inequality and polarisation in health systems responsiveness a cross country analysis the world health report 2000 proposed three fundamental goals for health systems encompassing population health health care finance and health systems responsiveness the goals incorporate both an efficiency and equity dimension while inequalities in population health and health care finance have motivated two important strands of research inequalities in responsiveness have received less attention in health economics this paper examines inequality and polarisation in responsiveness bridging this gap in the literature and contributing towards an integrated analysis of health systems performance it uses data from the world health survey to measure and compare inequalities in responsiveness across 25 european countries in order to respect the inherently ordinal nature of the responsiveness data median based measures of inequality and polarisation are employed the results suggest that in the face of wide differences in the health systems analysed there exists large variability in inequality in responsiveness across countries

glass ceilings or glass doors the role of firms in male female wage disparities i use canadian linked employer employee data to examine whether women face a glass ceiling in the labour market i also measure the extent to which the glass ceiling comes about because women are segregated into lower paying firms or because they are segregated into lower paying jobs within firms i find clear evidence that women experience a glass ceiling that is driven by their disproportionate sorting across firm types glass doors rather than within firms i find no evidence that these results are supply driven however my results are consistent with predictions of an efficiency wage model where high paying firms discriminate against females

occupational self selection a human capital approach to sex differences in occupational structure a rich and diverse literature exists concerning the distribution of labor incomes one approach namely that of human capital concentrates on lifetime accumulation paths of earnings capacity units human capital individual variations in human capital imply differences in earnings power thereby yielding strong implications concerning earnings distribution within a population despite its explanatory power the human capital model has been widely criticized one criticism centers on its inability to obtain inferences concerning occupational distribution the purpose of this paper is to alleviate at least some such criticism by applying the hedonic price approach so as to embed occupational choice into the human capital framework the significance is that neoclassical economic theory can be used to obtain implications concerning the determinants of occupational structure excerpt

economic hysteresis in hog production german hog production only responds in a very limited way to price fluctuations in the pork market the hog production concentrates on a few regions though it is not bound to special natural conditions such as soil quality furthermore the volume of production does not vary over time relatively high market risks sunk costs and the flexibility of the decision maker to defer investments characterize decision problems in hog production thus the real option approach is chosen to explain the inertia in production capacity by the use of panel data of specialized hog farms from the german farm accountancy data network an empirical investment model is estimated formally the model has the structure of a generalized ordered probit model this approach allows to test for economic hysteresis in the adjustment of hog production capacity the results confirm that uncertainty and flexibility widen the optimal range of inaction

interrupted work careers depreciation and restoration of human capital the quantitative effects and even the existence of a human capital depreciation phenomenon have been a subject of controversy in the recent literature prior work however was largely cross sectional and the longitudinal dimension if any was retrospective using longitudinal panel data on married women in nls we have now established that real wages at reentry are indeed lower than at the point of labor force withdrawal and the decline in wages is greater the longer the interruption another striking finding is a relatively rapid growth in wages after the return to work this rapid growth appears to reflect the restoration or repair of previously eroded human capital the phenomenon of depreciation and restoration is also visible in data for immigrants to the united states however while immigrants eventually catch up with and often surpass natives returnees from the nonmarket do not fully restore their earnings potential

gender differences in training capital and wages this paper constructs an equilibrium job matching model where workers differ in their attachment to the labor force the model predicts that workers with weaker attachment to the labor market will receive lower starting wages and lower post training wages and will be placed in jobs that offer less training and use less capital the implications of the model for gender differences in pay and job assignment are tested with the eopp data set ourfindings suggest that while training intensity during the first three months of employment is similar in positions filled by males and females females are employed in positions that have a shorter duration of on the job training and that use less capital these differences in on the job training and capital in positions filled by men and women as well as a lower market value for women s prior labor market experience account for a substantial part of the gap in wages between males and females

a search interpretation of male female wage differentials a general equilibrium search framework is used to examine the role of gender differences in labor market behavior patterns e g quit rates for personal reasons in determining gender wage differentials for samples of high school and college graduates from the national longitudinal survey of youth nlsy these behavioral patterns are found to be significantly different across the sexes and account for 20 30 of the wage differentials in particular they play a key role in explaining the male female wage differential that remains after controlling for the gender composition across occupations

job exit behavior of older men a dynamic programming model of job exit behavior and retirement is constructed and estimated using the method of simulated moments the model and estimation method allow for both unobserved individual effects and unobserved job specific match effects the model is estimated using two different assumptions about individual discount factors first a static model with the discount factor equal to zero is estimated then a dynamic model with the discount factor equal to 95 is estimated in both models it is found that bad health age and lack of education increase the probability of retirement the dynamic model performs better than the static model and has different implications for retirement behavior the job specific effects are an important source of unobserved heterogeneity copyright 1991 by the econometric society

unequal assignment and unequal promotion in job ladders in this study gender differentials in professional status attainment are analyzed in the theoretical literature unequal treatment of females is often rationalized by their higher probability of quitting to test this hypothesis empirically we use data from the austrian microcensus and find that neither the risk of childbearing nor different productive characteristics can explain the crowding of females in lower hierarchical positions females have to fulfill higher ability standards to be promoted work experience is not rewarded in the same manner as it is for men

