Kirjahaku

What happens if an employer cuts wages by one cent? Much of labor economics is built on the assumption that all the workers will quit immediately. Here, Alan Manning mounts a systematic challenge to the standard model of perfect competition. Monopsony in Motion stands apart by analyzing labor markets from the real-world perspective that employers have significant market (or monopsony) power over their workers. Arguing that this power derives from frictions in the labor market that make it time-consuming and costly for workers to change jobs, Manning re-examines much of labor economics based on this alternative and equally plausible assumption. The book addresses the theoretical implications of monopsony and presents a wealth of empirical evidence. Our understanding of the distribution of wages, unemployment, and human capital can all be improved by recognizing that employers have some monopsony power over their workers. Also considered are policy issues including the minimum wage, equal pay legislation, and caps on working hours. In a monopsonistic labor market, concludes Manning, the "free" market can no longer be sustained as an ideal and labor economists need to be more open-minded in their evaluation of labor market policies. Monopsony in Motion will represent for some a new fundamental text in the advanced study of labor economics, and for others, an invaluable alternative perspective that henceforth must be taken into account in any serious consideration of the subject.

The Argentaye Tract, writing some time in the early fifteenth century, is a little-known heraldic treatise of which there appears to be only one extant copy. In this book, the first scholarly edition of any such treatise, Alan Manning presents the original text with extensive notes elucidating difficult passages and points of interest. The text is preceded by an introduction dealing with the present state of heraldic studies and with the history of heraldic treatises in England and France during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It also gives a detailed description of the Argentaye tract's date, provenance, possible author, main divisions, social and psychological context, language, and influence. Manning shows that, by the middle of the fifteenth century, a classical pattern had been developed and that all subsequent treatises were modelled on it. The Argentaye tract, however, represents an original departure from this classic model, certain sections of which it reorganized and expanded significantly. Following the text of the tract itself are a glossary of heraldic terms, an index of proper names, and a bibliography. The fifty-six shield illustrations from the original text are reproduced.

President Abraham Lincoln is known as the Great Emancipator, the Savior of the Union, and an American martyr to the people who read about him. But that was not how his sons knew him. Presidential historian Alan Manning invites readers to see not the thoughtful, burdened president delivering the Gettysburg Address to a war-torn nation, but a man quietly reading bedtime stories to his sleepy-eyed sons; and not the resolute commander-in-chief seeking out winning generals and forming war policy, but a man wrestling with his own grown son’s desire to join the army and go off to war. A combination of history, biography, and family culture, this book follows Lincoln from his growing law practice in Springfield through the turbulent war years in the White House, highlighting the same challenges that many fathers face today: balancing a successful career with paternal responsibilities—a perspective largely ignored by previous Lincoln biographers, thus helping to complete the portrait of one of the most popular, significant, and complex figures in American history.

Immigration policy will never satisfy everyone. It’s a stubborn fact that more people will want to move to high-income countries than residents will want to admit. But, as Alan Manning – former head of Britain’s Migration Advisory Committee – makes clear, that doesn’t mean we can’t do much better. We should start, Manning says, by ditching simplistic views that frame immigration as either wholly good or wholly bad. We will always have and need some level of immigration. But, just as inevitably, we will have rules on who can and cannot immigrate. To set those rules we need reliable evidence to navigate among the often-competing claims of the economy, culture, justice, and democracy. Manning supplies such evidence in abundance, guiding us through cutting-edge international research on key questions, including the effects of immigration on people’s lives, their jobs and incomes, taxes and public services, and their communities. Why Immigration Policy Is Hard is an indispensable resource for informed debate on one of the most charged subjects in public life today.