estimates of the returns to quality and coauthorship in economic academia salaries of academic economists are studied to determine if individuals receive differential returns to publishing articles of varying quality and to coauthored versus single authored articles estimates based on detailed data and a flexible nonlinear least squares procedure indicate that substantial returns to quality exist and that an individual s return from a coauthored paper with n authors is approximately 1 n times that of a single authored paper

professional achievements and gender differences among academic economists i introduction while the academic labor market for economists attracts a good deal of attention among its participants work on the differences in remuneration for economic research and other professional characteristics between men and women in academic institutions has been limited this paper tests for gender differences using data on grants and grant applications from the national science foundation ault rutman and stevenson 1979 addressing issues of academic placement found that the highest rated institution at which an academic economist will be employed is the institution of first employment willis and pieper 1991 found that women who received doctorates in economics in the 1970s had a somewhat higher rate of placement at doctoral degree granting institutions than men but that there was no difference in the rank of the institutions for these placements lower tier institutions must offer promotions to attract candidates moore et al 1983 reported that the rank of the department at which one earned the doctorate is critically important in determining initial academic placement hamermesh johnson and weisbrod 1982 found that for those at prestigious departments increases in citations lead to salary increases but that the department s rank was not inversely related to salary in his review of work by sociologists youn 1988 reported that the prestige of an academic institution was positively related to the research productivity of its scientists there are two competing hypotheses that might explain this result better departments select better scientists achievement model or better departments foster greater productivity ascription model empirical efforts to distinguish between these hypotheses have been mixed the research on salary differentials in academia has generally found that there are significant gender differences that widen during the careers of men and women 1 barbezat 1991 the most recent evidence suggests that salary differentials in the academic community may have diminished somewhat since the 1960s but still remain weiler 1990 separated the influence of the department s rank on salary by treating it in a separate equation and found that standard formulations underestimate the degree of salary discrimination although important salary is not the only measure of achievement in academe promotion to a higher rank employment in key departments and the production of well placed articles all help determine an economist s influence in the profession but despite the dramatic increase in the percentage of women receiving the ph d during the past two decades the number of senior women at graduate institutions is still very low 2 to what extent does gender bias exist in economics departments as measured not only by salary but also by other achievements such as the likelihood of achieving a senior position or being employed by a top department is there a difference in the experiences of the younger cohorts compared to their more senior counterparts this paper attempts to answer these important questions by 1 taking into account the endogeneity of the variables that are usually treated as exogenous in models of salary determination and thereby broadening the characteristics that traditionally reflect discrimination and 2 using a new detailed data base developed from the national science foundation the results of this more complete model in which salary as well as other measures of professional achievement are explained show significant differences between men and women at the more senior level at the assistant professor level although the signs of the gender coefficients are consistent with a discrimination hypothesis the results are not statistically significant ii the model single equations using the techniques developed by oaxaca 1973 and blinder 1973 have long been used to estimate gender salary differentials in academia with productivity measures such as books and articles published administrative experience etc

new revelations about unemployment persistence in spain time series and panel data approaches using regional data this article aims to re examine the persistence of unemployment in spain for this purpose we use time series and cross section analysis from a time series viewpoint we disaggregate unemployment by regions and use unit root tests ar coefficients and fractional differencing parameters as indicators of persistence for the cross section approach we first estimate mean regressions of regional unemployment rates then using a panel of 114 periods and 50 provinces we estimate pooled fixed and random effects models finally following some recent developments we implement several panel data unit root tests previous studies had already shown the strong persistence of spanish unemployment our disaggregated analysis extends the finding to reveal that the persistence is greater in the most industrialized regions the results also suggest that a structural break took place in 1994 implying a decline in the unemployment persistence since then

fair share siting noxious facilities as a risk distribution game under nontransferable utility abstract the search for equitable solutions to the siting of noxious facilities has long been an unresolved problem theoretically and politically common prescriptions often involve compensating host communities in this article we address the case when compensation is not an option or when we are unable to translate risk into a common measure of utility we propose a new analytic for finding equity based fair share distributions of risk which translates directly to mixed siting strategies in order to do this we employ a new general solution concept for n person bargaining games under nontransferable utility we discuss conditions under which the existence of such solutions can be proven last we illustrate the solution concept with application to the lancer project a controversial municipal incinerator originally proposed for east los angeles comparing results obtained with the ntu shapley value with the actual proposal finally we point out that solutions will involve risk elimination not just redistribution per se but we need both and to talk of one without the other is at times unjust at times ineffectual and often both

a context based procedure for assessing participatory schemes in environmental planning the efficiency of participatory schemes in environmental planning is an emerging research area and many issues are not solved yet regarding the assessment of such procedures it is essential for decision makers to identify improvement opportunities of participatory schemes we propose an original procedure to address such issue through a bargaining model from the signaling game literature which accounts for participation design as well as for agents preferences beliefs and bargaining power the model is calibrated using qualitative data from surveys in french local communities involved in municipal solid waste management model simulations are used to test for assumptions on the stakeholder dialogue and explore sensitivity of game outcomes to structural parameters we propose a set of performance indicators to identify the most effective participatory schemes in achieving convergence in stakeholder positions regarding environmental and land use planning

