Optimal Income Taxation and Job Choice

In this paper, we study optimal income taxation when different job types exist for workers of different skills. Each job type has some feasible range of incomes from which workers choose by varying labor supply. Workers are more productive than others in the jobs that suit them best. The model combines features of the classic optimal tax literature with labor variability along the intensive margin, with the extensive‐margin approach where workers make discrete job choices and/or participation decisions. We find that first‐best maximin utility can be achieved in the second‐best, and marginal tax rates below the top can be negative or zero.     

Challenges facing international projects for entrepreneurial development in South Africa

International development projects that support entrepreneurship face a number of challenges, not least because they need to integrate different paradigms. Based on the case study of a Canadian non-governmental organisation in South Africa, this paper provides an exploratory assessment of these challenges and highlights four major factors that affect the success of such international projects: transposing a northern business model to the south; developing local roots and adapting to the local context; balancing the allocation of resources between managing the project and providing services to entrepreneurs; and aligning the cultures of the private sector and international development agencies. In practical terms, the findings provide benchmarks for the success of these projects and could help improve interventions that encourage entrepreneurship in developing countries.     

Simultaneous Public and Private Provision of Services, Asymmetric Information and Innovation

Public and private provision of a service coexist. There is asymmetric information between the government and the agency providing the public service with respect to the costs, the quality of the service and the innovation effort of the agency. We examine the optimal government design of the funding contracts to induce the agency to reveal its costs and exert high innovation effort. The optimizing behaviour of consumers and private firms generates observable information, which can be used by the government to reduce its information problem. In the optimal contracts, the informational rents of the agency increase with the level of innovation effort that the government induces from the agency. Correlation between public and the private sector costs results in a trade-off in the government's policy between inducing innovation and extracting the informational rent of the agency. To increase the redistribution inherent in the public provision of the service, the government will manipulate the expected profits of the private firms to induce higher innovation effort.     

Managerial career success in Canadian organizations: is gender a determinant?

The purpose of this research is to examine which of the following approaches - human capital, family context, socio-economic origin, work investment and reward expectations and structural factors - can eliminate the influence of gender on career success of 3,060 Canadian managers. Taken individually, these different approaches did not counter the effect of gender on career success of managers. However, the use of an overall regression model containing all the approaches countered the effect of gender on the number and speed of promotion, but not on salary and hierarchical level. Finally, the results suggest that the career success of male and female managers is predicted by different variables.     

The relationship between career plateauing,employee commitment and psychological distress: the role of organizational and supervisor support

This research examines the role played by an employee's supervisor and organization in the relationship between structural and content plateauing, affective commitment to the organization, and psychological distress. Our analyses, based on data taken from a sample of 575 hospital employees, reveal that there is a significant relationship between the two forms of plateauing and perceived supervisor support, whereas only hierarchical plateauing is related to perceived organizational support. Our results also highlight the mediating effect of perceived organizational support in the relationship between hierarchical plateauing, perceived supervisor support, and the consequences examined.     

Informal thinkering — how is it important?: Case studies of technical change processes: an industrialized–industrializing country comparison

This paper examines innovation processes or technical change-generation processes at the firm level. It emphasizes the notion that the element of technical and technological change that is a determinant of productivity growth is strongly induced by internal factors related to the firm's behavior, via investment in R&D but also, and importantly, on the basis of “informal thinkering” within plants.This research is unique in that it seeks first, to examine the pattern of technical change and its ensuing productivity growth, and second, to make a comparison between an industrialized and an industrializing country. This comparison is conducted by empirically comparing mills in the pulp and paper manufacturing sector in two countries: Canada and India. The overall analysis is based on direct observations at the mill level, face-to-face interviews and on analysis of mill documentary records.This paper highlights the importance of managing change as a continuous process. The introduction of intermittent, “step-jump” technical changes contributed little to explain the differences in performance between the mills. Much more important are (i) the continuing sequences of smaller investments in technical change, often linked to the larger step-jumps, and (ii) the existence of steady streams of changes and improvements that are unrecorded as capital expenditure.     

Non-cooperative pollution control in an inter-jurisdictional setting

This paper examines various circumstances under which decentralized pollution policies can be efficient both in federal settings and in multi-region settings with labor mobility. We consider a model in which pollution control policies are set by regional governments non-cooperatively and pollution damages are borne by the residents of all regions. We characterize the efficiency of pollution policies, and of population allocation among regions, in a variety of scenarios, including when pollution policies are enacted before interregional transfers are determined by the federal government and before migration occurs; when migration decisions are taken before policy decisions; in the absence of a central government if regional governments can make voluntary interregional transfers; when decisions over pollution control policies are followed by voluntary contributions by regions to a national public good; when regions can commit to matching the abatement efforts of each other; and when regions can commit to specific levels of abatement contingent on the emissions of other regions not exceeding some maximum level.     

ADVERTISING RESTRICTIONS, COMPETITION, AND ALCOHOL CONSUMPTION

Distilled spirits producers recently voted to eliminate their voluntary ban on broadcast advertising. The ban received public support because of the high social cost associated with alcohol consumption and the belief that advertising promotes alcohol consumption and abuse. In spite of this belief, the empirical evidence indicates that advertising has no significant effect on the market demand for distilled spirits. This evidence has led many policy economists to conclude that eliminating the ban will have no effect on alcohol consumption. The purpose of this research is to show that this conclusion is incorrect because it ignores the fact that advertising restrictions may affect industry competition as well as market demand.