The practice of collective bargaining in the private sector in Quebec (Canada): the changing ‘rules of the game’

Drawing on 45 semi‐structured interviews with union negotiators active in the Quebec private sector, this article shows that local bargaining practices, despite their plurality, have tended to change following major trends. It also reveals, more fundamentally, a redefinition of the ‘rules of the game’. The transformation and stability of these social rules, which are much more focused on the needs of employers, have tended to weaken collective bargaining as a tool for industrial democracy.     

The economics of nonprofit organisations' governance

We determine theoretically when we can expect agency problems amenable to shirking agents to arise in nonprofit organisations and derive the conditions for governance measures to remedy these. Agents' private benefits of shirking need to be considered combined with the effect of their efforts on the probabilities of being successful in fundraising and production. If this effect is large, agency problems can more easily be avoided. Sufficient conditions for governance measures to reduce agency problems are derived. The empirical literature fits a number of the results derived and shows important gaps, especially w.r.t. the role of success probabilities.     

Giving Stated Preference Respondents “Time to Think”: Results From Four Countries

Previous studies have found that contingent valuation (CV) respondents who are given overnight to reflect on a CV scenario have 30–40% lower average willingness-to-pay (WTP) than respondents who are interviewed in a single session. This “time to think” (TTT) effect could explain much of the gap between real and hypothetical WTP observed in experimental studies. Yet giving time to think is still rare in binary or multinomial discrete choice studies. We review the literature on increasing survey respondents’ opportunities to reflect on their answers and synthesize results from parallel TTT studies on private vaccine demand in four countries. Across all four countries, we find robust and consistent evidence from both raw data and multivariate models for a TTT effect: giving respondents overnight to think reduced the probability that a respondent said he or she would buy the hypothetical vaccines. Average WTP fell approximately 40%. Respondents with time to think were also more certain of their answers, and a majority said they used the opportunity to consult with their spouse or family. We conclude with a discussion of why researchers might be hesitant to adopt the TTT methodology.     

Optimal financial investments for non-concave utility functions

We prove a formula for the computation of optimal financial investments in an expected utility framework with arbitrary (not necessarily concave) utility functions. This extends classical results on optimal financial investments for strictly concave utility functions and is of importance particularly for applications of prospect theory where the utility function has a convex-concave shape.     

Does work pay in France? Monetary incentives, hours constraints, and the guaranteed minimum income

This paper uses a representative sample of individuals on France's main welfare program (the Revenu Minimum d'Insertion, or RMI) to estimate monetary incentives for employment among welfare recipients. Based on the estimated joint distribution of wages and hours potentially offered to each individual, we compute potential gains from working in a very detailed manner. Relating these gains to observed employment, we then estimate a simple structural labor supply model. We find that potential gains are almost always positive but very small on average, especially for single mothers, because of the high implicit marginal tax rates embedded in the system. Employment rates are sensitive to incentives with extensive margin elasticities for both men and women usually below one. Conditional on these elasticities, simulations indicate that existing policies devoted to reducing marginal tax rates at the bottom of the income distribution, such as the intéressement earnings top-up program, have little impact in this population due to their very limited scope. The negative income tax (Prime pour l'emploi), seems to be an exception.     

The consequences of private equity acquisitions for employees: new evidence on the impact on wages,employment and productivity

There is growing controversy on the HR consequences of private equity acquisitions, especially when the existing management team is replaced. Much of the debate thus far has centred on the use of limited panels of case studies and industry surveys. This article, in contrast, uses both in‐depth interviews with relevant stakeholders and objective company data to compare firms subject to private equity acquisitions against a control group of non‐acquired firms. Our interviews provide insights into key issues that are investigated in the subsequent empirical analysis. Our core findings are that firms subject to a specific type of private equity acquisition – institutional buyouts – are associated with job losses, lower wages and lower productivity. This evidence is consistent with the notion that this type of private equity acquisition has negative employment consequences without any corresponding improvement in productivity.     

Mergers in asymmetric Stackelberg markets

It is well known that the profitability of horizontal mergers with quantity competition is scarce. However, in an asymmetric Stackelberg market we obtain that some mergers are profitable. Our main result is that mergers among followers become profitable when the followers are inefficient enough. In this case, leaders reduce their output when followers merge and this reduction renders the merger profitable. This merger increases price and welfare is reduced.      

Investment and technological choice in a right-to-manage model

We analyze the interactions between investment and local wage bargaining in a putty-clay model where the investment decision commits the firm to a particular capital intensity. This technological precommitment is used strategically in order to manipulate the bargaining outcome. We show that this strategic behavior induces a nonmonotonic relationship between the capital and labor demands of the firm and most of its environmental parameters (e.g., the bargaining power of the union, its minimum wage requirement, the capital cost). The results we obtain in our putty-clay framework thus contradict several conclusions of the standard literature on wage bargaining and investment.     

Informal economy, wage goods and accumulation under structural adjustment theoretical reflections based on the Tanzanian experience

Economic development in sub-Saharan Africa under structuraladjustment witnessed the upsurge of informal sector development—thedevelopment of unregulated labour-intensive activities, in partexport-oriented. This paper argues that two factors played animportant role in shaping the dynamics of informal sector development:(1) the process of the relative cheapening of wage goods asa result of their importation, partly financed through foreignaid, thereby lowering unit-labour costs in labour-intensiveproduction, and (2) the processes at work of subsidising realwages by other forms of economic security as a result of multiple,diversified and spatially extended livelihood strategies. Whilethese factors undoubtedly brought a new vitality to economicdevelopment, this paper questions the long-run sustainabilityof this new trend for two reasons. One is its dependence onforeign aid to finance imports. The other is that it does notappear to propel endogenous increases in productivity by achievinggreater synergy in intersectoral linkages between agricultureand industry.