One line of my research seeks to explain changes and differences in income distribution in terms of (1) changes and differences in institutions, and (2) changes in the technologies of coordination and control used in business. The second part of this (technologies of coordination and control) is an agency-theoretic argument about the effects of technological change, or what Peter Skott (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) and I have called “power-biased technological change” (PBTC) here, here, and here. A draft of a new paper dealing with interactions between PBTC and institutional change is here.
Some related work deals with questions of changes in bargaining power and wages as a result of changes in institutions (specifically the regulatory environment) and technology. This includes a paper with Matias Ramirez (SPRU, University of Sussex) and Dave Beale (University of Manchester) on industrial relations in American and British telephone companies, here. Some of the theoretical arguments in that paper had earlier been developed in a paper of mine on a link between customer service and employee bargaining power in American supermarkets, here. With Steve Burks and Ben Maxwell (University of Minnesota at Morris), I have studied changes in the pay of US trucking company executives following deregulation of that industry, here. More work with Burks, on truck drivers’ wages following deregulation, is in progress.
Weeranan Kamnungwut and I study cooperation (and lack of it) between ceramics manufacturing companies in the city of Lampang, Thailand, here. This contribution to the literature on industrial districts, or geographically concentrated enterprise clusters, builds on Kamnungwut’s Birkbeck PhD thesis.
How changes in the organization and technology of production have contributed to international economic integration is a topic I take up here (we could say “globalization” instead of international economic integration, but only with scare quotes are because I don’t really believe that g_n is pervasive, and do believe that regionalization is at least as important: see my book).
Finally, the effect of out-off-town shopping on prices and variety in neighborhood stores (bottom line: prices go up, variety goes down) is something I take up here. This implies a link between social policy (the high local prices are disproportionately those without cars, who tend to be the poor, so out-of-town shopping makes purchasing power more un-equal), environmental policy (requiring out-of-town superstores to shoulder the environmental costs of car traffic would, in some cases, make neighborhood stores competitive again) and, of course, urban policy. Further work on this will be forthcoming from me and Philip McCann (University of Groningen).