estimating the willingness to pay of industrial firms for japanese industrial parks this study aims to investigate the determinants of the willingness to pay wtp of industrial firms and the sales price of public companies for industrial parks and the gap between the two the sales price is estimated using ordinary least squares ols while wtp and the gap are estimated using random wtp probit models and disaggregated sales data of japanese industrial parks between 2002 and 2007 testing the model reveals two important differences between firms wtp and sales price first the sale price is decided in order to cover the development cost since only the sale price is influenced by the average land price of each region while wtp is not secondly the current demand of the industrial sector is insufficiently represented in the sales price this is because firms wtp is significantly more sensitive than suppliers sales prices in terms of accessibility to both large and small cities and agglomeration economies

strategic extremism why republicans and democrats divide on religious values party platforms differ sharply from one another especially on issues with religious content such as abortion or gay marriage given the high return to attracting the median voter why do vote maximizing politicians take extreme positions in this paper we find that strategic extremism depends on an intensive margin where politicians want to induce their core constituents to vote or make donations and the ability to target political messages toward those core constituents our model predicts that the political relevance of religious issues is highest when around one half of the voting population attends church regularly using data from across the world and within the united states we indeed find a nonmonotonic relationship between religious extremism and religious attendance

public private political cleavage what happens after retirement political preferences of public employees differ from those of workers in the private sector the former are more likely to vote for left wing parties and orient themselves ideologically towards the left this political cleavage can be understood as the result of occupational incentives or alternatively as ideological self selection whereby individuals favoring government solutions seek employment in the public sector we test the selection hypothesis by estimating the effects of public versus private occupational sector on political preferences before and after retirement the data are from the norwegian election surveys and cover nine national elections between 1977 and 2009 the research design addresses a series of cross sectional data and the key challenge of endogenous retirement is handled with instrumental variables party choice ideological orientation and public spending preferences are shown to change following retirement and former private and public employees converge the results reject selection based on hard wired political preferences

using maimonides rule to estimate the effect of class size on scholastic achievement the twelfth century rabbinic scholar maimonides proposed a maximum class size of 40 this same maximum induces a nonlinear and nonmonotonic relationship between grade enrollment and class size in israeli public schools today maimonides rule of 40 is used here to construct instrumental variables estimates of effects of class size on test scores the resulting identiecation strategy can be viewed as an application of donald campbell s regression discontinuity design to the class size question the estimates show that reducing class size induces a signiecant and substantial increase in test scores for fourth and efth graders although not for third graders when asked about their views on class size in surveys parents and teachers generally report that they prefer smaller classes this may be because those involved with teaching believe that smaller classes promote student learning or simply because smaller classes offer a more pleasant environment for the pupils and teachers who are in them mueller chase and walden 1988 social scientists and school administrators also have a longstanding interest in the class size question class size is often thought to be easier to manipulate than other school inputs and it is a variable at the heart of policy debates on school quality and the allocation of school resources in many countries see e g robinson 1990 for the united states ofsted 1995 for the united kingdom and moshel ravid 1995 for israel this broad interest in the consequences of changing class size

the economics of urban sprawl theory and evidence on the spatial sizes of cities many commentators believe that the phenomenon of urban sprawl which is characterized by vigorous spatial expansion of urban areas is a symptom of an economic system gone awry by transforming pastoral farmland into often unattractive suburbs sprawl is thought to disrupt a natural balance between urban and non urban land uses leading to a deplorable degradation of the landscape this sentiment is often translated into policy through zoning restrictions designed to inhibit the conversion of land from agricultural to urban use see bryant and conklin 1975 the economist s view of urban expansion stands in stark contrast to this emotionally charged indictment of sprawl economists believe that urban spatial size is determined by an orderly market process which correctly allocates land between urban and agricultural uses the model underlying this view which was originally developed by muth 1969 and mills 1972 and more completely analyzed by wheaton 1974 suggests that urban spatial size is determined in a straightforward way by a number of exogenous variables by showing empirically that urban size is related to the given variables population income agricultural rent and commuting cost in the manner predicted by the model the present paper achieves two goals first the empirical results suggest that the economist s view of urban sprawl is justified rather than being determined by a process which indiscriminately consumes agricultural land urban sizes are the result of an orderly market equilibrium where competing claims to the land are appropriately balanced 2 second by confirming the urban size predictions of the underlying model the empirical results constitute yet another piece of evidence validating the basic framework of urban economic analysis 3 the plan of the paper is as follows section ii sketches the structure of the muth mills model and presents the main comparative static results relevant to urban sprawl with the model s predictions in focus section iii discusses the sample and the data and section iv presents the empirical results section v offers conclusions