consumers opinion of inflation bias due to quality improvements abstract measurement of quality changes has proven to be an especially difficult aspect of calculating unbiased rates of inflation we propose a new methodology of capturing quality improvements based on consumer focus groups and apply this methodology in an environment where quality changes might be expected to be especially rapid and extensive a post communist transition economy we find that the methodology indicates a substantial understatement of quality improvements during transition and therefore a substantial overstatement of inflation resulting in a serious downward bias in growth rate estimates for post communist economies the move to free markets has apparently improved consumers welfare more by improving what they can purchase than by increasing how much they can purchase overall mismeasurement of quality changes may have understated czech growth rates during the first decade after communism by as much as 5 percentage points per year

determinants of scholarly productivity among male and female economists i introduction the purpose of this article is to test a model of the determinants of articles produced by male and female academics of particular interest is how article production is influenced by coauthorship institutional research orientation and gender several works have identified and demonstrated the trend toward coauthorship in economics and in other disciplines using data from the journal of economic literature heck and zaleski 1991 demonstrated that the incidence of coauthorship has increased from about 15 of total articles in 1969 to about 35 in 1989 durden and perri 1995 report that as of 1992 the proportion coauthored had grown to more than 38 hudson 1996 finds that by 1993 coauthorship rates in the journal of political economy and american economic review were 39 6 and 54 9 respectively as compared to rates of 6 and 8 in 1950 why do economists coauthor rational interest theory suggests that if scholars collaborate then there must be a utility enhancing result other things equal this could be in the form of higher salaries and increased probabilities of promotion greater access to funded research greater mobility in job markets and the like which might result if collaboration significantly increases the overall production of published papers studies by mcdowell and melvin 1983 barnett et al 1988 and piette and ross 1992 suggest that coauthorship among scholars may increase article production through the division of labor made necessary by increased complexity in the subject matter and by the need to saturate markets to increase the probability of getting papers accepted for publication laband and tollison 2000 find evidence that increasing rates of coauthorship result from the greater quantitative content of articles greater requirement for the use of sophisticated econometric techniques and the fact that cooperation is cheaper in time and other resources as compared to learning what is necessary to publish in another field or discipline hamermesh and oster 2002 discuss nonpecuniary purely consumption benefits such as the pleasure obtained from cooperation and suggest that higher levels of prestige among colleagues may also be relevant although many reasons for cooperation have been developed not much has been done to determine whether the rate of coauthorship among scholars actually affects total article production using cross section data hansen et al 1978 and graves et al 1982 estimate productivity models but coauthorship is not included in either study mcdowell and smith 1992 include a coauthorship variable but find that it neither increases nor decreases article production when articles are discounted by the number of authors hollis 2001 uses panel data to examine the relationship between coauthorship and research productivity he finds that coauthorship leads to better longer and more frequent publications when publications are discounted by the number of authors however coauthorship appears negatively related to research output mcdowell and smith s 1992 and hollis s 2001 results are very counterintuitive because a viable reason for coauthorship is to increase efficiency as shown in durden and perri 1995 durden and perri 1995 estimate a time series model finding that coauthorship is highly instrumental in determining article productivity as far as we know the only study by economists that specifically analyzes the effect of institutional research orientation on publishing output is that by graves et al 1982 using data from 240 schools they estimate total pages published per faculty member in the top 24 economics journals between 1974 78 using a series of independent variables to proxy influences that affect publication they find that secretaries per faculty member helps and teaching load hinders production the effects of ph d status teaching assistance and faculty student ratios are mixed depending on specification of the model

two to tango gender differences in the decisions to publish and coauthor i introduction there is a well developed mythology regarding the presence of old boy networks and their importance in explaining gender differences in labor market outcomes as articulated by saloner 1985 nonetheless aside from works such as simon and warner 1992 there is relatively little empirical evidence examining the impact of networks on market outcomes how these effects differ by gender and whether gender differences in network access change over time as women become more well represented in a profession the paucity of empirical evidence arises in part from the difficulty of measuring the presence of such networks prior work including that of saint paul 2001 and erickson and jacoby 2003 has found evidence that networks facilitate the adoption of team oriented work practices and information sharing that increase average worker productivity in management and professional jobs on the other hand studies such as that by marmaros and sacerdote 2002 have also found that women have less access to networks than their male counterparts in both private and public sector jobs which has been shown to yield gender differences in job placement and other labor market outcomes this article considers how gender differences in networks are manifested in a specific male dominated profession i e academic economists and in a specific work related outcome i e the decision to coauthor articles in which access to networks is likely to be important the analysis uses uniquely detailed individual and job level data for phd economists included in nearly four decades of american economic association aea membership to examine the role of networks on the joint decision to publish and coauthor the unique matching process of phd economists between academic and nonacademic jobs and within the hierarchy of academic departments along with the relative ease of observing joint research provide a rare opportunity to distinguish differential network access and measure joint production the results demonstrate the importance of networks in the production of research output and that new female entrants into a male dominated profession do not have equal access to these professional networks the results also provide evidence that women are able to plug into networks over time as the profession becomes more gender representative our study contributes to the literature on the role of networks in the labor market in several ways first the profession of academic economist is well suited to this study because it is made up of workers who produce a relatively homogenous output i e scholarly journal articles and that share a common set of job related tasks i e teaching research and service second the incidence of coauthorship is an observable outcome measure of network utilization a phenomenon inherently difficult to measure in the tradition of the business productivity literature as found in sabel 1993 third there is extensive evidence in the literature that journal publications are positively linked to academic salaries as found in siegfried and white 1973 and sauer 1988 that the propensity to coauthor is positively associated with publication output as in as found in durden and perri 1995 and maske et al 2003 that there are gender differences in tendencies to coauthor as shown by ferber and teiman 1980 and mcdowell and smith 1992 and that there are gender differences in professional outcomes such as publications salary and promotion as seen in mcdowell 1982 hansen et al 1978 formby et al 1993 and broder 1993 cumulatively these studies suggest that understanding the determinants of coauthorship is important for evaluating the sources and the extent of gender inequity in the profession prior work on coauthorship behavior has analyzed patterns over time and across disciplines several studies including hudson 1996 mcdowell and melvin 1983 and barnett et al