on gender gaps and self fulfilling expectations alternative implications of paid for training i introduction the recent literature on gender differences in the labor market has focused mainly on two issues the first one deals with the mechanisms e g adverse selection that can amplify initial differences in preferences or productivity across genders leading to sizeable gender gaps in wages labor force participation or working hours these models help us understand to what extent changes in gender gaps have been due to changes in fundamentals including differences in the pattern of endogenous accumulation of human capital by men and women 1 the second one is related to the channels explaining persistence in gender gaps even when exogenous differences across the sexes are of little importance or even absent 2 these studies tend to rely upon the existence of incentive problems in the labor market e g moral hazard leading to self fulfilling prophecies about differences in gender roles without assuming any initial comparative advantages our paper falls into this second strand of the literature by considering an alternative mechanism based on statistical discrimination by firms in the provision of paid for training to male and female workers this yields multiplicity of equilibria in gender gaps even in the absence of moral hazard 3 the basic idea in models of gender gaps relying upon self fulfilling prophecies is that employers beliefs about women s lower attachment to the labor market lead to wage differentials in favor of men hence since women expect to face a lower expected opportunity cost they end up devoting more time to housework validating in this way firms beliefs for example albanesi and olivetti 2009 propose a model where firms are subject to incentive compatible constraints due to their imperfect monitoring of workers effort a moral hazard problem and of hours of housework an adverse selection problem as a result different types of labor contracts are offered to men and women in a similar vein lommerud and vagstad 2007 deal with a model where firms allocate workers to fast and slow track jobs the former requiring a fixed investment cost if women have traditionally exerted primary major responsibility at home and wages are non contractible they will predominantly follow a mommy track in equilibrium while incentive problems often used to derive additional predictions on the structure of wages to be confronted with the data provide a useful modeling device they could be somewhat restrictive for instance concerning the difficulty of perfectly monitoring effort pay gaps should be negligible for routine tasks performed by less skilled employees for whom effort and output should be easily observable yet even after removing differences in observable characteristics and in the overall wage dispersion there is evidence about substantial gender gaps in hourly wages in these categories see e g blau and kahn 2000 bassanini and saint martin 2008 de la rica et al 2008 our paper contributes to this literature by proposing a novel mechanism which does not rely on incentive problems we consider a two period model in which firms initially offer paid for training to workers taking as given the division of housework between spouses in the second period spouses decide on how to split the certain and uncertain parts of housework where the latter is captured by the realization of a shock affecting household tasks during this period e g unexpected need of housework or events that require parental leave etc both decisions interact because the housework decision determines whether a spouse works or quits after receiving training and the firm chooses the amount of training without observing the household s housework allocation statistical discrimination arises in this setup as a result of firms prior beliefs about which spouse is more likely to quit the job under the key assumptions that wages are predetermined with respect to housework shocks and that the household does not re optimize after the shock is revealed asymmetric beliefs will induce differences in the provision of training across spouses

mommy tracks and public policy on self fulfilling prophecies and gender gaps in hiring and promotion abstract consider a model with two types of jobs the profitability of hiring a worker to a fast track job depends not only on his or her observable talent but also on incontractible effort we investigate whether self fulfilling expectations may lead to higher hiring or promotion standards for women if employers expect women to do more household work than men thereby exerting less effort in their paid job then women must be more talented to make it profitable to hire them specialization in the family will then result in women doing most of the household work such self fulfilling prophecies can be defeated by affirmative action or family policy however it is unlikely that temporary policy can move the economy to a symmetric equilibrium policy must be made permanent anti discrimination policy need not enhance efficiency and from a distribution viewpoint this is a policy with both winners and losers

luck effort and reward in an organizational hierarchy using the personnel records of a large british financial sector employer we investigate how workers respond to remuneration differences and luck in the promotion system the results confirm that workers respond to larger remuneration spreads by working harder increased certainty in the promotion process also has this effect there appears to be no difference between men s and women s reactions to promotion incentives gender differences in the raw data therefore appear not due to incentives we need to look elsewhere for an explanation

the earnings of male immigrants in england evidence from the quarterly lfs in this paper we estimate earnings functions for native born and foreign born white and non white males in the english labour market using data from the quarterly labour force survey our results highlight the importance of distinguishing between native born and foreign born males when investigating the labour market experience of ethnic minorities furthermore the earnings performance amongst white immigrants varies considerably

the ethnic wage gap and employment differentials in the 1990s evidence for britain abstract it is twenty years since britain passed legislation to combat racial discrimination despite this britain s nonwhite ethnic minorities still appear to face substantial amounts of discrimination in the labour market unemployment is particularly severe

the gender gap in early career wage growth in the uk the gender pay gap on entry to the labour market is approximately zero but ten years after labour market entry there is a gender wage gap of almost 25 log points this article explores the reason for this gender gap in early career wage growth considering three main hypotheses human capital job shopping and psychological theories human capital factors can explain about 11 log points job shopping about 1 5 log points and the psychological theories up to 4 5 log points depending on the specification but a substantial unexplained gap remains women who have continuous full time employment have had no children and express no desire to have them earn about 8 log points less than equivalent men after 10 years in the labour market

addressing nurse shortages what can policy makers learn from the econometric evidence on nurse labour supply this paper provides a detailed review of the international studies that have used formal econometric models to investigate the labour supply decision of registered nurses rns the main finding is that at least in the short run rn labour supply appears to be fairly unresponsive to wage changes consequently even large wage increases are unlikely to be successful in tackling current and predicted nurse shortages this finding points to the importance of non pecuniary job aspects in influencing labour supply however the paper concludes by arguing that these empirical findings should be viewed with some caution given both theoretical and econometric limitations

discrimination empirical evidence from the united states the study of discrimination received a major impetus in the 1960 s when increasing social attention focused upon race and gender differentials in market outcomes gary becker s the economics of discrimination 1957 strongly influenced empirical research by providing a definition of wage discrimination and suggesting a specific way in which it might operate during the following years new theories were developed and refined in an attempt to explain why there appears to be continued discrimination in spite of market forces presumably operating against it similarly a large amount of empirical work has been done to determine whether and how much discrimination actually exists and to a lesser extent to test the implications of the various theories even so the hope expressed by becker in the preface of the second edition 1971 that our understanding of discrimination would increase so rapidly that the materials in his book would become obsolete before another decade began has clearly not been fulfilled here we review what has been learned in the intervening years and suggest some fruitful directions for future research 1 the focus of this paper like that of most of the empirical research in this area is on determining the extent of discrimination rather than on testing alternative models of discrimination

parental leave a policy evaluation of the swedish daddy month reform abstract many governments are making attempts to increase fathers share of parental leave in order to correct for unequal labor market outcomes using swedish data we ask whether fathers can be encouraged to take more parental leave in order to mitigate the negative consequences of mothers career interruptions the unique data stem from a reform of parental leave resulting in a clean natural experiment data comprise all children born before control group and after treatment group the date of implementation of the reform in cohorts of up to 27 000 newborns mothers and fathers we find strong short term effects of the incentives on male parental leave but no behavioral effects in the household fathers in the treatment group do not take larger shares of the leave taken for care of sick children which is our measure for household work we also investigate a second data set on fathers and mothers long term wages and employment without finding evidence for substantial effects of the reform