micro targeting and polarization abstract this paper connects the rise in polarization to changes in media technology which allow for higher precision in the advertising strategy of candidates candidates place ads in media outlets whose audiences differ in ideology and size we develop the concept of media centrality which takes into account differences in the media network and in ideology media centrality leads to a simple characterization of both the optimal targeting strategy and policy we show that generally a more fragmented media landscape leads to an increase in polarization

retirement effects on health in europe what are the health impacts of retirement as talk of raising retirement ages in pensions and social security schemes continues around the world it is important to know both the costs and benefits for the individual as well as the governments budgets in this paper we use the survey of health ageing and retirement in europe share dataset to address this question in a multi country setting we use country specific early and full retirement ages as instruments for retirement behavior these statutory retirement ages clearly induce retirement but are not related to an individual s health exploiting the discontinuities in retirement behavior across countries we find significant evidence that retirement has a health preserving effect on overall general health our estimates indicate that retirement leads to a 35 percent decrease in the probability of reporting to be in fair bad or very bad health and an almost one standard deviation improvement in the health index while the self reported health seems to be a temporary impact the health index indicates there are long lasting health differences

retirement effect on health status and health behaviors in urban china abstract this paper analyzes the causal impact of retirement in china on body mass index bmi and weight which are a good gauge of the risk for some diseases many middle income developing countries are aging very rapidly and may have to adjust the retirement age to have financially feasible government budgets it is important to know and understand any plausible health consequences of raising the retirement age in developing countries and which sub populations within these countries may be most affected by using 2011 2013 and 2015 waves of the china health and retirement longitudinal study charls our identification strategy uses variation in china s mandatory retirement age with a fuzzy discontinuity design to examine an exogenous shock to retirement behavior our study finds that retirement will increase weight and bmi among men this effect is much larger for men with low education the channel may be that men with low education drink more and take less vigorous exercises after they get retired retirement does not affect weight and bmi for women these effects are robust with different definitions of retirement narrow retirement bandwidth for samples as well as dropping samples with rural hukou

consistent estimation of the urban land value function abstract previous studies have found that the urban land value function became flatter during the 19th century apparently due to declining transportation costs and increasing income estimates from these studies imply that housing demand became less elastic over the same period from elastic to unit elastic this paper demonstrates that the latter conclusion is rejected when the area of the city is defined correctly and consistent estimation procedures are used by combining urban and non urban data previous studies underestimated the degree to which the slope of the land value function declined over time when only urban data are used the decline is even greater and the price elasticity of demand for housing is uniformly unit elastic in addition the commonly used box cox transformation is found to be an imprecise method of generalizing functional form and subject to substantial small sample bias which if ignored leads to an underestimate of standard errors

estimation of the bid rent function with the usage decision model abstract this paper examines whether the bid rent function model is a valid description of a mechanism of the urban land market we estimate the function that decides land usage and price using the full information maximum likelihood fiml it finds that land usage on average follows the rule that is consistent with the bid rent function model whichever usage outbids the others occupies the land however the evidence also suggests that there is a systematic departure from the model namely the distance from the second city center may directly affect land usage even though it is not reflected in land prices

healthier when retiring earlier evidence from france this paper contributes to the literature on the health retirement relationship by looking at the effect of retiring before legal age on health in later life in france to account for the endogeneit

coarse thinking and persuasion we present a model of uninformative persuasion in which individuals think coarsely they group situations into categories and apply the same model of inference to all situations within a category coarse thinking exhibits two features that persuaders take advantage of i transference whereby individuals transfer the informational content of a given message from situations in a category where it is useful to those where it is not and ii framing whereby objectively useless information influences individuals choice of category the model sheds light on uninformative advertising and product branding as well as on some otherwise anomalous evidence on mutual fund advertising

do political protests matter evidence from the tea party movement can protests cause political change or are they merely symptoms of underlying shifts in policy preferences this paper studies the effect of the tea party movement in the united states which rose to prominence through a series of rallies across the country on april 15 tax day 2009 to identify the causal effect of protests we use an instrumental variables approach that exploits variation in rainfall on the day of the coordinated rallies weather on tax day robustly predicts rally attendance and the subsequent local strength of the movement as measured by donations media coverage social networking activity and later events we show that larger rallies cause an increase in turnout in favor of the republicans in the 2010 congressional elections and increase the likelihood that incumbent democratic representatives retire incumbent policymaking is affected as well representatives respond to large protests in their district by voting more conservatively in congress finally the estimates imply significant multiplier effects for every protester republican votes increase by seven to fourteen votes together our results show that protests can build political movements that ultimately affect policy and they suggest that it is unlikely that these effects arise solely through the standard channel of private information revelation

