The Provision of Company Benefits in the UK

Abstract:   A theoretical analysis argues that a company will provide benefits if they are worth more to the employee than income equal to the net amount it is costing the firm to provide the benefit. Because the individual is being denied choice, other things being equal he/she would prefer the income. But the firm may be able to provide a benefit‐wage package which compensates the individual because of (i) tax advantages, (ii) economies of scale in purchasing or (iii) production function advantages. The empirical work focuses on benefit provision in the UK.     

Hours Worked and Permanent Technology Shocks in Open Economies

We use Structural Vector Autoregressions to study the impact of technology improvements on hours worked in the major seven countries. While previous studies estimate the response of labor input to permanent shocks to country-level labor productivity, we consider the response of labor input to aggregate-level labor productivity. Since labor productivities do cointegrate in the G7, the estimated responses should look very similar. They do not: for each country but Germany, the responses estimated using G7 labor productivity sizeably exceed those estimated using country-level labor productivity. These results also hold in larger SVAR models.     

Sharing or gambling? On risk attitudes in social contexts

Experimental Economics - Decisions under risk are often embedded in a social context that we usually abstract from when studying decision-making in the laboratory. In contrast to that practice, our...     

Tax distortions and the case for price stability

We investigate the case for price stability in the general version of the New Keynesian (NNS) model with capital and several shocks. The model includes, in addition to the standard imperfect competition and monetary frictions, a non-trivial, endogenous tax distortion. We find that the case for perfect price stability is not significantly weakened. Optimal policy tolerates a small amount of output gap and price variability by reacting less strongly to supply and fiscal shocks in comparison to a policy that aims at perfect price stabilization.     

On the Kim and Roush Voting Procedure

We study in this paper some features of a new voting rule recently proposed by K.H. Kim and F.W. Roush. The (conjectural) optimality of this voting rule with respect to statistical manipulability by coalitions is discussed under two alternative probabilistic assumptions, namely the impartial culture condition (IC) and the impartial anonymous culture condition (IAC). We also analyze the ability of Kim and Roush procedure to fulfil the Condorcet conditions. Some representations of its Condorcet efficiency in three-alternative elections are obtained.     

60 Years of March and Simon’s Organizations: An Empirical Examination of its Impact and Influence on Subsequent Research

We provide an analytic and systematic review of the impact of March and Simon’s seminal Organizations on management research and discuss the book’s value for current research and propose future applications of it. Building on bibliometric and text‐mining approaches, our empirical analysis reveals that although Organizations was contextually based in the industrial milieu of the 1950s, its concepts have found ongoing resonance with scholars. Further, we find that much of this resonance appears to be driven by the ability of scholars in different ‘schools of thought’ to find useful insights from March and Simon’s generalized theoretical structure. However, we also observe that scholars have been selective in their usage of ideas from the book over the last 60 years. Based our analysis, we propose a particular set of future research areas, including a focus on new organizational forms and extending March and Simon’s ideas to multi‐level research, which can benefit from more holistically drawing on Organizations and connect its original ideas to address current management problems.     

The spatial organization of multinational firms

Abstract Using six years of firm‐level data covering 224 regions of the enlarged European Union, we evaluate the importance to a firm of locating its activities (production, headquarters, R&D, logistics and sales) close together. We find that, after controlling for regional characteristics, being closely located to a previous investment positively affects firm location choice. However, the impact of distance is dependent on the type of investment (production or service). The impact dies out faster for service activities. Finally, we show that a surprisingly positive effect comes from locating a new production plant close to an existing production investment, but in another country.     

The geometry of Black''s single peakedness and related conditions

By using geometry to analyze all three candidate profiles satisfying Black's single peakedness constraint, we characterize all associated election behavior. The same analysis is applied to related profile constraints where some candidate never is top-ranked, or never bottom ranked.     

Privacy intrusiveness and web audiences: Empirical evidence

The development of Internet technologies and personalized advertising has amplified public concern about privacy, but there is little empirical analysis of how firms exploit personal data. This article investigates how website performance, measured by web audience, is affected by intrusions into privacy. We analyze an original dataset of the 197 most visited websites in France. Our study shows that a high level of firm intrusiveness is associated with better economic performance. The results shows that consumers do not respond negatively to overly intrusive data requirements since intrusiveness is associated with higher website traffic, industry self-regulation may not be the most efficient regulation mechanism.