Greg Hundley

Why and When Are the Self‐Employed More Satisfied with Their Work?

Analysis confirms that the self-employed are more satisfied with their jobs because their work provides more autonomy, flexibility, and skill utilization and greater job security. These underlying mechanisms have been stable over the last 30 years and are not due simply to personality differences. The self-employed job satisfaction advantage is relatively small or nonexistent among managers and members of the established professions—occupations where organizational workers have relatively high autonomy and skill utilization.

The effects of the Keiretsu on the export performance of Japanese companies : Help or hindrance?

This study investigates the effect that membership in a financial keiretsu has on the export performance of Japanese manufacturing companies. Companies that belong to one of the six major financial keiretsu are found to have lower export ratios than similar companies who are not members. The negative effects of keiretsu membership appear confined to producer goods companies where intergroup linkages such as preferential trading relationships are tightest. Additional evidence from the producer goods sector showing that keiretsu members do less well on other measures of company performance supports the argument that the cartel-like properties sometimes ascribed to the keiretsu actually reduce competitiveness, thus dampening export performance. In general, the data do not support recommendations that non-Japanese companies might look to keiretsu-type alliances as an organizational strategy that will lead to competitive advantage in global markets.

Effects of Profitability and Liquidity on R&D Intensity: Japanese and U.S. Companies Compared

This study investigates the proposition that Japanese companies have a greater propensity than U.S. companies to sustain commitment to R&D in the face of fluctuating profits and liquidity. The anal...

Family Background and the Propensity for Self-Employment

Empirical analysis shows that men with self-employed fathers and higher parental incomes are more likely to be self-employed, the impact of paternal self-employment is leveraged by higher family income, and self-employment is more likely when the father worked in an occupation with task requirements similar to those of an independent business. The idea that the paternal self-employment effect is attributable to sons following their fathers into occupations inherently more or less conducive to self-employment is not supported.

Domestic Division of Labor and Self/Organizationally Employed Differences in Job Attitudes and Earnings

This study analyzes the association between self-employment and work-related outcomes including negative spillover between work and home, earnings, and job attitudes. National Study of the Changing Work Force 1997 data support the idea that self-employment provides workers with more scope for matching work activities to their presumed roles in the domestic division of labor. Among married women, the self-employed experience is associated with less negative spillover from job-to-home, greater job satisfaction, and less job burnout. Where pre-school children are present, the earnings of self-employed women are much less than the earnings of the organizationally employed. Among men, self-employment is associated with more job-to-home spillover when there are small children in the family, and with greater job satisfaction.

Women of Steel: Female Blue-Collar Workers in the Basic Steel Industry.

ine whether making WC premiums more accurately reflect the firms injury experiences significantly reduces industrial injuries. The answer is not obvious because small firms (with no experience rating) and large firms (the most completely experience rated) have the lowest injury rates. Chelius and Smith present results strongly implying that improved experience rating has little effect on injury rates. While they are careful to note that a more detailed measure of premium savings might provide a sharper picture, my opinion is that if one has to use a microscope to find something, it is not very large. William Johnson raises the possibility that WC has caused greater work disincentives over time because of growing reliance on payments related to wage loss rather than on lump-sum payments. Unfortunately, he puts this simple idea in very cumbersome economic language, so that the argument (on pages 139-40) loses much of its force. Moreover, his basic empirical result is that among the injured, benefit generosity has little influence on labor supply. He fails, however, to provide empirical results on the behavioral influence of payment mode-lump sum versus payments contingent upon earningsalthough the data appear to be there. How benefit increases during the 1970s influenced the allocation of resources to injury protection is the topic addressed in the essay by James Chelius. He finds a positive relationship between income replacement generosity and a measure of injury frequency. Although Chelius does not note it explicitly, the implication of an early part of his essay is that workers take fewer precautions as their costs of injuries fall. Another interpretation, consistent with research on unemployment insurance, is that causality runs both ways and that states with relatively high injury rates pass WC laws with relatively generous benefits. Thus, we cannot be sure from Cheliuss single-equation model what is going on. The final essay, by Alan Dillingham, examines structural changes in the economy and the workforce using a fixed coefficient framework to summarize the effect of changes in the agesex-industry-occupation distributon on injury rates and WC costs over time. He finds downward pressure on WC costs during the 196080 period, which he attributes to a decrease in the number of older workers and an increase in the number of younger and female workers. He also forecasts WC costs through 1995 based on demographic trends. This essay presents the types of numbers that are helpful in the policy decision process. It also underscores that the issue of sex differences in injury rates merits further analysis. The general thrust of this set of essays might have been improved if the authors had made readers more aware of how the subject fits into the field of social insurance. In particular, these essays could have benefited from greater recognition of the similarities between WC and medical and unemployment insurance. Still, I think that this book is must reading for someone interested in the relation between the economics of job safety and the WC program.

Who joins unions in the public sector? The effects of individual characteristics and the law

Analysis of a large micro-data set shows that state public-sector bargaining laws significantly influence state and local government union membership in several ways. Membership probability is lowest where a right-to-work law is present; it is greatest when there are mandatory agency shop provisions. Compulsory arbitration leads to a significantly greater probability of membership than does the right-to-strike. Simulations based on model estimates indicate that policy changes along the lines of proposed national public bargaining laws could lead to major changes in public-sector union density. Among individual and demographic characteristics, membership probability is significantly affected by full-time/part-time status and the statewide extent of private-sector unionism. Although non-whites and males are more likely to be union members, race and gender membership differentials are shown to be relatively small.

The Effects of Unionism on Recruitment and Selection Methods

This study develops and tests a model of union effects on staffing practices. Unionism is found to be associated with fewer recruitment sources—suggesting that unionism reduces the need to increase applicant supply. Some data suggest that unionization increases the use of formal selection methods—consistent with arguments that higher costs make it important that the best applicants be selected. Other data support the idea that unions resist selection practices that break down the collective identity among workers.

The threat of unionism and wage-coverage effects

This study finds that the union/nonunion wage differential decreases with local labor-market coverage. In general, SMSA coverage has a negligible impact on union wages, and nonunion wages increase significantly with coverage. This is consistent with strong threat effects operating at the local labor-market level. As with most other wage-coverage studies, however, union wages increase more quickly with industry coverage than do nonunion wages. These results support the argument that distinctly different economic processes underlie local labormarket and industry-coverage effects. Economies in the provision of union services imply that union threat effects will be most salient at the local labor-market level. Industry wage-coverage relationships are dominated by the positive effect of product-market coverage on union bargaining power. Estimated coverage effects vary by major industry groupings and are sensitive to changes in the specification of the wage equations.

The Effects of Comparable Worth in the Public Sector on Public/Private Occupational Relative Wages

If, as appears likely, comparable worth programs are confined to the public sector, the level of public/private relative pay may change, and the structure of public/private relative wages within occupations will almost certainly change. The nature of these changes will determine the degree to which public wages conform more or less closely to the prevailing wage standard which requires that wages for public jobs be equivalent to wages for similar private-sector jobs. Thus, there will be implications for economic efficiency. This study analyzes alternative scenarios involving comparable worth in the state and local government (SLG) sector. The results suggest that when comparable worth is implemented through special wage increases, public-sector wages are moved further from compliance with the prevailing wage standard. This is because public wages are, on average, already on a par with private-sector wages. However, comparable worth tends to provide larger wage increases to those occupations where public/private wages are relatively low. And, when the payroll budget under comparable worth is fixed at the same size as the payroll budget before comparable worth, public wages could be moved closer to compliance with the prevailing wage norm.