DO WAGE CUTS DAMAGE WORK MORALE? EVIDENCE FROM A NATURAL FIELD EXPERIMENT

Employment contracts are often incomplete, leaving many responsibilities subject to workers' discretion. High work morale is therefore essential for sustaining voluntary cooperation and high productivity in firms. We conducted a field experiment to test whether workers reciprocate wage cuts and raises with low or high work productivity. Wage cuts had a detrimental and persistent impact on productivity, reducing average output by more than 20%. An equivalent wage increase, however, did not result in any productivity gains. The results from an additional control experiment with high monetary performance incentives demonstrate that workers could still produce substantially more output, leaving enough room for positive reactions. Altogether, these results provide evidence consistent with a model of reciprocity, as opposed to inequality aversion.     

Probabilistic feature analysis of facial perception of emotions

Summary.  According to the hypothesis of configural encoding, the spatial relationships between the parts of the face function as an additional source of information in the facial perception of emotions. The paper analyses experimental data on the perception of emotion to investigate whether there is evidence for configural encoding in the processing of facial expressions. It is argued that analysis with a probabilistic feature model has several advantages that are not implied by, for example, a generalized linear modelling approach. First, the probabilistic feature model allows us to extract empirically the facial features that are relevant in processing the face, rather than focusing on the features that were manipulated in the experiment. Second, the probabilistic feature model allows a direct test of the hypothesis of configural encoding as it explicitly formalizes a mechanism for the way in which information about separate facial features is combined in processing the face. Third, the model allows us to account for a complex data structure while still yielding parameters that have a straightforward interpretation.     

Population growth and optimality: when does serendipity hold?

This note gives the conditions under which there is an interior optimum rate of population growth in a two-generations-overlapping model. These conditions imply complementarity both in production and in consumption. They also validate Samuelson's serendipity theorem.     

Book reviews

Diffusion Processes and Fertility Transition: Selected Perspectives. 2001. Edited by John B. Caster-Line. National Research Council, Committee on Population. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. Pp. xi + 271. N.p.g. ISBN: 0-309-07610-2. Available online at http://www.nap.edu/books/0309076102/html/Rl.html The Explanatory Power of Models. 2002. Edited by Robert Franck. Boston/Dordrecht/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Pp. x + 310. ￡74.00. ISBN: 1-4020-0867-8. Communism, Health and Lifestyle. The Paradox of Mortality Transition in Albania, 1950-1990. 2001. By Arjan Gjon?a. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Pp. ix + 227. US$69.95. ISBN: 0-313-31586-8. Historical Studies in Mortality Decline. 2002. By William H. Hubbard, Kari Pitk?nen, Jürgen Schlumbohm, S?lvi Sogner, Gunnar Thorvaldsen, and Frans van Poppel. Oslo: Novus Forlag. Pp. 134. ISBN: 82-7099-360-3. Population and Society in Western European Port-Cities. 2002. Edited by Richard Lawton and Robert Lee. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Pp. xx + 385. ￡18.95. ISBN: 0-85323-907-X. The Changing Face of Home: The Transnational Lives of the Second Generation. 2003. Edited by Peggy Levitt and Mary C. Waters. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Pp. xi + 408. US$39.95. ISBN: 0-87154-517-9. The Demography of Victorian England and Wales. 2000. By Robert Woods. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pp. xxv + 447. ￡50.00. ISBN: 0-521-78254-6. The Life Table: Modelling Survival and Death. 2002. Edited by Guillaume Wunsch, Michel Mouchart, and Josianne Duchêne. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers (European Studies of Population, Volume 11). Pp. x + 306. ￡89.00. ISBN: 1-4020-0638-1.     