sense of place geographic discounting by people animals and plants abstract people animals and plants seem to consistently prefer to distance themselves from objects they fear and draw close to things that they desire i present an argument for ecologists and economists which allows them to capture this behavior in a simple way i offer some evidence for how such behavior occurs and how to include it in specific formulation of environmental policy models

how not to sell nuclear weapons we consider situations where a sale affects the ensuing interaction between potential buyers these situations are modeled by assuming that an agent who does not acquire the object for sale incurs an identity dependent externality we construct a revenue maximizing auction for the seller we observe that 1 outside options and participation constraints are endogenous 2 the seller extracts surplus also from agents who do not obtain the auctioned object 3 the seller is better off by not selling at all while obtaining some payments if externalities are much larger than valuations

wage inflation and unemployment in europe the regional dimension johnes g and hyclak t j 1989 wage inflation and unemployment in europe the regional dimension reg studies 23 19 26 in this paper a bargaining model of wage and unemployment determination is used to estimate regional phillips curves for britain italy and the federal republic of germany estimates of region specific non accelerating inflation rates of unemployment nairu are provided movements of these over time are examined the impact of inter regional differences in wage rigidity on unemployment change is analysed in the final section johnes g et hyclak t j 1989 l inflation par les salaires et le chomage en europe l optique regional reg studies 23 19 26 cet article se sert d un modele de la determination des salaires et de l emploi afin d estimer des courbes de phillips pour la grande bretagne l italie et la republique federale allemande on fournit des estimations des taux de chomage regionaux etant donne une inflation stable et on examine les mouvements de ces taux sur le temp

employment unemployment and demand shifts in local labor markets this paper analyzes the effects of demand shifts within and between local labor markets on unemployment and employment outcomes observed in those markets the demand shifts are calculated from sales growth data at the firm and industry levels the results show that in general employment and wage adjustments by firms are primarily driven by shifts in labor demand demand shifts between local areas account for large fractions of the observed variation in unemployment and employment rate levels and changes across areas within area shifts cause much smaller and insignificant amounts of unemployment and only if they are between industry copyright 1991 by mit press

choosing and sharing implementing a project like a nationwide nuclear waste disposal which benefits all involved agents but brings major costs only to the host is often problematic in practice revelation issues and redistributional concerns are significant obstacles to achieving stable agreements we address these issues by proposing the first mechanism to implement the efficient site the host with the lowest cost and share the exact cost while retaining total control over realized transfers our mechanism is simple and in the vein of the well known divide and choose procedure the unique nash equilibrium outcome of our mechanism coincides with truthtelling is budget balanced individually rational and immune to coalitional deviations more generally our mechanism can also handle the symmetric case of positive local externalities e g olympic games and even more complex situations where the usefulness of the project regardless of its location is not unanimous

noxious facilities environmental damages and efficient randomized siting this paper considers the efficient siting of a noxious facility that causes environmental damages for example increased pollution in the host community the analysis shows that there can be multiple efficient locations without transfers and that an efficient location need not have the smallest wta or wtp in general there exist randomized outcomes that are ex ante efficient and that pareto dominate efficient outcomes the analysis also shows that a community s most preferred lottery never provides full insurance under some conditions lotteries with no host compensation are pareto superior to those with compensation

victim compensation revisited abstract the siting of an efficient noxious facility may decrease social welfare if people care about horizontal equity the facility decreases the relative attractiveness of the host city decreasing land rent in the host city and increasing land rent elsewhere victim compensation which promotes horizontal equity at the expense of efficiency will increase social welfare if a the demand for land is relatively inelastic b the demand for the output of the noxious facility is relatively elastic and c the preferences for horizontal equity are relatively strong

competition in regional environmental policies when plant locations are endogenous abstract a two region model is presented in which an imperfectly competitive firm produces a good with increasing returns at the plant level production of the good causes local pollution the firm decides whether to maintain plants in both regions serve both regions from a single plant or shut down if the disutility of pollution is high enough the two regions will compete by increasing their environmental taxes standards until the polluting firm is driven from the market alternatively if the disutility from pollution is not as great the regions will usually compete by undercutting each other s pollution tax rates