retirement intergenerational time transfers and fertility abstract retired parents might invest time in their adult children by providing childcare such intergenerational time transfers can have important implications for family decisions this paper estimates the effects of parental retirement on the fertility of their adult children we use representative panel data from germany to link observations on parents and their adult children we exploit eligibility ages for early retirement for identification in a regression discontinuity and pension reforms in a difference in differences design the results suggest that parents retirement positively influences the fertility of their adult children which is mainly driven by an increase in the likelihood of having a second birth however while parental retirement affects the timing of the fertility of their adult children it does not affect the children s total fertility

what explains the difference in the effect of retirement on health evidence from global aging data this paper analyzes the reasons for differences in the effect of retirement on health estimated results in previous studies we investigate these differences by focusing on the analysis methods used by these studies using various health indexes numerous researchers have examined the effects of retirement on health however there are no unified views on the impact of retirement on various health indexes consequently we show that the choice of analysis method is one of the key factors in explaining why the estimated results of the effect of retirement on health differ moreover we re estimate the effect of retirement on health by using a fixed analysis method controlling for individual heterogeneity and endogeneity of the retirement behavior we analyze the effect of retirement on health parameters such as cognitive function self report of health activities of daily living adl depression and body mass index in eight countries we find that the effects of retirement on self report of health depression and adl are positive in many of these countries

does retirement age impact mortality the relationship between retirement and mortality is studied with a unique administrative data set covering the full population of norway a series of retirement policy changes in norway reduced the retirement age for a group of workers but not for others difference in differences estimation based on monthly birth cohorts and treatment group status show that the early retirement programme significantly reduced the retirement age this holds true also when we account for programme substitution for example into the disability pension instrumental variables estimation results show no effect on mortality of retirement age neither do estimation results from a hazard rate model

early retirement and economic incentives in norway early retirement programmes have gradually reduced the retirement age from 67 to 62 for a majority of the labour force based on micro data for 1990 and 1992 we estimate a competing risk model with three states full retirement partial retirement part time work and full time work we then use the estimated model in simulations to study how financial incentives can be strengthened to extend working life financial incentives educational background and industry affiliation are found to influence retirement behaviour for low and medium incomes the tax system shifts the incentives heavily towards early retirement and in particular towards partial retirement combined with part time work

new evidence on pensions social security and the timing of retirement using a unique dataset that links the economic and demographic information of households with the details of their pension formulas i estimate the combined effect of social security and pension benefits on the probability of retirement in a cross section of the population near retirement age the accrual rate of retirement wealth is shown to be a significant determinant of the probability of retirement simulations of extensions in pension coverage comparable to those that occurred in the early postwar period can account for one fourth of the contemporaneous decline in labor force participation rates 1998 elsevier science s a all rights reserved

the market effects of zoning undeveloped land does zoning follow the market through restricting the uses of land zoning gives local governments the power to modify the dictates of unconstrained land markets many believe however that the regulations tend to coincide with or anticipate the market solution rather than modify it the validity of this assertion is an empirical question and has not yet been adequately addressed the purpose of this paper is to develop and apply an empirical test of the null hypothesis that zoning follows the market the null hypothesis can be rejected only if land uses under zoning differ from what they would be without zoning the first task in deriving the test is to differentiate between constrained and unconstrained land market allocations it is shown that parameter estimates for hedonic price functions when markets are zoned cannot be interpreted to imply that the regulations constrain market prices it is also shown that sample selection bias is a likely source of specification error in estimating hedonic price functions for zoned land markets since the sample selection of parcels to zone designations is unlikely to be random the selection process must be accounted for in ordinary least squares ols estimation of zone constrained hedonic price functions fortunately the correction for the specification error also provides a test for the market effects of zoning a bid price interpretation of hedonic price functions for land is presented in section ii the sample selection bias issues are also discussed in that section and a formal test for the market effects of zoning is introduced

the rise in the disability rolls and the decline in unemployment between 1984 and 2001 the share of nonelderly adults receiving social security disability insurance income di rose by 60 percent to 5 3 million beneficiaries rapid program growth despite improving aggregate health appears to be explained by reduced screening stringency declining demand for less skilled workers and an unforeseen increase in the earnings replacement rate we estimate that the sum of these forces doubled the labor force exit propensity of displaced high school dropouts after 1984 lowering measured u s unemployment by one half a percentage point steady state calculations augur a further 40 percent increase in the rate of di receipt

optimal choice of health and retirement in a life cycle model abstract we examine within a life cycle model the simultaneous choice of health care and retirement together with consumption health tends to have an impact on retirement through morbidity determining earnings and the disutility of work and through longevity determining the need to accumulate retirement wealth conversely the age of retirement drives the demand for health care through the value of survival and the value of morbidity reductions we characterise the optimal relationship between health expenditure and retirement and apply our model to analyse the effects of moral hazard in the annuity market while moral hazard always induces excessive health investments and an excessive duration of working life it also triggers an excessive level of consumption if the impact of health on the disutility of work is sufficiently large we examine a transfer scheme and mandatory retirement as policies towards curtailing moral hazard numerical analysis illustrates the role of moral hazard in shaping the life cycle allocation

