THE BUS INDUSTRY: FRANCHISE AND THE LOSS OF FREEDOM

Political pressure exists for the bus industry to be brought under local authority control by means of 'Quality Contracts.'These would take away from management the freedom for marketing, and especially for marketing by price, that was returned to them by the 'deregulation' of 1985. The proposed franchises would return the industry to the 'bad old days' and prevent its continued improvement through market forces from taking place. The Department of Transport considered the idea of franchises in 1985, but concluded that it would merely lead to monopoly power.     

Gender and Piece Rates, Commissions, and Bonuses

Previous work shows that establishments with higher proportions of women are more likely to use piece rates but that individual women are less likely to receive performance pay. We present a model in which lower expected tenure and labor force attachment are positively associated with piece rates but are negatively associated with other forms of performance pay. Analysis of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) confirms that women are more likely to be paid piece rates and simultaneously less likely to be paid commissions and bonuses.     

Intertemporal Substitution and Terms-of-Trade Shocks

The paper examines the relationship between transitory terms‐of‐trade shocks and private saving. Using a model allowing for nonseparability between the consumption of tradables and nontradables, the paper estimates the intertemporal elasticity of substitution while accounting for the intratemporal elasticity of substitution between the consumption of tradables and nontradables. Empirical analysis of data for five industrial countries indicates that in response to transitory terms‐of‐trade shocks, intertemporal substitution of consumption and intratemporal substitution of consumption between tradables and nontradables both have large effects on private saving.     

Identifying “best” applicants in recruiting using data envelopment analysis

Selecting the most promising candidates to fill an open position can be a difficult task when there are many applicants. Each applicant achieves certain performance levels in various categories and the resulting information can be overwhelming. We demonstrate how data envelopment analysis (DEA) can be used as a fair screening and sorting tool to support the candidate selection and decision-making process. Each applicant is viewed as an entity with multiple achievements. Without any a priori preference or information on the multiple achievements, DEA identifies the non-dominated solutions, which, in our case, represent the “best” candidates. A DEA-aided recruiting process was developed that (1) determines the performance levels of the “best” candidates relative to other applicants; (2) evaluates the degree of excellence of “best” candidates’ performance; (3) forms consistent tradeoff information on multiple recruiting criteria among search committee members, and, then, (4) clusters the applicants.     

TAX COMPETITION

In the modern world, capital enterprise and skilled labour are increasingly mobile, and naturally attracted to countries with low taxes. Indeed tax competition can be healthy, and far preferable to a 'tax collectors' cartel.' The right of the fiscally oppressed to move themselves and their capital elsewhere is a great defender of economic freedom.     

Optimal immigration, education and growth in the long run

The paper extends Manning's model on education and balanced growth to include labour immigration. Each immigration unit is assumed to consist of one skilled worker and some unskilled members. The optimal immigration policy which maximizes the per capita steady-state consumption of the host country is derived. We show that optimal immigration policy can reduce the steady-state skilled labour ratio. More interesting still, contrary to the widespread belief that immigration of skilled workers hurts local skilled workers, it is the unskilled local workers whose interests are threatened by optimal immigration policy.     

The Post-Issue Operating Performance of IPO Firms

This article investigates the change in operating performance of firms as they make the transition from private to public ownership. A significant decline in operating performance subsequent to the initial public offering (IPO) is found. Additionally, there is a significant positive relation between post-IPO operating performance and equity retention by the original entrepreneurs, but no relation between post-IPO operating performance and the level of initial underpricing. Post-issue declines in the market-to-book ratio, price/earnings ratio, and earnings per share are also documented.     

The distributional impact of unification and the 1992–93 recession on West German households

The 1992–93 recession in the western states of Germany has been attributed, in substantial measure, to the macroeconomic consequences of policies to finance unification. Studies of the costs of unification have not attempted to measure the burden of the recession. We estimate a dynamic, panel model of household incomes using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) and use it to forecast what these incomes would have been in 1992–94 without a recession. Using a ratio of actual to forecast incomes, we compare the relative burden of the recession across households. Our findings suggest that western households below the median income bore the brunt of the combined impact of unification and the recession of 1992–93.
JEL classification: P3, D3, E3.