Unemployment May Be Lower if Unions Bargain over Wages and Employment

This paper addresses the question under which circumstances unemployment can be lower if unions bargain over wages and employment in a general equilibrium framework. Thereby, it turns out that the unemployment rate may negatively depend on the wage rate, if the unemployment compensation scheme contains a constant real term in addition to the replacement ratio component. This is, compared with a pure replacement ratio scheme, the more plausible formalization of the real world’s compensation systems, at least for European countries. Besides the theoretical analysis, the paper also derives political implications by identifying the relevant parameters for the decision on whether weakening unions will be a good strategy for an economy to overcome its unemployment problem.     

Business as unusual: Coaching in Echtzeit

Business as unusual: Coaching in real time Using the concrete example of a newly founded company, the authors demonstrate how executives and employees can keep themselves, their teams and organizational unity effective and capable of action in an increasingly dynamic, complex and changing world. These managers do not ?muddle through“, they seek functioning action-coalitions where they can act as individuals in interplay with others for the good of the commonly defined whole. Increasing the effectiveness of individual managers, their units and entire businesses, decisively depends on the promotion of trust co-operation, the development of common goals and reference frameworks, and potent jointly produced diagnoses. In successful cases this leads to coherence and sense emerging for individuals, their organizational units, overlapping working teams and, in the best case, for the whole business. The authors describe their supporting function in this process and call it real time-coaching.     

Stabilized‐Cycle Strategy for Capacitated Lot Sizing with Multiple Products: Fill‐Rate Constraints in Rolling Schedules

In practice, deterministic, multi‐period lot‐sizing models are implemented in rolling schedules since this allows the revision of decisions beyond the frozen horizon. Thus, rolling schedules are able to take realizations and updated forecasts of uncertain data (e.g., customer demands) into account. Furthermore, it is common to hold safety stocks to ensure given service levels (e.g., fill rate). As we will show, this approach, implemented in rolling schedules, often results in increased setup and holding costs while (over‐)accomplishing given fill rates. A well‐known alternative to deterministic planning models are stochastic, static, multi‐period planning models used in the static uncertainty strategy, which results in stable plans. However, these models have a lack of flexibility to react to the realization of uncertain data. As a result, actual costs may differ widely from planned costs, and downside deviations of actual fill rates from those given are very high. We propose a new strategy, namely the stabilized cycle. This combines and expands upon ideas from the literature for minimizing setup and holding costs in rolling schedules, while controlling actual product‐specific fill rates for a finite reporting period. A computational study with a multi‐item capacitated medium‐term production planning model has been executed in rolling schedules. On the one hand, it demonstrates that the stabilized‐cycle strategy yields a good compromise between costs and downside deviations. Furthermore, the stabilized‐cycle strategy weakly dominates the order‐based strategy for both constant and seasonal demands.     

Management und Marketing ferngesteuerter Dienstleistungen: Konzeptionelle Verortung, betriebswirtschaftliche Herausforderungen und k??nftige Forschungsaufgaben

The possibilities of service delivery have expanded vastly over the last years, mainly due to the rapid development of information and communication technologies. Modern forms of data transmission enable a technologically mediated delivery of a broad spectrum of services over great distances. These ??remote services?? gain more and more importance in business, yet have only attracted little attention in academic research so far. This overview article captures the state-of-the-art of research in this field and starts laying the groundwork for a thorough discussion of economically relevant aspects of remote services. Based on a definition and conceptualization of this new service type that considers current service typology, this article identifies specific challenges for management and marketing of remote services and deduces an agenda for future research.     

Flow and stock analysis of Polish unemployment: January 1990-June 1991*

Abstract. Unemployment is and will be for the foreseeable future one of the major issues of economies in transition. Not onIy is unemployment in post-communist economies a socially explosive problem; what happens on the unemployment front allows us to also make inferences about the state of the transition process in general. In this paper we look at Polish unemployment as it evolved from January 1990 to June 1991. A framework is developed which allows us to discuss flows into and out of unemployment. In analyzing the determinants of the various flows we discuss the macroeconomic environment brought about by the reforms and the role of prices and wages. However, we stress above all institutional and structural factors which have an impact on labour flows in the Polish post-communist economy. The stocks of several variables are also analyzed. We relate the trends of some unemployment stocks (especially the stocks of school leavers and group layoffs) to the trend of the overall stock of unemployment. We also look at the trends of vacancies and of various UIV ratios and touch upon the short run and long run trends of employment by sector. The main conclusion of the paper is that the high level of unemployment in Poland is neither due to the elimination of hidden unemployment (it actually increased in 1990!) nor a result of restructuring. The level of unemployment is high because of large inflows from outside the labour force and because hirings have been much fewer than in previous years while separations have only been slightly greater.