model selection based unit root detection in unemployment rates international evidence a model selection based unit root detection by using the bayesian information criterion is proposed first six alternative model classes are obtained considering the presence or absence of a unit root and considering three kinds of deterministic terms no constant constant constant and trend second given the selected model class the best model is selected from the alternative models with different lags third the best of the entire model set comprising the six models obtained in the preceding step is selected finally whether an observed time series contains a unit root is determined on the basis of the selected model simulation results suggest that the proposed method is at least comparable to and often better than the sequential testing method provided by dolado et al 1990 empirical results obtained by the proposed method are more convincing than those obtained by the sequential testing method and suggest that the hysteresis hypothesis can be applied to monthly time series of the unemploym

are oil shocks permanent or temporary panel data evidence from crude oil and ngl production in 60 countries this paper examines the unit root properties of crude oil production for 60 countries employing a range of panel data unit root tests for the period 1971 to 2003 the study first employs a number of panel data tests that do not accommodate structural breaks and then proceeds to apply the lagrange multiplier lm panel unit root test with one structural break the results of the panel data tests without a structural break are inconclusive with at best mixed support for joint stationarity the findings from the lm panel unit root test with a structural break however are conclusive suggesting that for a world panel and smaller regional based panels crude oil and ngl production are jointly stationary

what s an economics seminar worth information authors and organizers should know es de lille abstract this paper is an empirical study of the publication records of communications to a weekly seminar continued from 1997 we look at the quality of publications and also at the determinants of publications our results offer lessons for both presenters and organizers of research seminars in academia

hysteresis in east asian unemployment high performing asian economies are quite distinctive with efficient flexible and responsive labour markets comparing the persistence of unemployment in east asian economies to that in western countries is difficult due to the data s short time spans and possible structural breaks this article employs advanced unit root tests to deal with these problems and fails to reject hysteresis in the unemployment rates of the high performing asian countries even after taking into account structural change an alternative explanation of different productivity growth for the hysteresis phenomenon of the asian countries is proposed herein

a sealed bid auction mechanism for siting noxious facilities this paper proposes a sealed bid mechanism for facilitating the siting process of noxious facilities such as prisons trash disposal plants and incinerators for hazardous waste these facilities have created such opposition by communities that the acronyms nimby not in my backyard or lulu local undesirable land use are now in common usage to describe the public s reaction to them the noxious facility siting problem arises because there are economies of scale associated with having only one plant to serve the needs of a wide region the community that hosts the plant absorbs all of the environmental costs while the rest of the region enjoys the benefits of the facility one reason that these facilities have been so strongly opposed by communities is that they generate relatively little new employment and provide limited additional taxes in relation to their perceived negative impact d morell and c magorian 1982 some compensation arrangement is thus needed to share the gains from the winners to the potential loser this paper discusses a sealed bid auction mechanism for selecting a location for the facility so that all communities feel they are better off than under the status quo

property rights protest and the siting of hazardous waste facilities ture since that time no major hwf has been sited anywhere in the united states the epa had anticipated that local opposition would make finding these sites an exceptionally difficult task their pessimism was well founded and if anything understated according to the hazardous waste counsultant s latest state by state review the outlook for siting hwfs in the future is even more bleak than in the past due in large part to what they term a worsening of the emotional atmosphere surrounding siting efforts this failure to site any new hwf has come about in spite of assurances by government and company officials that new facilities built according to the present standards would pose negligible risks to the local residents attempts have been made to break the deadlock by instituting extensive public participation procedures establishing state siting boards with the power to overrule local decision makers and requiring facility owners to compensate local governments for safety services the latter provided in this paper we argue that the ambiguous nature of the present property rights governing the siting of hwfs is an important cause of the stalemate we offer a new approach to siting which recognizes the de facto property rights assumed by local communities we propose a political market via a referendum

transboundary externalities in the environmental transition hypothesis the environmental kuznets curve ekc is a hypothesis which implies that it is possible to grow out of environmental degradation most theoretical models of the ekc relation have not accounted for transboundary and intergenerational externalities nor have empirical studies provided evidence that validates an inverted u shaped relation between environmental degradation and economic growth for pollution problems where the effects are far displaced or are long delayed

a consumption based theory of the environmental kuznets curve abstract most theories about the inverted u relationship between pollution and income termed the environmental kuznets curve ekc are production side theories emphasizing pollution and abatement technologies production side theories are implicitly based on the assumption of low factor mobility and the absence of pollution as a variable in the utility function both assumptions are called into question by the empirical evidence of ekcs for i pollutants that are long lived and not easily shiftable and ii regional cross sections with free labor mobility hazardous waste sites are a prime example this paper develops a stylized model of the ekc based on perfect mobility of households and labor it represents the first attempt at developing a consumption side model of the ekc

hysteresis in unemployment empirical evidence from taiwan s region data based on panel unit root tests in this study we test the hysteresis hypothesis in unemployment for taiwan s 21 regional data sets using the levin et al 2002 im et al 2003 and taylor and sarno 1998 panel based unit root tests for the june 1993 to september 2001 period the results from all three tests provide evidence that based on taiwan s regional unemployment data the hysteresis hypothesis can justifiably be rejected