the employment effect of stricter rules for eligibility for di evidence from a natural experiment in sweden we study the effect of a reform of the swedish disability insurance di program whereby the special eligibility rules for workers in the age group 60 to 64 were abolished first we use a differences in differences approach to study changes in the disability take up as compared to the age group 55 to 59 then we use a similar approach to study to what extent the employment effect of the reform is crowded out by an increase in the utilization of the sickpay insurance si and or the unemployment insurance ui in an extended analysis we study the effect of firm closure on employment and the utilization of different labor market insurance programs in different age groups before and after the reform

social interaction and stock market participation we propose that stock market participation is influenced by social interaction in our model any given social investor finds the market more attractive when more of his peers participate we test this theory using data from the health and retirement study and find that social households those who interact with their neighbors or attend church are substantially more likely to invest in the market than non social households controlling for wealth race education and risk tolerance moreover consistent with a peer effects story the impact of sociability is stronger in states where stock market participation rates are higher

the effect of a wife s retirement on her husband s mental health this article examines the effect of wives retirement on their husband s mental health in australia by exploiting the exogenous variations in women s retirement induced by the age pension qualifyi

retirement and healthcare utilization abstract pension systems and reforms thereof are often discussed in the context of financial viability in industrialized countries these debates grow in intensity with the aging of the population however an increase in the retirement age may create unintended side effects with regard to retirees health or healthcare costs this study empirically analyzes the effect of early retirement on individual inpatient and outpatient healthcare utilization in austria we use comprehensive labor market and retirement data from the austrian social security database together with detailed information about individual inpatient and outpatient healthcare service utilization in the province of upper austria to account for endogeneity in retirement decisions we exploit exogenous variation in the early retirement age as induced by two austrian pension reforms i e those in 2000 and 2003 we find a significant negative effect of retirement on service utilization for both genders retirement reduces subsequent doctor visits and expenditure for outpatient medical attendance and hospitalization based on the analysis of disaggregated components of services and expenditure we interpret the results as evidence for positive health effects and behavioral changes in the utilization of healthcare services after retirement

the effect of social security on labor supply a cohort analysis of the notch generation this article uses aggregate birth year calendar year level data derived from the current population survey cps to estimate the effect of social security wealth on the labor supply of older men in the 1970s and 1980s the analysis focuses on measuring the impact of the 1977 amendments to the social security act which created a substantial unanticipated reduction in social security wealth for individuals born after 1916 this differential in benefits has become known as the benefit notch results indicate that labor supply continued to decline for the notch babies who received lower social security benefits than earlier cohorts

does raising the early retirement age increase employment of older workers two pension reforms in austria increased the early retirement age era from 60 to 62 for men and from 55 to 58 25 for women we find that raising the era increased employment by 9 75 percentage points among affected men and by 11 percentage points among affected women the reforms had large spillover effects on the unemployment insurance program but negligible effects on disability insurance claims specifically unemployment increased by 12 5 percentage points among men and by 11 8 percentage points among women the employment response was largest among high wage and healthy workers while low wage and less healthy workers either continued to retire early via disability benefits or bridged the gap to the era via unemployment benefits taking spillover effects and additional tax revenues into account we find that for a typical birth year cohort a one year increase in the era resulted in a reduction of net government expenditures of 107 million euros for men and of 122 million euros for women

media and polarization this paper provides an economic framework to explain the impact of the media on political polarization we start from a context where media environments characterized by their levels of accessibility and ideological content variety aect citizens ideological views and political motivation from this we derive comparative statics in a model of electoral competition with endogenous turnout in which politicians react to those media inuenced attitudes we identify two channels the ideology eect whereby a decrease in media ideological variety leads to convergence in citizens views and hence to lower polarization and the composition eect whereby a lowering of barriers to media accessibility increases turnout and hence aects the composition of the electorate as the inow of new citizens who turn out are relatively more moderate we show that the composition eect aects the extensive and intensive margins for political parties chasing voters so that its ultimate direction depends on the political system lower polarization in majoritarian systems but higher polarization under proportional representation we test the model s predictions in the us context of the introduction of broadcast tv in the 1940s and 1950s and radio in the 1920s and 1930s consistent with our model the evidence shows that tv decreased polarization and exposure to radio was associated with lower polarization the evidence suggests that the composition eect predominated in the case of radio while the ideology eect was more important in the case of tv

