The extent to which market conditions effects workers' abilities to influence their conditions of work, including wages, has been much considered by many economists in the last three centuries. The conventional economic view has been that conditions of work are largely determined by the forces...

Harvey Leibenstein was the first to introduce the revolutionary concept of X-efficiency and its counterpart X-inefficiency. X-inefficiency exists when firms and economies do not work as hard or as well as they could. X-inefficiency is caused by an organisational structure which does not promote...

Conventional economic modelling of social welfare predicts that welfare payments will have unequivocal negative effects upon the economy in terms of labor supply, production costs, and employment. However, the conventional model is built upon assumptions that are too restrictive given the...

There are two main types of protection costs, "natural costs", such as transportation costs, and imposed costs, such as tariffs and embargoes. Imposed costs have been used for a variety of reasons including raising state revenue and protecting domestic producers. Reducing "natural" protection...

Contrary to the conventional view that unemployment insurance serves to directly increase the rate of unemployment as well as reducing an economy's competitiveness by increasing the market wage of labor, the argument presented in this paper is that this worldview critically depends on...

Standard neoclassical theory argues that an economy is negatively affected by increased labor rights and power since it is assumed that economic agents are always x-efficient; performing at the height of efficiency. However, a behavioral model of the firm suggests that more rights and power,...

Revised Canadian real GNP estimates for the 1870-1926 period, based on the nominal GNP estimates constructed by M. C. Urquhart and on a variety of sector-specific price indexes, are presented. The construction of this revised real GNP series allows for the creation of real output estimates for...

Alternative estimates for the volatility of pre-depression and post-World War II Canadian business cycles are constructed using various real Canadian GNP series. These estimates all suggest that the latter period was prone to much less cyclical volatility than the pre-depression years. With few...

This is an interesting and stimulating book that should be widely read. The Human Firm continues Tomer's ongoing research on what has been referred to as the black box of the firm. In particular, Tomer introduces us to the concept of socio-economic failure, which is the focus of Chapter 2. This...

A key objective of this book is to show that (p. vii) "plain economic history can help pick out the more durable of the arrangements that favour growth." He argues that the conditions favoring long run growth are largely political and include competitive markets, free trade, decentralized...