energy consumption and economic growth relationship evidence from panel data for low and middle income countries abstract this paper uses the panel data of energy consumption ec and economic growth gdp for 51 countries from 1971 to 2005 these countries are divided into three groups low income group lower middle income group and upper middle income group countries firstly a relationship between energy consumption and economic growth is investigated by employing pedroni 1999 panel cointegration method secondly panel causality test is applied to investigate the way of causality between the energy consumption and economic growth finally we test whether there is a strong or weak relationship between these variables by using pedroni 2001 method the empirical results of this study are as follows i energy consumption and gdp are cointegrated for all three income group countries ii the panel causality test results reveal that there is long run granger causality running from gdp to ec for low income countries and there is bidirectional causality between ec and gdp for middle income countries iii the estimated cointegration factor is not close to 1 in other words no strong relation is found between energy consumption and economic growth for all income groups considered in this study the findings of this study have important policy implications and it shows that this issue still deserves further attention in future research

quick job entry or long term human capital development the dynamic effects of alternative training schemes this study evaluates and compares the eectiveness of two alternative training schemes for the unemployed short job search oriented training and long human capital oriented training we investigate the impact dynamics of these pro grams considering both unemployment and employment duration our analysis uses a rich administrative longitudinal data set for germany where both programs were implemented at the same time our estimation strategy flexibly accounts for dy namic selection on observables and unobservables as well as heterogeneous treatment eects the results indicate that short term training schemes can be an eective tool to reduce unemployment in the long run in particular if participation occurs early during unemployment long term training schemes increase the average du ration of employment spells more strongly than short term training however they increase the expected unemployment duration if they are started early during un employment this negative short run impact of long term training is an important driver of its overall eectiveness

semi autonomous revenue authorities in sub saharan africa silver bullet or white elephant a major component of tax administration reform in sub saharan africa for the last 30 years has been the creation of semi autonomous revenue authorities saras the effects of their creation on rev

mobility and wage growth of male household heads 1989 mobility and wage growth of male household heads applied economics vol 21 no 4 pp 475 485

long run effects of public sector sponsored training in west germany between 1991 and 1997 west germany spent on average about 3 6 bn euro per year on public sector sponsored training programmes for the unemployed we base our empirical analysis on a new administrative data base that plausibly allows for selectivity correction by microeconometric matching methods we identify the effects of different types of training programmes over a horizon of more than seven years using bias corrected weighted multiple neighbours matching we find that all programmes have negative effects in the short run and positive effects over a horizon of about four years however for substantive training programmes with duration of about two years gains in employment probabilities of more than 10 points appear to be sustainable but come at the price of large negative lock in effects

energy taxes and endogenous technological change abstract this paper studies the effects of a tax on energy use in a growth model where market structure is endogenous and jointly determined with the rate of technological change because this economy does not exhibit the scale effect a positive relation between tfp growth and aggregate r d the tax has no effect on the steady state growth rate it has however important transitional effects that give rise to surprising results specifically under the plausible assumption that energy demand is inelastic there may exist a hump shaped relation between the energy tax and welfare this shape stems from the fact that the reallocation of resources from energy production to manufacturing triggers a temporary acceleration of tfp growth that generates a shaped time profile of consumption if endogenous technological change raises consumption sufficiently fast and by a sufficient amount in the long run and households are sufficiently patient the tax raises welfare despite the fact that in line with standard intuition it lowers consumption in the short run

the role of investment specific technological change in the business cycle this is a quantitative investigation of the importance of technological change speci c to new investment goods for postwar us aggregate uctuations a growth model that incorporates this form of technological change is calibrated to us data and simulated using the relative price of new equipment to identify the process driving investmentspeci c technology shocks the analysis suggests that this form of technological change is the source of about 30 of output uctuations 2000 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

the school to work transition a cross national perspective school to work patterns and issues are discussed for seven economies france germany japan the netherlands sweden the united kingdom and the united states the emphasis is placed on differences across countries in the current labor market position of young people and recent trends therein along with the institutions that regulate youth education training and employment the power of public policies including labor market deregulation labor market programs vocationalization of education and apprenticeship to improve youth outcomes is discussed drawing on national evaluation literatures evidence of extensive policy failure points up the need to develop nationally appropriate institutions to improve school to work transitions

energy consumption and economic growth new insights into the cointegration relationship abstract this paper examines the long run relationship between energy consumption and real gdp including energy prices for 25 oecd countries from 1981 to 2007 the distinction between common factors and idiosyncratic components using principal component analysis allows to distinguish between developments on an international and a national level as drivers of the long run relationship indeed cointegration between the common components of the underlying variables indicates that international developments dominate the long run relationship between energy consumption and real gdp furthermore the results suggest that energy consumption is price inelastic causality tests indicate the presence of a bi directional causal relationship between energy consumption and economic growth