your retirement and my health behavior evidence on retirement externalities from a fuzzy regression discontinuity design this paper presents evidence on intra household retirement externalities by assessing the causal effect of partner s retirement on own health behaviour in europe we identify partner s retirement effects by applying a fuzzy regression discontinuity rd framework using retirement eligibility as an exogenous instrument for partner s retirement status using data from the survey of health ageing and retirement in europe share we find that while partner s retirement increases own physical activity it also increases smoking by up to 7 cigarettes a day and increases alcohol intake by 1 2 drinks per day furthermore we find that physical activity increases only for individuals that are themselves retired pointing toward compensated effects that arise due to husband s and wife s retirement being complements similarly an increase in alcohol intake is observed only if the individuals are themselves retired and an increase in smoking is only observed if the partner is a smoker suggesting mutual positive externalities and leisure complementarities

labor supply responses to marginal social security benefits evidence from discontinuities abstract a key question for social security reform is whether workers respond to the link on the margin between the social security taxes they pay and the social security benefits they will receive we estimate the effects of the marginal social security benefits that accrue with additional earnings on three measures of labor supply retirement age hours and labor earnings we develop a new approach to identifying these incentive effects by exploiting five provisions in the social security benefit rules that generate discontinuities in marginal benefits or non linearities in marginal benefits that converge to discontinuities as uncertainty about the future is resolved we find that individuals approaching retirement age 52 and older respond to the social security tax benefit link on the extensive margin of their labor supply decisions we estimate that a 10 increase in the net of tax share reduces the two year retirement hazard by a statistically significant 2 0 percentage points from a base rate of 15 the evidence with regard to labor supply responses on the intensive margin is more mixed we estimate that the elasticity of hours with respect to the net of tax share is 0 42 and statistically significant but we do not find a statistically significant earnings elasticity though we lack statistical power to estimate results within subsamples precisely the retirement response is driven mostly by the female subsample while the hours response comes from the male subsample

not by the sword alone soft power mass media and the production of state sovereignty scholars of civil conflict have long recognized the importance of state strength in the suppression of nascent insurgencies however previous empirical investigations have generally focused on the material and coercive dimensions of state power obscuring the critical role played by the generation of widespread voluntary compliance through processes of political communication that is the production of soft power in contrast in this article i focus on a factor mass communication technology that can enhance state capacity only by strengthening the state s ability to broadly and publicly disseminate political messages i argue that the enhanced capacities for large scale normative influence generated by mass communication technologies can be expected to produce substantial barriers to the mobilization of militarized challenges to state rule by strengthening economies of scale in the marketplace of ideas utilizing newly compiled cross national data on mass media accessibility in the post world war ii period i show that densely constituted mass media systems dramatically reduce the probability of large scale civil violence thereby providing new evidence for the fundamental importance of nonmaterial state capacities in the suppression of internal armed conflicts

the growth in the social security disability rolls a fiscal crisis unfolding the u s social security disability insurance di program has grown dramatically over the last 20 years in size and expense this growth poses significant risks to the finances of the di program and the broader social security system and raises troubling questions as to whether the program is being misused by claimants this article first provides an overview of the disability insurance program describing who qualifies for the program how an individual applies for benefits and how the level of benefits is determined next we summarize the factors responsible for the growth in the di rolls and discuss how the characteristics of di recipients have changed as a result we then explore the extent of moral hazard in the di program and the effectiveness of the screening process in distinguishing meritorious from nonmeritorious claims finally we identify the challenges that the di program creates for social security finances and social security reform and discuss potential reforms to the di program

the mortality effects of retirement evidence from social security eligibility at age 62 abstract social security eligibility begins at age 62 and approximately one third of americans immediately claim at that age we examine whether age 62 is associated with a discontinuous change in aggregate mortality a key measure of population health using mortality data that covers the entire u s population and includes exact dates of birth and death we document a robust two percent increase in male mortality immediately after age 62 the change in female mortality is smaller and imprecisely estimated additional analysis suggests that the increase in male mortality is connected to retirement from the labor force and associated lifestyle changes

retirement and health behaviour this article investigates whether and to what extent retirement changes health behaviour for identification we use an instrumental variable approach that exploits exogenous variations in the early

selection bias and land development in the monocentric city model the land development process implied by the monocentric city model is extremely simple the model as set forth by muth 13 and mills 12 contains no error terms and the city lies on a featureless plain land is converted to urban use whenever urban land values rise relative to agricutural land values the assumptions of the model assure that land development in any period takes place in a ring at the edge of the city in this paper we relax the assumption that the city is a featureless plain by introducing error terms to the urban and non urban land value functions this simple addition a necessity for empirical work produces a much richer land development process than is imbedded in the simple muth mills model the error terms in the land value functions which represent the effects of missing variables such as the fertility of the soil influence the selection of land for urban and non urban use this selection process in turn causes a bias in ols estimates of land value functions the form of the selection bias implies three possible land development patterns first if traits that produce high urban land values cause low non urban values relatively low value non urban land is developed first and has above average value in urban use however if unusually productive agricultural land is also highly valued in urban use then the development process depends on the relative magnitudes of the variances of the two land value distributions for example if the variance of the urban distribution is the larger then relatively high value non urban land is developed first and has above average land value in urban use the greater variance in the urban distribution implies that unusually good farmland can earn more in urban use thus the expanded muth mills model incorporates urban expansion at the expense of high quality agriculture and a more benign land market in which only comparatively low quality agricultural land is taken by cities the expanded muth mills model implies the existence of selection bias in land value equations selection bias has only recently been recognized