sectoral shifts and cyclical unemployment a substantial fraction of cyclical unemployment is better characterized as fluctuations of the frictional or natural rate than as deviations from some relatively stable natural rate shifts of employment demand between sectors of the economy necessitate continuous labor reallocation since it takes time for workers to find new jobs some unemployment is unavoidable this paper presents evidence that most of the unemployment fluctuations of the seventies unlike those in the sixties were induced by unusual structural shifts within the u s economy simple time series models of layoffs and unemployment are constructed that include a measure of structural shifts within the labor market these models are estimated and a derived natural rate series is constructed

unemployment in britain male unemployment in britain has risen from around 2 per cent in the 1950s to around 17 per cent in 1985 see figure 1 the figures are for male unemployment because there is no consistent series for women 1 even more remarkably unemployment has fallen in only three years out of the last twenty 1973 1978 and 1979 to account for this we need a model that explains both changes in the natural or non accelerating inflation rate of unemployment nairu and deviations from it we use a three equation supply side model centred on the labour market this has two main features the first concerns the determination of employment in the short run the labour demand function that we use cuts through the fruitless debate now raging especially in europe as to whether current unemployment is classical or keynesian according to the classical view employment is too high because real wages are too high according to the keynesian view real wages are not binding and unemployment is high because the product market does not clear with prices too high relative to nominal demand the whole debate is set in the framework of perfect competition yet in perfect competition prices are set by impersonal forces and it is not clear what could possibly stop prices clearing the market it is much more reasonable to think of prices as being set by imperfectly competitive firms existing prices being the best they can think of given the demand they face in this context firms demand for labour will depend on both the real product wage and the level of real aggregate demand this is the demand function we estimate and it conforms both to common sense and to the data however this does not imply that employment can be made to grow without limit by pumping up real demand for in the medium term when price surprises are eliminated our model determines three variables employment real wages and real demand on the basis of three equations an employment equation a price equation and a wage equation thus in the medium term there is a natural level of employment and corresponding to this a natural level of real aggregate demand the second key feature of our model concerns the medium term determination of unemployment in the medium term the planned mark up of wages over prices in wage settlements must be consistent with the mark up of prices over wage costs in employers pricing behaviour for if wage setters try to set real product wages higher than is consistent with employers pricing behaviour this generates ever increasing inflation thus the key to understanding unemployment in the medium term is the behaviour of wage setters if events occur that push them towards too high real wages then unemployment has to rise to offset these influences we shall call these influences wage pressure variables or push factors and they are clearly crucial in understanding unemployment the variables here include the social security system employment protection

the effect of gender sorting on propensity to coauthor implications for academic promotion a cohort sample of ph d economists indicates a significant propensity for researchers to select coauthors of the same sex this gender sorting contributes to lower article production for women further we find evidence of bias in academic promotion when single authored and coauthored articles carry the same weight in promotion and salary decisions the evidence explains in part why women academics wait longer for promotion and are not as likely to be promoted as men among the effects of gender sorting is self selection of women into larger departments where they are more likely to find colleagues of the same sex

efficient allocation of a prize king solomon s dilemma abstract a planner is interested in allocating an indivisible good a prize to one of many agents in the economy his objective is to give the prize to the agent who values it most without any payments being made by the recipient the planner however does not know the identity of this agent while the agents themselves do this paper shows how the planner can construct simple multistage mechanisms with a unique subgame perfect equilibrium outcome at this outcome the agent who values the prize most gets it without any transfer of money being made by any of the agents or the planner

two views of the geographic distribution of unemployment this paper investigates the extent to which equilibrium and disequilibrium explanations can account for unemployment rate differentials between cities it shows that shocks that disturb the steady state relationship among the unemployment rates of metropolitan areas tend to be eliminated by mobility within a single year it also shows that high unemployment areas tend to be those with attractive climates and amenities high wages and high unemployment insurance it argues that the main effect of government programs that create jobs in high unemployment areas will be to lure additional job seekers to those areas

unraveling the academic productivity of economists the opportunity costs of teaching and service this study investigates the relationships among research productivity teaching and service on the basis of individual specific information involving approximately 715 academic economists responding to an online survey these economists provided information regarding their teaching and service commitments as well as personal and institutional information the publication record of each respondent was then obtained from econlit together these data constitute a rich field for the systematic study of research productivity results of a tobit analysis reveal much about the nature of research productivity underscoring for instance the importance of gender coauthorship presen tations at conferences and peers who publish among the more important findings from this analysis is that both teaching and service commitments have a significantly negative impact on the research productivity of academic economists these relations hold across types of academic employer though to varying degrees taken together the results provide interesting insights into the roles of academic scholars teachers and colleagues

fairness and social risk i unaggregated analyses this paper is the second of a two paper study of fairness issues for decisions that affect the benefits received and the risks encountered by a population the study examines fairness for individuals and for homogeneous groups within the population it considers fairness both for population benefit risk profiles and for probability distributions over profiles our study bases fairness on notions of envy among individuals and groups the first paper focused on fairness in profiles and profile distributions when benefits and risks are not aggregated the present paper uses individual preferences to assess fairness when benefits and risks are aggregated within groups or over the population it concentrates on intergroup envy measures and fairness indices that account for ways that aggregated benefits and risks might be allocated to members of groups or to groups within the population