energy consumption synchronization between europe united states and japan a spectral analysis assessment abstract this paper aims to advance a model able to explain the synchronization tendency in energy consumption under the impact of international technology transfers the key argument is related to the differences in energy consumption efficiency of local and foreign technologies one direct testable consequence of the model is that there might be a certain correlation between the energy consumption between countries and or economic areas where a free movement of capital goods and technologies takes place hence it is further tested in the framework of a multivariate spectrum analysis the case of energy consumption synchronization between europe and respectively united states and japan for a time span between 1981 and 2011 based on the data provided by u s energy information administration there are evidences of a leading behavior of energy consumption in united states and japan in respect to europe as well as of short run phase delays of 2 up to 5 months

a reanalyis of marital stability in the seattle denver income maintenance experiment this paper challenges the widely cited finding of groeneveld hannan and tuma that the seattle denver income maintenance experiment provides evidence that guaranteed income plans for poor husband wife families will increase marital dissolution relative to the existing program aid to families with dependent children the reanalysis of the experimental data distinguishes between the experimental treatment in the form of the pure negative income tax and the treatment plans that involved an experimental training program all the time periods of the experiment are used with allowance for the timing of the marital dissolution in the inferences and with allowance for attrition the conclusion of this paper is that the plans specifically the negative income tax plans in the experiment had no effect on the rate of marital dissolutions among the treatment couples relative to the control couples

assessing the case for social experiments rs ecent academic debates pit two alternative approaches to policy evaluation against one another the first is the experimental approach based on the random assignment of accepted program applicants to a recipient or treatment group and a non recipient or control group the second is the nonexperimental or econometric approach that uses a variety of microdata sources statistical methods and behavioral models to compare the outcomes of participants in social programs with those of nonparticipants the central question addressed in this paper is whether or not randomized social experiments aid in securing answers to basic questions about the evaluation of social programs there are many distinct and complementary approaches to the study of the impact of public policy including full general equilibrium analysis of policy impacts tinbergen 1956 auerbach and kotlikoff 1987 shoven and whalley 1992 kydland and prescott 1991 and less ambitious partial equilibrium microeconomic structural research programs such as those designed to estimate the impact of taxes on labor supply both approaches offer answers to many interesting counterfactual policy questions but their credibility rests critically on the quality of the empirical input used to generate their answers

trade finance specialization and synchronization i investigate the determinants of business cycle synchronization across regions the linkages between trade in goods financial openness specialization and business cycle synchronization are evaluated in the context of a system of simultaneous equations the main results are as follows i specialization patterns have a sizable effect on business cycles most of this effect is independent of trade or financial policy but directly reflects differences in gdp per capita ii a variety of measures of financial integration suggest that economic regions with strong financial links are significantly more synchronized even though they also tend to be more specialized iii the estimated role of trade is closer to that implied by existing models once intra industry trade is held constant the results obtain in a variety of data sets measurement strategies and specifications they relate to a recent strand of international business cycle models with incomplete markets and transport costs and on the empir

viewpoint estimating the causal effects of policies and programs estimation inference and interpretation of the causal effects of programs and policies have all advanced dramatically over the past 25 years we highlight three particularly important intellectual trends an improved appreciation of the substantive importance of heterogeneous responses and of their methodological implications a stronger focus on internal validity brought about by the credibility revolution and the scientific value that follows from grounding estimation and interpretation in economic theory we discuss a menu of commonly employed partial equilibrium approaches to the identification of causal effects emphasizing that the researcher s central intellectual contribution always consists of making an explicit case for a specific causal interpretation given the relevant economic theory the data the institutional context and the economic question of interest we also touch on the importance of general equilibrium effects and full cost benefit analyses

electricity consumption and economic growth nexus in portugal using cointegration and causality approaches the aim of this paper is to re examine the relationship between electricity consumption economic growth and employment in portugal using the cointegration and granger causality frameworks this study covers the sample period from 1971 to 2009 we examine the presence of a long run equilibrium relationship using the bounds testing approach to cointegration within the unrestricted error correction model uecm moreover we examine the direction of causality between electricity consumption economic growth and employment in portugal using the granger causality test within the vector error correction model vecm as a summary of the empirical findings we find that electricity consumption economic growth and employment in portugal are cointegrated and there is bi directional granger causality between the three variables in the long run with the exception of the granger causality between electricity consumption and economic growth the rest of the variables are also bi directional granger causality in the short run furthermore we find that there is unidirectional granger causality running from economic growth to electricity consumption but no evidence of reversal causality

is there a safety premium in the design of corporate bond contracts this study examines empirically whether there is a safety premium in the design of bond contracts by highlighting a safety attribute of general mortgage bonds in japan which can give especially st