retirement personality and well being this study investigates how two sources of individual heterogeneity personality and gender impact the well being effects of retirement using data on older men and women from the british household panel survey and its continuation understanding society we estimate the causal effect of retirement on satisfaction with overall life and domains of life in the presence of personality characteristics as retirement is often considered to be a choice and thus may be endogenous to individual level characteristics we use the eligibility ages for basic state pension in the united kingdom as instruments for retirement we find that retirement increases leisure satisfaction of both males and females but not necessarily life satisfaction and income satisfaction we further show that certain personality characteristics affect the well being of female retirees for males however personality does not seem to matter in how they cope with retirement jel i31 j26 a12 c23

does job loss shorten life this paper examines the impact of job loss on overall and cause specific mortality using linked employer employee data we identified the workers displaced due to all establishment closures in sweden in 1987 and 1988 hence we have extended the case study approach which has dominated the plant closure literature the overall mortality risk among men increased by 44 percent during the first four years following job loss while there was no impact on either female overall mortality or in the longer run for both sexes however there was an about twofold short run increase in suicides and alcohol related mortality

economics and identity this paper considers how identity a person s sense of self affects economic outcomes we incorporate the psychology and sociology of identity into an economic model of behavior in the utility function we propose identity is associated with different social categories and how people in these categories should behave we then construct a simple game theoretic model showing how identity can affect individual interactions the paper adapts these models to gender discrimination in the workplace the economics of poverty and social exclusion and the household division of labor in each case the inclusion of identity substantively changes conclusions of previous economic analysis

self selection and the earnings of immigrants this paper analyzes the way in which the earnings of the immigrant population may be expected to differ from the earnings of the native population because of the endogeneity of the decision to migrate the empirical study shows that differences in the u s earnings of immigrants with the same measured skills but from different home countries are attributable to variations in political and economic conditions in the countries of origin at the time of migration excerpt

future social security entitlements and the retirement decision abstract a critical question for social security policy is how program incentives affect retirement behavior we use the health and retirement survey hrs to examine the impact of social security incentives on male retirement we implement forward looking models whereby individuals consider the incentives to work in all future years we find that forward looking incentive measures for social security are significant determinants of retirement we also find that private pension incentives have roughly similar effects our findings suggest that social security policies that increase the incentives to work at older ages can significantly reduce the labor force exit rate of older workers

the market for news we investigate the market for news under two assumptions that readers hold beliefs which they like to see confirmed and that newspapers can slant stories toward these beliefs we show that on the topics where readers share common beliefs one should not expect accuracy even from competitive media competition results in lower prices but common slanting toward reader biases on topics where reader beliefs diverge such as politically divisive issues however newspapers segment the market and slant toward extreme positions yet in the aggregate a reader with access to all news sources could get an unbiased perspective generally speaking reader heterogeneity is more important for accuracy in media than competition per se

earthquakes religion and transition to self government in italian cities this article presents a unique historical experiment to explore the dynamics of institutional change in the middle ages we have assembled a novel data set where information on political institutions for northern central italian cities between 1000 and 1300 is matched with detailed information on the earthquakes that occurred in the area and period of interest exploiting the panel structure of the data we document that the occurrence of an earthquake retarded institutional transition from autocratic regimes to self government the commune in cities where the political and the religious leaders were the same person episcopal see cities but not in cities where political and religious powers were distinct non episcopal see cities such differential effect holds for destructive seismic episodes and for events that were felt by the population but did not cause any material damage to persons or objects ancillary results show that seismic events provoked a positive and statistically significant differential effect on the construction and further ornamentation of religious buildings between episcopal and non episcopal see cities our findings are consistent with the idea that earthquakes interpreted in the middle ages as manifestation of the will and outrage of god represented a shock to people s religious beliefs and as a consequence enhanced the ability of political religious leaders to restore social order after a crisis relative to the emerging communal institutions this interpretation is supported by historical evidence

should i stay or should i go an econometric analysis of retirement decisions by couples abstractthis article analyses retirement decisions from a household perspective treating the retirement timing of spouses as potentially interdependent choices to identify the determinants of ret

