paired comparison and contingent valuation approaches to morbidity risk valuation abstract this research uses an experimental approach for eliciting consumer valuations of morbidity risk reductions associated with safter chemical products and introduces the paired comparison questions approach to non market valuation in four applications the paired comparisons approach yields higher morbidity valuations than the more familiar contingent valuation approach however both methodologies produce large values of morbidity reduction benefits in comparison to estimates derived from wage hedonic studies explanations for the difference in the estimates and their magnitudes are suggested along with the public policy implications

the socioeconomic consequences of teen childbearing reconsidered we present new estimates of the consequences of teen childbearing that take into account observed and unobserved family background heterogeneity comparing sisters who have timed their first births at different ages the estimation is conducted using data from the u s national longitudinal survey of young women excerpt

social indicators and comparisons of living standards abstract construction of an international index of standards of living incorporating social indicators and economic output typically involves scaling and weighting procedures that lack welfare economic foundations revealed preference axioms can be used to make quality of life comparisons if we can estimate the representative household s production technology for the social indicators this method is applied to comparisons of gross domestic product gdp and life expectancy for 58 countries neither gdp rankings nor the rankings of the human development index hdi are consistent with the partial ordering of revealed preference a method of constructing a utility consistent index incorporating both consumption and life expectancy is suggested

international corporate entrepreneurship and firm performance the moderating effect of international environmental hostility abstract globalization of the world economy has encouraged u s companies to leverage their resources and skills by expanding into existing or new foreign markets u s companies have also acquired new capabilities by locating important functional activities overseas and joining with foreign partners in new markets through alliances and joint ventures these opportunities however are tempered by the constraints imposed by the competitive forces that exist in international environments aggressive government intervention technological changes and fierce local rivalries all contribute to hostile international environments for u s firms global expansion success in global business operations requires resourcefulness and entrepreneurial risk taking the activities of u s companies in foreign markets therefore provide a unique opportunity to examine the effects of international corporate entrepreneurship ice efforts on company performance ice is defined as the sum of a company s efforts aimed at innovation proactiveness and risk taking these efforts offer an important means of revitalizing and renewing established companies and improving their performance few studies have empirically examined the effects of ice activities on companies financial performance this study used data from 98 u s companies to 1 determine the impact of ice efforts on firm performance and 2 explore the moderating effect that the perceived hostility of the international environment has on the relationship between ice and company performance the results showed that ice was positively associated with a firm s overall profitability and growth as well as its foreign profitability and growth those firms that aggressively pursued ice in international environments with higher levels of hostility had higher return on assets roa but did not achieve significantly higher levels of growth however as hostility in the international environment continued to intensify roa rose and then fell as companies increased their ice activities thus there was a point of diminishing returns to a company s aggressive pursuit of ice under excessive environmental hostility the results highlight both the rewards and risks of pursuing ice companies benefit from ice activities by achieving higher overall performance as well as foreign profits and growth in revenue however the aggressive pursuit of ice does not always guarantee superior performance our results show that the payoff from ice is moderated by executives perceptions of the hostility of their firm s international business environment our findings highlight the importance of ice for organizational success both overall and in foreign markets yet the results compellingly suggest that there are upper limits to the potential gains a firm achieves from its aggressive pursuit of ice when the international environment in which it competes is hostile

games parents and adolescents play risky behaviors parental reputation and strategic transfers this article examines parental reputation formation in intra familial interactions in a repeated two stage game children decide whether to drop out of high school or daughters decide whether to have births as teens and parents then decide whether to provide support to their children beyond age 18 drawing on milgrom and roberts 1982 and kreps and wilson 1982 we show that under certain conditions parents have the incentive to penalise older children for their adolescent risk taking behaviour in order to dissuade their younger children from such behaviour when reaching adolescence we find evidence in favour of this parental reputation model