occupational mobility and the returns to training the literature on the returns to training has pointed out that immediately following a training episode wages of participants in employer sponsored training increase substantially while wages of participants in government sponsored training hardly change we argue that there is a potential selection issue most of the government sponsored trainees are occupation switchers while most participants in employer sponsored training are occupation stayers an occupational switch involves a substantial destruction of human capital and once we account for the associated decline in wages we find a large positive impact of both employer and government sponsored training on workers human capital mobilite professionnelle et benefices des formations les etudes ayant trait aux benefices conferes par les formations professionnelles montrent que lorsque ces dernieres sont parrainees par l employeur le salaire des participants augmente significativement a l issue de leur formation en revanche lorsqu elles sont parrainees par le gouvernement le salaire des participants n evolue presque pas nous affirmons qu il s agit la d un probleme de selection potentiel dans le cadre des formations parrainees par le gouvernement la plupart des participants sont tres mobiles en emploi tandis que dans le cadre des formations parrainees par l employeur les participants sont tres stables en emploi une plus grande mobilite professionnelle genere une destruction importante du capital humain et des lors que l on tient compte de la baisse concomitante des salaires nous estimons que les formations parrainees a la fois par l etat et l employeur ont une incidence tres positive sur le capital humain des employes

bounds on average and quantile treatment effects of job corps training on wages we review and extend nonparametric partial identification results for average and quantile treatment effects in the presence of sample selection these methods are applied to assessing the wage effects of job corps united states largest job training program targeting disadvantaged youth excluding hispanics our estimates suggest positive program effects on wages both at the mean and throughout the wage distribution across the demographic groups analyzed the statistically significant estimated average and quantile treatment effects are bounded between 4 6 and 12 percent and 2 7 and 14 percent respectively we also document that the program s wage effects vary across quantiles and demographic groups

discretionary policy and multiple equilibria in lq re models we study discretionary equilibria in dynamic linear quadratic rational expectations models in contrast to the assumptions that pervade this literature we show that these models do have multiple equilibria in some situations we demonstrate the existence of multiple discretionary equilibria by example we investigate general properties of discretionary equilibria and discuss implications for numerical algorithms

learning but not earning the impact of job corps training on hispanic youth i introduction job corps jc is a federally funded training program for disadvantaged youth aged 16 24 yr that provides educational and vocational training life skills and job placement services with some exceptions jc participants reside at the corresponding jc facility through this comprehensive approach the goal of jc was to tackle the adverse effects of being raised under low socioeconomic conditions to enable disadvantaged youths obtain and keep well paying jobs from the middle to late 1990s the national job corps study njcs employed a randomized social experiment to evaluate the effectiveness of jc across various dimensions including employment and earnings educational achievement criminal behavior and health outcomes 1 the main finding of the njcs 48 mo after randomization reported in schochet burghardt and glazerman 2001 was that the treatment group earned on average a statistically significant 12 more per week than the control group however this effect was not homogeneous varying from 46 per week for whites and 23 for blacks to 15 for hispanics this last estimate was not statistically significant see their table d 14 2 these differential effects are especially puzzling given similar gains in measurable human capital across the three groups 3 since hispanics represent a significant and growing proportion of the u s population and disproportionately exhibit disadvantaged characteristics it is important to understand the heterogeneous labor market impacts of jc we trace these heterogeneous treatment effects to different local labor market conditions first we note that a higher and statistically significant level of labor market experience is gained by hispanics in the control group relative to the treatment group during the time of the njcs which does not happen among whites or blacks after adjusting for this labor market experience the estimated negative effects of jc for hispanics decrease considerably subsequently we show that the differential labor market outcomes of the three groups is in part due to the distinct local labor market conditions faced on average by each group and importantly due to the differential impact that those labor market conditions have on each group s earnings by randomization status specifically we find that a blacks and hispanics face higher local labor market unemployment rates lur that mitigate the potential gains from jc for them and b jc is able to shield white participants from adverse lur but not blacks and hispanics this study contributes to different strands of literature most labor market program evaluations in the literature generally focus on individuals that have been in the labor market for some time frequently avoiding the inclusion of youths such as in for example heckman et al 1998 and mueser troske and gorislavsky 2007 or doing separate analyses for adults and youths as in for example heckman et al 2000 and heckman and smith 1999 we add to this literature by focusing on young persons and stressing the importance of lock in effects as defined by van ours 2004 local labor market conditions and different early labor market dynamics across racial and ethnic groups recent work in lechner and wunsch 2006 lechner miquel and wunsch 2007 johansson 2001 kluve 2007 and others emphasize that the effects of active labor market programs in europe depend on the state of the economy typically finding a direct relationship between their effectiveness and the unemployment rate for the united states hotz imbens and klerman 2006 present evidence for california pointing to an inverse relationship between the labor market programs and the unemployment rate while most of the previous articles rely heavily on aggregate time series variation of economic conditions e g the unemployment rate we present new evidence for the united states exploiting large cross sectional variation of county specific local unemployment rates