aching to retire the rise in the full retirement age and its impact on the social security disability rolls abstract the social security amendments of 1983 reduced the generosity of social security retired worker benefits in the u s by increasing the program s full retirement age from 65 to 67 and increasing the penalty for claiming benefits at the early retirement age of 62 these changes were phased in gradually so that individuals born in or before 1937 were unaffected and those born in 1960 or later were fully affected no corresponding changes were made to the program s disabled worker benefits and thus the relative generosity of social security disability insurance ssdi benefits increased in this paper we investigate the effect of the amendments on ssdi enrollment by exploiting variation across birth cohorts in the policy induced reduction in the present value of retired worker benefits our findings indicate that the amendments significantly increased ssdi enrollment since 1983 with an additional 0 6 of men and 0 9 of women between the ages of 45 and 64 receiving ssdi benefits in 2005 as a result of the changes our results further indicate that these effects will continue to increase during the next two decades as those fully exposed to the reduction in retirement benefit generosity reach their fifties and early sixties

does postponing minimum retirement age improve healthy behaviors before retirement evidence from middle aged italian workers abstract by increasing the residual working horizon of employed individuals pension reforms that rise minimum retirement age can affect individual investment in health promoting behaviors before retirement using the expected increase in minimum retirement age induced by a 2004 italian pension reform and a difference in differences research design we show that middle aged italian males affected by the reform reacted to the longer working horizon by increasing regular exercise with positive consequences for obesity and self reported satisfaction with health

life cycle earnings education premiums and internal rates of return using norwegian population panel data with nearly career long earnings histories we provide a detailed picture of the causal relationship between schooling and earnings over the life cycle to address selection bias we apply three commonly used identification strategies we find that additional schooling gives higher lifetime earnings and a steeper age earnings profile in line with predictions from human capital theory our preferred estimates imply an internal rate of return of around 11 suggesting that it was highly profitable to acquire additional schooling our analysis reveals that mincer regressions dramatically understate the returns to schooling because key assumptions are violated

trends in male labor force participation and retirement some evidence on the role of pensions and social security in the 1970 s and 1980 s this article estimates the effects of changes in pension plans and social security in the 1970s and 1980s on the steady state retirement of men work incentives associated with pension coverage and plan characteristics are calculated primarily from the 1969 79 retirement history study and the 1983 and 1989 surveys of consumer finances simulations with a structural retirement model suggest that the long run effects of changes in pension plans and social security account for about a quarter of the reduction in full time work by men in their early sixties but cannot explain the reduction by those age 65

estimating the effect of financial aid offers on college enrollment a regression discontinuity approach an important problem faced by colleges and universities that of evaluating the effect of their financial aid offers on student enrollment decisions is complicated by the likely endogeneity of the aid offer variable in a student enrollment equation this article shows how discontinuities in an east coast college s aid assignment rule can be exploited to obtain credible estimates of the aid effect without having to rely on arbitrary exclusion restrictions and functional form assumptions semiparametric estimates based on a regression discontinuity rd approach affirm the importance of financial aid as an effective instrument in competing with other colleges for students

persuasion in politics we present a model of the creation of social networks such as political parties trade unions religious coalitions or political action committees through discussion and mutual persuasion among their members the key idea is that people are influenced by those inside their network but not by those outside once created networks can be rented out to politicians who seek votes and support for their initiatives and ideas which may have little to do with network members core beliefs in this framework political competition does not lead to convergence of party platforms to the views of the median voter rather parties separate their messages and try to isolate their members to prevent personal influence from those in the opposition this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

revolt on the nile economic shocks religion and political power using centuries of nile flood data i document that during deviant nile floods egypt s highest ranking religious authority was less likely to be replaced and relative allocations to religious structures increased these findings are consistent with historical evidence that nile shocks increased this authority s political influence by raising the probability he could coordinate a revolt i find that the available data provide support for this interpretation and weigh against some of the most plausible alternatives for example i show that while nile shocks increased historical references to social unrest deviant floods did not increase a proxy for popular religiosity together the results suggest an increase in the political power of religious leaders during periods of economic downturn publication abstract

time to burn calories the impact of retirement on physical activity among mature americans abstract physical activity is crucial for maintaining and improving health especially at advanced ages while retirement increases the amount of time available for physical activity there is only limited evidence regarding the causal effect of retirement on recommended levels of physical activity addressing this gap in the literature we use data from the u s health and retirement study to estimate the causal impact of retirement on meeting the federal government s 2008 physical activity guidelines for americans using official early and normal retirement ages as instruments for retirement our causal iv analyses suggest significant positive effects of retirement on meeting the guidelines these effects are robust with regard to the treatment of unobserved individual specific heterogeneity the measurement of guideline compliance the definition of retirement and respondents health insurance status we also show that the effects of retirement on physical activity are larger for persons with higher levels of education and wealth

