This paper examines international wage determination using a new data set of wages for the year 1998 from a sample of medium to large companies in 58 countries. The data were collected to provide simple and comparable information about wage levels in a large cross-section of diverse countries. Good wage data exist from official sources for several high-income countries. However, these data are sometimes too detailed and usually not immediately comparable, due to the lack of synchronization in reporting and the lack of common standards. For many poorer countries the problem is simply lack of data.
The data will be discussed more extensively below, but briefly, it was collected in early 1999 through identical surveys of managers in large firms in 58 countries. Each executive was asked to report monthly take-home-pay in their company for five occupations: Janitors, Drivers, Secretaries with five years experience, mid-level managers and top managers. Companies were also asked to report their sector of operation, number of employees, multinational affiliation and a number of other questions pertaining to the nature of their business and labor market practices in their company and main country of operation. The strategy was to ask relatively simple questions to obtain a high response rate, with full awareness that there would be some cost in terms of precision. The advantage of this data is that it covers a large number of countries, and asks the same questions about wages to executives within each country at the same point in time. The average sample size is 56 firms per country.
n Tolstoy’s oeuvre, illness often serves as a moment of revelation about profound questions of human existence and the limits of knowledge and positivist science. Levin facing the problem of death at the sight of his brother, stricken with tuberculosis, and Ivan Il’ich reconsidering his entire life in the process of his prolonged, lethal illness are perhaps the most intense and memorable examples. My goal in this paper, however, is to focus on an entirely different and seemingly banal example of illness in Tolstoy: banal both because the disease is successfully cured and because it is a traditional literary topos, almost a cliché. The disease in question is the love-sickness from which Kitty Shcherbatskaia suffers and recovers in Part II of Anna Karenina. A close examination of the way her illness is presented in the novel and how her medical evaluation and the process of her recovery are depicted sheds significant light on Tolstoy’s position on the limitations of the positivist understanding of the human being.
The topos of love-sickness has a long history, both in medicine and literature. Its roots in the Western literary and medical traditions and the interaction between the two are explored in detail in Massimo Ciavolella’s comprehensive study, La “Malattia d’Amore” dall’ Antichità al Medioevo. To summarize briefly, the scientific concept of love-sickness has its roots in the Hippocratic theory of humors, later developed by Galen, the Platonic doctrine of the tri-partite structure of the soul, and the Aristotelian psychology and physiology of passion.
When a manager is concerned with his firm's stock price, his disclosure decisions likely depend on what he expects the stock market reaction to his private information to be. This paper tests the hypothesis that the manager characterizes his private information relative to the firm's stock price and that changes in the stock price can affect the manager's incentives to disclose. In particular, I investigate whether managers tend to withhold information with negative value implications (bad news), releasing this information once a stock price decline transforms it into good news (i.e., relative to the lower stock price).