economic development and the demand for energy a historical perspective on the next 20 years abstract this paper draws on evidence from the last two centuries of industrialisation analysing the evolution of energy intensity over the long and short run we argue that the increased specialisation of the fuel mix coupled with accelerating convergence of both the sectoral and technological composition of economies will continue to improve energy intensity of economic output and to reduce the reliance on any single energy resource this analysis suggests that even high growth in per capita income over the next 20 years need not be constrained by resource availability

causes and consequences of layoffs using probit analysis this article finds that differential treatment accounts for a substantial portion of the higher layoff rates of blacks in comparison to whites however women are found to be considerably less prone to layoffs than men with similar characteristics among those who obtained subsequent employment taking into account the possible selectivity bias in such a subsample white males are hurt more by layoffs than black males in terms of both short term and long term earnings growth women s earnings are not necessarily affected by layoff at all however whites and males are found to be more likely to be reemployed than blacks and females respectively

the econometrics of the general equilibrium approach to business cycles early in this century american institutionists and members of the german historical school attacked and rightfully so neoclassical economic theory for not being quantitative this deficiency bothered ragnar frisch and motivated him along with irving fisher joseph schumpeter and others to organize the econometric society in 1930 the aim of the society was to foster the development of quantitative economic theory that is the development of what frisch labeled econometrics soon after its inception the society started the journal econometrica frisch was the journal s first editor and served in this capacity for twenty five years

the pre programme earnings dip and the determinants of participation in a social programme implications for simple programme evaluation strategies the key to estimating the impact of a programme is constructing the counterfactual outcome representing what would have happened in its absence this problem becomes more complicated when agents such as individuals firms or local governments self select into the programme rather than being exogenously assigned to it this paper uses data from a major social experiment to identify what would have happened to the earnings of self selected participants in a job training programme had they not participated in it we investigate the implications of these earnings patterns for the validity of widely used before after and difference in differences estimators

do wage subsidies increase employment in subsidized firms this paper examines whether subsidized jobs have contributed to employment in subsidized firms or have merely substituted for non subsidized ones the data set is an unbalanced panel of some 31 000 firms that are followed annually between 1995 and 2002 the analysis is based on difference in differences which is adjusted by regression and matching methods the results indicate that wage subsidies stimulate employment and that the magnitude of the effect is as aimed i also found that subsidies have no sizeable effects on non subsidized firms

reconciling conflicting evidence on the performance of propensity score matching methods there is a long standing debate in the literature over whether social programs can be reliably evaluated without a randomized experiment this paper summarizes results from a larger paper smith and todd 2001 that uses experimental data combined with nonexperimental data to evaluate the performance of alternative nonexperimental estimators the impact estimates based on experimental data provide a benchmark against which to judge the performance of nonexperimental estimators our experimental data come from the national supported work nsw demonstration and the nonexperimental data from the current population survey cps and the panel study of income dynamics psid these same data were used in influential papers by robert lalonde 1986 james heckman and joseph hotz 1989 and rajeev dehejia and sadek wahba 1998 1999 we focus on a class of estimators called propensity score matching estimators which were introduced in the statistics literature by paul rosenbaum and donald rubin 1983 traditional propensity score matching methods pair each program participant with a single nonparticipant where pairs are chosen based on the degree of similarity in the estimated probabilities of participating in the program the propensity scores more recently developed nonparametric matching estimators described in heckman et al 1997 1998a b use weighted averages over multiple observations to construct matches we apply both kinds of estimators in this paper heckman et al 1997 1998a b evaluate the performance of matching estimators using experimental data from the u s national job training partnership act jtpa study combined with comparison group samples drawn from three sources they show that data quality is a crucial ingredient to any reliable estimation strategy specifically the estimators they examine are only found to perform well in replicating the results of the experiment when they are applied to comparison group data satisfying the following criteria i the same data sources i e the same surveys or the same type of administrative data or both are used for participants and nonparticipants so that earnings and other characteristics are measured in an analogous way ii participants and nonparticipants reside in the same local labor markets and iii the data contain a rich set of variables relevant to modeling the program participation decision if the comparison group data fails to satisfy these criteria the performance of the estimators diminishes greatly more recently dehejia and wahba 1998 1999 have used the nsw data also used by lalonde to evaluate the performance of propensity score matching methods including pairwise matching and caliper matching they find that these simple matching estimators succeed in closely replicating the experimental nsw results even though the comparison group data do not satisfy any of the criteria found to be important in heckman et al 1997 1998a from this evidence they conclude that matching approaches are generally more reliable than traditional econometric estimators in this paper we reanalyze the nsw data in an attempt to reconcile the conflicting findings smith department of economics university of western ontario social science centre london on n6a 5c2 canada and nber todd department of economics university of pennsylvania 3718 locust walk philadelphia pa 19104 and nber versions of the paper that is the source for this paper have been presented at a 2000 meeting of the institute for research on poverty in madison wisconsin at the western research network on employment and training summer workshop august 2000 at the canadian international labour network meetings september 2000 and at the university of north carolina we thank james heckman for comments on this paper and we thank robert lalonde for comments and for providing us with the data from his 1986 study we thank rajeev dehejia for providing us with information helpful in reconstructing the samples used in the dehejia and wahba 1998 1999 studies jingjing hsee and miana plesca provided excellent research assistance

