ORGANIZATIONAL AND OCCUPATIONAL COMMITMENT: KNOWLEDGE WORKERS IN LARGE CORPORATIONS*

Previous discussion of knowledge work and workers tends to overlook the importance of contextual knowledge in shaping the organizational form of knowledge workers who are employees in large corporations. This paper proposes a model to understand the way knowledge base and organizational form are related to the work commitment, effort and job satisfaction of knowledge workers. The model is derived from (1) a critical examination of the market model of knowledge work organization, and (2) the results of empirical research conducted in two large corporations. We argue that contextual knowledge is important in the relationships between the corporation and knowledge workers. A dualistic model and an enclave organizational form are suggested to examine the relationships between the commitment, work effort and job satisfaction of knowledge workers. We noted from our empirical cases that enclave‐like work teams enhanced the expertise and job autonomy of knowledge workers vis‐à‐vis management. These work teams together with the performance‐based pay system, however, led to unmet job expectations including limited employee influence over decision‐making and careers, and communication gaps with senior management. Under these circumstances, and in contrast to the impact of occupational commitment, organizational commitment did not contribute to work effort. The study highlights the importance of management’s strategy in shaping the organizational form of knowledge work. The paper concludes by noting general implications of our study for the management of expertise and for further research.     

International Spillover Effects and Monetary Policy Activism

This paper examines how the preferences of a large economy’s central bank affect the trade‐off between output and inflation volatility faced by the central bank of a small open economy by analyzing the impact of a global cost‐push shock. We demonstrate that under the assumption of producer currency pricing, the trade‐off faced by the small open economy is likely to worsen as the foreign central bank becomes more focused on output stabilization relative to inflation stabilization; but the opposite is true in the case of local currency pricing.     

A Welfare-Based Analysis of International Monetary Policy Spillovers at the Zero Lower Bound

We study the welfare effects of international monetary policy spillovers at the zero lower bound, focusing on the effects of forward guidance in a large economy (“foreign”) on its smaller trading partner (“home”) in scenarios motivated by the global financial crisis. We find that foreign forward guidance has an overall prosper-thy-neighbor effect on the home economy as long as it increases foreign welfare. This finding holds under alternative assumptions about exchange rate pass-through or the degree of international financial integration. However, foreign forward guidance may worsen the trade-off between the stabilization objectives of home monetary policy.     

MODELLING SOCIAL ENTERPRISES

The majority of research concentrates exclusively on the objectives of governments, profit entities or non‐profit organizations, while a significant number of organizations are hybrids. One form of these hybrids is the social enterprise. This paper theoretically describes social enterprises taking into consideration their main aims. Based on the ‘earned income’ school of thought, the principal‐agent theory and considering the nature of social enterprises’ activities we propose the objective functions of their owners (principals) and managers (agents). The maximization problem of the social enterprise is defined as the weighted average of the utilities of two groups of stakeholders who have an influence on the degree of the realization of the social mission and business orientations. We point out the direction which social enterprises should follow in order to obtain the highest value of their objective functions. The desired state for social enterprises should be one in which they reinvest all surpluses in the process of their mission realization and their profit is slightly higher than the required level by the principal's contract.     

An Inflation‐Predicting Measure of the Output Gap in the Euro Area

Using a small Bayesian dynamic factor model of the euro area, we estimate the deviations of output from its trend that are consistent with the behavior of inflation. We label these deviations the output gap. In order to pin down the features of the model, we evaluate the accuracy of real‐time inflation forecasts from different model specifications. The version that forecasts inflation best implies that after the 2011 sovereign debt crisis, the output gap in the euro area has been much larger than the official estimates. Versions featuring a secular stagnation‐like slowdown in trend growth, and hence a small output gap after 2011, do not adequately capture the inflation developments.     

FAVORITISM AND REFEREE BIAS IN EUROPEAN SOCCER: EVIDENCE FROM THE SPANISH LEAGUE AND THE UEFA CHAMPIONS LEAGUE

In this paper, we test for, and find evidence of, referee bias in favor of home teams in European football using minute‐by‐minute analysis to control for within‐game events. The context for the analysis is Spain's Primera Liga and the Union of European Football Association (UEFA) Champions League. We find that the award of sanctions by Spanish referees in the Champions League are not significantly different to those of the referees from other countries and as such are subject to the same sources of bias. In Primera Liga matches where the crowd is separated from the pitch by running tracks, we find that the probability of the award of a yellow card to the home team is higher and that of the away team is lower compared to matches played at stadia without running tracks. Similar results are found in the Champions League, where efforts are made to hire “neutral” referees. Referee behavior is also influenced by the size of the crowd in attendance. (JEL D8, J2)     

Employees' Desire to Join or Leave a Union: Evidence from Poland

This research note provides an empirical analysis of the factors related to Polish employees' desire to join and leave a union. Our regression analysis, based on a sample of 298 unionized and 338 nonunionized employees, shows that the desire to join a union is positively associated with career prospects and negatively with company commitment, while the desire to leave a union is positively associated with one's intention to leave the company.     

Hotelling–Downs Competition with Free Entry When Voters Have an Option to Contest

Osborne shows that for almost all distributions of voters’ preferences, a pure strategy Nash equilibrium does not exist in the classical Hotelling–Downs model of electoral competition with free entry. We show that equilibrium is generically possible if in addition one allows voters an option to announce their candidacy to compete side‐by‐side with office‐seeking players. The model studied in this paper renders Osborne and the celebrated citizen‐candidate model à la Osborne and Slivinski as two extreme cases. We characterize the equilibrium set with two central questions: (i) can there be equilibria where only voters contest? and (ii) are equilibria with contesting office‐seeking players possible? We also show that in our general setting, extremists are typically voter‐candidates so that in every two‐party contest, office‐seeking politicians stay out of competition.     

How to Solve the Price Puzzle? A Meta‐Analysis

The short‐run increase in prices following an unexpected tightening of monetary policy constitutes a puzzle frequently reported in empirical studies. Yet the puzzle is easy to explain away when all published models are quantitatively reviewed. We collect and examine about 1,000 point estimates of impulse responses from 70 articles that use vector autoregressions to study monetary transmission in various countries. We find that the puzzle is created by model misspecifications: especially by the omission of commodity prices, neglect of potential output, and reliance on recursive identification. Our results also suggest that the strength of monetary policy depends on the country’s openness, phase of the economic cycle, and degree of central bank independence.