Product Market Competition and Human Resource Practices in the Retail Food Sector

In the wake of Wal‐Mart and other mass merchandisers’ entry into food retailing, the nature of competition in the industry has changed radically. Using longitudinal data on workers and firms to construct measures of compensation and churning for traditional food retailers, this paper examines how these measures change in response to mass merchandiser entry. While there is considerable heterogeneity across retail food establishments, human resource practices are persistent even in the face of new external competition.     

The Effects of Reallocating General Revenue Assistance among the Australian States*

The Australian government distributes about 4 per cent of GDP to the State governments in the form of general revenue assistance. The distribution formula, which favours the less populous States, is a source of resentment in Victoria and NSW. We use two general equilibrium models to analyze the regional employment, output and efficiency effects of proposed changes in the formula     

Temporary Layoffs and Unemployment in Canada

The importance of temporary layoffs in measured unemployment has not been solidly established empirically. Clark and Summers (1 979) maintain that these separations account for only a small fraction of U.S. unemployment. Administrative data analyzed in this paper show that temporay layoffs are an important feature of the Canadian labor market. Approximately 35 per cent of the variation in the Canadian unemployment rate over time can be accounted for by changes in temporary layoffs and about 45 per cent by variations in all temporary employment separations.     

Leveraging FDA Health Claims

Although past research has investigated different aspects of various health claims, relatively little effort has been directed toward synthesizing the reasons why some Food and Drug Administration (FDA) health claims are more successful than others. After outlining two necessary conditions for a health claim's success, currently approved FDA health claims are examined to explain both the diet–health relationship and its effect on the widespread awareness and adoption of the claim. Understanding what makes health claims successful provides useful nutrition education and product‐labeling lessons for policy makers in all countries.     

Concentrating on Governance

This paper develops a novel trade‐off view of corporate governance. Using a model that integrates agency costs and bargaining benefits of management‐friendly provisions, we identify the economic determinants of the resulting trade‐offs for shareholder value. Consistent with the theory, our empirical analysis shows that provisions that allow managers to delay takeovers have significant bargaining effects and a positive relation with shareholder value in concentrated industries. By contrast, non‐delay provisions have an unambiguously negative relation with value, particularly in concentrated industries. Our analysis suggests that there are governance trade‐offs for shareholders and that industry concentration is an important determinant of their severity.     

Withering Government Spending Multipliers

The empirical literature has documented a weakening of the consumption and output responses to an increase in government spending during the last 30 years. We show that a New Keynesian model in which real government spending is observed with measurement errors can account for the reduction in the size of government spending multipliers. The model implies—consistent with empirical evidence presented by Ilzetzki, Mendoza, and Vegh (2010)—that the evolution of monetary policy and greater globalization (increasing international trade and decreasing capital controls) are key factors in this development.     

Banking on the Boom,Tripped by the Bust: Banks and the World War I Agricultural Price Shock

How do banks respond to asset booms? This paper examines (i) how U.S. banks responded to the World War I farmland boom; (ii) the impact of regulation; and (iii) how bank closures exacerbated the postwar bust. The boom encouraged new bank formation and balance sheet expansion (especially by new banks). Deposit insurance amplified the impact of rising crop prices on bank portfolios, while higher minimum capital requirements dampened the effects. Banks that responded most aggressively to the asset boom had a higher probability of closing in the bust, and counties with more bank closures experienced larger declines in land prices.     

Testing Commitment Models of Monetary Policy: Evidence from OECD Economies

Inflation in many Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries was low in the 1960s, rose for a time before peaking in the 1970s or early 1980s, and then fell back to initial levels. This paper shows that a simple time inconsistency model of monetary policy does not explain OECD inflation outcomes, except in the United States. The hypothesis that time inconsistency mattered only in earlier decades fits the data no better than the baseline model. We find some, albeit limited support for a model in which inflation spills over from the United States into other countries as a result of exchange rate targeting.     

The Relevance of a Choice of Auction Format in a Competitive Environment

We examine the relevance of an auction format in a competitive environment by comparing uniform and discriminatory price auctions with many bidders in a private values setting. We show that if the number of objects for sale is small relative to the number of bidders, then all equilibria of both auctions are approximately efficient and lead to approximately the same revenue. When the number of objects for sale is proportional to the number of bidders, then the particulars of the auction format matter. All equilibria of the uniform auction are efficient, while all of the equilibria of the discriminatory auction are inefficient. The relative revenue rankings of the auction formats can go in either direction, depending on the specifics of the environment. These conclusions regarding the efficiency and revenue ranking are in contrast to the previous literature, which focused on the case of independent information across agents.