use of damage schedules in environmental valuation the case of urban singapore increasing concerns over environmental degradation have amplified the role of environmental economics and the valuation of non pecuniary environmental resources as tools of analysis to facilitate the design of policies to date however environmental valuation methods have continued to be unreliable misleading and contentious as a guide to resource allocations and damage compensations in this paper a damage schedule is developed based on the scales of relative importance translated from people s judgments about values of various environmental damages or losses the variance stable rank method is applied to the paired comparison responses to obtain the scale values as well as the importance of rankings statistical tests of significance are used to determine the level of the agreement among the survey respondents and the degree of correspondence between different respondent groups this will determine the number of relative importance scales required to adequately represent the responses from all respo

substitution effects in the valuation of multiple environmental programs abstract a theoretical framework for understanding substitution and complementary effects between environmental programs is derived a multiple program valuation function is specified and its structure analyzed a maximum likelihood estimator is derived to estimate the parameters of the valuation function using referendum type contingent valuation data the empirical analysis shows that the conventional benefit aggregation approach of independent valuation and summation overstates the benefits of two and three program policies by an average of 24 and 54 respectively

the costs of low birth weight birth weight has emerged as the leading indicator of infant health and welfare and the central focus of infant health policy this is because low birth weight lbw infants experience severe health and developmental difficulties that can impose enormous costs on society but would the prevention of lbw generate equally sizable cost savings and health improvements estimates of the return to lbwprevention from cross sectional associations may be biased by omitted variables that cannot be influenced by policy such as genetic factors to address this we compare the hospital costs health at birth and infant mortality rates between heavier and lighter infants from all twin pairs born in the united states we also examine the effect of maternal smoking during pregnancy the leading risk factor for lbw in the united states on health among singleton births after controlling for detailed background characteristics both analyses imply substantially smaller effects of lbw than previously thought suggesting two possibilities 1 existing estimates overstate the true costs and consequences of lbw by at least a factor of four and by as much as a factor of 20 or 2 different lbw preventing interventions have different health and cost consequences implying that policy efforts that presume a single return to reducing lbw will necessarily be suboptimal

is the well being of children converging in the european union recent discussion of convergence in the european union has focused on macroeconomic indicators in line with requirements for participation in the single currency but it is reduction of disparities in living standards that is an ultimate goal of european integration the greater economic and social cohesion emphasised by the treaty on union we assemble evidence on whether the well being of children in member states has been converging over the last two decades taking a variety of indicators poverty household worklessness youth unemployment child mortality youth suicide educational enrolment teenage fertility and self reported life satisfaction

the impact of order and mode of market entry on profitability and market share market share performance and profitability of overseas business activities has long been an important issue in international business in this study we explore the impact of order and mode of market entry into an overseas market we find that early entrants have significantly higher market shares and profitability than late followers we also find that equity joint ventures have a higher profitability than either wholly owned operations or contractual joint ventures a significant interaction exists between order and mode of market entry as expected firm efficiency and size affect the performance of firms these results are based on the business activities of a sample of 14 466 foreign firms in china in 1995

wta estimates using the method of paired comparison tests of robustness the method of paired comparison is modified to allow choices between two alternative gains so as to estimate willingness to accept wta without loss aversion the robustness of wta values for two public goods is tested with respect to sensitivity of the wta measure to the context of the bundle of goods used in the paired comparison exercise and to the scope scale of the public good project there was no statistical difference in wta measures for open space based on independent treatments with different contexts one treatment involved valuing open space within a set of goods with similar value the other treatment involved valuing open space within a choice set of goods which had lower dollar values than open space there was a statistical difference in wta between a permanent expansion in the bus system and a temporary expansion in the bus system we conclude the method of paired comparison appears to be a very promising approach to elicit measures of wta

the eclectic paradigm of international production a restatement and some possible extensions this article reviews some of the criticisms directed towards the eclectic paradigm of international production over the past decade and restates its main tenets the second part of the article considers a number of possible extensions of the paradigm and concludes by asserting that it remains a robust general framework for explaining and analysing not only the economic rationale of economic production but many organisational and impact issues in relation to mne activity as well

from dark to light skin color and wages among african americans this paper develops and tests a theory referred to as preference for whiteness which predicts that the interracial white black and intraracial wage gap widens as the skin shade of the black worker darkens using data drawn from the multi city study of urban inequality and the national survey of black americans we report evidence largely consistent with the theory moreover we decompose the estimated interracial and intraracial wage gaps and find that favorable treatment of lighter skinned workers is a major source of interracial and intraracial wage differences as predicted by the theory

