Against the trend: trade union growth in Northern Ireland

This paper analyses the dimensions and determinants of trade union growth in Northern Ireland. Aggregate membership, mostly in Great Britain-based unions, has grown more rapidly than the UK average in recent decades, largely due to a massive shift of employment into public sector services, where trade union density is higher.     

Knowledge management practice in Scottish law firms

Law firms, as part of the professional services sector, are increasingly engaged in strategic thinking about business growth and development. The management of partners, staff and their knowledge is critical to this strategic development. This study of a sample of Scottish law firms engaged in commercial and corporate law finds that organisations are at different stages of progress, and that change has focused more on technical solutions than on organisational and HR issues. Based on evidence from partners and management, and on attitude data from salaried staff, the article suggests that, although the traditional professional firm's interest in building and leveraging its human capital is still present, the underlying social and cultural processes involving motivation, sharing of experiences, coaching and mentoring are relatively underdeveloped. The implications for HR strategy and practice, and for the role of the HR manager, are considered.     

Demographic Change and Entrepreneurial Occupations: African Americans in Northern Cities

A bstract . In the early twentieth century, the African American (AA) populations of northern cities grew rapidly, whereas the foreign-born white populations of these cities stabilized. Stanley Lieberson has hypothesized that, in these cities, the resulting shifts in the ethnic composition negatively affected the economic prospects of AAs. The present study shows that the transformation of business enterprise among AAs in the urban North during 1900-1930 is consistent with this hypothesis. Census data and evidence from historical case studies suggest that the above demographic changes affected two trends: 1) a decline in the concentration of AAs in entrepreneurial occupations which served whites and 2) an increase in their concentration in entrepreneurial occupations serving other AAs.     

Fundraising and campaigning: Working towards greater effectiveness

This paper provides a benchmark for campaigning charities who intend, or already are, moving towards greater campaigning and fundraising effectiveness through partnership between these two key functions. Over the last four years Shelter's Fundraising and Communications Divisions have forged a new and successful partnership between income generation and campaigning. The Shelter case study is distilled down into a list of key questions and some anecdotes to illustrate some of the processes gone through, including mistakes made, which it is hoped will mean others do not have to re-invent the wheel completely and will sec a route to greater campaigning and fundraising effectiveness.     

WHAT DRIVES TIME VARIATION IN EMERGING MARKET SEGMENTATION?

I use American Depositary Receipts and underlying stocks to test the level of integration of the stock markets of Argentina, Chile, and Mexico into the world capital market in the post‐liberalization period. I find that these markets experience time‐varying integration and are, on average, still not highly internationally integrated. Furthermore, there is no distinct trend toward higher levels of integration. In fact, the markets of Argentina and Mexico have become increasingly segmented over the post‐liberalization period. I find that financial and economic openness, stock market liquidity and volatility, and the state of the currency market significantly affect the level of segmentation.     

Some economic aspects of industrial democracy*

Laurence Hunter argues that although there has been some reference to economic questions in the debate on industrial democracy, they have not received the attention that they deserve. Rather than to provide answers, the purpose of his article is to highlight the importance of the questions, in the hope that others might be encouraged to accept the presented challenge.     

The Effect of Eliminating Direct Payments to Farmers on Land Values

This study looks at the effects of the complete elimination of direct government payments to farmers on the U.S. economy in general and the effect on land values in particular. The analytical approach used consists of a computable general equilibrium model composed of 14 producing sectors, 14 consuming sectors, six household categories classified by income, and a government. The results suggest that, with a complete elimination of direct government payments to farmers, there will be a reduction in output by all producing sectors of 0.18% or about $14.5 billion, a decline in output in the agricultural sectors of 4.39% or about $12.0 billion, a fall in the consumption of goods and services by about 0.11% or $4.15 billion, a fall in total utility by 0.47% or $22.0 billion, and a net reduction in expenditures for the government of $13.4 billion. Land values will be adversely affected, falling an average of 14%.     

Feedforward versus recurrent neural networks for forecasting monthly japanese yen exchange rates

Neural networks are a relatively new computer artificial intelligence method which attempt to mimic the brain's problem solving process and can be used for predicting nonlinear economic time series. Neural networks are used to look for patterns in data, learn these patterns, and then classify new patterns and make forecasts. Feedforward neural networks pass the data forward from input to output, while recurrent networks have a feedback loop where data can be fed back into the input at some point before it is fed forward again for further processing and final output. Some have argued that since time series data may have autocorrelation or time dependence, the recurrent neural network models which take advantage of time dependence may be useful. Feedforward and recurrent neural networks are used for comparison in forecasting the Japanese yen/US dollar exchange rate. A traditional ARIMA model is used as a benchmark for comparison with the neural network models.Results for out of sample show that the feedforward model is relatively accurate in forecasting both price levels and price direction, despite being quite simple and easy to use. However, the recurrent network forecast performance was lower than that of the feedforward model. This may be because feed forward models must pass the data from back to forward as well as forward to back, and can sometimes become confused or unstable. Both the feedforward and recurrent models performed better than the ARIMA benchmark model.The author wish to thank the reviewers Drs. Kraft and Radford for their helpful comments.