Are Good Industrial Relations Good for the Economy?

Abstract. Recent US microeconomic analysis indicates that good industrial relations might improve firm performance. Of late, it has also been claimed that the benefits of industrial relations quality – proxied inversely by a strikes variable – could also extend to the macroeconomy. Using cross-country data, we find that, independent of other labor market institutions, a lower strike volume is associated with lower unemployment. Although there is a separate line of causation running from unemployment to strikes, our analysis suggests that this is not dominant. That said, support for the notion that macro performance owes something to good industrial relations is, however, weakened once we formally control for strike endogeneity.     

Capital flows to emerging market economies: A brave new world?

We examine the determinants of net private capital inflows to emerging market economies (EMEs) since 2002. Our main findings are: First, growth and interest rate differentials between EMEs and advanced economies and global risk appetite are statistically and economically important determinants of net private capital inflows. Second, there have been significant changes in the behavior of net inflows from the period before the recent global financial crisis to the post-crisis period, especially for portfolio inflows, partly explained by the greater sensitivity of such flows to interest rate differentials since the crisis. Third, capital controls introduced in recent years do appear to have discouraged both total and portfolio net inflows. Finally, we find positive effects of unconventional U.S. monetary policy on EME inflows, especially portfolio inflows. Even so, U.S. unconventional policy is one among several important factors influencing flows.     

小议现场管理及其在企业中的应用

本文主要指出当前生产管理中存在问题的解决途径,并且对现场管理作了应用研究。     

Trade and revelation of information

We consider an economy with asymmetric information and two types of agents, fully informed and uninformed. Uninformed agents update their information observing equilibrium prices and the equilibrium levels of other agents’ excess demand. We show that, for a generic set of economies, there are rational expectations equilibria which are partially revealing on an open, dense set of signals of positive Lebesgue measure, provided that the dimension of the signal space is sufficiently larger than the dimension of the commodity space.     

The stained China miracle: Corruption,regulation, and firm performance

Regional corruptness in China has a positive effect on the profitability of private firms, but not that of state-owned firms. A natural experiment of exogenous trade policy change suggests that corruption may help private firms circumvent government regulation.