energy conservation nudges and environmentalist ideology evidence from a randomized residential electricity field experiment nudges are being widely promoted to encourage energy conservation we show that while the electricity conservation nudge of providing feedback to households on own and peers home electricity usage works with liberals it can backfire with conservatives our regression estimates predict that a democratic household that pays for electricity from renewable sources that donates to environmental groups and that lives in a liberal neighborhood reduces its consumption by 3 percent in response to this nudge a republican household that does not pay for electricity from renewable sources and that does not donate to environmental groups increases its consumption by 1 percent

the impact of stricter criteria for disability insurance on labor force participation this paper studies the effect of a large scale policy change in the austrian disability insurance program which tightened eligibility criteria for men above a certain age using administrative data on the universe of austrian private sector employees the results of difference in difference regressions suggest a substantial and statistically significant decline in disability enrollment of 6 to 7 4 percentage points and an increase in employment of 1 6 to 3 4 percentage points the policy change had important spillover effects into the unemployment and sickness insurance program specifically the share of individuals receiving unemployment benefits increased by 3 5 to 3 9 percentage points and the share receiving sickness insurance benefits by roughly 0 7 percentage points

the causal effect of retirement on health new evidence from australian pension reform the causal effect of retirement on health is studied using the australian 1993 age pension reform to isolate exogenous variation in retirement status using instrumental variable methods we find that retirement has a positive impact on subjective and objective measures of health

how social security and medicare affect retirement behavior in a world of incomplete markets this paper provides an empirical analysis of how the u s social security and medicare insurance system affect the labor supply of older males in the presence of incomplete markets for loans annuities and health insurance we estimate a detailed dynamic programming dp model of the joint labor supply and social security acceptance decision focusing on a sample of males in the low to middle income brackets whose only pension is social security the dp model delivers a rich set of predictions about the dynamics of retirement behavior and comparisons of actual vs predicted behavior show that the dp model is able to account for wide variety of phenomena observed in the data including the pronounced peaks in the distribution of retirement ages at 62 and 65 the ages of early and normal eligibility for social security benefits respectively we identify a significant fraction of health insurance constrained individuals who have no form of retiree health insurance other than medicare and who can only obtain fairly priced private health insurance via their employer s group health plan the combination of significant individual risk aversion and a long tailed pareto distribution of health care expenditures implies that there is a significant security value for these individuals to remain employed until they are eligible for medicare coverage at age 65 overall our model suggests that a number of heretofore puzzling aspects of retirement behavior can be viewed as artifacts of particular details of the social security rules whose incentive effects are especially strong for lower income individuals and those who do not have access to fairly priced loans annuities and health insurance

social security unanticipated benefit increases and the timing of retirement between 1969 and 1972 real u s social security retirement benefits rose by 20 the rise was unanticipated and followed over 15 years of relatively constant real benefits this paper proposes a model of retirement behaviour in which workers respond differently although in a theoretically consistent manner to the anticipated and unanticipated components of the social security benefit they can receive upon retirement the retirement age decision in the presence of unanticipated benefit changes is shown to be a special case of utility maximization under a nonlinear budget constraint the model is estimated using the longitudinal retirement history survey between 1969 and 1973 real social security benefits for u s workers with fixed earnings histories were raised by more than 20 these increases were the first significant increases in social security since the early 1950 s at the same time that retirement benefits were rising the trend toward early retirement among older american men accelerated in the period from 1965 to 1970 the labour force participation rate of men aged 55 to 64 fell 1 6 percentage points from 84x6 to 83 0 but in the five years after 1970 the rate fell an additional 7 4 points to 75 6 the participation rate of men over 65 fell by 1 1 points in the five years after 1965 but by 5 2 points during the mid 1970 s 1 not surprisingly a large share of this labour force decline has been attributed to the effects of the social security increases enacted in 1969 and 1972 the purpose of this paper is to determine the precise effect of the unanticipated benefit increases on the timing of retirement the effect of social security on the age at retirement has been the subject of lively debate in recent years the literature has been reviewed in two recent papers by mitchell and fields 1982 and hurd 1983 who reach nearly opposite conclusions about the lessons that can be drawn from past empirical research mitchell and fields find that no definite judgment can be reached about the effects of social security on retirement while hurd argues that more careful studies have all found a significant and meaningful effect of social security on early retirement certainly the earlier studies by boskin 1977 and boskin and hurd 1978 found very large social security effects with boskin concluding that the social security system has been the major factor in the explosion in earlier retirement boskin 1977 p 1 very recent studies by burkhauser and quinn 1983 burtless and moffitt 1984 diamond and hausman 1984 fields and mitchell 1984 and hausman and wise 1985 have found smaller social security effects however none of them dealt explicitly with the rapid rise in real benefits during the early 1970 s the approach taken in this paper differs significantly from that in the earlier research just cited the proposed econometric model takes full account of the nonlinear relationship between goods consumption and the age at retirement introduced by social security