adult outcomes for children of teenage mothers using data from the british household panel survey this study examines the relationship between several outcomes in early adulthood e g education inactivity earnings and health and being born to a teenage mother besides standard cross sectional multivariate regression estimates we also present evidence from non parametric estimates and from estimates that account for unmeasured family background heterogeneity by comparing siblings born to the same mother who timed their births at different ages regardless of the econometric technique being born to a teenage mother is usually associated with worse outcomes an important channel of transmission of this adverse effect is childhood family structure which plays a more powerful role than childhood family poverty albeit smaller some of the detrimental effects are also found for children of mothers who gave birth in their early 20s

global strategy implementation at the business unit level operational capabilities and administrative mechanisms the study examines the impact of internationally strategy on organizational design and the influence of the organizational design on effectiveness at the business unit level the empirical findings are based on survey responses from eighty two business units competing in global industries the findings are supportive of the contingency notion which suggests that business unit effectiveness is a function of the fit between the international strategy and the organizational design

iq and stock market participation stock market participation is monotonically related to iq controlling for wealth income age and other demographic and occupational information the high correlation between iq and participation exists even among the affluent supplemental data from siblings studied with an instrumental variables approach and regressions that control for family effects demonstrate that iq s influence on participation extends to females and does not arise from omitted familial and nonfamilial variables high iq investors are more likely to hold mutual funds and larger numbers of stocks experience lower risk and earn higher sharpe ratios we discuss implications for policy and finance research

in high school and pregnant the importance of educational and fertility expectations for subsequent outcomes i introduction after an almost 40 decline in the incidence of teenage childbearing in the united states over a period of 15 consecutive years the number of children born to adolescent mothers rose for the first time in 2005 hamilton martin and ventura 2007 with a number of high profile celebrity teenage pregnancies gully 2008 and a recent widely publicized case of a high school pregnancy pact kingsbury 2008 our nation s attention is once again drawn to the issue of adolescent childbirth and its impact on the young mother s future this study finds that although the negative effect of a high school pregnancy on subsequent educational and earnings outcomes appears particularly large for young women from poor socioeconomic environments it can almost fully be explained by preexisting low educational expectations and early fertility expectations rather than by difficulties in coping with unplanned parenthood over three decades ago researchers first reported a large negative effect of early child bearing on the educational attainment of women waite and moore 1978 in a wealth of subsequent studies adolescent mothers were found to compare unfavorably to women who delay childbearing along a wide range of measures of economic well being from high school completion to postsecondary educational attainment to labor market employment and earnings however the difficulty with interpreting these associations between early childbirth and poor subsequent outcomes lies in the fact that the timing of childbearing is clearly nonrandom in particular women from poor socioeconomic backgrounds are likely to have low educational expectations and low expected labor market earnings trent 1994 trusty 1998 thus facing a relatively low opportunity cost of childbearing they may choose to have a child earlier or to be more likely to engage in behaviors that may lead to an unwanted pregnancy mccrate 1992 women with high educational expectations and a high opportunity cost of childbirth on the other hand may be less likely to become pregnant furthermore given that 40 of unwanted pregnancies in the united states are terminated finer and henshaw 2006 these women may be more likely to terminate a pregnancy if one were to occur as educational and fertility expectations are private information that is not directly observable to the researcher previous studies have employed a number of ways of accounting for the endogeneity of fertility timing such as controlling for observable socioeconomic and demographic characteristics using the siblings of adolescent mothers as the comparison group and exploiting natural experiments like twin births and miscarriages see hotz mcelroy and sanders 2005 for a review of the literature hotz mcelroy and sanders 2005 carried out arguably the most convincing study of the causal impact of teenage childbearing in their study they showed that long term outcomes of women whose teenage pregnancy ends in a miscarriage instead of a live birth are nevertheless very similar to outcomes of teenage mothers thus suggesting that teenage childbirth itself has a few long term negative consequences in this article we come to a similar conclusion by using the educational and fertility expectation data for young women from the sophomore cohort of the high school and beyond hs b study 1980 1992 to explicitly account for the endogeneity of fertility timing this approach is motivated by economic theory if young women behave optimally and form rational expectations over their future fertility education and labor market outcomes then measuring these expectations prior to childbirth should capture all relevant unobservable private information consequently examining how fertility and educational expectations differ between adolescent mothers and women who delay childbearing can help explain why hotz mcelroy and sanders 2005 did not find any causal effect of childbirth on subsequent educational and labor market outcomes despite the wealth of statistical evidence of the relationship