worker effort decisions and efficient gender specific wage tenure profiles i introduction during the past thirty years women have increased their labor force participation female labor market intermittency has decreased and women s total labor market experience and years of tenure with the current employer have increased what these trends imply about the evolution of the gender gap in wages depends in part on gender differences in returns to tenure it is therefore surprising that economists have all but ignored the empirical finding that women have higher returns to tenure than do men over a significant portion of their working lives one reason why this finding has been ignored or treated as an anomaly may be the lack of theoretical constructs which predict an inverse gender gap in returns to tenure several labor market models predict that women should have lower returns to tenure than men human capital theory offers the most frequently cited explanation of flatter earnings profiles for female workers according to human capital theory gains from specialization and exchange lead to one household member specializing in home production and the other in market work since only women bear children historically the outcome of the exchange has been that women have specialized in home production indeed all surveys of time use indicate that women spend on average two to three times as long on housework as men as a consequence of this allocation women anticipate intermittent labor force participation and fewer years overall in the labor force than men this pattern too is borne out in national surveys which invariably find shorter average tenure and fewer total years of labor market experience for women than for men women typically have shorter completed job spells as well hall 1982 table 5 presents evidence that the gender gap in completed job duration is quite large he estimates that 63 8 percent of men but only 49 6 percent of women hold jobs with eventual tenure of at least five years with 37 3 and 15 1 percent of men and women respectively holding jobs with eventual tenure of at least twenty years because of the greater intermittency and shorter anticipated work history for women than men women will find it optimal to acquire less human capital than men 1 lesser quantities of general human capital tends to flatten both the observed earnings experience profile and the observed earnings tenure profile two factors contribute to this pattern first skills deteriorate during periods out of the labor market as in mincer and polachek 1974 which flattens the earnings experience profile for women relative to men second women anticipating discontinuous work histories select into occupations with flatter earnings profiles to minimize the penalty to labor force withdrawals as in polachek 1981 the effects of firm specific human capital on gender differences in wage tenure profiles vary across models for example kuhn 1993 constructs an elegant game theoretic model of gender differences in training and wages if women have a higher exogenous exit rate than men in equilibrium they will be placed in jobs with lower levels of firm specific training with a positive relation between training and productivity and a common share rate of the costs and benefits of specific training for men and women the wage tenure profiles of men will be steeper than those for women in contrast becker and lindsay 1994 argue that firm specific human capital leads to higher returns to tenure for women than men becker and lindsay assume that men and women have the same level of firm specific training however women have greater variance in their opportunity cost of remaining with a firm and so are more likely than men to separate inefficiently by giving women a greater share of both the costs and benefits of firm specific human capital through a steeper wage tenure profile firms reduce undesirable turnover although human capital arguments dominate the literature on gender differences in the labor market other models of wage growth predict flatter wage tenure profiles for women

estimating a structural search model the transition from school to work this paper presents a finite horizon search model that is econometrically implemented using all of the restrictions impli ed by the theory following a sample of male high school graduates fr om the youth cohort of the national longitudinal surveys from graduat ion to employment search parameters are estimated reservation wages and offer probabilities are estimated to be quite low simulations a re performed of the impact of changing the parameters on the expected duration of unemployment copyright 1987 by the econometric society

psychological bias and gender wage gap basing our work on the literature on psychology that highlights differences in confidence levels between men and women we provide a rationale for the simultaneous existence of the two dimensions of the gender wage gap i on average men earn more than women and ii the difference in wages depends on the gender structure we also argue that although an equal compensation policy does not eliminate the gender wage gap it nonetheless increases social welfare finally endogenizing the choice of task by agents we show how women in a vast majority can self select on low paying jobs

beauty vs earnings gender differences in earnings and priorities over spousal characteristics in a matching model abstract i develop a model of marriage matching where males and females care about two distinct characteristics of their spouse beauty and earnings each individual s beauty is exogenous but earnings depend on human capital investments made by each individual prior to entering the marriage market i show that even if males and females constitute ex ante identical populations with identical underlying preferences and equal access to human capital investment and labor market opportunities there can still exist an equilibrium where on average one gender invests more in human capital than the other and moreover members of one gender are more likely to prioritize beauty over earnings in a spouse while members of the other gender are more likely to prioritize a potential spouse s earnings over beauty

rational beliefs or distorted beliefs the equity premium puzzle and micro survey data 1 introductionsince shiller 1982 and mehra and prescott 1985 questioned why the gap between the rates of returns from stocks and bonds is so large the equity premium puzzle has attracted the attention of many economists the numerous explanations for the puzzle that have been put forth can be categorized into three approaches the first approach is to explain the puzzle under full rationality by introducing more complex utility functions epstein and zin 1989 and weil 1989 use a utility function that breaks the tight relation between the risk aversion coefficient and the elasticity of intertemporal substitution constantinides 1990 introduces the utility function with habit formation to the literature and campbell and cochrane 1999 succeed in explaining the equity premium puzzle and stock return predictability by making use of a particular variant of habit formation the second approach is to see the puzzle as being a result of distorted beliefs while maintaining the traditional power utility function rietz 1988 shows that the puzzle can be explained if consumers believe that a disastrous situation has a higher probability of arising than the historical data imply recently cecchetti lam and mark 2000 also succeeded in matching the first and second moments of the equity premium and the predictability of stock returns by assuming that the representative consumer with the traditional power utility function has distorted beliefs of a particular kind that lead him her to expect that both expansions and contractions end more quickly than the data suggest the third approach is to see the puzzle as being a result of market frictions such as borrowing constraints and short sale constraints heaton and lucas 1996 show the potential of this approach and luttmer 1999 estimates the magnitude of such frictions using the first order conditions from utility maximization however because of the success of campbell and cochrane 1999 and cecchetti lam and mark 2000 in explaining various aspects of the asset pricing phenomena including the equity premium puzzle this paper mainly focuses on an investigation of the first two approaches with the use of survey forecasts 1 in spite of the success of both approaches the puzzle has not yet been resolved because both approaches use completely different mechanisms to explain the puzzle we still do not know which one provides a better description of the cause of the puzzle in other words because the stylized facts in the financial market can be explained by both models it is hard for economists to judge which is the correct mechanism by looking at financial and consumption data 2 hence the main purpose of this paper is to derive different implications of consumers expectations from both models and to examine which implication is supported more through an investigation of the survey forecasts because campbell and cochrane s model retains rational expectations whereas cecchetti lam and mark s model is based on distorted beliefs the two models implications for survey forecasts will differ whereas campbell and cochrane 1999 would predict that survey forecasts are rational cecchetti lam and mark 2000 would claim that forecasts are excessively pessimistic over expansions and excessively optimistic over contractions using the livingston survey forecasts for the standard and poor s 500 index which is managed by the federal reserve bank of philadelphia this paper conducts a test of these implications to check whether the expected excess returns from the survey forecasts are rational a panel data model allowing a four dimensional structure for forecast errors individual bias business cycle effect aggregate shocks and idiosyncratic errors is analyzed 3the test results seem to support the model of cecchetti lam and mark 2000 the expected equity premium implied by the survey forecasts is on average lower than the actual realized equity premium during the sample period

