ADVANCE PRODUCTION,INVENTORIES, AND MARKET POWER: AN EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATION

We report an experiment that assesses the effects of alterations in production conditions and product durability on market power in Bertrand‐Edgeworth duopolies. Static equilibrium analysis predicts that advance (rather than “to demand”) production raises prices, but does not affect profits. The further addition of a simple inventory option causes prices to fall and seller earnings to increase. Contrary to these predictions, we observe similar prices in baseline and advance production treatments, but lower profits given advance production. An inventory option reduces both prices and earnings. Results are driven by the treatments' effects on sellers' capacities to tacitly collude. (JEL C9, D4, L4)     

Children's lives in an era of school closures: Exploring the implications of COVID-19 for child labour in Ghana

On 11 March 2020, the World Health Organisation declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. Subsequently, governments worldwide implemented strict regimes of lockdowns and school closures to contain the transmission of the virus. Ghana's government on 15 March 2020 also announced a lockdown and closure of schools, lasting up till January 2021. Against this backdrop, the paper examined the implications of school closures on child labour in Ghana. Qualitative data for the study were collected between October 2020 to February 2021 in a small rural community in northern Ghana. Findings from 16 semi-structured interviews with schoolchildren aged 8–13 years show how school closures have meant that children from contexts of poverty: (a) are driven into child labour as they are either forced to accompany their parents to work on farms or sell foodstuff by the roadside; and thus, ultimately (b) engage in no learning during the lockdown period.     

Unrealistic Expectations? Zambia's Mineworkers from Independence to the One‐Party State, 1964–1972

Abstract  Political scientists have neglected the extent of opposition and resistance to the policies of African states amongst civil society organisations in the immediate post-colonial period. Unionised Zambian mineworkers expected Independence to bring about a transformation in their work and living conditions, a demand that brought them into conflict with the new Zambian Government and its dependency on mine revenue. Government attempts to control the behaviour of mineworkers through legislation and the union bureaucracy proved unsuccessful, and popular grassroots challenges to the union leadership, and the Government itself, were only ended by state suppression, and the establishment of a one-party state.     

BEHAVIORAL PATTERNS IN SOCIAL NETWORKS

In this article, we focus on the analysis of individual decision‐making for the formation of social networks, using experimentally generated data. We analyze the determinants of the individual demand for links under the assumption of agents' static expectations and identify patterns of behavior that correspond to three specific objectives: players propose links so as to maximize expected profits (myopic best response strategy); players attempt to establish the largest number of direct links (reciprocator strategy); and players maximize expected profits per direct link (opportunistic strategy). These strategies explain approximately 74% of the observed choices. We demonstrate that they are deliberately adopted and, by means of a finite mixture model, well identified and separated in our sample. (JEL C33, C35, C90, D85)     

Tensions between institutional closure and deinstitutionalisation: what can be learned from Victoria’s institutional redevelopment?

Deinstitutionalisation must extend beyond the closure of institutions to individualised support to people with intellectual disabilities and societal change. Castellani suggests that closure processes may be incompatible with effective deinstitutionalisation. This article draws on findings from two Australian studies of institutional closures to explore tensions in the closure process that occur in the policy context of applying managerialist principles to the delivery of services, and examines how these processes hindered or furthered the aims of deinstitutionalisation. It suggests closure can divert attention from planning for individualised support, the needs of staff may conflict with those of residents, transition plans may be disrupted by organisational imperatives and that little attention may be paid to broader community development strategies or micro-level planning of the nature of staff support. The article reiterates the danger of equating institutional closure with deinstitutionalisation and the need to focus beyond the imperatives of closure.     

MONEY SUPPLY VARIABILITY IN A MACRO MODEL OF MONOPOLISTIC COMPETITION

The effects of changes in money supply variability are examined for a macro model of monopolistic competition. Increases in money supply variability raise demand uncertainty causing individual firms to produce more for inventory. In addition, expected profits decrease, inducing a number of firms to leave the economy. Aggregate income then falls in spite of an increase in firm-level production. The result on aggregate income is standard, but the results on inventories and the number of firms in the economy distinguish this monopolistic macro model empirically from conventional macro models when changes in money supply variability occur.     

THE COMMON POOL, BARGAINING, AND THE RULE OF CAPTURE

Firms producing from a single oilfield face the common-pool problem: how to divide production and profits among themselves. The rule of capture creates competition among them to produce the oil before anyone else does, and a tendency for overproduction. Private bargaining among the firms can avoid the wasteful production practices associated with the rule of capture and increase joint profits. This paper explores the structure and expected outcome of the common-pool problem, and demonstrates that smaller producers hold a bargaining advantage that is not easily overcome by larger producers or neutral arbitrators.     

