Oligopsony/oligopoly power and factor market performance

This paper is concerned with the economic performance of factor markets in an oligopsony/ oligopoly setting. Firm arid industry indexes are developed to measure factor market price distortions caused by exerted oligopsony/oligopoly power. These measures indicate that the elasticity of output demand, the elasticity of input supply, and the input and output conjectural elasticities determine the degree of non-competitive performance in factor markets. It is also shown that under special conditions the firm index equals the Lerner index and the industry index equals the Herfindahl-Hirschman index.     

The publishing performance of U.S. economics departments in industrial economics

The publication records (1980–1986) of U.S. Ph.D.-granting economics departments are used to rank departments in industrial economics. Princeton, Cal Tech, Harvard, Yale, and Northwestern demonstrate the strongest and most consistent publishing performances. Also examined are the departmental publication records in each of the 16 subfields of industrial economics and the publication records of the leading individual researchers. The results indicate that the overall reputation of a department does not always reflect faculty strength in industrial economics.     

Brewing Wars of Attrition for Profit (and Concentration)

Although research on industry structure, conduct, and performance has been important there are concerns that empirical applications inappropriately pool data from different industries and ignore the contributions of game theory. We avoid these concerns by investigating a single industry, U.S. brewing, in a simultaneous system derived from a game theoretic model. In spite of rising concentration in brewing, profits remained low because of a continuing war of attrition. We develop a measure of the likelihood of “war” and find that the type of game being played, as well as structure and conduct variables, is an important determinant of industry performance.      

Taxation and skills investment in frictional labor markets

This paper examines the effects of wage taxation and corporate income taxation on training investment in frictional labor markets. Because of labor market frictions, the wage structure is compressed and workers do not capture the entire return from their skills. As a result, both firms and workers have incentives to support part of the costs of training investments. The analysis shows that when decisions to invest in training are made by firms and workers acting cooperatively, a wage tax increases the level of investment in skills whereas a corporate income tax decreases it. In this case, the introduction of a small wage tax unambiguously increases efficiency. The effects of both types of taxes on training are reversed when investment decisions are taken by firms alone. In any case, a corporate income tax is not neutral with respect to decisions to invest in skills even if the full cost of investment is deducted from taxable income in the period when it is incurred and the tax system provides full loss offset.     

Parental Leave: An Important Employee Right,But an Organizational Challenge

While parental leave is considered an important right for employees, its application in different work environments is not always straightforward. It is worthwhile to study the implementation in the workplace of the parental leave policy introduced in Québec, especially since this policy has unique characteristics not found anywhere else in North America. We chose to carry out our study in a metropolitan police service. Our results, both quantitative and qualitative, outline significant differences between the perception of all types of parental leave by respondents who have already taken it up and those who have not yet done so. Analysis of these differences brings to light the fact that formal support is not enough: management needs to make sure that employees really feel supported by their work environment when they taking up leave and that they do not feel that they have to pay for it in terms of career opportunities or advancement.