Knowledge that Transforms

This paper describes the responses of index-linked wage rates to concurrent price increases for a sample of Canadian union contracts and then analyzes theseresponses in terms of a simple model of indexation to the aggregate price level. The model highlights the importance of aggregate price movements in conveying information about industry-specific prices. The empirical analysis confirms that industry-specific correlations between input and output prices and the consumer price index are important determinants of the flexibility of wages to prices across indexed contracts.

The purpose of this cross-national study is twofold. First, it introduces income distribution and sociopolitical instability as arguments in the savings function. Second, it presents some empirical evidence in relation to their quantitative effects on savings. It is shown that sociopolitical instability has profound effects on the savings ratio. It is also shown that the bulk of savings is produced by the middle income class. As a result a redistribution of income at the expense of the upper income class yields a constant or an increased savings ratio developing on whether such a redistribution includes the lower income class or not.

This paper evaluates the hypothesis that the influence of "traditional" market variables on migration in Canada has diminished over time. This is attributed to a crowding-out process whereby growth of social security--type programs has cushioned the effects of, say, unemployment and thus motivation to migrate for jobs, and fiscal policies have exerted unintended effects. Implications are that market forces that would work naturally to induce migration from low-to high-income regions (and thus equalize earned incomes) have been short-circuited and that traditional tools of manpower policy for influencing migration, such as job creation, skill enhancement, or wages, are less effective currently than they might have been in the past.

A model economy is described that integrates job search and signal extraction analysis. Equilibrium differs from search models without signal extraction in that, even with a fixed real sector, unemployment fluctuates stochastically. It differs from standard signal extraction models because search introduces persistence. In fact, unemployment follows a second-order difference equation with coefficient that are functions of current and lagged values of the stochastic shocks. Thus the model has the potential to mimic actual business cycle data despite the fact that the underlying shocks are independently and identically distributed. Policy implications are discussed.

The gold standard in 1890-1908 period was efficient by any criterion: the number of gold point violations was small; violations did not persist; gold movements occurred in the predictable, profitable, direction in response to violations; and the mean absolute exchange rate (for 1881-1900) was at exactly half the average of the gold points. The actions of the Bank of England and U.S. Treasury in manipulating gold points were consistent with the "rules of the game" and in fact facilitated the efficiency of the gold standard. In contrast, the operations of banking syndicates were of a nature to generate inefficiencies, but the evidence is that they did not have this effect.

We present a signaling model, based on ideas of Phillip Nelson, in which both the introductory price and the level of directly "uninformative" advertising or other dissipative marketing expenditures are choice variables and may be used as signals for the initially unobservable quality of a newly introduced experience good. Repeat purchases play a crucial role in our model. A second focus of the paper is on illustrating an approach to refining the set of equilibria in signalling games with multiple potential signals.

Evidence has recently been presented by Salih Neftçi to support the hypothesis that recessions in economic activity tend to be steeper and more short-lived than recoveries in economic activity. That evidence, however, was confined to the behavior of the unemployment rate in the United States. In this paper it is shown that when Neftçi's methods are applied to analyze the behavior of real gross national product, investment, and productivity in the United States or when they are used to analyze industrial production abroad, the asymmetry hypothesis seems to be less compelling.

The output-inflation trade-off is investigated in a rational expectations equilibrium economy in which costly price setting makes it inefficient for agents to vary their prices at every instant. It is shown that "sticky prices" are not some exogenous source of output fluctuation but result from the monetary policy process. An economy with slow and counterinflationary money growth exhibits staggered changes in sticky prices as assumed in some "new-Keynesian" analyses. An economy with fast money growth and a high degree of monetary accommodation exhibits either flexible prices or "bunched," frequently changing sticky prices.

The recent literature on employment contracts emphasizes that it is in the interests of the parties to produce institutional arrangements that lead to employment contracts that we have termed "strongly efficient." Strong efficiencyimplies that employment is set so as to equate the marginal revenue product of workers to their alternative wage. It follows that employment in such contracts fluctuates with the determinants of a worker's marginal revenue product and with the worker's alternative wage, but not with the observed contract wage. We have examined two kinds of evidence to test the strong efficiency hypothesis. Laboratory experiments by Siegel et al. indicate that this hypothesis is strongly confirmed when the bargaining parties are required to agree on price and quantity simultaneously and is strongly rejected when the parties are required to bargain by a system of price leadership. In our field data on the printing trades, we find no convincing evidence of strong efficiency. We have also examined the evidence in support of what we have called the "weak efficiency hypothesis." According to this hypothesis, both the contract wage and the alternative wage determine employment. We have found only mixed support for this hypothesis because our measures of the alternative wage available to workers are frequently positively related to employment, precisely the contrary to the hypothesized direction of this effect in a weakly efficient contract.

With data from the 1980 census, earnings of artists are investigated. It is found that, contrary to widely held beliefs, artists do not appear to earn less than other workers of similar training and personal characteristics. Artists in 1980 are significantly younger than the general work force, probably because of the rapid growth of the artistic professions in recent years.