			Home About us Contact

Market Situation (market + situation)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Business, Economics, Finance and Accounting	75%

Selected Abstracts

Labour market implications of EU product market integration

ECONOMIC POLICY, Issue 30 2000
Torben M. Andersen
European labour markets are in a state of flux due to the changing market situation induced by international integration. This process affects wage formation through more fierce product market competition and increased mobility of jobs. This development is by some observers taken to enforce labour market flexibility, while for others it signals an erosion of social standards and in turn possibly the welfare society. Since labour is not very mobile in Europe, the effects of international integration on labour markets are mostly indirect via product market integration. We review the channels through which product market integration affects labour markets and perform an empirical analysis of the convergence and interdependencies in wage formation among EU countries. We find that integration is changing labour market structures and inducing wage convergences as well as stronger wage interdependencies, but it is a gradual process. Moreover, the present study does not support the view that international integration will lead to a ,race to the bottom' and rapidly erode domestic labour markets standards, nor that it will relieve politicians of the need to consider labour market reforms to improve labour market performance. [source]

Changes in the Labor Market and Occupational Prestige Scores

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF JAPANESE SOCIOLOGY, Issue 1 2000
Junsuke Hara
Abstract, In spite of the great changes in the structures of industry as well as work and occupation in postwar Japan as a result of rapid industrialization, occupational prestige scores as an index of people's evaluation of occupations did not reveal the corresponding changes. They maintained consistent stability since the mid 1950s aside from parallel upward movements, which might be a result of the permeation of an egalitarian ideology. Three kinds of occupational prestige scores calculated from data in the SSM survey of 1955, 1975 and 1995 had very high correlation with each other. The scores also showed a strong correlation between levels of education and income for each occupation, and no relation with labor market situation. And the unchanged order of occupations in Japan might be one of the reasons for the stability. The fact that people's evaluation of occupations revealed by prestige scores has scarcely changed and such scores has been associated with differences in the level of education makes us suspect that Japan's "credentialism" might be weakened in the near future. [source]

Order imbalance and the dynamics of index and futures prices

THE JOURNAL OF FUTURES MARKETS, Issue 12 2007
Joseph K.W. Fung
This study uses transaction records of index futures and index stocks, with bid/ask price quotes, to examine the impact of stock market order imbalance on the dynamic behavior of index futures and cash index prices. Spurious correlation in the index is purged by using an estimate of the "true" index with highly synchronous and active quotes of individual stocks. A smooth transition autoregressive error correction model is used to describe the nonlinear dynamics of the index and futures prices. Order imbalance in the cash stock market is found to affect significantly the error correction dynamics of index and futures prices. Order imbalance impedes error correction particularly when the market impact of order imbalance works against the error correction force of the cash index, explaining why real potential arbitrage opportunities may persist over time. Incorporating order imbalance in the framework significantly improves its explanatory power. The findings indicate that a stock market microstructure that allows a quick resolution of order imbalance promotes dynamic arbitrage efficiency between futures and underlying stocks. The results also suggest that the unloading of cash stocks by portfolio managers in a falling market situation aggravates the price decline and increases the real cost of hedging with futures. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 27:1129,1157, 2007 [source]

Obesity as Market Failure: Could a ,Deliberative Economy' Overcome the Problems of Paternalism?

KYKLOS INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF SOCIAL SCIENCES, Issue 2 2009
Paul Anand
SUMMARY The paper argues that the problem of obesity can usefully be seen as illustrating a new kind of market failure. At the heart of such failures is the emergence of a sub-optimal choice environment which, though derived from a large number of small individual optimising decisions, is not the choice environment that people would choose if they were able to choose the environment itself. This idea is claimed to be consistent with modern economic theories of freedom of choice and applicable particularly to choice environments that emerge in highly competitive market situations. The retail supply of food and consumer credit is discussed by way of example. Concluding, the paper develops the concept of a ,deliberative economy' as an alternative to liberal paternalism and explores conditions under which such an approach to social choice might deliver desirable outcomes. [source]