gender discrimination in the british labour market a reassessment survey wes the wes is the first british survey to collect detailed work histories and earnings data for a nationally representative sample of british women therefore for the first time estimates of discrimination based on real work experience data are presented a number of the earlier studies use data from the general household survey which does not collect actual work experience data they have been forced to use potential work experience or imputed experience in their wage equations this paper compares estimates based on potential or imputed experience with those based on actual experience using wes data our analysis finds that estimates of the parameters of a women s earnings function and a summary measure of gender discrimination using a measure of imputed experience differ little from those based on actual experience indeed our estimates of gender discrimination are very robust to estimation method and only slightly higher than miller s i987 estimate for i980 these estimates indicate that the oft quoted and influential study by zabalza and arrufat i 982 i 985 which pioneered the use of imputed experience severely underestimated the level of gender discrimination and exaggerated the impact

appointments pay and performance in uk boardrooms by gender this article uses uk data to examine issues regarding the scarcity of women in boardroom positions the article examines appointments pay and any associated productivity effects deriving from increased diversity evidence of gender bias in the appointment of women as non executive directors is found together with mixed evidence of discrimination in wages or fees paid however the article finds no support for the argument that gender diverse boards enhance corporate performance proposals in favour of greater board diversity may be best structured around the moral value of diversity rather than with reference to an expectation of improved company performance

gender and promotion in the economics profession the authors use unique panel data on american economic association members to test for gender differences in promotion in a profession with a well defined promotion and job hierarchy and in which men and women exhibit similar labor market attachment the results suggest that over the period from the 1960s through the early 1980s female economists had lower levels of professional attainment and career advancement than did their male colleagues with similar attributes these gender differences remain in evidence despite controls for unobserved heterogeneity and self selection between academic and non academic jobs there is evidence however that promotion prospects for female economists significantly improved during the 1980s not only at all ranks but also within both ph d granting institutions and non ph d granting institutions in fact the results reveal no unexplained gender specific differences in promotion by the end of the 1980s

the disinterest in deregulation in the analysis of the costs of monopoly power the usual experiment is to convert a competitive industry into a monopoly and observe the consequent change in consumer s surplus modern contributions have emphasized the deadweight cost of monopoly arnold harberger 1954 and the possibility of an associated rent seeking cost of monopoly gordon tullock 1967 the harberger cost of course refers to the lost consumer s surplus triangle the tullock cost concerns the role of competition for monopoly returns taken together and assuming that the competition for monopoly rents is perfect the total cost of monopoly power is a trapezoid the rectangle of monopoly profits plus the triangle of lost consumer s surplus richard posner 1975 in this paper we approach the monopoly problem in a different spirit we compare three states of the world competition regulation and deregulation in this setting we ask what happens if a monopoly is eliminated through deregulation our analysis suggests that because under most conditions tullock costs cannot be recouped the returns to deregulation are lower than previously thought rent seeking expenditures in the past leave the economy permanently poorer even if competition is restored to the industry in contrast the returns to preventing monopoly in the first place are relatively high in our model an insight afforded by the analysis is an explanation of the persistence of laws and regulations which appear to serve no interest in this regard the example of railroad regulation in the united states comes to mind the standard explanation for such regulation is either that voters and government decision makers are ignorant of basic economics or that a small interest group like railroad firms wins rents at the expense of uninformed or economically rational consumers of rail services who do not find it cost effective to seek deregulation we offer another and perhaps more plausible explanation for the persistence of regulation and the apathy of consumers about the costs of regulation namely the costs of such regulations are for the most part the original rent seeking expenditures that lead to the regulation in the first place and these costs are sunk abolishing so called uneconomic laws does nothing to recover these losses hence there is little political support from any quarter to return to the status quo ante in fact as we shall show such a deregulatory program can easily impose more costs than it is worth there are numerous examples of this point including tariffs and quotas of all sorts subsidies to farmers the postal monopoly organized labor s antitrust exemption the licensing of doctors and so forth the traditional explanations of these monopoly rights namely ignorance of economic common sense and special interest groups are neither sufficient nor necessary since the primary costs of these laws are rent seeking expenditures which are made prior to their passage there is simply little to be gained by changing them now gains would accrue in the form of reduced harberger costs costs would be borne in passing and implementing the deregulatory program it is not that the potential gainers from deregulation are large in number diffuse heterogeneous and face high organizational costs rather they do not exist to any degree interpreted in this light efforts by political action groups such as the right to work foundation stand to be a drain on society s resources they cannot produce anything unless they prevent further monopolization through regulation we do not of course mccormick and shughart clemson university clemson sc 29631 tollison center for the study of public choice george mason university fairfax va 22030 thanks go to james buchanan rex cottle and gordon tullock for helpful comments the usual caveat applies

multiple event incidence and duration analysis for credit data incorporating non stochastic loan maturity summary applications of duration analysis in economics and finance exclusively employ methods for events of stochastic duration in application to credit data previous research incorrectly treats the time to pre determined maturity events as censored stochastic event times the medical literature has binary parametric cure rate models that deal with populations that never experienced the modelled event we propose and develop a multinomial parametric incidence and duration model incorporating such populations in the class of cure rate models this is the first fully parametric multinomial model and is the first framework to accommodate an event with pre determined duration the methodology is applied to unsecured personal loan credit data provided by one of australia s largest financial services organizations this framework is shown to be more flexible and predictive through a simulation and empirical study that reveals simulation results of estimated parameters with a large reduction in bias superior forecasting of duration explanatory variables can act in different directions upon incidence and duration and variables exist that are statistically significant in explaining only incidence or duration

