Community gardens as food producing units∗

This article discusses the nature and functioning of community gardens in Ciskei, KwaZulu and KwaNdebele, arguing that these units have often been neglected by agricultural officers. It shows that these units, being indigenous and acceptable to the people, are indeed producing food and also display a great deal of local expertise, to be acknowledged and developed by agencies.     

Greasing the Wheels of Trade: A Profile of the Dutch Transaction Sector***

How many resources does a nation spend on transactions costs to ‘grease the wheels of trade’? To examine this question the Dutch economy is used as a case study. The Netherlands are known as a nation of traders and this image was derived in the seventeenth century from successes in long distance trade, shipping and financial innovations. Despite its historical background the trading sector has never been adequately measured. In this paper, we present a first attempt in measuring and describing the Dutch transaction sector. Measurement by means of occupational data points out that approximately 25% of Dutch workers is employed in transaction jobs, and 29% if one includes transport tasks. We make the case that traditional industrial sector categories overestimate the true transaction character of an economy. Traditional ‘trade’ sectors employed 13% of the workers in 1807 and 39 percent in 1998, but these figures conceal the fact that all organizations employ jobs which have transformation and transaction tasks. A counterfactual exercise suggests that the growth of the transaction sector share in employment over two centuries was not 200% but 42%.     

The congruence of actual and perceived person–organization fit

Person–organization fit (P–O fit) is an important and often-researched variable, which sheds light on the way employees perceive their relationship with the organization they work for. In this study, two different assessments of P–O fit are compared, i.e. actual fit (an indirect measurement based on the comparison of organizational and personal values or characteristics) and perceived fit (a direct measurement involving employees' own estimations of their P–O fit). The four quadrants of the Competing Values Framework (CVF) are used to investigate which values have the strongest influence on employees' fit perceptions. In a polynomial regression analysis, the predictive power of the indirect fit measure on the direct fit measure is tested in a sample of two organizations (hospital n1 = 222; chemical plant n2 = 550). The results show that of the four CVF quadrants human relations values have the strongest predictive power for employees' fit perceptions and rational goal values contribute least. In the discussion section, special attention will be paid to the measurement of individual values as the results raise important methodological questions.     

Modes of Managing Morality: A Descriptive Model of Strategies for Managing Ethics

As an alternative to attempts to impose models of personal moral development (e.g. Kohlberg) upon organisations we propose an evolutionary model of managing ethics in organisations. The Modes of Managing Morality Model that we suggest, is based on an analysis that explains why business organisations tend to move from less complex modes of managing ethics to more complex modes thereof. Furthermore, it also identifies the dominant ethics management strategies that characterise each of the stages. It is done in a way that avoids claiming that the more advanced modes of managing ethics necessarily represent moral development by business organisations. Instead of claiming the organisations develop morally, we claim that organisations move through an evolutionary process of improving their sophistication in managing ethical performance.     

Counterfactual distributions with sample selection adjustments: Econometric theory and an application to the Netherlands

Several recent papers use the quantile regression decomposition method of Machado and Mata [Machado, J.A.F. and Mata, J. (2005). Counterfactual decomposition of changes in wage distributions using quantile regression, Journal of Applied Econometrics, 20, 445–65.] to analyze the gender gap across log wage distributions. In this paper, we prove that this procedure yields consistent and asymptotically normal estimates of the quantiles of the counterfactual distribution that it is designed to simulate. Since employment rates often differ substantially by gender, sample selection is potentially a serious issue for such studies. To address this issue, we extend the Machado–Mata technique to account for selection. We illustrate our approach to adjusting for sample selection by analyzing the gender log wage gap for full-time workers in the Netherlands.     

Using a Structural‐Form Model to Analyze the Impact of Home Ownership on Unemployment Duration

It is often found that the impact of home ownership on the hazard rate for leaving unemployment is positive, indicating that home ownership helps workers to leave unemployment for a paid job. However, little emphasis has been given to how such a relationship can be explained. This paper estimates a structural‐form model that allows for self‐selection into home ownership and the risk of home owners losing their property during a spell of unemployment. We find a substantial amount of self‐selection using indirect inference based on a mixed proportional hazards‐rate model and find virtually no impact of home ownership on individual labor market performance. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

FLEXIBLE RETIREMENT

Flexible retirement – that is, the opportunity to choose one's own personal retirement age – is a hedge against pension risk and provides insurance to workers facing health or productivity shocks. Flexible retirement and flexible pension schemes are in practice closely linked because of imperfect capital markets and institutional restrictions. I discuss three necessary conditions to provide insurance through flexible retirement. First, it should be possible to adjust the pension starting date at limited cost. This condition is gradually being fulfilled, as many countries are moving toward more actuarially neutral pension schemes. Second, individuals should be willing to adjust their labor supply in case of a wealth shock. This condition seems largely fulfilled, although the available empirical evidence suggests that the ‘standard retirement age’ is at least as important as the income effect. Third, the labor market should be able to deal with flexible individual retirement decisions. This condition is gaining importance, but has not yet received much attention in the literature. Institutions often hamper employment past the ‘standard retirement age’. Moreover, the hiring rates of older workers are low and their unemployment duration is high. Institutional reforms facilitating flexible retirement opportunities are desirable from an insurance perspective.     

The effect of search frictions on wages

We aim to test whether the degree of informational search frictions in the labor market has a negative effect on wages. In a range of equilibrium search models of the labor market, this effect is predicted to be negative. Nevertheless, this has never been tested. We perform tests with matched worker–firm data. The worker data are informative on individual wages and labor market transitions, and this allows for estimation of the degree of search frictions. The firm data are informative on labor productivity. This allows us to investigate how the mean difference between labor productivity and wages in a market depends on the degree of frictions and other determinants, and to assess the quantitative relevance of frictions for wages.