‘The status quo is not an option’: Community impacts of school closure in South Taranaki,New Zealand

This paper explores the impacts of proposed school closures on families in rural communities in the South Taranaki region of New Zealand. We situate this instance of educational restructuring in a critical policy context and present an account of its regional unfolding through drawing on local media coverage. We then interpret narratives gathered during an interview-based study of the proposed changes undertaken in 2003–2004. Our analysis highlights the impact of school closure for rural settlements in terms of affect as well as effects. More generally we reflect on the place of schools in the experience of place itself, as well as their contribution to social cohesion and the broadly defined health of a community.     

Deinstitutionalisation: the management of rights

This article is based on an ethnographic study of the closure of a large institution for people with intellectual disabilities in Australia. The research involved 20 months of field work including participant observation in a locked unit at the institution, 120 interviews with those closing the institution, staff and families involved with people living there. The researcher was also involved as a participant observer in the closure of the institution. The paper argues that deinstitutionalisation is a problematic process because it necessarily involves a tension between two incompatible discourses: one concerned with the 'rights' of people with intellectual disabilities and the other with their 'management'. This tension leads inevitably to compromises in the practice of deinstitutionalisation. The paper concludes by exploring the implications of this argument for future institutional closures.     

PROFIT‐MAXIMIZING GATE REVENUE SHARING IN SPORTS LEAGUES

In this article, I examine how sports leagues can use gate revenue sharing to coordinate talent investments and maximize club profits. Gate revenue sharing reduces incentives to invest in talent. Initially lower investments boost profits, because total costs go down, but investing less also shrinks revenues, which harms profits at higher levels of sharing. The league maximizes profits by setting a sharing rule, which balances these two effects. Gate revenue sharing decreases talent investments more strongly in leagues with heterogeneous rather than homogeneous local market sizes. As a result, the profit‐maximizing level of sharing is higher for relatively homogeneous leagues. This implies that more balanced leagues are expected to share more gate revenues than less balanced leagues. It also explains why gate revenue sharing is widely used in the U.S. major leagues, while it is largely absent in European soccer. (JEL L41, L83)     

‘Closure’ at Manus Island and carceral expansion in the open air prison

ABSTRACT

Manus prison was officially closed in 2017 following Papua New Guinea’s (PNG) Supreme Court decision that the existence of the camp breached the PNG Constitution. The ‘Namah’ decision was significant in signalling and seeking to curb the imperial reach of Australian law but insufficient in resolving the question of refugee imprisonment. Far from ending the imprisonment of refugees, the closure following the judicial ruling has facilitated the expansion of the imperial carcerality that has characterized Australia’s immigration detention policy since 1992. By revealing how refugee incarceration has been extended and offshore processing instantiated following the closure of Woomera camp in 2003, we argue that official closures of refugee camps Woomera and Manus have been constitutive of carceral expansion that is imperial in form and that reiterates patterns of colonial violence. After tracking imperial expansion, we make a call for prison abolition in the refugee incarceration arena as this is a critical decolonizing strategy.     

FACTOR DEMAND UNDER CONDITIONS OF PRODUCT DEMAND and SUPPLY UNCERTAINTY

The paper develops a theory of factor demand under uncertainty, that encompasses neo-classical factor demand and Keynesian effective factor demand as special cases. The model allows factor demand and output to move positively with product demand, even with a constant product price. This, in turn, permits real wages to move pro-cyclically in response to product demand shocks. In addition the model provides a new perspective on the "adding-up" problem (which posits that total factor payments exceed output if increasing returns to scale exist), and generates positive uncertainty profits that are similar in spirit to those of Frank Knight.     

Unions,corporations, and political campaign contributions: The 1982 house elections

Because legislation affects so many aspects of the labor market, unions have long considered the political arena to be a major battleground. This paper investigates fund raising, a primary ingredient of this political activity. Specifically, the pattern of campaign contributions from labor PACs (and corporate PACs) is explained as an interaction of supply and demand. The results suggest that the demand for funds depends on the tightness of the race, the tenure of the incumbent, and ideology. Contributors are more willing to support ideological allies, expected winners, and powerful candidates.     

"They're Worse Off Than Us"- The Social Construction of European Space and Boundaries in the German/Polish Twin-City Guben-Gubin

In the context of globalization and European integration, the interplay between social boundaries and territorially defined political borders becomes more complex in that they become increasingly delinked. In some regional settings, this might imply that while the political border is softened, the socio-cultural closure between the border communities becomes even tighter. This article investigates this issue in relation to the German-Polish border region. Looking at the German-Polish twin-city, Guben-Gubin, the first section describes the ways in which cultural closure materializes. Emphasis is given to the link between cultural closure and an increasing alienation of local people from the Europeanized symbolic cross-border politics pursued by the local and regional political elite(s). The second section, however, argues that the "cultural closure" thesis is perhaps too simplistic to grasp the complexity of cross-border interaction of local people. Investigating the cross-border strategies of three milieux, the article concludes that what can be found in a setting like Guben-Gubin is in fact a complex configuration of openings and closures at various spatial and symbolic levels, sometimes taking place simultaneously in one and the same milieu.     