new frontiers in international strategy this paper studies a new frontier in the understanding of international strategy is to explore it we propose the analogy of the ecology of firms and places as a way to emphasize that the real problem is the colocation of different places with different types of firms locations are in fact the distinctive content of international business strategy we deal with this problem with four different perspectives first differences across countries must be addressed with integrative frameworks able to represent the multidimensionality of semiglobalization or intermediate states between total localization and total integration second differences in the development of intermediary markets in a particular place influence firm positioning and industry structure in that place but their impact also crosses different places and it is endogenous to the ecology of places and firms in a systemic integrative way that makes simplifications extremely risky in the design of competitive strategy in an international context third places firms and strategies form a complex ecology that can be studied with a framework focused in understanding the geography strategy link that incorporates different levels of analysis new economic actors and a set of primitives finally firms around the ecology of places face the challenge of developing strategies and business models to serve the majority of humanity today excluded from world trade it is a fundamentally different way to think about the ecology of places and firms overall we present an intriguing new frontier with the capacity to impact both research and practice in the field of international strategy based in understanding the interplay among firms and places

regional factor price convergence across four major european countries w ebber d j and w hite p 2003 regional factor price convergence across four major european countries reg studies 37 773 782 neo classical growth models predict that the free movement of goods and factors will result in the spatial convergence of output and an ensuing convergence of factor prices based on distribution free statistics this paper presents an empirical examination of average factor prices for labour across 58 regions of the eu over the period 1980 94 using methods of concordance and discordance that identify the presence of switching persistence stratification and convergence between individual and groups of regions our results suggest swings in the trend between factor price convergence and factor price divergence while switching persistence and stratification characterize the sample s evolution w ebber d j et w hite p 2003 la convergence re gionale des prix des facteurs a travers quatre grands pays europeens reg studies 37 773 782 les modeles de croissance neo

the economic consequences of absent parents we examine the effects of family structure on economic resources controlling for unobservable family characteristics in the year following a divorce family income falls by 41 percent and family food consumption falls by 18 percent six or more years later the family income of the average child whose parent remains unmarried is 45 percent lower than it would have been if the divorce had not occurred marriage raises the long run family income of children born to single parents by 45 percent these estimates are substantially smaller than the losses that are implied by cross sectional comparisons across family types

using contingent pricing analysis to value open space and its duration at residential locations to estimate benefits from open space adjacent to residences this paper blends contingent valuation and conjoint analysis within a housing market context the resulting framework contingent pricing analysis represents the stated preference counterpart to hedonic pricing analysis by asking individuals to state prices for hypothetical housing locations which include an environmental amenity then it asks individuals to state their willingness to pay for a better and longer lasting environmental amenity as an advantage over hedonic pricing analysis it directly isolates willingness to pay results indicate that potentially short lasting open space adds no value while preserved open space adds 5 066 or 5 to housing value

an empirical analysis of the integration responsiveness framework in global industries in this study businesses competing in global industries were categorized into three groups according to the integration responsiveness framework for conceptualizing industry pressures confronting business competing internationally using this framework contextual conditions associated with each group were examined competitive attributes distinguishing each group were then identified to clarify alternate business level strategies for competing within a global industry context beyond providing additional insight into the nature of competition in global industries several broad extensions to the integration responsiveness framework are suggested

transactions cost economics and the multinational enterprise an assessment abstract this paper applies transactions cost principles to the multinational enterprise in order to ascertain its distinctive properties as a mode of economic organization the analysis helps identify just when and where contractual alternatives to the multinational firm are likely to be viable this turns out to depend upon the nature of the technology the regime of appropriability within which the firm operates and the characteristics of the markets in question transactions cost analysis is also extended to the multinational enterprise host country relationship implications for management and public policy are derived

