Does trade unionism have a future in Russia?

Official Russian trade unions seek to maintain their traditional privileges and resources, while alternative unions have remained marginal and relatively ineffectual. The result is that workers are not effectively represented by either type of union. This argument is supported by extensive original research, examining the recent history of Russian unionism.     

Labor matching behavior and trade adjustment

This paper develops a model of costly trade and team production to examine the matching behavior of skilled workers in an open economy. Trade liberalization changes the supply of skilled production teams available for hire, even when firm production techniques remain fixed. As trade barriers fall, some workers choose to quit small firms in order to accept less skill intensive jobs at large firms that participate in foreign markets. Changes in worker matching behavior can explain several stylized features of firm-level adjustments to trade, with effects that are not limited to firms on the margin of exit or exporting. Trade is shown to rationalize the matching behavior of workers, leading to aggregate gains in productivity and lower prices. Openness benefits workers employed at exporting firms, however the likelihood of gaining from trade is not necessarily increasing in skill. Wages in the open economy are tied to both worker skill and job type.     

Investigation of the Greek – Turkish Military Spending Relation

In this paper, the relation between the Greek and Turkish military spending is investigated, examining first the identification of its exact statistical form, and second, a diachronically constant ratio between the two magnitudes. Using annual nominal data over the period from 1949 to 2008, the stationarity of the series is tested by performing a sequential Augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF) and a Kwiatkowski?CPhillips?CSchmidt?CShin (KPSS) unit root test. Both the long?Crun equilibrium relation among the series of the Greek and Turkish military spending and their diachronically constant ratio are estimated following a Johansen cointegration analysis.     

Factors influencing the uptake of a mechatronics curriculum initiative in five Australian secondary schools

While the ready-made Lego™ Robotics kits are popular in schools and are used by students at both primary and secondary year levels, using the Picaxe microcontroller (chip) to create simple electronic devices, including robotic devices is less popular. The latter imposes an additional challenge as a result of the need to construct the universal board with the chip in it—a challenge embraced in the cross-disciplinary mechatronics program in this study. This paper reports on how teachers from five Australian secondary schools put into practice technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPCK) developed from expert-led workshops and explores factors (intrinsic and extrinsic) that influenced the implementation. The results show that different strategies were adopted by the schools in implementing the programs. While teacher attitude played an important role in influencing the program’s success, being able to identify where the program sits within the curriculum and planning around timetable and facility constraints were also important factors to consider. The research indicated that teachers’ TPCK was most challenged in non-obvious areas such as diagnosing where faulty soldering joints were.     

The effect of management commitment to service quality on frontline employees' affective and performance outcomes: an empirical investigation of the New Zealand public healthcare sector

• Very little attention has been given to understand the antecedents of service recovery performance in a public healthcare setting. In this study, a cross-sectional survey investigates a model of service recovery performance. Frontline hospital employees completed a self-administered questionnaire on how factors characterising management commitment to service quality (MCSQ) affect their service recovery efforts. The results suggest the influence of MCSQ is mediated by frontline employees' affective commitment to their hospital. The research advances understanding of frontline service recovery performance in a public healthcare setting and the findings indicate that public healthcare managers can take actions on a number of fronts to assist progress towards the achievement of frontline service recovery excellence.

Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Continuity properties of the private core

Let be a sequence of differential information economies, converging to a limit differential information economy (written as ). Denote by the set of all ε-private core allocations, ε ≥ 0 (for ε=0 we get the private core of Yannelis (1991), denoted by ). Under appropriate conditions, we prove the following stability results

AnnaLee Saxenian. The New Argonauts: Regional Advantage in a Global Economy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006. 424 pp. ISBN 0-674-02201-7, $27.95 (paper).

This book considers a fascinating aspect of new technology businessesand the network economies that support their development. Essentially,it is about the movement of technically skilled professionalswho have been drawn into the commercial environment of SiliconValley and their subsequent technology transfer relationshipwith the part of the world from which they were originally drawn.To use the phraseology of the book, this is about "brain circulation"as opposed to     

Election predictions as martingales: an arbitrage approach

The more volatile the prediction the closer to an even call