do generous parental leave policies help top female earners generous government mandated parental leave is generally viewed as an effective policy to support women s careers around childbirth but does it help women to reach top positions in the upper pay echelon of their firms using longitudinal employer employee matched data for the entire norwegian population we address this question exploiting a series of reforms that expanded paid leave from 30 weeks in 1989 to 52 weeks in 1993 the representation of women in top positions has only moderately increased over time and career profiles of female top earners within firms are significantly different from those of their male counterparts the reforms did not affect and possibly decreased the probability for women to be at the top over their life cycle we discuss some implications of this result to put into perspective the design of new family friendly policy interventions

forecasting stock prices do forecasters herd abstract we use the livingston survey data to study whether forecasters of the s p 500 stock price index herd our results imply that forecasters do not herd rather we find that forecasters anti herd anti herding is less prevalent among academics and federal reserve economists forecaster anti herding is inversely correlated with forecast accuracy forecaster anti herding is not correlated with age

earnings unemployment and the allocation of time over time since an individual s labour market history can be described by a markov chain in state space it is possible to calculate the steady states it is natural to interpret the steady state proportion in unemployment for a group of identical workers as the natural rate of unemployment for this group i e it is the expected proportion that would be employed if the environment were to remain constant it is shown how the natural rate of unemployment is different for different groups the model is estimated using data from a large u s income maintenance experiment the predictions of the model with some exceptions bear up well to confrontation by data the empirical findings also accord well with existing evidence on cross section studies of labour supply we find that labour force participation rates implied by the estimated models are positively related to earnings for all age sex and race groups as expected we demonstrate that the elasticities of the unemployment rates for all groups with respect to expected wage rates are negative and large in absolute value in the case of adults while the role of the wage in allocation of time is not novel the existing neoclassical labour literature uses static labour supply models to interpret participation rate studies

can gender parity break the glass ceiling evidence from a repeated randomized experiment this paper studies whether the gender composition of recruiting committees matters we make use of the unique evidence provided by spanish public examinations where the allocation of candidates to evaluating committees is random we analyse how the chances of success of 150 000 female and male candidates for positions in the four main corps of the spanish judiciary from 1987 to 2007 were affected by the gender composition of their evaluation committee we find that a female male candidate is significantly less likely to be hired whenever she he is randomly assigned to a committee where the share of female male evaluators is relatively greater evidence from multiple choice tests suggests that this is due to the fact that female majority committees overestimate the quality of male candidates

vertical aspects of male female disparity in the labor market abstract the organization based economy model presented by garicano and rossi hansberg g rh 2004 is used to study the vertical dimensions of male female disparity in the labor market this sheds a new light on the major aspects of the phenomenon

habit formation as a resolution to the equity premium puzzle what is in the data what is not the consumption based asset pricing model of lucas 14 defines a theoretical relationship between streams of consumption and equilibrium asset prices since data of both aggregate consumption and asset prices are available the theory can be tested empirical tests of the lucas model using standard time separable utility functions indicate mismatches between the theory and the data for example in the gmm generalized method of moments estimation of hansen and singleton 9 overidentifying constraints implied by the model were rejected mehra and prescott 16 demonstrated the difficulty of explaining a particular statistic the theoretical expected equity premium the yield differential between stocks and risk free bonds is much higher than the observed one if a standard utility function is used they called the mismatch the equity premium puzzle to improve the performance of the model several authors have relaxed the time separability of preferences in a stimulating paper constantinides 1 argued that the equity premium puzzle can be resolved through the assumption of habit formation the idea is that consumption in the past reduces utility in the present because it establishes habits his model can match the observed mean and the variance of both the equity premium and the consumption growth rate the match of the low moments is consistent with the bound tests of heaton 11 gallant hansen and tauchen 7 and hansen and jagannathan 10 on the other hand gmm estimations using monthly aggregate consumption of nondurable goods and leisure by eichenbaum hansen and singleton 3 and that using consumption of nondurable goods and durable goods by dunn and singleton 2 and eichenbaum and hansen 4 showed that if current utility depends on current and past consumption then current utility increases in past consumption i e consumption has local durability the opposite of that implied by habit formation a particularly strong result was obtained by gallant and tauchen 6 they estimated a general form of utility functions with a general law of motion of data and found that the source of the time non separability is local durability since it is known that local durability

early gender gaps among university graduates abstract we use data from six cohorts of university graduates in germany to assess the extent of gender gaps in college and labor market performance twelve to eighteen months after graduation men and women enter college in roughly equal numbers but more women than men complete their degrees women enter college with slightly better high school grades but women leave university with slightly lower marks immediately following university completion male and female full timers work a very similar number of hours per week but men earn more than women across the pay distribution with an unadjusted gender gap in full time monthly earnings of about 20 log points on average including a large set of controls reduces the gap to 5 10 log points the single most important proximate factor that explains the gap is field of study at university

will you marry me a perspective on the gender gap abstract this paper develops a general equilibrium model of the gender wage gap the difference in earnings is a consequence of a demographic regularity that men tend to marry younger women which may limit women s labor mobility and hence their average earnings however couples are always free not to marry and do so only if it is in each s self interest the intrafamily allocation of resources is determined via non cooperative bargaining this leads to interesting interactions between the game played by husband and wife on the one hand and the competitive environment in which they are immersed on the other the predictions resulting from this model s interplay between locational choice and family bargaining are consistent with the observation that the increasing stress put by women on their careers over the past 30 years has been contemporaneous with reductions in both marriage rates and the gender gap the model provides insight into the consequences of this for the relative welfare of men and women as well as exploring its wider economic implications

pay differences among the highly paid the male female earnings gap in lawyers salaries this article uses very detailed information on graduates of the university of michigan law school to examine male female pay differences in that population men and women in this population have virtually identical human capital on graduation from law school allowing us to examine carefully the different impact of children and work history on men s and women s careers and earnings taking time from work in order to care for children reduces wages significantly but a rich set of controls including childcare work history school performance and job setting measures still leave one fourth to one third of the earnings gap unexplained

