COMMON PROPERTY AS AN INSTITUTIONAL RESPONSE TO ENVIRONMENTAL VARIABILITY

Relationships between the potential productivity of land and property rights generally are couched in terms of measures of central tendency or means. However, risk or variance as a measure of uncertainty also is critical in relating property rights and organizational arrangements developed within various property regimes. Meteorological and hydrological research results support the appropriateness of risk-spreading property regimes, especially in semi-arid and arid lands. Spatial diversification models indicate that common property regimes can be a rational response to environmental variability. Efforts by the public sector to privatize and fence grazing lands on the extensive margin may have limited appeal to pastoralists throughout the world .     

LABOUR MARKET FLEXIBILITY AND EMPLOYMENT ADJUSTMENT: MICRO EVIDENCE FROM UK ESTABLISHMENTS

In this paper we study how firms react to demand shocks, examininghow different aspects of flexibility shape their responses.Our main findings are: (i) very few firms choose to adjust pricein response to a demand shock; (ii) firms with more flexibilityare more likely to respond to demand shocks by adjusting employmentand hours. Our results provide a microeconomic explanation forrecent macroeconomic evidence that labour input has become moreclosely aligned to the business cycle.     

SMOKE-FREE LAWS AND EMPLOYEE TURNOVER

This study examines how smoke-free laws influence turnover among restaurant workers. The study uses a unique data set of payroll records of a franchisee of a national full-service restaurant chain operating 23 restaurants in the state of Arizona, a state where several communities have adopted smoke-free laws. Municipal smoke-free laws did not, on average, have a statistically significant effect on the probability of employee separation in the years after implementation. These results suggest that training costs associated with employee turnover would not rise for full-service restaurants in municipalities that adopt smoke-free laws. ( JEL I18, J63)