Knowledge that Transforms

This article examines a model of "semiefficient" bargaining in which the union and the firm bargain over wages and various types of work rules. The results are compared to the outcomes that are associated with fully efficient bargaining (i.e., over wages and the level of employment) and bargaining solely over wages.

This article investigates the effect of external, national, and sectoral shocks on Canadian employment fluctuations at the national, industrial, and provincial levels. We assume that employment growth in each industry-province pair depends on U.S. growth, lagged Canadian growth at the national, industrial, and provincial levels, an aggregate shock, and shocks specific to each industry, province, and industry-province pair. We estimate that the U.s. and Canadian shocks account for two-thirds and a quarter, respectively, of aggregate variation. Sectoral shocks account for only one-tenth of aggregate variation but represent 30% of the variation from Canadian sources.

This article investigates cyclicality in real wages between 1969 and 1982, using Panel Study of Income Dynamics data. There is little evidence that movements in and out of the labor market induced aggregate wage cyclicality during these years. However, cyclicality in the movement of workers between heterogeneous labor-market sectors affected aggregate wage cyclicality. While sector location is important, sector selectivity is not correlated with wages. Yet, even within sectors, cyclicality is present in real wages over this time period and is the result of cyclicality in overall wage levels, as well as in the coefficients associated with particular worker characteristics.

There is much variation in the union/nonunion wage gap across groups of workers within each of the two sectors, public and private. Furthermore, the variation in the public sector does not parallel in all of its detail that in the private sector. Thus, though the public-sector gaps typically are somewhat below their private-sector counterparts, there are important exceptions to this difference, especially among employees of local governments: public school teachers, clerical workers, refuse collectors, local transit bus drivers, licensed practical nurses, hospital technicians, nonprofessional hospital workers, and undoubtedly some others.

The "job-stopping" process of older workers often includes some combination of postcareer "bridge" employment, partial retirement, and reverse retirement. Fewer than two-fifths of household heads retire directly from career jobs, over half partially retire at some point in their working lives, and a quarter reenter the labor force after initially retiring. In addition, postcareer employment is frequently located outside the industry and occupation of the career job, and there are important differences in postcareer labor force experiences by gender, permanent income, and career-job pension status.

The federal tax code creates strong incentives for tax arbitrage on the part of state governments. This arbitrage activity is illegal and previous research has typically assumed that the constraint against arbitrage activity is binding. This paper explicitly tests this proposition by considering whether financial asset holdings increase as the yield spread between taxable and tax exempt securities rises. Using a data set on 40 state governments over a seven year period, I find that there is a significant response to changes in the yield spread. One implication of these results is that the Tax Reform Act of 1986, which made even greater efforts to curb arbitrage activity, is likely to be ineffective. Copyright 1990 by MIT Press.

This study constructs dynamic welfare measures for a system of futures markets that express the allocative efficiency of a particular market as a function of its accuracy and speed of adjustment following a shock to the system. The system comprises futures prices for T-bills, exchange rates (German mark, British pound, Canadian dollar and yen), and agricultural commodities (corn, wheat, and cotton) for delivery in 1981 and 1982. The results suggest that, although agricultural, exchange, and financial markets allover-react to a disturbance, agricultural markets do so to a much greater degree. Owing to their much greater size, however, the welfare loss arising from the overshooting is likely to be much larger for interest rate and exchange markets.

Empirical implementation of the buffer stock money (DSM) notion tends to concentrate either on the 'shock absorber aspects or the 'spillover' ('disequilibrium money') aspects but rarely combines both. Moreover, a potential buffer role for non-money assets is usually precluded without explicit empirical testing. This paper examines the role of financial buffers in an ex ante sedtoral model of expenditure and portfolio behaviour incorporating both the shock absorber and spillover aspects in terms of cross-equation parameter restrictions. These are tested for a range of different assets and liabilities using quarterly data for the UK personal sector.

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Marzio Galeotti, Specification of the Technology for Neoclassical Investment Theory: Testing the Adjustment Costs Approach, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 72, No. 3 (Aug., 1990), pp. 471-480