the new econometrics of structural change dating breaks in u s labor productivity we have seen the emergence of three major innovations in the econometrics of structural change in the past fifteen years 1 tests for a structural break of unknown timing 2 estimation of the timing of a structural break and 3 tests to distinguish unit roots from broken time trends these three innovations have dramatically altered the face of applied time series econometrics in this paper we review these three innovations and illustrate their application through an empirical assessment of u s labor productivity in the manufacturing durables sector

learning by working in big cities individual earnings are higher in bigger cities we consider three reasons spatial sorting of initially more productive workers static advantages from workers current location and learning by working in bigger cities using rich administrative data for spain we find that workers in bigger cities do not have higher initial ability as reflected in fixed effects instead they obtain an immediate static premium and accumulate more valuable experience the additional value of experi ence in bigger cities persists after leaving and is stronger for those with higher initial ability this explains both the higher mean and greater dispersion of earnings in bigger cities

evaluating the econometric evaluations of training programs with experimental data this paper takes the results of an employment and training program thatwas run as a field experiment in which the participants were randomlyassigned into a treatment or a control group and compares these results to the estimates that might have been produced by an econometrician who evaluated the program using the same econometric procedures that have been used in the program evaluation literature this comparison shows that many of these econometric procedures fail toreplicate the experimentally determined results and suggests that researchers should be aware of the potential for specification errorsin other nonexperimental evaluations copyright 1986 by american economic association

financial globalization and real regionalization over the period 1972 1986 the correlations of gdp employment and investment between the united states and an aggregate of europe canada and japan were respectively 0 76 0 66 and 0 63 for the period 1986 to 2000 the same correlations were much lower 0 26 0 03 and 0 07 real regionalization at the same time u s international asset trade has significantly increased for example between 1972 and 1999 united states gross fdi and equity assets in the same group of countries rose from 4 to 23 percent of the u s capital stock financial globalization we argue that these two trends are intimately related we document that the correlation of real shocks between the u s and the rest of the world has declined we then present a model in which international financial market integration occurs endogenously in response to less correlated shocks financial integration further reduces the international correlations in gdp and factor supplies we find that both less correlated shocks and endogenous financial market development are needed to account for all the changes in the international business cycle

r d subsidies and productivity in smes this paper examines the effect of r d subsidies on labour productivity we use firm level data on finnish smes from 2000 to 2012 and apply a combined matching and difference in differences method to control for selection bias we find no significant positive effect on labour productivity over the five year period after a subsidy is granted however the results vary over time and indicate a 2 4 negative effect on smes annual productivity growth one to 2 years after the subsidy year nevertheless subsidies generate a positive employment effect and enhance firm survival additional scrutiny reveals that subsidies positively affect the human capital level of low skill firms

career technical education and labor market outcomes evidence from california community colleges career technical education cte programs at community colleges are increasingly seen as an attractive alternative to four year colleges yet little systematic evidence exists on the returns to specific certificates and degrees we estimate returns to cte programs using administrative data from the california community college system linked to earnings records we employ estimation approaches including individual fixed effects and individual specific trends and find average returns to cte certificate and degrees that range from 14 to 45 percent the largest returns are for programs in the healthcare sector estimated returns in non health related programs range from 15 to 23 percent end page 986 abstract from author

how does globalization affect the synchronization of business cycles this paper examines the impact of rising trade and financial integration on international business cycle comovement among a large group of industrial and developing countries the results provide at best limited support for the conventional wisdom that globalization has increased the degree of synchronization of business cycles the evidence that trade and financial integration enhance global spillovers of macroeconomic fluctuations is mostly limited to industrial countries one striking result is that on average cross country consumption correlations have not increased in the 1990s precisely when financial integration would have been expected to result in better risk sharing opportunities especially for developing countries this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

job mobility and earnings over the life cycle previous studies have shown that in the short run quits generally lead to wage increases on the next job and layoffs to no increase or to a wage cut the author of this study argues however that the prospect of a job change for any reason creates a disincentive for a worker to invest in training that is specific to the current job and therefore those who change jobs frequently may earn less over their life cycle than those who other things equal seldom change jobs an analysis of data from the national longitudinal survey of mature men supports that expectation showing that for white males job separations usually lead to wage gains in the short run but nonmobile workers tend to achieve significantly higher wages over the long run

alternative approaches to evaluation in empirical microeconomics four alternative but related approaches to empirical evaluation of policy interventions are studied social experiments natural experiments matching methods and instrumental variables in each case the necessary assumptions and the data requirements are considered for estimation of a number of key parameters of interest these key parameters include the average treatment effect the treatment on the treated and the local average treatment effect some issues of implementation and interpretation are discussed drawing on the labour market programme evaluation literature