children and their parents a review of fertility and causality childbearing decisions are not made in isolation they are taken in concert with decisions regarding work marriage health investments and stocks as well as many other observable and non observable considerations drawing causal inferences regarding the effect of additional children on family outcomes is complicated by these endogenous factors this paper lays out the issues involved in estimating the effect of additional child births on family outcomes and the assumptions underlying the range of estimators and methodologies proposed in the economic literature the common pitfalls of these estimators are discussed as well as their potential to bias our interpretation of the effect additional births have on children and parents both in the existing literature and in future work in the face of changing patterns of childbearing and child rearing

economic and social convergence in colombia royuela v and garcia g a economic and social convergence in colombia regional studies gross domestic product gdp has usually been used as a proxy for human well being nevertheless other social aspects should also be considered such as life expectancy infant mortality educational enrolment and crime issues this paper investigates economic and social convergence between regions in colombia in the period 1975 2005 the main results confirm that there is convergence in colombia in key social variables although not in the classic economic variable gdp per capita it is also found that spatial autocorrelation reinforces convergence processes through deepening market and social factors while isolation condemns regions to non convergence

quality of life indices for analysing convergence in the european union giannias d liargovas p and manolas g 1999 quality of life indices for analysing convergence in the european union reg studies 33 27 35 this paper investigates convergence and tests it empirically across countries of the european union between 1970 and 1990 convergence is defined not only in terms of economic indicators but also in terms of social and quality of life indicators real convergence is computed by evaluating a weighted average coefficient of variation based on economic and quality of life variables the weights are based on an experts opinion survey country rankings based on the values of a composite quality of life index are also constructed the results confirm that real convergence was achieved between 1970 75 for most of the countries convergence stagnated between 1980 85 and then it increased southern european member states did not exhibit similar patterns giannias d liargovas p et manolas g 1999 l analyse de la convergence au sein de l union europe enne a partir

strategic alignment and performance of market seeking mncs in china this study explores the environment strategy performance relation of foreign firms especially those with a market seeking mandate in china the results indicate that the analyzer orientation is best suited to the turbulent chinese market which has been undergoing an economic transition in recent years there is also a significant difference in financial performance among market seeking mncs depending on strategic orientations with the analyzer orientation producing the highest performance the prospector and the defender orientations lead to poor financial performance because of the mismatch with china s market which is highly dynamic and complex our findings reiterate the importance of understanding local market traits and opportunities and developing proper strategic configurations for market seeking mnc subsidiaries especially in an emerging economy like china copyright 2001 john wiley sons ltd

bounding causal effects using data from a contaminated natural experiment analysing the effects of teenage childbearing in this paper we consider what can be learned about causal effects when one uses a contaminated instrumental variable in particular we consider what inferences can be made about the causal effect of teenage childbearing on a teen mother s subsequent outcomes when we use the natural experiment of miscarriages to form an instrumental variable for teen births miscarriages might not meet all of the conditions required for an instrumental variable to identify such causal effects for all of the observations in our sample however it is an appropriate instrumental variable for some women namely those pregnant women who experience a random miscarriage although information from typical data sources does not allow one to identify these women we show that one can adapt results from horowitz and manski 1995 on identification with data from contaminated samples to construct informative bounds on the causal effect of teenage childbearing we use these bounds to re examine the effects of early chilbearing on the teen mother s subsequent educational and labour market attainment as considered in hotz mcelroy and sanders 1995a 1995b consistent with their study these bounds indicate that women who have births as teens have higher labour market earnings and hours worked compared to what they would have attained if their childbearing had been delayed

a review essay on isabel sawhill s generation unbound drifting into sex and parenting without marriage and laurence steinberg s age of opportunity lessons from the new science of adolescence sawhill and steinberg approach risky behavior among youth from two different angles steinberg argues for intervention during the adolescent years to alter behavior in ways that prioritize patience and self regulation while sawhill advocates interventions that mitigate the negative effects of risky behavior both argue that disadvantaged youth suffer worse consequences as a result of risky behavior and therefore stand to gain the most from interventions while the authors develop strong arguments for adolescent interventions the existing evidence on their effectiveness is less compelling to reconcile the promise with the reality i argue that growing up in environments of significant uncertainty reduces the returns to forward thinking behavior in the daily lives of disadvantaged youths interventions to develop adolescent decision making skills so as to reduce risky behavior will not be effective if they are inconsistent with the incentives generated by a local environment that is often characterized by uncertainty