Truncated cross-sectional average length of life: A measure for comparing the mortality history of cohorts

Period life expectancies are commonly used to compare populations, but these correspond to simple juxtapositions of current mortality levels. In order to construct life expectancies for cohorts, a complete historical series of mortality rates is needed, and these are available for only a subset of developed countries. The truncated cross-sectional average length of life (TCAL) is a new measure that captures historical information about all cohorts present at a given moment and is not limited to countries with complete cohort mortality data. The value of TCAL depends on the rates used to complete the cohort series, but differences between TCALs of two populations remain similar irrespective of the data used to complete the cohort series. This result is illustrated by a comparison of TCALs for the US with those for Denmark, Japan, and other high-longevity countries. Specific cohorts that account for most of the disparity in mortality between the populations are identified.

Supplementary material for this article is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00324728.2015.1019955     

Interregional equilibrium with heterogeneous labor

The impact of labor migration on interregional equilibrium is studied when workers are heterogeneous in productivity and regional mobility. The skilled respond to market disequilibrium by moving into the most attractive region. The unskilled are immobile in the short-run and move with the skilled in the long-run. Both regions have a neoclassical production function affected by an externality depending on the number of skilled. Workers move according to the utility differential when regional amenities vary with population or according to the wage differential. The equilibrium pattern depends on the unskilled‘s mobility and on migration incentives. Typically, regional imbalance characterizes the equilibrium which is often suboptimal. Received November 7, 1994 / Accepted April 12, 1995     

A representation of preferences by the Choquet integral with respect to a 2-additive capacity

In the context of Multiple criteria decision analysis, we present the necessary and sufficient conditions allowing to represent an ordinal preferential information provided by the decision maker by a Choquet integral w.r.t a 2-additive capacity. We provide also a characterization of this type of preferential information by a belief function which can be viewed as a capacity. These characterizations are based on three axioms, namely strict cycle-free preferences and some monotonicity conditions called MOPI and 2-MOPI.     

Professionals' understanding of partnership with parents in the context of family support programmes

Partnership has become a dominant concept in current thinking about the parent–professional relationship within a variety of interventions aimed at child welfare, including family support practice. However, despite the burgeoning policy and research attention, the meaning of partnership in practice remains unclear. Based on interviews with professionals in a family support intervention in Flanders (the Dutch‐speaking part of Belgium), this paper offers an insight into professionals' daily interactions with parents. The analysis reveals a tension between professionals' commitment towards parents on the one hand, and the way professionals take up this commitment in an expert role on the other. Consequences for professionals' relationships in child and family welfare interventions are discussed, as well as some implications for the realization of proper partnerships that acknowledge the power imbalances that exist in such partnerships.     

Trust and social capital in the regulation of lending activities

When a bank grants a loan, it takes the risk that the borrower will not honor his debt. To reduce this uncertainty, banks have created instrumental evaluation methods in order to try to evaluate the risk more objectively. An analysis of financial counselors’ practices shows the limits of these methods. To obtain information needed for the financial risk evaluation and to reduce the information asymmetry between bankers and borrowers, financial counselors integrate social networks to establish bonds of trust and to accumulate social capital. The quality of the social bond determines the quality of the gathered information and therefore the quality of the risk evaluation. Bank management is aware of the limits of instrumental methods and the importance of social risk evaluation. To improve their economic efficiency, they modify their work organization and their management practices so as to facilitate the emergence of a bond of trust and the accumulation of social capital by their financial counselors. The analysis of economic actors’ speech and behavior involved in activities of credit shows that behind the claimed altruism nature of the trust relationship exists an economic rationality whose social and temporal horizons of optimization differ from the model of the trade exchange seen in conventional economic theory.     

Covering relations,closest orderings and hamiltonian bypaths in tournaments

We show that the Slater's set of a tournament, i.e. the set of the top elements of the closest orderings, is a subset of the top cycle of the uncovered set of the tournament. We also show that the covering relation is related to the hamiltonian bypaths of a strong tournament in that if x covers y, then there exists an hamiltonian bypath from x to y.We thank B. Monjardet and an anonymous editor for helpful suggestions.