deriving natural rates of unemployment for sub national regions the case of canadian provinces in order to pursue informed stabilization policies it is vital for policy markers to have estimates of how much of the total unemployment rate can be classified as cyclical rather than natural unemployment this paper describes a method for generating regional natural rate estimates and applies this method to the case of canadian provinces results indicate that unemployment insurance generosity and relative minimum wages play an important role in determining natural unemployment rates in canadian provinces one of the enduring characteristics of the canadian labour market has been substantial and peresistent unemployment rate disparities across provinces the results of this study indicate that these disparities are primarily explained by differences in provincial values of structural variables such as unemployment generosity and by differences in provincial sensitivities to these structural variables a furher result is that variation in cyclical unemployment rates is substantially less in the traditio

the siting of hazardous waste facilities in federal systems the political economy of nimby this paper offers a new political economy explanation for thepervasive problem of siting hazardous waste treatment facilitiesin federal system we first show that a decentralized systemyields the first best waste treatment capacity level and that acentralized structure gives rise to free riding behavior amonglocal jurisdictions in our model each community seeks toinfluence the central government through political contributions this leads to suboptimal levels of treatment capacity thecapacity is increasing in the compensation level if the marginalbenefit of treatment capacity is sufficiently large and in thegovernment s weight on aggregate social welfare relative tolobbying activities the centralized system can replicate thedecentralized system with a sufficiently high compensation level since compensation has proved difficult a centralized systemfaces greater obstacles than a decentralized system

english proficiency and labor market performance evidence from the economics profession this article investigates whether the global spread of the english language provides an inherent advantage to native english speakers this question is studied within the context of the economics profession where the impact of being a native english speaker on future publishing success is examined english speakers may have an advantage because they are writing in their native language the quality of writing is a crucial determinant of publishing success and all the top economics journals are published in english using a ranking of the world s top 2 5 of economists this article confirms that native english speakers are ranked 100 spots higher better than similar non native english speakers a variety of extensions examine and dispel many other potential explanations jel a11 j44 f66

voluntary auctions for noxious facilities incentives to participate and the efficiency of siting decisions abstract this paper explores the efficiency properties of a voluntary auction under which the city submitting the low bid hosts the region s noxious facility and receives the high bid as compensation in the nash equilibrium of the auction game the auction mechanism is individually rational participation is rational for all values of the local environmental costs of the facility incentive compatible the facility is located in the low cost city and revenue neutral if the compensation of the host city distorts location choices participation in the auction is rational for all values of local environmental costs if the scale economies associated with the noxious facility are large relative to the average local environmental cost and the distortionary cost per dollar of compensation

directional heterogeneity of environmental disamenities the impact of crematory operations on adjacent residential values a hedonic study of residential house sales in rawlins wyoming was conducted to estimate the impact of an environmental shock from a new point source upon adjacent residential property values we use a unique data base of house sale prices and associated house attributes including structural and neighbourhood characteristics and geographic distances and directions from the source of the shock atmospheric emissions from a new crematory our data spans 27 months of house sales 7 months before and 20 months after the startup of crematory operations results indicate that proximity measured both in terms of direction and distance from the crematory imparts a statistically significant negative impact on average house sale prices an increase of 0 3 to 3 6 of average sale price for every one tenth mile increase up to one half mile in distance away from the crematory but depending on direction from the crematory this distance benefit increases somewhat with calendar time only for houses located west of

unit root tests persistence and the unemployment rate of the u s states author affiliation diego romero avila department of economics carretera de utrera km 1 pablo de olavide university 41013 seville spain dromtor upo escarlos usabiaga professor department of economics carretera de utrera km 1 pablo de olavide university 41013 seville spain cusaiba upo es corresponding author acknowledgment the authors would like to thank seminar participants at the pablo de olavide university and dg economics at the european central bank carlos usabiaga acknowledges the financial support from centro de estudios andaluces ecod1 05 033 special thanks go to junsoo lee and nikolay gospodinov for making available to us the codes to implement some of the techniques used in the paper and to two anonymous referees for suggestions that substantially improved the paper the usual disclaimer applies 1 introductionthe high persistence in unemployment rates observed in the developed world since the first oil shock has led to a vivid debate over which paradigm can better explain the behavior of unemployment rates the traditional strand of the literature that forms the basis of the natural rate theory phelps 1967 1968 friedman 1968 assumes that the unemployment rate evolves around an equilibrium level describing stationary fluctuations this equilibrium level or natural rate is set depending on fundamentals of the economy while initially the absence of theories explaining the determination of the natural rate meant that in practice it was taken to be constant and exogenous subsequent developments have attempted to identify the structural factors behind differences across economies and over time including labor productivity technological change real interest rates real exchange rates and energy prices to name a few see phelps 1994 phelps and zoega 1998 according to the structuralist view phelps 1994 most shocks to unemployment are temporary but occasionally the natural rate permanently changes and is affected by variations in the aforementioned structural factors as a consequence the unemployment rate may be characterized as a process that is stationary once a small number of structural breaks are allowed for in contrast to the natural rate and structuralist approaches the hysteresis hypothesis see blanchard and summers 1986 1987 implies that the unemployment rate is path dependent and temporary shocks can affect unemployment permanently 1 while hysteresis is thought to imply that the natural rate is conditioned by the level of unemployment recorded in the past persistence in unemployment which is a special case of the natural rate hypothesis entails a slow adjustment process of reversion toward the mean thus hysteresis implies that unemployment is characterized by a unit root while persistence is characterized by a near unit root in the latter case shocks to unemployment though long lasting would not have a permanent effect to discriminate among theories explaining the behavior of unemployment rates unit root tests have been widely applied the hysteresis hypothesis has been formulated as a unit root process and its rejection lends support to the natural rate hypothesis if no breaks are included in the specification and the structuralist hypothesis if breaks are allowed for the purpose of this article is to investigate which theoretical paradigm most closely represents the behavior of unemployment rates in the states of the united states over the period 1976 2004 we first apply the individual lagrange multiplier lm t statistic proposed by schmidt and phillips 1992 to monthly data and we fail to reject the null hypothesis of a unit root in unemployment for forty states perron 1989 pointed out that the presence of structural changes could favor the nonrejection of the unit root null if they are not properly accounted for therefore we employ the minimum lm t statistic allowing for up to two endogenous changes in level proposed by lee and strazicich 2003

