High-Wage Workers and High-Wage Firms

We study a longitudinal sample of over one million French workers and over 500,000 employing firms. Real total annual compensation per worker is decomposed into components related to observable characteristics, worker heterogeneity, firm heterogeneity and residual variation. Except for the residual, all components may be correlated in an arbitrary fashion. At the level of the individual, we find that person-effects, especially those not related to observables like education, are a very important source of wage variation in France. Firm-effects, while important, are not as important as person-effects. At the level of firms, we find that enterprises that hire high-wage workers are more productive but not more profitable. They are also more capital and high-skilled employee intensive. Enterprises that pay higher wages, controlling for person-effects, are more productive and more profitable. They are also more capital intensive but are not more high-skilled labor intensive. We also find that person-effects explain 92% of inter-industry wage differentials

Price formation in a sequential selling mechanism

This paper analyzes the trade of an indivisible good within a two-stage mechanism, where a seller first negotiates with one potential buyer about the price of the good. If the negotiation fails to produce a sale, a second–price sealed–bid auction with an additional buyer is conducted. The theoretical model predicts that with risk neutral agents all sales take place in the auction rendering the negotiation prior to the auction obsolete. An experimental test of the model provides evidence that average prices and profits are quite precisely predicted by the theoretical benchmark. However, a significant large amount of sales occurs already during the negotiation stage. We show that risk preferences can theoretically account for the existence of sales during the negotiation stage, improve the fit for buyers’ behavior, but is not sufficient to explain sellers’ decisions. We discuss other behavioral explanations that could account for the observed deviations

Buy-It-Now prices in eBay Auctions - The Field in the Lab

Electronic commerce has grown extraordinarily over the years, with online auctions being extremely successful forms of trade. Those auctions come in a variety of different formats, such as the Buy-It-Now auction format on eBay, that allows sellers to post prices at which buyers can purchase a good prior to the auction. Even though, buyer behavior is well studied in Buy-It-Now auctions, as to this point little is known about how sellers set Buy-It-Now prices. We investigate into this question by analyzing seller behavior in Buy-It-Now auctions. More precisely, we combine the use of a real online auction market (the eBay platform and eBay traders) with the techniques of lab experiments. We find a striking link between the information about agents provided by the eBay market institution and their behavior. Information about buyers is correlated with their deviation from true value bidding. Sellers respond strategically to this information when deciding on their Buy-It-Now prices. Thus, our results highlight potential economic consequences of information publicly available in (online) market institutions

Ambiguous volatility and asset pricing in continuous time

This paper formulates a model of utility for a continuous time framework that captures the decision-maker's concern with ambiguity about both volatility and drift. Corresponding extensions of some basic results in asset pricing theory are presented. First, we derive arbitrage-free pricing rules based on hedging arguments. Ambiguous volatility implies market incompleteness that rules out perfect hedging. Consequently, hedging arguments determine prices only up to intervals. However, sharper predictions can be obtained by assuming preference maximization and equilibrium. Thus we apply the model of utility to a representative agent endowment economy to study equilibrium asset returns. A version of the C-CAPM is derived and the effects of ambiguous volatility are described

The Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History Project

Everybody loves a murder mystery. Of all the historical situations researchers encounter nothing has quite the same impact as discovering an innocent person hanged, a guilty person going free. Co-directors of the GREAT UNSOLVED MYSTERIES IN CANADIAN HISTORY project located at the University of Victoria, John Lutz (Department of History, University of Victoria) and Ruth Sandwell (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto), have just received funding from the Canadian Content Online Program (CCOP) of the Canadian Heritage Ministry to move ahead with phase two including two new mysteries “What happened to Aurore Gagnon?” (Peter Gossage, Research Director) and “Nobody Knows His Name: Klatssasin and the Chilcotin Massacre” (John Lutz, Research Director) to complement the pilot “Who Killed William Robinson?”

History Departments and Cultural Institutions / Départements d’histoire et institutions culturelles

Please find news from the History Department at the University of Saskatchewan that was sent the CHA to be included in “News from the Field” in the last issue but that were, regrettably, omitted.Voici des nouvelles du milieu qui nous ont été envoyées par le département d’histoire de l’Université de la Saskatchewan à l’automne dernier. Celles-ci n’avaient malheureusement pas été publiées dans la rubrique “Nouvelle du milieu” du numéro précédent

150 Years of Education in the Americas: Assessments and Prospects

In 2002, l’Université Laval will celebrate its 150th anniversary as a university holding a Royal charter. The biennial conference of l’Association canadienne d’histoire de l’éducation/ Canadian History of Education Association will be part of those celebrations and will coincide with the 340th anniversary of the foundation of the Séminaire de Québec, the oldest institution of education in North America

Editors' Note / Note de la rédaction

It was with more than a little trepidation that I deposited my doctoral thesis at the University of Ottawa this past September. These feelings were, of course, accompanied by a great deal of satisfaction and relief at having (nearly) completed a project that I have been working on for years now, and for which I remain passionate. My trepidation stems from the usual feelings of anxiety that come with submitting a thesis: I pray to Clio for a speedy administrative process and for a timely and successful defence. I hope the readers are satisfied with the work, but I also look forward to discussing it in detail with five different people who have actually read it! /J’avais envoyé cet hiver les étudiants de mon cours de méthode historique à Bibliothèque et archives Canada. J’étais alors enthousiasmé par le succès de l’activité : les étudiants s’étaient lancés à la recherche de documents couvrant une période historique et un thème spécifique choisi en classe. La phase de recherche et de consultation des documents archivistiques avait ravi les étudiants, qui étaient fascinés par le processus de recherche documentaire et la facilité relative avec laquelle ils avaient eu accès aux documents

Oral History and Performance in the Classroom

If asked to describe a history seminar at the senior undergraduate or graduate level, I don’t think anyone in my discipline would have imagined a dance studio with hardwood floors, mirrored walls, or floor-to-ceiling windows that cover an entire wall. Nor would they have imagined a classroom where students and faculty communally set-up and take-down the tables and chairs eachweek, sitting instead on foam mats in a big circle. I also doubt they would have expected to see students engaged in song, dance, and improvisational exercises such as the “Fantasy Machine” where one person enters our big circle and begins to do a repetitive movement.One by one, others join in until everyone is a cog in this gloriously strange and silly machine. Yet this is precisely what a group of twenty-six history and theatre students enrolled in Concordia University’s inaugural “oral history and performance” course did over an eight month period