do the poor benefit from devolution policies evidence from malawi s forest co management program do local people especially vulnerable households benefit from devolution of forest management the authors apply the propensity score matching and decomposition techniques on household data from chimaliro and liwonde forest reserves under the pilot forest co management program in malawi after controlling for selection bias they find that while the program raises forest income for participants in chimaliro it reduces revenue for participants in liwonde interestingly results indicate that the program raises forest income for female and low income participants although male and richer participants capture more benefits due to discrimination and endowment differences accounting for 100 and 60 of the inter group income disparity respectively

the geography of trade and technology shocks in the united states abstract this paper explores the geographic overlap of trade and technology shocks across local labor markets in the united states regional exposure to technological change as measured by specialization in routine task intensive production and clerical occupations is largely uncorrelated with regional exposure to trade competition from china while the impacts of technology are dispersed throughout the united states the impacts of trade tend to be more geographically concentrated owing in part to the spatial agglomeration of labor intensive manufacturing our findings highlight the feasibility of separately identifying the impacts of recent changes in trade and technology on us regional economies

determinants of business cycle comovement a robust analysis abstract this paper investigates the determinants of business cycle comovement between countries our dataset includes over 100 countries both developed and developing we search for variables that are robust in explaining comovement using the approach of leamer amer econom rev 73 1983 31 variables considered are i bilateral trade between countries ii total trade in each country iii sectoral structure iv similarity in export and import baskets v factor endowments and vi gravity variables we find that bilateral trade is robust however two variables that the literature has argued are important for business cycles industrial structure and currency unions are found not to be robust

employment and earnings effects of awarding training vouchers in germany participation in intensive training programs for the unemployed in germany is allocated by awarding training vouchers using rich administrative data for all vouchers and actual program participation the authors provide first estimates of the short run and long run employment and earnings effects of receiving a training voucher award based on a selection on observables assumption the results imply that after the award voucher recipients experience long periods of lower labor market success compared to had they not received training vouchers small positive employment effects and no gains in earnings were observed four to seven years after the receipt of the voucher award in addition the findings suggest stronger positive effects both for all low skilled individuals who were awarded and redeemed a voucher and for low skilled and medium skilled individuals who chose to take degree courses than for higher skilled recipients

disentangling the effects of fair trade on the quality of malian cotton the increasing importance of premium segments and private labels raise skepticism about the ability of fair trade to help smallholders compete in high value added markets using panel data collected in mali this paper contributes to the debate by estimating the impact of fairtrade certification on the quality of malian cotton controlling for the nonrandom certification of producers results show a significant impact on the quality of cotton produced by both certified and geographically close noncertified growers via spillover effects the analysis suggests that contract farming enforced by third parties and demonstration effects foster the adoption of innovative agricultural practices

credit counseling and consumer credit trajectories nonprofit credit counseling provides consumers with financial education individualized financial counseling and debt restructuring despite potential benefits relatively little is known about its efficacy this study uses administrative data to assess the relationship between counseling and consumer credit outcomes we estimate difference in difference models to analyze credit outcomes for a counseled group relative to a matched comparison group for six quarters after a baseline period we find evidence of a substantial credit shock around the time of counseling post treatment counseling is associated with a persistent reduction in debt even after accounting for bankruptcies foreclosures debt charge offs or participation in debt consolidation programs jel d12

the economic returns to an mba because mba programs require work experience before admittance prior wages can be exploited to disentangle the return to the degree from unobserved productivity we find that controlling for individual fixed effects generally reduces the estimated returns to an mba particularly for those in top programs however for full time mba students attending schools outside of the top 25 the estimated returns are higher when we control for individual fixed effects we show that there is some evidence that those who take the gmat but do not obtain an mba are stronger in dimensions such as workplace skills that are not easily measured

energy consumption and growth in south america evidence from a panel error correction model abstract this study examines the relationship between energy consumption and economic growth for a panel of nine south american countries over the period 1980 2005 within a multivariate framework given the relatively short span of the time series data a panel cointegration and error correction model is employed to infer the causal relationship pedroni s heterogeneous panel cointegration test reveals a long run equilibrium relationship between real gdp energy consumption the labor force and real gross fixed capital formation with the respective coefficients positive and statistically significant the granger causality results indicate both short run and long run causality from energy consumption to economic growth which supports the growth hypothesis

are classical experiments needed for manpower policy the critical element that distinguishes classical experiments from all other modes of analysis is the random assignment of treatment to enrollees in a study this paper examines the major methodological advantages of random assignment for the purpose of estimating the effectiveness of current manpower policy it also reviews the claimed methodological and ethical objections to experiments the main valid objection to an experiment is neither methodological nor ethical it is the experiment s cost in relation to that of nonexperimental methods of analysis the authors argue that the offsetting gain from experimentation is the inherent reliability of experimental estimates of treatment effects the paper offers a simple framework for deciding whether the improved reliability of treatment effect estimates is worth the added cost of experimentation it concludes with an assessment of the actual value of experiments for evaluating current manpower policies

