Domestic Outsourcing, Rent Seeking, and Increasing Inequality

An increasing share of the economy is organized around financial capitalism, where, in contrast to the past, capital market actors actively assert and manage their claims on wealth creation and distribution. These new actors challenge prior assumptions of managerial capitalism about the goals and governance of firms. The focus on shareholder value is credited with increasing firm efficiency and shareholder returns. This lecture analyzes the changes in organizational behavior and value extraction under financial capitalism

Insurance Industry and E-Business

亀井利明教授古稀記念特

What's Behind the Increase in Inequality?

The focus of this paper is the increase in earnings inequality over the last 30-plus years. Economists have well-developed theories that explain differences in wage levels among different categories of workers. Differences in educational attainment and skills are a major source of these differences; large organizations typically employ workers with a wide range of skills and responsibilities and pay them accordingly. As a result, the level of wage inequality within organizations is quite large. This paper does not challenge these results. It argues, however, that these theories are not adequate to explain a relatively recent phenomenon: the increase in recent decades in wage inequality among workers with similar levels of education and similar demographic characteristics who are employed in similar occupations but in different firms or establishments. These differences in wages are how most people experience inequality. Yet much of the analysis by economists has focused on developments that have enabled leading firms in the U.S. to increase their ability to extract monopoly rents.This paper reviews a wide-ranging literature that examines the increased ability of leading firms to extract monopoly rents. It also reviews the more recent and still thin literature on the increase in inequality among workers with similar characteristics but different employers. The contribution of this paper is the identification of a mechanism that reconciles these two strains of economic research and explains how the increase in rent extraction is linked to the increasingly unequal pay of U.S. workers with similar characteristics. I draw on joint work with Rosemary Batt (2014) to identify new opportunities for rent seeking behavior, and on joint work with Annette Bernhardt, Rosemary Batt and Susan Houseman (2016, 2017) on domestic outsourcing, inter-firm contracting and the growing importance of production networks to establish a mechanism that connects the increase in rents with this new type of increase in wage inequality

EVOLVING RESEARCH ON PRICE COMPETITION IN THE GROCERY RETAILING INDUSTRY: AN APPRAISAL

With the end of the Supermarket Revolution in the 1970s, new forms of horizontal, vertical, and geographic competition have appeared to challenge the supremacy of the supermarket format. New retail formats like warehouse stores, supercenters, and fast-food outlets appear to affect local retail supermarket prices. Slotting allowances, coupons, and electronic data gathering have intensified retailer-manufacturing rivalry. Foreign direct investment offers the promise of new European-style management styles in U.S. grocery retailing.Agribusiness, Demand and Price Analysis,

Farmers of the Future: Market Segmentation and Buying Behavior

Dramatic structural changes are occurring in U.S. and world agriculture. These changes have important implications for the customer base and marketing strategy of input supply manufacturers, distributors and retailers. The framework and model presented can and is being used to understand structural change in production agriculture on a global basis.Structural change, Buying behavior, Marketing strategy, Farm size, Marketing,

Telecommunications 2000 Strategy, HR Practices & Performance

This report constitutes the first benchmarking survey of business and human resource practices among a nationally representative sample of workplaces in the broadly defined telecommunications industry that includes wireline, wireless, cable, and internet providers. It grows out of a multi-year study of organizational change in the industry, and is based on extensive field study, site visits, interviews, and surveys conducted by research teams at Cornell and Rutgers Universities. Managers at 577 establishments across the country gave generously of their time during a lengthy telephone survey. The study was made possible through a generous grant by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. While this report is based on data collected among workplaces in the U.S., it has implications for the restructuring of the global telecommunications industry. In other research, we have found that the United States has been at the forefront of market deregulation and technology change, but many other countries have followed a similar path and look to the United States as a model for organizational restructuring (Katz 1997). Thus, at least some of the patterns we find here are likely to occur in other countries undergoing similar patterns of deregulation

Linking Farmers to Markets Through Cooperatives Vegetables Supply Chain Redesign Options for Kapatagan, Mindanao, Philippines

The paper looks into the temperate vegetable industry in Kapatagan, an upland community in Mindanao, the Southern part of the Philippines. The intention in general is to identify ways by which smallholder vegetable producers are appropriately linked to markets through cooperatives with the end in view of increasing farmers’ income. Specifically the paper documented existing vegetable supply chains in Kapatagan as well as other relevant chains, assessed the various chains’ gaps and potentials in view of changing concepts and market requirements with supply chain and agro-industrial concepts as bases and identified entry points for chain enhancements.Farm Management, Production Economics,

Telecommunications 2000: Strategy, HR Practices and Performance

This report constitutes the first benchmarking survey of business and human resource practices among a nationally representative sample of workplaces in the broadly defined telecommunications industry that includes wireline, wireless, cable, and internet providers. It grows out of a multi-year study of organizational change in the industry, and is based on extensive field study, site visits, interviews, and surveys conducted by research teams at Cornell and Rutgers Universities. Managers at 577 establishments across the country gave generously of their time during a lengthy telephone survey. The study was made possible through a generous grant by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

Horizontal and Vertical Analysis of Privacy and Cyber-Security Markets

Deliverable 4.2 (\u201cHorizontal and Vertical Analysis of Privacy and Cyber-Security Markets\u201d) provides an in-depth discussion of economic incentives, stakeholder engagement and market opportunities in privacy and cyber-security. This report first introduces the reader to the horizontal market analysis, which covers firms active at the same stage of the production chain in the privacy and cyber-security industry and present key market segmentations.The report also presents the vertical analysis of players at different stages of the production chain in the PACS industry. These relations are covered as security in the supply chain is of utmost importance: only secure inputs ensure a secure product as final output. The report also covers engagement and assessment of stakeholders in the privacy and security chain and their relation to PACS in the ICT sector. The report gives several case studies on vertical relations and includes an empirical analysis of incentive schemes. The proposed innovation value chain connects inputs and outputs in the production of PACS goods and services and their relation to economic incentives.Finally, a preliminary scheme on mapping privacy and personal data product and service markets is proposed. Firms active in these markets can be categorized according to their generic value chain, where some use the identification of the user as key input and others do not. The report provides economic incentive templates that enable market players and regulators to potentially better map the markets.The following scheme outlines in brief the relation of the two deliverables D4.1 and D4.2 to the developed Privacy and Cyber-Security Market Scheme. It enables the reader to see what is covered in the different deliverables and to what deliverable he/she needs to turn in order to find the information of interest