The purpose of this paper is to analyze the productivity change for agricultural cooperatives in Japan measured by nonparametric outputoriented Malmquist indices of total factor productivity. The productivity change is decomposed into technical change and technical efficiency change. Linear programming techniques are used to calculate the productivity change using a panel data set for 49 agricu...

The history of forest management in the southern United States has been a process of intensification and the pine forests of the Coastal Plain can be regarded as in the early stage of crop domestication. Silviculture research into tree improvement and other aspects of plantation establishment and management has been critical to the domestication process, which began in the early 1950s with the ...

Reframing the Attitude-Behavior Debate: The Case of Meat-Abstinence in Vegetarian Student Cooperatives

This paper utilizes unique survey data on labor union coverage at the firm level to examine union effects on the profitability of 705 U.S. companies during the 1970s. Market value and earnings are estimated to be about 10-15 percent lower in an average unionized company than in a nonunion company, following extensive control for firm and industry characteristics. Deleterious union effects on fi...

Previous large-N research suggests that globalization could have either positive or negative consequences for labor rights in developing nations. This article examines the ways in which domestic political institutions and interests conditions the effects of economic globalization. It develops several hypotheses regarding the impact of domestic factors on labor rights outcomes and uses the case ...

S mall employers have particular disadvantages as purchasers of health insurance.They often are not well informed about the insurance options available to them because, unlike large employers, they do not have specialized staff to manage their employee benefit programs. Small business owners, who usually make decisions about insurance for their firms, typically have little time or expertise to ...

Economic Growth with Political Lobbying and Wage Bargaining This paper examines an economy with a large number of industries, each producing a different good. Technological change follows a Poisson process where firms improve their productivity through investment in R&D. The less there are firms in the economy or the more they can coordinate their actions, the higher their profits. Labor is use...

A comparative perspective on labor unions reveals that the best of all worlds for the workers is coordinated bargaining at the national level and significant rank-and-file engagement at the local level. But the achievement of national and coordinated bargaining is an unrealistic goal in the foreseeable future in the United States. What American labor can do, however, is to become once again a s...

BACKGROUND In the Netherlands, primary out-of-hours (OOH) care is provided by large scale General Practitioner (GP) cooperatives. GP cooperatives can be contacted by patients living in the area surrounding the GP cooperative (catchment area) at hours when the patient's own general practice is closed. The frequency of primary OOH care use substantially differs between GP cooperative catchment ar...