male female disparity in starting pay empirical studies of the earnings of male and female workers persistently reveal a gap that is unexplained by the economic variables in these models this gap has been given two interpretations in the literature one holds that the gap reflects non market forces which distort the equilibrium relation among the wages of competing workers discrimination according to this view prevents female workers from being offered jobs commensurate with their qualifications and crowds them into low productivity occupations 2 the alternative interpretation holds that some substantial portion of the gap is an artifact the result of missing variables biased parameters or measurement error these researchers view the labor market as highly competitive and were it possible to correct for all these statistical problems the measured wage gap would largely vanish 3 this research belongs to the latter category we argue that a portion of the measured gap at least that observed between the earnings of young men and women during their first few years with their employers reflects sex related differences in the shares of investment in firm specific human capital borne by workers of each group moreover these variations in investment levels are freely chosen by women and in no way imply long run deficits in their earning power on the contrary the model predicts steeper earnings profiles of women who undertake this firm specific investment thus women s earnings are predicted eventually to overtake and surpass those of equally qualified men this theory was developed in earlier research by becker and lindsay 2 based on a model of hashimoto 11 12 and extensions by parsons 21 we argued that young women for nondiscriminatory reasons elect to shoulder a larger share of this investment than young men the explanation for this is developed in two stages the first derives the terms under which both male and female workers share the investment with their employers the second argues that female workers will be led by these considerations to bear a larger share workers of both sexes agree to enter into inflexible wage contracts with employers specifying a share of the investment i e a wage deduction from current mvp and a post investment wage the advantage to such contracts lies in the solution to an assymetric information problem the

discrimination and job uncertainty abstract in this paper i incorporate group behaviour into a model of the labour market and show that discrimination can be the result of competition between coalitions of workers and bosses for jobs if the probability of correctly assessing the productivity of individual workers decreases coalition formation on the basis of recognisable characteristics becomes relatively more rewarding than coalition forming on the basis of productivity the conditions are under which each individual in the endogeneously defined group actively discriminates persons with different recognisable characteristics independent of productivity

some empirical evidence on rent seeking we tested for the capture of net gains by winners in rent seeking competitions using the most prominent announcements of government favors in the canadian economy over a twelve year period stockholders returns were not significantly different from zero one possible explanation is that government assists firms only when assistance creates political gains refusing to transfer economic rents to firms maximmizes the resources available to serve political purposes this kind of behavior by government officials would imply that government has market power which is consistent with several well known theories of government

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

long run equilibrium and total expenditures in rent seeking a comment although corcoran is mathematically correct i believe his comment is not very helpful in order to discuss the matter in some detail the reader should consult table 7 1 from my original efficient rent seeking reproduced on page 92 1 this shows the equilibrium investment of each individual different numbers of individuals playing the game n and differing values of r table 7 2 also reproduced on page 93 shows the total investment

how well do economists forecast stock market prices a study of the livingston surveys the desire to forecast stock prices appears to be eternal alfred cowles 1933 was one of the first researchers to evaluate statistically how well professional forecasters predict stock prices in this tradition our paper will explore the statistical properties of the livingston stock market forecasts a number of recent studies including those by josef lakonishok 1980 bryan brown and shlomo maital 1981 and douglas pearce 1984 finds that the livingston stock market forecasts are statistically biased and or do not utilize all available information i e are informationally inefficient in contrast to earlier studies we find using 61 semiannual livingston surveys from june 1955 through june 1985 that stock market forecasts are statistically unbiased and minimum error variance estimators in section i we show that earlier studies are likely to mask the true relationships between stock market forecasts and realized rates of return because of inappropriate computational algorithms in section ii we present our statistical results based upon the corrected data algorithm we provide a brief summary of the paper in the last section 1 computing livingston stock market rate of return forecasts

outside offers and the gender pay gap empirical evidence from the uk academic labour market using a unique data source on academic economist labour market experiences we explore gender pay and promotions in addition to earnings and productivity measures we have information on outside offers and perceptions of discrimination we find both a gender promotions gap and a within rank gender pay gap a driving factor may be outside offers men receive more outside offers than women of comparable characteristics and gain higher pay increases in response this may arise due to discrimination we find that perceptions of discrimination and also outside job applications correlate with an individual receiving earnings below that expected given their characteristics

nurses labor supply participation hours of work and discontinuities in the supply function this paper presents the results of a formal labor supply model for nurses in great britain it corrects for misspecification and sample selection bias which affected earlier research on women s labor supply generally in the united kingdom and tests for the existence of discontinuities in the supply curve of nurses estimates of labor market participation elasticities with respect to the wage rate non labor income and to the costs incurred through work are reported for nurses qualified and unqualified participation is found to be highly responsive to wage changes and some discontinuity is found in the supply function

consequences of seniority wages on the employment structure the author examines seniority wage profiles in german establishments to discern hiring patterns with respect to age and sex using the country s linked employer employee dataset liab over the per

long run equilibrium and total expenditures in rent seeking the lure of excess profits or rents associated with monopoly power gives rise to expenditures to obtain these rents competitive rent seeking behavior is recognized as a factor which must be included among the wastes associated with monopoly power tullock 1967 posner 1975 1 the expenditures are aimed at transferring wealth rather than its creation and the use of resources to obtain this transfer is a loss to society how important rent seeking is as a part of the total monopolistic waste hinges on the size of the total expenditures induced by a given level of excess profits

market imperfections liquidity and farm household labor allocation the case of rural south africa asset endowments and market imperfections shape households labor allocation decisions and lead to different production regimes within rural farm households in south africa this article uses a farm household model to explain the presence of three main household groups determined on the basis of the labor regime adopted small peasants working both on and off farm self cultivators autarkic in labor and hiring in households a partial generalized ordered logit is used to test the main predictions of the model and a brant test on threshold constancy is performed to identify the household specific factors affecting labor market participation the results show that liquidity constraints and market imperfections matter in the choice of the labor strategy adopted liquidity constrained households are more likely to sell labor off farm while access to information facilitates the hiring in of workers

formal but less equal gender wage gaps in formal and informal jobs in urban brazil in developing countries a large share of employees work informally and are not covered by employment protection legislation i study here how gender wage inequality differs across formal and informal jobs in brazil the raw gender wage gap is higher in informal jobs 13 compared to formal jobs 5 but i show that this difference is an artefact of different male and female selection processes first women have better observable characteristics than men and the female advantage is stronger among formal employees second men and women entering formal and informal jobs have different unobservable characteristics controlling for endogenous selection into formal vs informal jobs i find that the gender gap in wage offers is high and increases with education in formal jobs in informal jobs however estimated wage offers are the same for men and women i discuss the potential implications of these findings regarding the effect of labour market regulation on gender wage gaps

