence and strict liability as the basis for environmentalregulations and show that, when jurisdictions compete for firms that engagein environmentally risky behaviour, strict liability implements the sociallyoptimal outcome while simple negligence does not, even if the jurisdictionsfully cooperate in setting standards of care. Consequently, we argue that,even if jurisdictions delegate standard setting to a central authority, likein the European Union, this would not implement the socially optimaloutcome. We also demonstrate that harmonization of environmental regulationsmakes more sense if strict liability is used rather than simple negligence.     

Understanding nonprofit social enterprises: Lessons from Austrian economics

There is a large literature on the role of nonprofit enterprises within society. This literature typically views nonprofits as either substitutes for government enterprises or complements to, and even necessary extensions of, these government efforts. While this literature has improved our understanding of the role and importance of nonprofit social enterprises, how social entrepreneurs identify opportunities, allocate resources, and adapt to changing circumstances has been relatively underexplored. Efforts to fill this gap within Austrian economics have categorized nonprofits and identified the limitations of calculation and coordination in the nonprofit sector and the characteristics of successful and unsuccessful nonprofit enterprises. This strand of literature focuses on the differences between economic calculation in for-profit enterprises and decision making in nonprofit enterprises. We argue that another meaningful aspect to determining the ability of nonprofit enterprises to coordinate plans is whether they are structured more like private enterprises and public enterprises. These insights from Austrian economics shed light on why some nonprofits are more effective than others at achieving social goals.

     

Entrepreneurs drive community revival in the wake of disaster

This article responds to the points raised by Daniel P. Aldrich, Emily Chamlee-Wright, and Lori Peek in the symposium on our book Community Revival in the Wake of Disaster: Lessons in Local Entrepreneurship (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).     

Integrating innovation skills in an introductory engineering design-build course

Modern engineering curricula have started to emphasize design, mostly in the form of design-build experiences. Apart from instilling important problem-solving skills, such pedagogical frameworks address the critical social skill aspects of engineering education due to their team-based, project-based nature. However, it is required of the twenty-first century engineer to be not only technically competent and socially and culturally aware, but also innovative and entrepreneurial. This paper discusses a reformulated first-year engineering course at the University of Pretoria, which was adopted 6 years ago to better address the required innovation skills of engineering students. This design-build-innovate course employs a unique creative problem-solving strategy in designing and building solutions to set technological problems. The students further investigate the provisional patenting of their design concepts. Mini business plans are developed and the students participate in a university- and in a national innovation competition. This introductory engineering course has been successful as measured by overwhelmingly positive student feedback, several provisional patents, and a number of small start-up companies that emanated from the students’ work.     

Exchange rate and foreign price effects on UK inflation

The issue of incomplete pass-through from exchange rate changes to domestic inflation has received considerable attention. Most models try to account for this by using a variety of assumptions about the costs of changing prices. These suggest complete pass-through, but only after the possible elapse of a considerable delay. In contrast, in this article Graeme Chamberlin and Brian Henry provide evidence that exchange rate effects on inflation may be non-linear and, more specifically, subject to thresholds. Their tentative results suggest this may be important in describing price-setting behaviour in the UK.     

Financial Social Accounting Matrix: a useful tool for understanding the macro-financial linkages of an economy

This article extends the traditional methodology of social accounting by building a Financial Social Accounting Matrix (FSAM) and a corresponding Satellite Asset–Liability Matrix for Spain. In so doing, the difficulties that typically arise in consolidating data from the National Bureau of Statistics (INE) and the Bank of Spain (BdE) were overcome. This is the first FSAM for the Spanish economy and might provide new tools to deepen the analysis of the financial sector and of the determinants of financial vulnerability associated with interactions with other sectors of the economy. As a novel contribution to the literature, this paper incorporated a structural path analysis grounded in the FSAM multiplier to identify the principal paths through which financial shocks are transmitted.