Falling Wage Shares in Europe and the United States: How Important is Aggregation Bias?

This paper sheds light on the importance of aggregation bias in the analysis of wage shares developments over time and across countries. We focus on five European countries and the United States and show that the trend decline in the aggregate wage share observed in these countries over much of the 1980s and 1990s partly reflects changes in the sectoral composition of the economy. The application of a fixed-weight aggregation method changes the profile of the observed wage share in a significant way: in particular there is no longer sign of an overshooting of the wage share levels of the early-1970s. Error-correction wage equations based on the adjusted wage shares generally have a better regression fit and show long-run elasticities of real wages to unemployment that vary less across countries and are substantially lower than those obtained with observed shares.     

Property rights in conflict: wild berry-picking and the Nordic tradition of allemansrätt

Wild berries became a valuable export article in Sweden and Finland at the end of the nineteenth century. At the time, property rights over wild berries were not explicitly defined, and in both countries, proposals were made to subject the berries to the landowner. The proposals did not pass and wild berry-picking on another's land continued, as seen from today's perspective, to be available to everyone. This paper looks at the socioeconomic context of wild berry-picking, and asks whether the principle of allemansrätt – a Nordic tradition of public access to nature – played a role in why wild berries did not become private property. By focusing on the Finnish penal code debate of 1888 and the process of stabilising the property rights, the paper rejects the idea of continuity. It argues that (1) the traditional allemansrätt is debatable as a historical concept and shows how (2) the contingent political process created the conditions, and economic imagination the impetus, that wild berries were not privatised but turned into an open resource.     

Managerial perceptions of global pioneering advantage: Theoretical framework and empirical evidence in the U.S. and Korea

Managers form mental models of their business environment, and make strategic decisions based on these perceptions of reality. We study managerial perceptions of the competitive advantage gained by a pioneering firm. We expect that managers will make pioneering entry decisions based on their perceptions of pioneering advantages. Due to cross-national cultural and business environment differences, managers from different countries will employ different mental models and thus perceive the relative advantage of pioneering differently.Drawing from the literature on cultural influence on decision-making, we build a theoretical framework of perceived pioneering advantage in different cultural environments. From this framework, and from cultural differences that exist between the United States and South Korea, we derive hypotheses regarding expected cross-cultural perceptual differences. We test these hypotheses using samples of senior product managers from both countries. We find that some, but not all, of the principles of pioneering advantage empirically verified in North America are generalizable to the culturally-different South Korean business environment.     

政府公共服务的企业化改革

传统政府治理中的一个误区是忽视服务提供和服务主体之间的区别，进而错误地认为如果政府放弃了服务生产者的功能，它自然就放弃了服务提供者的角色。政府的自信甚至自负导致公共物品垄断性的直接生产模式，它所伴随的高成本，低效率，质量不尽人意和回应性的缺乏，不仅损坏了公众对政府的信任，而且无端耗费了公共资源，导致普遍的低效。     

Happiness and relational goods: well-being and interpersonal relations in the economic sphere

The present paper provides an introduction to this special issue devoted to Happiness and Relational Goods. We start by presenting a few concepts that have recently appeared in the economic literature with the aim of capturing some of the peculiarities of personalised interactions. We claim that these concepts can be subsumed fairly well under the concept of ‘relational goods’. We then review the recent empirical literature on happiness and relational goods. Finally, we briefly introduce the papers contained in this special issue by outlining their respective contributions.