work and health after retirement a competing risks model with semiparametric unobserved heterogeneity competing risks models recognize that there may be more than one exit from a given state but they make the strong assumption that there is no correlation between unobserved heterogeneity components in each state here a competing risks model that uses a semiparametric method of estimation and controls for the correlation between unobserved heterogeneity components in each state is compared with a traditional competing risks model of exit from retirement the unobservable heterogeneity components of the competing risks are insignificantly positively correlated and the effects of policy relevant variables are changed somewhat copyright 1989 by mit press

promotion signaling gender and turnover new theory and evidence we extend promotion signaling theory to incorporate gender and across firm mobility within and across job levels evidence from worker firm linked finnish panel data supports our theory for some groups controlling for worker performance inferred from performance related pay within firm promotion probabilities are increasing and wage increases from promotion are decreasing in educational attainment for some educational groups with results stronger for first than for subsequent promotions women have lower promotion probabilities than men and a greater sensitivity of promotion probability to educational attainment across firm promotions are rare but bring wage increases exceeding those for internal promotions and across firm lateral moves

gender race pay and promotion in the british nursing profession estimation of a generalized ordered probit model we analyse job grading within the uk national health service nursing profession using 1994 survey data we start from the ordered probit model for which we develop and apply appropriate specification tests threshold constancy and covariate exogeneity are rejected with important consequences for estimates of the influence of gender ethnicity training and career interruptions we find little evidence of disadvantage for females relative to males but significant differences in speed of promotion between ethnic groups implying non negligible differences in lifetime earnings copyright 2000 john wiley sons ltd

foreign capital and gender differences in promotions evidence from large brazilian manufacturing firms proquest denotes formulae omitted widespread consensus asserts that occupational segmentation is the chief determinant for gender differences in wages in the brazilian labor market see for example oliveira 2001 although women represent 39 percent of the formal workforce in brazil they amount to only 23 percent of the employees in the sectors that pay relatively higher wages in 2004 as well the predominance of segmentation increases if one restricts attention to managerial positions of which women hold only 14 percent this suggests that limited promotion prospects for women in the brazilian job market may present barriers to their promotion to the upper rungs of the corporate ladder this paper contributes to the literature by examining data from the larg est firms of the brazilian manufacturing industry in particular our goal is to determine whether obstacles to women s ascension exist by tracking the amount of time it takes for a woman to get a promotion to a managerial posi tion the aim is to complement the literature on gender differences in promo tions whose papers mainly focus on computing the promotion rates time to promotion offers a different angle in that samples with a large time span could well present similar likelihoods of promotion for both genders even if the promotion durations are different we construct the duration variable by following from january 1996 to december 2005 every individual who enters the annual report of social information rais database between january 1991 and december 1995 we denote as nonpromoted the individuals who do not obtain a promotion to a managerial position within the sample that is the right censored observations whereas we assign duration zero to the workers who already are in managerial positions in january 1996 accordingly we label as promoted the individuals within our sample who rise to a managerial position that is those with uncensored positive durations investigating dif ferences in promotions is particularly difficult because observationally simi lar male and female workers may display equal promotion rates and durations even in the presence of gender differences for example promotions may differ in quality as far as we know this is the first study to examine gender differences in promotions using microdata from a developing country apart from the obvious interest in finding whether the main stylized facts hold in a latin american country we were also motivated by the quality and availability of the brazilian data in contrast to the many studies that employ data from individual firms see for example cabral ferber and green 1981 gerhart and milkovich 1989 baker gibbs and holmstrom 1994 our study relies on a homogeneous sample of recently hired workers from the brazilian manufac turing industry in the period from 1996 to 2005 our data set is particularly convenient first the data include a wide array of controls for worker and firm characteristics second unlike blau and devaro 2007 we observe multiple workers per establishment at different occupations and hierarchical levels as well as their career paths in terms of occupation and wage a potential limi tation is that our data set does not include any direct measure of on the job productivity and hence we must come up with indirect controls interestingly we find that there are significantly fewer gender differences in the time to promotion within foreign owned firms than within domestic firms in the brazilian manufacturing industry our findings complement to some extent the literature on the differences between multinationals and domestic firms doms and jensen 2006 greene and others 2009 as well as the evidence that gender differences may depend on the nature of the firm 1 we argue that such gender differences are consistent with statistical discrimi nation and self selection we reason as follows suppose there are relatively more women than men who prefer to dedicate more time to their family than to their careers

female led firms and gender wage policies using a longitudinal data set covering the period 1987 2000 the authors explore the impact of female employers and gender segregation on wages in portugal in the context of becker s 1957 taste for discrimination theory they investigate whether the gender of a firm manager affects gender wage differences they find that females benefit from higher wages in female led firms than in male led firms further when females lead the wage gap between female and male workers is reduced by 1 5 regardless of the gender composition of the workforce at the same time the higher the share of females in a firm the lower the wages overall for both female and male workers the authors results are compatible with the notion that job promotion is an important factor in wage increases the more females are mentored and promoted the less men will be however as more females in the firm compete for promotion opportunities for both females and males to be promoted diminish author s abstract

equal but inequitable who benefits from gender neutral tenure clock stopping policies many skilled professional occupations are characterized by an early period of intensive skill accumulation and career establishment examples include law firm associates surgical residents and untenured faculty at research intensive universities high female exit rates are sometimes blamed on the inability of new mothers to survive the sustained negative productivity shock associated with childbearing and early childrearing in these environments gender neutral family policies have been adopted in some professions in an attempt to level the playing field the gender neutral tenure clock stopping policies adopted by the majority of research intensive universities in the united states in recent decades are an excellent example but to date there is no empirical evidence showing that these policies help women using a unique data set on the universe of assistant professor hires at top 50 economics departments from 1985 2004 we show that the adoption of gender neutral tenure clock stopping policies substantially reduced female tenure rates while substantially increasing male tenure rates

gender and promotions evidence from academic economists in france the promotion system for french academic economists provides an interesting environment to examine the promotion gap between men and women promotions occur through national competitions for which we have information both on candidates and on those eligible to be candidates thus we can examine the two stages of the process application and success women are less likely to seek promotion and this accounts for up to 76 percent of the promotion gap being a woman also reduces the probability of promotion conditional on applying although the gender difference is not statistically significant our results highlight the importance of the decision to apply