quality of life and economic convergence across spanish regions 1980 2001 marchante a j and ortega b 2006 quality of life and economic convergence across spanish regions 1980 2001 regional studies 40 471 483 evaluations of regional welfare conventionally rely on gross value added gva per capita as an indicator of living standards this paper attempts to readdress the regional welfare issue by using alternative composite indicators in the context of the united nations development programme undp human development indices evidence is presented regarding to what extent such alternative measures of living standards are converging with this aim a database for the spanish regions nuts ii was constructed for 1980 2001 and an augmented version of the human development index ahdi was estimated incorporating sub indices of health education and the resources required for a decent standard of living including an indicator of social exclusion the regional convergence of three per capita income measures and the raw data of seven indicators of quality of life were also

international strategy and environment an assessment of the performance relationship this study develops a classification of international business level strategies built on the dimensions of segment differentiation and geographic scope in addition performance outcomes associated with specific international environment and business level strategy matches are suggested using information from firms competing in both global and multidomestic industries the study finds that geographic scope and segment differentiation can be used to distinguish four international strategies the effectiveness of which is a function of the environments in which firms compete

why wait the effect of marriage and childbearing on the wages of men and women we use data from the earlier and later cohorts of the nlsy to estimate the effect of marriage and childbearing on wages our estimates imply that marriage lowers female wages 2 4 percent in the year of marriage marriage also lowers the wage growth of men and women by about two and four percentage points respectively a first birth lowers female wages 2 3 percent but has no effect on wage growth male wages are unaffected by childbearing these findings suggest that early marriage and childbearing can lead to substantial decreases in lifetime earnings

trends in the well being of american women 1970 1995 this paper examines the trends in the well being of american women over the last 25 years a time of significant changes in the relative economic status of women and in the labor market as a whole a broad range of indicators are considered to capture changes in women s well being in the family as well as in the labor market for virtually all age and education groups substantial evidence is obtained of rising gender equality in labor market outcomes notably labor force participation wages and occupational distributions broad evidence is also found of greater gender parity within married couple families as the housework time of husbands increased relative to wives and the relative wages of wives rose compared to their husbands however parallel to the recent evidence of the declining labor market position of lower skilled men there has been a similar deterioration in the economic status of less educated women especially high school dropouts their labor force participation rates and wages have risen at a much slower pace than those of more highly educated women while their incidence of single headship has increased much more rapidly these findings for less educated women serve to underscore the widening gap between more and less skilled americans of both sexes as well as to emphasize its broad dimensions

teenage motherhood education and labor market outcomes of the mother evidence from brazilian data abstract this paper studies the effects of teenage motherhood on later educational and labor market achievement of the mothers we construct a pseudo panel from the brazilian household surveys the 1992 2004 pnads and from the health ministry data datasus 1981 1992 by state of birth and cohort we find that the effects of teenage pregnancy are much stronger for high school completion and labor market participation than for schooling or wages a reduction in teenage pregnancy by one standard deviation explains i 9 2 of the increase in high school completion and ii 5 4 of the increase in women s labor market participation as observed over 10 cohort years lifecycle results show that the gains in terms of high school education are greater for younger than for older women suggesting that women who give birth as teenagers tend to catch up with high school education while young but not as they become older the results on labor market participation show persistent teenage motherhood effects

high profit strategies in mature capital goods industries a contingency approach high profit and low profit strategic gestalts in two different types of mature capital goods industries are examined multiple avenues to high profits are found within both types but they differ