foods and fads the welfare impacts of rising quinoa prices in peru abstract riding on a wave of interest in superfoods in rich countries quinoa went in less than a decade from being largely unknown outside of south america to being an upper class staple in the united states the united kingdom and elsewhere as a result concerned commentators suggested that the rising international demand for quinoa which tripled prices might have substantially harmed peruvian quinoa consumers we study the impacts of rising quinoa prices on the welfare of peruvian households our analysis suggests these fears are unwarranted a descriptive analysis shows that quinoa is a small part

the performance of industrial sector voluntary climate programs climate wise and 1605 b abstract corporate voluntary climate programs have had limited evaluation the self selection of participants an essential element of such initiatives poses challenges to researchers because the decision to participate may not be random and may be correlated with outcomes this study aims to gage the environmental effectiveness of the industrial sector elements of two early voluntary climate change programs with established track records the u s environmental protection agency s climate wise and the u s department of energy s voluntary reporting of greenhouse gases program 1605 b particular attention is paid to the participation decision and how various assumptions affect estimates of program outcomes using propensity score matching methods applied to plant level census data overall the effects are modest reductions in fuel and electricity expenditures are no more than 10 percent and probably less than 5 percent virtually no evidence suggests either program has a statistically significant effect on fuel costs some evidence indicates that participation in climate wise led to a 3 5 percent increase in electricity costs that vanished after two years stronger evidence suggests that participation in 1605 b led to a 4 8 percent decrease in electricity costs that persisted for at least three years these results suggest that while voluntary programs can play some role in addressing climate change they are unlikely to bring about the kinds of steep reductions called for in the current debate

the effectiveness of public sponsored training revisited the importance of data and methodological choices this article revisits the effectiveness of public sponsored training programs for germany accounting for dynamic selection into heterogeneous programs we carefully assess to what extent various aspects of our empirical strategy such as conditioning flexibly on employment and benefit histories the availability of rich data handling of later program participations and further methodological choices affect our estimates our results imply pronounced negative lock in effects in the short run and positive medium run effects on employment and earnings when job seekers enroll after having been unemployed for some time we find that data and specification issues can have a large effect

way station or launching pad unpacking the returns to adult technical education abstract we estimate returns to diplomas and certificates awarded to adult students by public technology centers a niche sector of higher education that elevates occupational and competency based education over transferable credits and traditional degrees technology centers cater to nontraditional students particularly adults seeking part time training in specific skills sub associate credentials arising from tennessee colleges of applied technology increase access to new industries particularly health and industrial mobility explains half of the employment returns to postsecondary diplomas and at least three quarters of the earnings returns to certificates tcat diploma completers earn 707 1034 in additional quarterly earnings over non completers similar to the returns from community college diplomas benefits extend beyond the signal value of completion students who leave without a credential fare significantly better than matched non students with a similar history of earnings

performance of an agro forestry based payments for environmental services project in mozambique a household level analysis there has been a paucity of research on the impacts of small scale payments for environmental services pes projects in developing countries the aim of this paper is to evaluate the household level impacts of a small scale agro forestry based carbon sequestration project in rural mozambique in 2006 questionnaire based interviews were conducted quarterly of 290 randomly selected households in the buffer zone of the gorongosa national park in mozambique we used the propensity score matching technique to assess the pes project impacts on household cash income consumption expenditure forest resource use and crop yields we found that in contrast to nonparticipant households pes participant households earned more cash income incurred more consumption expenditure collected less forest products and harvested lower quantities of agriculture crops in addition we found through decomposition analysis that there was a differential in pes income both male headed and high income households were being favoured as project benefit recipients future pes projects should focus on a payment scheme that can better ensure the benefit to all the participant households and also pay extra attention on the benefits distribution to the vulnerable households

why has the u s economy become less correlated with the rest of the world in this paper we do two things first we document that over the last 40 years the u s business cycle has become less synchronized with the cycle in the rest of the world second we try to explain why this has happened we use a general equilibrium model as a tool to discriminate between two alternative explanations i a change in the nature of real shocks and ii an increase in u s financial integration with the rest of the world our results indicate that financial integration has played the major role in producing the observed changes in international co movement

disruption versus tiebout improvement the costs and benefits of switching schools most students change schools at some point in their academic careers but some change very frequently and some schools experience a great deal of turnover while many argue that mobility harms students economists tend to emphasize tiebout type moves to procure better school quality sq this paper disentangles the disruption effects of moves from changes in sq importantly it identifies the negative externality movers impose on other students student turnover is shown to entail a substantial cost for movers and non movers alike this cost appears to be larger for lower income and minority students who typically attend much higher turnover schools