rentless rent seeking and abnormal returns the assumption that seekers of a monopoly privilege from government will dissipate the expected value of future related rents by costly pursuit of the privilege is frequently used though subject to a growing debate tullock has described a set of plausible circumstances where strategic bidding for a single prize leads to net gains for the rent seeking participants 2 that is even with competition for rents less than full dissipation of future gains may obtain tullock also identifies other circumstances where the process is a zeroor negative sum game if the theory of rentless rent seeking holds under any set of circumstances empirical work designed to identify wealth effects associated with a regulatory event is destined to fail indeed such empirical analysis may find no effect when in fact a regulatory restriction has occurred yet reports of empirical research on regulatory effects have supported the hypothesis that rents have been generated 3 do such empirical results implicitly support tullock s theory of efficient rent seeking are such results purely random observations of one of many discrete regulatory processes involving the same firms where the overall expected value is zero 4 or is there an explanation of such results that is consistent with full dissipation of rents and systematic observation of abnormal positive returns for shareholders of directly affected firms this article offers another explanation for observing profitable rent seeking that is compatible with tullock s observations and rent dissipation theory the next section gives the explanation that section is followed by a brief summary

to aggregate pool or neither it is well known that even if all forecasters are rational unbiasedness tests using consensus forecasts are inconsistent because forecasters have private information however if all forecasters face a common realization pooled estimators are also inconsistent in contrast we show that when predictions and realizations are integrated and cointegrated microhomogeneity ensures that consensus and pooled estimators are consistent therefore contrary to claims in the literature in the absence of microhomogeneity pooling is not a solution to the aggregation problem we reject microhomogeneity for a number of forecasts from the survey of professional forecasters therefore for these variables unbiasedness can only be tested at the individual level

the influence of pensions on job mobility in this paper we construct a model of the loss of firm specific capital suffered by employees with occupational pensions who change job the simplest loss function may be represented as the product of job tenure and years to retirement estimates of logit equations for individual job search in great britain suggest that the effect of pension status can be satisfactorily captured by this simple loss function these equations and others for job turnover indicate that membership of an occupational pension scheme substantially reduces job mobility

male female wage differentials in job ladders much of the male female wage differential exists because men and women are assigned to different jobs within narrow job categories there is no male female differential only a tortured taste theory of discrimination can reconcile these facts we argue that differential movement along job ladders entails comparative advantage so the ability standard for promotion is higher for women this implies that more able women will be passed over in favor of less able men women assumed to have the same ability distribution as men earn less the differential reflects females lower promotion probability not within job discrimination

does employee body weight affect employers behavior in this paper we study the possible segregation of overweight individuals already established in the labor market when firms make decisions on hiring firing and promoting most existing studies use wage equations to document wage differences but little is known about the reason for the differences and the sorting of workers using an equilibrium search model search frictions are taken into account additionally sorting is examined using a logit model we find that wage differences between workers who have a normal weight and workers who are overweight or obese can be explained by differential firm behavior with respect to both the job offer arrival rate and the probability of being promoted

robust permanent income and pricing i suppose there exists an extremely powerful and if i may so speak malignant being whose whole endeavours are directed toward deceiving me rene descartes meditations ii 1

winners and losers under the robinson patman act the 1936 robinson patman amendments to the clayton antitrust act prohibit differences in price that might be injurious to competition they also restrict certain practices for example brokerage payments unequal advertising allowances etc that could be used to give hidden discounts to favored buyers the robinson patman r p act has the distinction of being almost universally unpopular among antitrust scholars this is probably because it looks less like an antitrust measure than like legislated relief for small business 2 that the law wears an antitrust cloak is probably a measure of the cunning of its original proponents the statute s poor reputation owes more to theory than to evidence however there has been very little empirical work on the effects of the act and what there is has been largely concerned with the effects of individual prosecutions the purpose of this essay is to begin a broader empirical study i start by reviewing the act s history the impetus for the legislation came from the distributive wholesale and retail trades where a struggle had developed between the old wholesale retail order and the

equal worth equal opportunities pay and promotion in an internal labour market using personnel data from a large financial company the authors find some evidence that women have to meet more stringent criteria than men for promotion but that much of the difference between men and women s attainment is due to their attributes for example lack of work experience is more important quantitatively than glass ceilings in preventing the preferment of women the authors data also suggest that the differential barriers confronting women are greatest at the lower end of the job ladder and that men and women may receive equal treatment once senior grades have been reached copyright 1996 by royal economic society

strategic promotion and compensation within a hierarchical firm structure this paper details how the composition of a worker s skills and the non observability of a worker s ability affect wage and promotion paths promotionbased compensation schemes derive naturally from the worker s asymmetrically observed ability promotion takes place over time and is inefficient since employers strategically exploit their knowledge of an able worker s ability conversely employers may be unable to efficiently demote and retain bad managers without paying bonuses employers are led to promote educated employees before their equally or more able but uneducated counterparts explanations for fast track promotions plans and other empirical regularities are provided

heterogeneity in ordered choice models a review with applications to self assessed health discrete variables that have an inherent sense of ordering across outcomes are commonly found in large data sets available to many economists and are often the focus of research however assumptions underlying the standard ordered probit which is usually used to analyse such variables are not always justified by the data this study provides a review of the ways in which the ordered probit might be extended to account for additional heterogeneity differing from other reviews in scope application and relevance in economic settings a series of issues pertaining to choices of variables and the economic assumptions underlying each model are discussed in the context of measuring the underlying health of respondents the models are applied to a wave of the household income and labour dynamics in australia survey in order to check the appropriateness of such assumptions in an applied context

occupational pensions and job mobility in britain estimation of a random effects competing risks model we analyse transitions between pensionable jobs non pensionable jobs and other labour market states using the 1988 9 uk retirement survey we focus on the positive association between length of job tenure and pensionable status allowing for the possibility that pension scheme members are less mobile than other workers because they have persistent unobserved characteristics that predispose them towards a high degree of security in both employment and retirement we use a competing risks model with state specific random effects the model is estimated by simulated maximum likelihood

black white male earnings and employment prospects in the 1970s and 1980s evidence for britain abstract using a sample of around 80 000 whites and 2500 blacks the paper highlights not just the economic disadvantage of blacks but also that this disadvantage worsened in the 1980s in britain