Job search and academic achievement

The paper develops a structural model for the labor market behavior of students entering the labor market. We explicitly model the trade-off between devoting effort to studying and to job search. Furthermore, we allow for on-the-job search. The model is estimated using a unique data set of individuals who completed undergraduate education in the Netherlands between 1995 and 2001. Our estimation results show that labor market returns of high grades are low. Wage increases between jobs are explained by labor market friction rather than returns of early work experience. Our results indicate that a 1 percentage point decrease in the unemployment rate increases wage offers on average by 3 percent, but that the amount of job search effort is not very sensitive to business cycle fluctuations. Policy simulations show that study effort and hence academic achievement are much more sensitive to financial incentives than job search effort and labor market outcomes.     

Future sustainability and images

Ambitions for sustainable development invariably lead to pondering the future, because sustainability issues require a future oriented transition of existing, unsustainable systems and practices. Working towards transition requires thorough experimentation with a broad range of innovation projects. However, in the public arena, many such projects are met with stereotypical images, which influence their innovative potential in often unpredictable ways. What is the role of multiple images in complex sustainable development issues, and what are promising approaches to deal with their associated problems? We report current insights from selected cases from TransForum, a large-scale innovation programme toward transition of Dutch agriculture. Our preliminary results show that that simple images can cause a disregard of complexity and that a negative societal image can stifle a project's innovative potential. Images need to me monitored and managed to increase the future potential of innovation projects. Visualisation techniques may foster taking complexity into account in an innovation project. Furthermore, increasing image awareness can help a project to adapt more effectively to existing societal discourses and the images embedded in them. Finally, fostering effective transition requires the creation of new, enticing, images, that do justice to the ambition for transition.     

The EEC is now a Customs Union

The Customs Union among the member states of the European Economic Community has come into force on July 1, 1968. Its main effect has been the eradication of the ultimate 15 per cent that had remained of the original internal rales of import duty on industrial products between member states and the complete application of the joint tariff of the Community to industrial imports coming from outside the area. Farm produce, which is not subject to import duty but to “Abschöpfungen” (levies) will in future be governed by a unified system of import control. Recently, it has not always been a true community spirit that ruled the fate of the EEC because, in many countries, national selfishness seems to recover ground. This renders more indispensable than ever for the Community a successful completion of the Customs Union, which is thought to be the first big step towards closer political cooperation in Europe.     

The effects of political fragmentation on investments: A case study of watermill construction in medieval Ponthieu, France

The link between political fragmentation and economic development has been frequently discussed in the pre-modern growth literature, yet, it has mostly been treated in a general manner. This paper provides a specific and detailed case study of the patterns of watermill construction in the northern French region of Ponthieu, France. The results suggest that political fragmentation in the juridical context of medieval Europe positively affected investments in machinery. I concentrate on the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a period characterized by political fragmentation and weak central authority, and provide original evidence that watermill construction was significantly more intense in areas where authority was fragmented and landholding was divided between numerous landlords. I suggest that the mechanism behind the phenomenon is that in the institutional context of medieval Europe political fragmentation reduced the territorial extent of lords' jurisdiction and therefore, of their monopoly over watermill construction. This, in return, promoted the construction of neighboring watermills, thereby affecting the number of watermills and the level of competition in the milling industry.     

Opportunity,fair process and relationship value: career development as a driver of proactive work behaviour

In line with recent findings from organisational justice theory, we hypothesised that employee proactive behaviour and careerist orientation is predicted by the interplay of perceived favourability of career development opportunities, the perceived fairness of the procedures used to decide them, and employee organisational commitment. Employees (N = 325) of a large financial services organisation responded to a self‐completion questionnaire. As predicted, when career development opportunities were viewed unfavourably, perceived procedural justice was significantly and positively related to individual proactive behaviour and significantly and negatively related to careerist orientation but only when organisational commitment was high. It appears that high procedural justice may only ‘offset’ the negative effects of unfavourable career development opportunities when employees identify with, and are committed to, their organisation. Further support is presented for a relational, rather than instrumental, model of procedural justice when reflecting on employee reactions to their employers’ policies and decision‐making. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.     

Testing for Distortions in Performance Measures: An Application to Residual Income‐Based Measures like Economic Value Added

Distorted performance measures in compensation contracts elicit suboptimal behavioral responses that may even prove to be dysfunctional (gaming). This paper applies the empirical test developed by Courty and Marschke (Review of Economics and Statistics, 90, 428–441) to detect whether the widely used class of residual income‐based performance measures—such as economic value added (EVA)—is distorted, leading to unintended agent behavior. The paper uses a difference‐in‐differences approach to account for changes in economic circumstances and the self‐selection of firms using EVA. Our findings indicate that EVA is a distorted performance measure that elicits the gaming response.