The Manufacturing Holonic Structured Virtual Team Organization: Labour Cost Reduction?

Management and Labour Studies, Ahead of Print.
It is an undeniable fact that business endeavours in modern times are centred on offshore operations. This scenario demands the employment of virtual teams to be seen as an essential requirement. The experiences from COVID-19 pandemic corroborate this reality. Corporations ought to revise their strategies to successfully incorporate technology as a part of their habitual actions. Holonic manufacturing emerges as a powerful communication and collaboration tool for virtual teams to optimize resources and human power. This study is based on an experiment consisting in a simulated automobile assembly industry. Holonic organizations are compared to non-holonic structures in terms of labour costs based on effective work times. The study employed a Holonic Manufacturing Structure to analyse its possible impact on labour cost reduction among several other advantages.

Managing Bubbles in Experimental Asset Markets with Monetary Policy

Abstract

We study the effect of a “leaning against the wind” monetary policy on asset price bubbles in a learning-to-forecast experiment, where prices are driven by the expectations of market participants. We find that a strong interest rate response is successful in preventing or deflating large price bubbles, while a weak response is not. Giving information about the interest rate changes and communicating the goal of the policy increases coordination of expectations and has a stabilizing effect. When the steady-state fundamental price is unknown and the interest rate rule is based on a proxy instead, the policy is less effective.

Revisiting Real Wage Rigidity

Abstract

In this paper, we provide empirical evidence that real wage rigidity is not a major cause of unemployment volatility. We argue that there is a disconnect between the theoretical and empirical literatures on this topic. While theoretical studies define real wage rigidity as the response of wages to changes in unemployment following productivity shocks, the empirical literature measures real wage rigidity as the estimated semi-elasticity of wages with respect to unemployment, averaged over all shocks. We show that averaging over shocks gives a biased measure of real wage rigidity, as the impact of other shocks confounds the response to productivity shocks. Our results indicate that the estimated semi-elasticity with respect to productivity shocks is twice as large as the estimated semi-elasticity averaged over all shocks. This implies that one cannot attribute unemployment volatility to real wage rigidity.