Alan Harrison

An historical decomposition of the great depression to determine the role of money

Abstract The innovation-accounting technique of historical decomposition seems ideally suited as a vehicle for a re-examination of moneys role during the Depression. Its application, using U.S. monthly data for 1919 to 1941, reveals that innovations in money exerted a considerable influence on prices and output after October 1929, although the depth of the Depression and the extent of the subsequent recovery cannot be attributed solely to monetary factors. An important, albeit occasionally diminished, monetary effect is also identified even when a passive, contemporaneous response by money to price and output fluctuations is assumed not to contribute to the effect.

Testing for efficient contracts in unionized labour markets

This paper addresses the design of empirical tests to distinguish between two competing explanations of wage and employment determination in unionized labour markets, the labour-demand and efficient-contract models. We argue that most of the tests employed are restrictive, propose an alternative non-nested approach, a central feature of which is the variation in the set of instrumental variables across the models, and provide an illustration of how it might be implemented, using data from the Work-place Industrial Relations Survey (WIRS) 1984 Panel File. The results demonstrate how the traditional approach can lead to inappropriate conclusions, and thereby emphasize the empirical importance of the specification of the instrumental variables. Copyright 1998 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the Board of Trustees of the Bulletin of Economic Research

The upper tail of the earnings distribution: Pareto or lognormal?☆

Abstract The functional description of the upper tail of the earnings distribution is re-examined using British data disaggregated by occupational group. The superiority of the Pareto distribution, over the lognormal is shown to be much less well-supported than at the aggregate level.

Contracts and Strikes in Canada, 1952-1988

Between 1952 and 1979, Labour Canada collected data on something in excess of 5300 contracts. An earlier subset of these data, covering 19531973, was used in work by, inter alia, Riddell (1979, 1980), but in recent years they have not been widely studied. The reason is perhaps that, in the early 1960s, while Labour Canada was still assembling what is usually referred to as the Wage Chronologies File, work also began on the collection of contract data for what is known as the Wage File; this data collection, which continues to the present day, has generated what many view as an unparalleled source of detail about wage agreements, and most analyses of Canadian contracts focus on the Wage File alone. This short paper briefly describes some aspects of the preparation of both data sets for analysis, including the incorporation of information on strikes, when they occurred. (A longer version of this paper that is available from the author dwells in considerably more detail on these issues.) The other main focus of this paper is on some preliminary evidence from a combination of the two samples, covering contracts from 1952 to 1988. Specifically, the combined sample reveals several insights into changes over time in strike behaviour and contract length. In future papers, it is planned to use an extended version of the data (beyond 1988) to explore these and other issues for a period of over 40 years. The paper is organized as follows. Section II describes the two sets of contract data, paying particular attention to the use of Labour Canadas Work Stoppage File to supplement the information on those contracts that were settled only after a strike. Section III outlines one way of combining the contract data sets, and reports on the changes over time in strike behaviour and contract duration thus revealed.

Welfare-improving changes in size distributions of income

Abstract We address the question: given a parameterised welfare function defined over income (via utility), for what values of the parameters do observed changes in U.K. income distribution, over time or as a result of taxes and benefits, constitute an improvement?

Oil prices and the US economy

Abstract An empirical investigation of the effects of oil-price changes on the US economy is conducted, using Sims (1980a) techniques based on unconstrained vector autoregressions. In a 7-variable system, estimated with monthly data for 1962 (May) to 1981 (June), we find the price of oil to be especially important in its impact on nominal wages. Lesser effects on industrial production and prices are also detected, the former only manifesting itself over a time period of two years or more.