Michael Parkin

Incomes Policy: Some Further Results on the Determination of the Rate of Change of Money Wages

In an earlier paper, Lipsey and Parkini [3] reported that the rate of change of money wages in the United Kingdom is closely related inversely to the level of unemployment in times when income restraint policies are not being operated, and that it is approximately constant and independent of the level of unemployment when these policies are being operated.2 If the Lipsey-Parkin analysis is correct, there is a crucial level of unemployment below which restraint policies will, on the average, be successful and above which such policies will, on the average, fail. That crucial level of unemployment was calculated to be 1-8 per cent. There is, of course, a considerable range of error on this point estimate. The equations on the basis of which this conclusion was reached are:3

Turnover in an Accounting Firm

We use a unique data set to investigate whether a matching model can describe turnover in an accounting firm. The main focus of the article is to determine whether the probability of separation from employment varies in the way described by Jovanovic. The evidence suggests that as tenure increases both terminations and quits follow the predicted pattern.

Inflation in North America

The past quarter century has seen inflation in North America accelerate and recede, and has seen our stock of knowledge about inflation steadily accumulate.1 The combination of these two events has transformed our attitudes toward inflation and led us to the point at which we now dare to plan for and talk of achieving zero inflation. A central purpose of this chapter is to evaluate the possibility of achieving and maintaining zero inflation in the United States and Canada in the decade ahead. It begins by reviewing the inflation record of the two countries, looking both at their separate performances and their inflation differential. This review highlights the questions that must be answered if zero inflation is to be a possibility.

A Framework & Negotiation Protocol for Service Contracts

This paper presents a specification for a domain-independent, symmetrical, two-party negotiation protocol to reach binding agreements between services based on the principles of contract law. The protocol is necessary as existing specifications, such as WS-agreement, lack the capability to form negotiated agreements and lack sufficient rigor in their design. This leads to ambiguities in their interpretations and, therefore, possible interoperability problems between different implementations. The negotiation protocol fits into the modular, high-level framework also presented here, that can be completed using a variety of existing contract monitoring and management procedures

Enabling scientific collaboration on the Grid

We examine the problem of supporting access by collaborations of scientists to Grid resources. Our aim is to support dynamic collaborations, by which we mean collaborations that can be easily formed and easily dissolved. We argue that current technology for creating Virtual Organisations has difficulty meeting this requirement. We propose an alternative structure, called an Alliance, based on a separation of the mechanisms for forming collaborations of people from the mechanisms for allocating and integrating resources in a Grid infrastructure. The key tools for achieving the Alliance are, firstly, a security architecture and, secondly, an ontological approach to the defining of roles and processes within an organisation. An example is presented to show how these tools can be implemented without needing to change current existing Grid middleware.

A PDA client for the computational grid

Access to the computational grid is currently tied to the laptop/desktop environment since previous grid client development has been concentrated in this area. This paper presents the design and implementation of a lightweight grid client that provides the same level of functionality and security as its desktop counterparts whilst conforming to the limitations and restrictions of a PDA Java runtime environment. This opens up a new area of grid computing access: secure and flexible job submission and monitoring to dependable, persistent, powerful and consistent computing services provided by a grid has been freed from static environments into the mobile domain using standards-based platforms, protocols and components: J2ME, X.509 certificates, SSL connections and IEEE 802.11b wireless networking.

Incomes policy and inflation

Inflation and its consequences remain probably the most serious economic problem which governments in advanced industrial countries face. This volume, originally published in 1972, offers 17 papers by economists on the theoretical and the practical applications of incomes policy on inflation.

THE THEORY OF INFLATION

The Theory of Inflation presents in one volume a comprehensive description of the historical inflation record, surveys the current state of knowledge on the fundamental forces that cause inflation and the mechanisms that propagate it, and examines the costs of inflation and the problems of achieving price stability.

Opportunity cost: A reexamination

That something is amiss with the professions grasp of opportunity cost was signaled when Ferraro and Taylor (2005) confronted 199 economists and PhD students with the following multiple choice que...

Mounting Evidence: Findings from Natural Experiments in Inflation Targeting

International evidence shows the wide economic benefits of inflation targeting, says a ground-breaking C.D. Howe Institute report. In “Mounting Evidence: Findings from Natural Experiments in Inflation Targeting,” author Michael Parkin shows how the evidence broadly supports the merits of inflation targeting as a monetary policy tool for central banks that have clear independence.