compensating for public harms why public goods are preferred to money this paper provides evidence that public goods represent a more acceptable response to public harms than monetary compensation we demonstrate a preference for public goods over monetary compensation in part because receipt of public goods may limit the sense of guilt or bribery from accepting compensation for the injury more surprising this preference for public goods over money in the presence of a harm remains in a free market choice where guilt is not an issue it appears that public goods psychologically mitigate or balance public harms in a way that makes them more valuable in the presence of public harms

siting noxious facilities a siting lottery with victim compensation abstract this paper proposes a scheme to facilitate the siting of noxious facilities a regional government announces that it will a use a lottery to choose a site for a noxious facility and b transfer income from tenants to host city landowners to at least partly offset the effects of the noxious facility on local property values the government will hold the lottery only if all citizens agree in advance to abide by the resulting siting decision the lottery approach is superior to the conventional approach to siting advance notification in the sense that the lottery approach achieves unanimous support for the siting decision with less compensation the compensation scheme can be financed with a regionwide tenant tax or a tax on residents in the nonhost city for small compensation programs the nonhost tax is superior to the regional tax

hysteresis in unemployment evidence from 48 u s states i introduction one central idea in macroeconomics is the equilibrium unemployment rate hypothesis 1 in many macroeconomic models which allow for some degree of price stickiness fluctuations in demand and supply may lead to deviations of the actual unemployment rate from its equilibrium value these deviations in turn trigger changes in the inflation rate there is nothing in the equilibrium unemployment rate literature which even vaguely suggests such a rate is constant indeed many studies have analyzed the factors which cause the equilibrium unemployment rate to change over time or across areas for example summers 1986 presents evidence of an increased normal u s unemployment rate since the mid 1960s and argues that this increase has in large part resulted from high and growing noncompetitive wage differentials barro 1988 addresses the issue of persistence of unemployment in various countries over a number of time periods and relates measures of persistence to variables that matter theoretically for the economy s speed of adjustment blanchard and summers 1986 1987 propose the so called hysteresis hypothesis of unemployment hysteresis is the term used to describe the long lasting influence of history on the natural rate a recession potentially has permanent effects if it changes attitudes and or characteristics of the unemployed and particularly the long term unemployed furthermore the latter may exert less pressure on the wage setting because they will become outsiders in the labor market the insiders union members or currently employed workers have much incentive to keep wages from falling 2 the hysteresis hypothesis of unemployment has important policy implications it suggests that high unemployment if left by itself may persist and continue to be a serious problem in the economy even in the long run this possibility leaves more room for active government policies to fight recessions and manage the economy the fact that the actual unemployment rate may not fluctuate around some natural rate suggests the possibility of nonstationarity in the unemployment series this relationship can be illustrated with a simple model from wyplosz 1987 or brunello 1990 consider the following phillips curve 1 mathematical expression omitted where p sub t is the current inflation rate e sub t i p sub t is the expected inflation rate of time t given information at time t 1 u sub t is the current unemployment rate mathematical expression omitted is the natural unemployment rate beta is the slope of the phillips curve and xi sub t is an error term the possibility of hysteresis arises when the natural rate is a function of past unemployment rates this can be expressed as follows 2 mathematical expression omitted where c and alpha are constants and zeta sub t is an error term substituting 2 into 1 yields 3 u sub t c alpha u sub t 1 epsilon sub t where epsilon sub t 1 beta e sub t 1 p sub t p sub t xi sub t zeta sub t hysteresis requires the parameter alpha in 3 to be equal to one 3 it implies that once disturbed the unemployment rate tends to wander around without returning to a mean value in this case the unemployment rate and also the natural rate contain a unit root in contrast when alpha is between zero and one the natural rate evolves towards its steady state level c 1 alpha and the weak version of the natural rate hypothesis holds as long as alpha is larger than zero there is persistence in unemployment rate in the sense that past unemployment affects the natural rate we however seek to test for the existence of hysteresis the extreme version of persistence finally when the parameter alpha equals zero the natural rate stays at a constant level c

nimby taxes matter the case of state hazardous waste disposal taxes this paper links the theoretical and empirical literatures on interjurisdictional tax and regulatory competition focusing on the case of state hazardous waste disposal taxes it begins by demonstrating that local environmental taxes can be inefficient and that the inefficiency depends on the tax elasticity of polluters responses the paper then uses panel data from the toxics release inventory to estimate the magnitude of the tax elasticities and to demonstrate the empirical relevance of the theoretical inefficiency of local taxes 1999 elsevier science s a all rights reserved