IF YOU DON'T LIKE THE OUTCOME,CHANGE THE CONTEST

This article analyzes contests when contestants derive heterogeneous benefits from winning and investments are seen as costs to the contest designer. An example of this is sports leagues maximizing league profits. For sports leagues, optimal contests depend upon the heterogeneity of market sizes and the impact of team investment on winning. Sports leagues have mechanisms to change the structure of contests, implying they have some control of the expected payoff of teams, the value of the athletes, and the balance of the league. Data from Major League Baseball and the National Basketball Association are used to empirically estimate the model. (JEL C72, L10, L83)     

The labor market costs of conflict: closures, foreign workers, and Palestinian employment and earnings

In this paper, we provide a lower bound estimate of the labor market costs of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The conflict is quantified by the number of overseas foreign workers in the Israeli labor market and the frequency of temporary closures of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. IV estimates, which exploit a source of exogenous variation in the number of overseas foreign workers, yield significant negative effects of the conflict on Palestinian employment rates in Israel and monthly earnings. Our cost-of-conflict estimates are also relevant for the literature on the economics of immigration.     

Firms,directors and time in the directorate tie market

Continuing the structural analysis of corporate profits and cooptive interorganizational ties through boards of directors, I summarize results obtained from research proposed several years ago in this journal. As expected, ties through directorates occurred in the 1967 American economy where market constraints on profits in manufacturing industries were most severe. Moreover. types of ties were coordinated as multiplex cooptive relations to sources of market constraint.The results led me to believe that there was a directorate tie market in the economy during the late 1960s — a social network composed of directorate ties providing a nonmarket context for the most competitive buying and selling between business establishments.Acting on this speculation, I propose lines of research into processes by which individual firms and individual persons would have had an incentive to maintain such a market. The research includes an analysis of the etiology of successful cooptation at the level of individual firms and assesses the impact of this success on corporate profitability and growth. The research includes an analysis of the etiology of an individual director's participation in successful cooptation and assesses the impact of this participation on his ability to obtain positions on the boards of large, profitable firms. The research includes analyses of the association between market constraints and directorate ties over a twenty year interval, 1960 through 1980, so that inferences made from the cross-sectional analysis in 1967 can be generalized with evidence on stability and change in the association between market constraint and directorate ties.     

INFLATION AND ASYMMETRIC OUTPUT ADJUSTMENTS BY FIRMS

Using ordered probit analyses of a unique micro data set, we find evidence of output asymmetry that is systematically related to inflation and to price asymmetry. As predicted by theory, firms are more likely at higher rates of inflation to raise prices in response to positive cost and demand shocks and less likely to lower prices in response to negative cost and demand shocks. The expected effects of higher inflation on output asymmetry, however, come primarily from cost and demand increases and to a lesser (and statistically insignificant) extent from cost and demand decreases. (JEL E3, D4)     

Graduate density,gender, and employment

The expansion of higher education is often viewed as reflecting increased demand for skills, whether related to technological change or the growing complexity of the economy. It is also linked to widening pay differentials between the poorly and highly educated. There are reasons, however, to question these associations. Even if demand for graduates is growing the supply of graduates might as a result of the status derived from having a degree still exceed this. The demand for graduates itself need not be wholly tied in with upgrading of the labour force. Graduates could be part of a more flexible workforce who increasingly undertake non-graduate work, thus downgrading their labour-market position. LFS (Labour Force Survey) and BHPS (British Household Panel Study) data are used to show that there has been no major shift in the distribution of graduates in the British labour market, that career starts are increasingly at a lower status point, and that there is a negative effect of graduate density on wages. There are also redistributional effects. There has been a large increase in the social demand for higher education by women, and they have gained from this expansion while men have lost out. In addition, graduate density is positive for non-graduates, who gain from the reduced rewards accruing to graduates. The results call into question the simple idea of a trend towards a demand for increasing levels of skills and qualifications. More attention should be paid to the distribution of skills and to complex interactions within this.     

UNIFORM TWO-PART TARIFFS AND BELOW MARGINAL COST PRICES: DISNEYLAND REVISITED

This paper completely characterizes the demand and cost parameters which induce a constant cost monopolist charging a uniform two-part tariff to choose a marginal price less than marginal cost when selling to two types of consumers with different linear demands. It also provides a quantitative assessment of the potential significance of such pricing. Pricing below marginal cost maximizes profits in large regions of the model parameter space, contrary to widely held beliefs. If fixed costs are zero, pricing below marginal cost can increase profits by a factor of √2, although for most parameters the profit increase is much smaller. ( JEL D42, L11)