the convergence in black white infant mortality rates during the 1960 s the dramatic reduction in the black white earnings gap from 1965 to 1975 represents the most significant period of economic progress for african americans in the post world war ii era after 25 years of contentious research economists have arrived at a consensus that title vii of the 1964 civil rights act which outlawed employment discrimination was a major factor underlying the post 1965 trend break in relative earnings john j donahue and james j heckman 1991 david card and alan krueger 1993 a key piece of supporting evidence is that most gains were concentrated among black workers in the south where title vii had its biggest impact the mortality rate of black infants relative to white infants is another clearly important measure of the relative well being of africanamericans surprisingly and in contrast to the relative earnings literature there are very few studies that focus on long run trends in the relative health of black infants over time in addition the existing research is based on highly aggregated data both across regions and over time which provide little information on the precise location and timing of infant mortality changes by race consequently the evidence on the specific factors underlying significant changes in black white infant health outcomes is sparse and often anecdotal an examination of infant death rates within a year of birth for whites and nonwhites and the nonwhite white infant mortality rate imr ratio from 1933 1990 in the united states reveals many striking patterns figure available from authors upon request immediately before world war ii about 4 1 percent of white infants and 7 5 percent of black infants died within a year of birth during world war ii there was a large decline in black infant mortality rates and in the black white ratio since world war ii there has been a secular increase in the black white imr ratio with one notable exception in the narrow period of 1965 1970 the black imr and the black white ratio declined sharply relative to preexisting trends relatively stable during 1961 1965 the black imr fell 30 percent from 4 0 per 100 live births in 1965 to 2 8 in 1971 at the same time the black white ratio fell from 1 9 to 1 65 the only prolonged convergence in the post world war ii era the national patterns suggest that 1965 1970 is the key period for improvements in the relative health of black infants over the past 50 years this study examines trends in black white rates of infant death during 1955 1975 to document the location of the improvements we collected data by race at the state and rural urban levels which has not been previously done using simple descriptive models we find discussants david meltzer university of chicago and nber kenneth chay university of california berkeley and nber jeffrey grogger university of california los angeles and nber dan black syracuse university

the motherhood earnings dip evidence from administrative records using spanish social security records we document the channels through which mothers fall onto a lower earnings track such as shifting into part time work accumulating lower experience or transitioning to lower paying jobs and are able to explain 71 percent of the unconditional individual fixed effects motherhood wage gap the earnings trajectories analysis reveals that mothers to be experience important relative earnings increases several years before giving birth but this earnings advantage falls right after birth taking in average nine years to recover heterogeneity matters as most of the motherhood dip is driven by workers with permanent contracts

the role of economic incentives in teenage nonmarital childbearing choices abstract in this paper we explore whether behaviors of youths that are likely to result in a teen nonmarital birth event are influenced by their expectations of the net economic benefits or costs associated with the occurrence of such a birth we posit and find that an increase in the perceived costs associated with the occurrence of a nonmarital birth would lead to a reduction in these risky behaviors and to a lower probability of a nonmarital birth event we represent these economic incentives by the income expectations of young women conditional on either giving birth as an unmarried teen or forgoing childbearing while unmarried and an adolescent we also measure the effects of an extensive list of other factors including the characteristics of the girl s family and its choices the social and economic environment in which she lives including policy related factors such as expenditures by states on family planning programs and the generosity of aid to families with dependent children and her own prior choices

intercountry inequalities in income and basic needs indicators a recent perspective abstract large crosscountry samples are used to compute intercountry inequalities in income and three indicators of basic needs fulfillment first the familiar picture of high intercountry inequality in income coexisting with low inequality in basic needs indicators is reaffirmed for the 1980s second income inequality seems to have continued its increasing trend third however while the pace of increase in inequality in conventional gdp per capita has accelerated accentuation of inequality in real gdp per capita has slowed fourth inequality in basic needs indicators continues to decline last caution is urged in interpreting the very low values observed for some indices of inequality in basic needs fulfillment during the 1980s

inequality among world citizens 1820 1992 this paper investigates the distribution of well being among world citizens during the last two centuries the estimates show that inequality of world distribution of income worsened from the beginning of the 19th century to world war ii and after that seems to have stabilized or to have grown more slowly in the early 19th century most inequality was due to differences within countries later it was due to differences between countries inequality in longevity also increased during the 19th century but then was reversed in the second half of the 20th century perhaps mitigating the failure of income inequality to improve in the last decades jel d31 f0 n0 o0