is labour market training a curse for the unemployed evidence from a social experiment summary in 1994 a social experiment was conducted in denmark where unemployed applicants for classroom training were randomised into treatment and control groups the data are contaminated by the presence of no shows and crossovers biasing the traditional experimental estimator we interpret our experiment within an economic model of agents maximising outcomes facing different cost regimes and present results interpretable within this model surprisingly we find that classroom training significantly increases individual unemployment rates and decreases employability we discuss possible reasons for this finding and some related policy issues copyright 2009 john wiley sons ltd this paper uses data from a social experiment to evaluate the impact of classroom training on the subsequent fraction of time individuals spend in unemployment and in employment and on their wages in doing so we exploit the information from one among only a handful of social experiments conducted in europe on labour market issues social experiments are seen by many as the way to consistently estimate the effect of a policy on an outcome variable of interest the trick is to randomise the selection process itself such that the outcomes in the control group can be used as an estimate of the unobserved counterfactual in this case the outcome of trained individuals in the absence of training however experimental data are often flawed as is the case in the experiment studied in this paper in the present study the data are contaminated by the presence of no shows members of the treatment group who do not show up at the course they signed up for and crossovers members of the control group who end up receiving the treatment they were randomised out of the presence of no shows crossovers and also drop outs is a well known phenomenon in social experiments see heckman et al 1998b 2000 neglecting their presence may seriously bias the estimates of the parameter of interest simply because they constitute the very phenomenon that the experiment is designed to eliminate namely non random selection 1 in the experiment studied in this paper only 52 of

the role of globalization on the recent evolution of energy demand in india implications for sustainable development using annual data for the period 1971 2012 this study explores the relationship between globalization and energy consumption for india by endogenizing economic growth financial development and urbanization the cointegration test proposed by bayer hanck 2013 is applied to estimate the long run and short run relationships among the variables after confirming the existence of cointegration the overall results from the estimation of an ardl energy demand function reveal that in the long run the acceleration of globalization measured in three dimensions economic social and overall globalization leads to a decline in energy demand in india furthermore while financial development is negatively related to energy consumption economic growth and urbanization are the key factors leading to increased energy demand in the long run these results have policy implications for the sustainable development of india in particular globalization and financial development provide a win win situation for india to increase its economic growth in the long run and become more environmentally sustainable

energy consumption and income a semiparametric panel data analysis this paper proposes a semiparametric analysis for the study of the relationship between energy consumption per capita and income per capita for an international panel dataset it shows little evidence for the existence of an environmental kuznets curve for energy consumption energy consumption increases with income for a majority of countries and then stabilizes for very high income countries neither changes in energy structure nor macroeconomic cycle technological change have significant effect on energy consumption

substitution and dropout bias in social experiments a study of an influential social experiment this paper considers the interpretation of evidence from social experiments when persons randomized out of a program being evaluated have good substitutes for it and when persons randomized into a program drop out to pursue better alternatives using data from an experimental evaluation of a classroom training program we document the empirical importance of control group substitution and treatment group dropping out evidence that one program is ineffective relative to close substitutes is not evidence that the type of service provided by all of the programs is ineffective although that is the way experimental evidence is often interpreted

a reassessment of the effect of income maintenance on marital dissolution in the seattle denver experiment cain and wissoker claim that income maintenance treatment had no effect on marital dissolution in the seattle denver income maintenance experiment yet parametric and nonparametric analyses reveal that there was a significant increase in the dissolution rate for blacks and whites but not chicanos this conclusion holds for many different specifications including a number that allow free form time variation in response while cain and wissoker s analyses and results differ in many ways from that of groeneveld hannan and tuma consideration of the full set of estimates including both main effects and interaction effects and analyses of the complete samples reveal that their analyses agree that the income maintenance treatment increased rates of marital dissolution for blacks and whites

cleaning house the impact of information technology monitoring on employee theft and productivity this paper examines how firm investments in technology based employee monitoring impact both misconduct and productivity we use unique and detailed theft and sales data from 392 restaurant locations from five firms that adopt a theft monitoring information technology it product we use difference in differences models with staggered adoption dates to estimate the treatment effect of it monitoring on theft and productivity we find significant treatment effects in reduced theft and improved productivity that appear to be primarily driven by changed worker behavior rather than worker turnover we examine four mechanisms that may drive this productivity result economic and cognitive multitasking fairness based motivation and perceived increases of general oversight the observed productivity results represent substantial financial benefits to both firms and the legitimate tip based earnings of workers our results suggest that employee misconduct is not solely a function of individual differences in ethics or morality but can also be influenced by managerial policies that can benefit both firms and employees this paper was accepted by serguei netessine operations management

forced sales and farmland prices we analyze farmland prices in the german federal state of brandenburg from 2000 to 2011 with the aim to understand the price formation process in farmland foreclosures pressured sales usually result in a price discount due to time constraints however the land is sold using public auctions this may lead to a price premium since the effect of a foreclosure on farmland prices is ambiguous we empirically quantify the overall effect we use matching techniques and a regression based approach we find that on average price premiums are realized though the effect depends on prevailing land market conditions