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Derek Jones, Professor of Economics, Hamilton College
Background
He has been a member of the faculty at Hamilton College (a liberal arts college in central New York) for more than 35 years. During this period he has had several spells as departmental chair. Currently he is Research Director, Economics, Mondragon Cooperative Academic Community (MCAC), Mondragon University, a Research Fellow at the Davidson Institute, University of Michigan and a Research Fellow SKOPE (Oxford). He is formerly Visiting Professor at the Heslinki School of Economics, Pembroke College (Oxford), Hitotsobashi University, the London Business School, Visiting Scholar at Cambridge University, Research Fellow at Manchester University and Warwick University, and Visiting Fellow at Copenhagen Business School, the Arbetslivcentrum (Stockholm) and the European University Institute, (Florence). From 1978-1996 he was also an Associate Fellow of the Program on Participation at Cornell.
Honors include being named in 2008 as the inaugural winner of Career Achievement Award at Hamilton College, Fellowships from Ikerbasque, the Finnish Foundation for Education,the German Marshall Fund, Hallsworth and SSRC, grants and research support from diverse organizations including NSF and Russell Sage and serving as President of both the Association for Comparative Economic Studies and International Association for the Economics of Participation.
He has published over 110 articles in referees journals and chapters in edited volumes. In addition, he has written or edited several books including, served on the editorial boards of several journals and acted as a consultant for several international bodies.
Overview of Research
There are four broad and intersecting tracks to my research interests. (working papers)
An enduring area of interest is employee participation, human resource management and corporate governance. After receiving a BA in Economics at the University of Newcastle and a M.Sc. at L.S.E. in economics and industrial relations, I received my Ph.D. in economics from Cornell in 1974. My principal advisor was Jaroslav Vanek and his doctoral thesis focused on the performance of long established producer cooperatives in the UK. Subsequent research in this broad area has continued though it has branched out in several directions. I have investigated a broader range of issues for producer cooperatives (including survivability, incidence and topics in industrial relations) and also have also undertaken studies of aspects of this organizational form in several other countries, including France, Italy, the US and Poland. In addition I began to study a broader range of forms of corporate governance and employee participation, including worker directors in the UK and Sweden, as well as questions raised by the literatures on profit sharing and employee ownership, executive compensation and stock options.
In this process I published some of the first econometric studies of "participatory" firms, collecting and using data for firms in diverse countries, notably Japan. Throughout this research program (which continues today) I had the good fortune to work and publish with a number of excellent collaborators on many of these matters including David Backus (NYU), Jan Svejnar (University of Michigan), Saul Estrin (London Business School), Louis Putterman (Brown University), Avner Ben-Ner (University of Minnesota), John Bonin (Wesleyan University), Geoff Hodgson (University of Cambridge), Takao Kato (Colgate), and Jeffrey Pliskin (Hamilton). During the last few years a main focus has been econometric case studies of firms in the US, China and especially Finland; several papers have been co-authored with Panu Kalmi, Antti Kauhanen and Mikko Makinen. This research has been published in a variety of journals including the A.E.R., JEL, E.J. Economica, ILLR, JCE., and IR; severl papers are forthoming )end of 2009). Some of this work has been reprinted in different forms (e.g. Producer Cooperatives and Labor Managed Systems, edited by D.L. Prychitko and Jaroslav Vanek, Elgar, Critical Writings Series, 1996.) It also led to what was the first edited volume of theoretical and empirical work in this area, Participatory and Self-Managed Firms Evaluating Economic Performance (with Jan Svejnar, ed., Lexington, Massachusetts, 1982), and to a research annual with Jan Svejnar, Advances in the Economic Analysis of Participatory and Labor Managed Firms (Emerald-Elsevier-JAI). Much of this work was supported by grants form various institutions including NSF.
I have always had an interest in what are now the former communist economies of central and Eastern Europe and the CIS. Beginning in about 1988 or so much of my research has examined diverse issues for transition economies. Panel data sets have been assembled for large samples of firms in Bulgaria, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania and Russia. I draw on these data to examine several research issues and already have produced several country (region) specific papers on particular issues as well as some cross national studies. A key focus has been to understand the determinants of economic performance and especially the roles of privatization, new forms of ownership, and changes in managerial labor markets. Other issues investigated include the nature and determinants of executive compensation, the effectiveness of different policies in relieving unemployment and poverty, the natures and role of labor unions, and the economics performance of small firms. In addition, a large city-level data set has been assembled for China. Together with colleagues at Hamilton (Li and Owen) I have used these data to investigate questions such as the causes of differential growth rates. For all of these projects, data collection and writing and analyses are on-going processes. During this period I have enjoyed visiting spells at several institutions including the London Business School, Cambridge University, Copenhagen Business School and the University of Sofia and I have received support from diverse institutions including NSF and NCEER. I have had the good fortune to work and publish with a number of excellent collaborators on many of these matters including Takao Kato, Niels Mygind, Mark Klinedinst, Mario Nuti, Mieke Meurs, Jeffrey Miller, Jeffrey Pliskin, Bersant Hobdari and Evis Sinai. This research has been published in a variety of journals including Labour Economics, JCE, ILLR, Review Economic Development, and CES and also produced a well-received volume on the Bulgarian economy, The Bulgarian Economy: Lessons from Reform During Early Transition (with Jeffrey Miller, ed.) Avebury, 1997. Other papers are forthcoming (end of 2009).
A third area of interest is economic development in depressed communities. In a project (funded by Russell-Sage and Rockefeller) I am investigating employment practices in local firms. With my collaborators (Takao Kato and Adam Weinberg) he is preparing a book-length manuscript detailing the findings as well as a series of papers, including some econometric case studies.
Also I have a large interest in the new economy and Internet economics. My interest in the new economy is reflected in my being senior editor for the Handbook of Economics in the Digital Age, forthcoming, Academic Press. Also, I have several on-going projects (some with students) which (i) investigate on-line price determination; (ii) provide a case-study of the book-industry as affected by the new economy, (iii) survey firms in upstate NY with a focus on the impact of the new information technologies, especially the internet.
See a list of publications and working papers (some of which are available in Adobe Acrobat PDF format.)
Teaching
I have taught a variety of courses at Hamilton. Courses have been mainly for undergraduates but he has also taught some graduate modules at different institutions and include: Labor Economics; Comparative Economic Systems; Intermediate Macroeconomic Theory; Workers' Participation in Management and Self-Management; Industrial Relations; Economics of Development; History of Economic Thought; Approaches to political Economy; Comparative Industrial Relations; Introductory Economics (Macro, Micro and both in one semester); Economics of Transition; Human Resource Management Policies; Economics of Transition.
As part of teaching at Hamilton I have worked closely with many undergraduates and also I have supervised many undergraduate theses. About half a dozen of these have resulted in publications with undergraduates
I have also supervised many Masters dissertations and been a member of or external examiner for several Ph.D. dissertations.
Personal
I grew up in Middlesbrough (then part of Yorkshire), England. I was the first child from the extended family to attend grammar school, let alone university. Both before and during my studies in the UK I had various spells of employment including working as a bartender, hotel porter, manual laborer in the steel industry, a packer in an ice-cream factory and an internship in with a noted Scandinavian management consultants. I am married and have two children. While I was an active field hockey and soccer player, my current recreational activities are cycling and walking. My interests include collecting old books and cartography (and collecting old maps), travel and watching many sports.
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