Unionization and cost of production: compensation, productivity, and factor-use effects

A demonstration that unionization can affect cost of production through increases in compensation, through shifts in technologies, and through deviations from the least-cost combination of inputs (the factor-use effect).Labor productivity ; Wages ; Labor unions

Metropolitan wage differentials: can Cleveland still compete?

A look at the Cleveland metropolitan labor market as a point of comparison to highlight how labor costs in a major industrial city fare with respect to other U.S. cities. ; A look at the Cleveland metropolitan labor market as a point of comparison to highlight how labor costs in a major industrial city fare with respect to other U.S. cities.Wages ; Cleveland (Ohio) ; Urban economics

School reform, school size, and student achievement

An estimation of the effect of school size on student achievement, with the results suggesting that market-based school reform could enhance student performance if the reform reduced school size.Education

Corporate Influence in World Bank Lending

The World Bank withholds loan disbursements in order to build a reputation for enforcing conditionality, and multinational firms lobby for these funds to be released. Using data drawn from World Bank reports, we find evidence that (1) participation by Fortune 500 multinational corporations as project contractors and (2) investments by these firms are associated with disbursements that are unjustified by project performance. In addition, these measures of corporate interest are associated with inflated project evaluations. These effects are limited to multinational corporations headquartered in the United States or Japan, suggesting that the influence of private actors depends on access to particular national policy networks. In contrast to the evidence of corporate influence, we find no consistent evidence of geopolitical influences

Greece illustrates how the politics of lending can undermine its effectiveness

Why do bailout packages often fail to restore market confidence? Outlining results from a recent study, Terrence Chapman, Songying Fang and Randall Stone write that creditor countries tend to have a special interest in the crisis country whose loans they are backing. Weaker conditionality applied to countries deemed to have high levels of importance, however, has counter-productive effects, with markets anticipating that easier access to credit may lead to further fiscal instability and recidivist borrowing. They argue that in the Greek case it will be difficult to rebuild the confidence of a market shaken by several failed attempts at stabilisation, and that the country will probably require another round of debt relief

Influential Article Review - Market Behaviour Research: Findings from New Literature

This paper examines consumer behavior. We present insights from a highly influential paper. Here are the highlights from this paper: This article analyzes 12 years of recent scholarly research on consumer behavior published in the five leading international journals in this field. Analyzing academic contributions to a specific area of research provides valuable insights into how it has evolved over a defined period. The approach was to briefly discuss content analysis and its application in scholarly literature review studies. The methodology used here involves the classification of topics to evaluate key trends in consumer behavior literature. It includes a ranking of topics published, typology of the published articles, the research classification in terms of methodologies, and analysis techniques. The most cited articles in the field and within each journal are also examined. The comprehensive literature review of consumer behavior research undertaken in this article could advance the discipline of consumer behavior research by elucidating the evolution of consumer behavior literature in the studied period. For our overseas readers, we then present the insights from this paper in Spanish, French, Portuguese, and German

Wage and Employment Adjustment in Local Labor Markets

Eberts and Stone have created dynamic models of labor supply and demand behavior for metropolitan labor markets. They use these models to simulate wage, employment, and personal income responses to local economic change, including changes brought about by governmental policy.https://research.upjohn.org/up_press/1089/thumbnail.jp

Using Information Systems as a Unifying Influence in an Integrated Business Curriculum

The integrated business curriculum of a College of Business at a public university in the northwestern United States uses semester projects and thematic examples to demonstrate that most business problems transcend functional areas. Information systems have proven to be especially useful for this purpose. The focus of the article is to describe the integrated business curriculum in general and, more specifically, the role of information systems as an integrative force within this curriculum. Specifically, the use of information systems models to develop thematic slides for reference purposes during class lectures and integrative information system student projects are described. Examples of these thematic slides and integrative projects are provided. Also presented are recommendations regarding how these techniques can be used in information systems courses

Teacher Performance Incentives and Student Outcomes

This paper reviews the evidence on the effectiveness of individual merit pay systems for teachers on student achievement, and it presents new empirical results based on a system established within a collective bargaining environment. While many merit pay systems have been established in school districts across the U.S., very little empirical evidence concerning their influence on student achievement exists. A natural experiment arose in a county in which one high school piloted a merit pay system that rewarded student retention and student evaluations of teachers while another comparable high school maintained a traditional compensation system. A difference-in-differences analysis implies that merit pay had no effect on grade point averages, reduced the percentage of students who dropped out of courses, reduced average daily attendance, and increased the percentage of students who failed. The outcomes illustrate the difficulty of instituting individual merit pay in schools. The goal was to increase student retention. A student was considered to be retained in a class if the student was present during a randomly selected day of the last week of classes. The system worked by this measure because the school experienced a significant reduction in course noncompleters. However it is not clear that this measure was correlated with student achievement or even average attendance, and indeed, neither of these outcomes were improved

Corn and grain sorghum response to limited irrigation, drought, and hail

A field study was conducted for eight years in southwest Kansas near Garden City to measure the response of corn and grain sorghum to limited irrigation in the region. An irrigation variable was imposed on each crop, with six irrigation treatments from full irrigation scheduled to minimize soil water deficits to minimal or no irrigation. To create differences in the amount of irrigation across treatments, the time between 25-mm irrigation events increased as irrigation decreased. A historic drought occurred during 2011 and 2012 when cropping season precipitation, the precipitation occurring from the harvest of the prior crop through the harvest of the next crop, was 60% of the 30-year average. Except for 2008, average cropping season precipitation was 8% above average during the prior six years. Linear regressions of corn and sorghum grain yields (GY) and dry matter yields (DMY) versus crop evapotranspiration (ETc) from all years combined, except hail damaged sorghum in 2005, produced R2 values from 0.71 to 0.79. One hailstorm during 2005 damaged sorghum to the extent that yields did not vary with respect to ETc or irrigation. Hail events in 2005 and 2006 occurred at nearly the same growth stage for corn caused lower leaf area and yields than during other wet years with no hail. Using quadratic regressions, corn yields during wet years with no hail, wet years with hail, and dry years had distinctly different dependence on irrigation. Although sorghum yields during wet years tended to increase as irrigation increased, sorghum’s response to irrigation was less than for corn during the same years. During dry years, sorghum and corn were highly dependent on irrigation. Net economic returns (NR) of continuous corn, continuous sorghum, cornsorghum, corn-wheat, and sorghum-wheat rotations were each higher with a year receiving average precipitation (460 mm) than a year receiving 60% of average precipitation (280 mm). The NR of continuous corn dominated the rest of the rotations when irrigation was more than 230 to 330 mm in the dry year and 90 to 180 mm in wet year. As farmers choose crop rotations, they need to consider management factors and crop tolerance to soil water stress in addition to potential NR