the informational value of unemployment statistics a note on the time series properties of participation rates abstract using a battery of unit root tests we show that labor force participation rates in australia canada and the u s are non stationary this implies that great care is needed before unemployment rates are used as measures of joblessness

tools or toys the impact of high technology on scholarly productivity i introduction and motivation in the past several decades investment that makes communication easier has increased rapidly in the united states and other developed economies since the mid 1980s a combination of technical change and deregulation has also reduced long distance telephone rates in the united states by 50 reported by allen 1995 pitney bowes 1997 reported that fax usage increased by 20 between 1996 and 1997 alone and electronic mail e mail unknown before 1985 is ubiquitous today popular discussion of a wide range of additional examples of rapidly declining prices and explosive growth of the use of telecommunications is provided by cairncross 1997 attempts to measure the impact on aggregate total factor and labor productivity of these supposedly productivity enhancing investments in broad reaching technical improvements such as computing machinery and communications equipment have not met with great success as in morrison 1997 but see greenan and mairesse 1996 1 an alternative to measuring effects on the broader economy is to measure the impact of generalized technical change on productivity in specific activities observed at the micro level an earlier literature including griliches 1958 and trajtenberg 1989 has clearly traced the effect of specific innovations in raising productivity in specific sectors of the economy this article expands on that tradition by trying to identify the effect of the recent broad revolution in communications on one activity scholarly publishing we propose studying scholarly publishing before and after technical change greatly lowered communication costs we examine in particular whether increasing ease of communication has altered scholars choices about their methods of production and whether those methods yielded changes in the productivity of scholarly activity that are consistent with increasing access to new communications technologies 2 in section ii we discuss a model of the production process in scholarly writing in relation to the cost of communications in section iii we describe the unique data set we assembled to examine the relation between technical change and scholarly productivity section iv presents the results of using these data to test the hypotheses that we develop and section v compares coauthored to solo authored studies and provides a suggestion for the increased prevalence of the former section vi offers a consistent explanation for most of the results ii a model of scholarly production the example that we use in this study of the impact of technology is the nature and outcomes of the choices of co workers by authors of scholarly publications in economics the importance of team research has been stressed by a number of authors studying the economics of innovation including dasgupta 1988 who also presents a research summary so that our specific example has broader implications for the study of technical change has the decline in the cost of communication altered scholars choices in a way consistent with these technologies increasing scholarly productivity in examining scholarly productivity we focus on research output in particular we view scholars as having three production choices 1 work solo s 2 work with close by coauthor s c or 3 work with distant coauthor s d in the model in this section the scholar is assumed to choose a production technology that maximizes his or her scholarly productivity measured as the quality of the article produced in section vi we a dopt an alternative characterization of a scholar s choices we assume that the scholar has a wide range of potential research activities to choose among and has perfect knowledge of the productivity p valued in dollars of all potential matches s c sub i member of c and d sub i member of d 3 each match generates one solo equivalent article per period

on a political solution to the nimby conflict scale economy in the construction and operation of public facilities such as landfills calls for cooperation among communities to build a common facility arthur o sullivan 1993 such a facility is a mixture of a public good and a private bad and hence leads to strong opposition by communities to locate it in their vicinity bruno s frey et al 1996 this is one of the most serious environmental concerns of recent years and is known as nimby not in my backyard in this paper we study the hypothesis that a democratic political process creates an adequate mechanism for the resolution of the nimby conflict the intuitive explanation is simple a nimby conflict is likely to induce lobbying and symmetric pressures by all threatened communities in the relevant region as is well known gene m grossman and elhanan helpman 1994 when subject to symmetric pressures politicians stick firmly to principles and function most efficiently the existing literature on the siting of noxious facilities focuses mainly on normative issues such as welfare maximizing siting via decentralized community based mechanisms e g howard kunreuther and paul r kleindorfer 1986 robert c mitchell and richard t carson 1986 and deborah minehart and zvika neeman 2002 evidently however such mechanisms have seldom been practiced e g stephen k swallow et al 1992 the current study adopts a positive approach integrating a political economic framework with a model of a competitive real estate market in the theoretical section a government of a linear two city economy determines the location of a noxious facility which affects the equilibrium in the real estate market and induces the spatial distributions of price and population the government is subject to political pressures by city level lobbies of landowners both landlords and home owners in general the political equilibrium and the socially optimal siting differ however the more equitable the distribution of landownership in the region the smaller the difference at the limit when property distribution is perfectly equitable and all cities participate in the political arena the government locates the facility at the socially optimal site the analysis proceeds by identifying additional conditions under which the political equilibrium siting coincides with the socially optimal location and with an empirical analysis in the empirical section the theoretical framework is extended to account for a multiple city region and is calibrated to assess the prospects of the political system for resolving the nimby conflict in the context of landfill siting in israel it is shown that if all cities in the region form political lobbies and the politicians are not extremely corrupt the political siting is close geographically to the socially optimal location and the difference entails a less than 0 1 percent reduction in social welfare moreover even if the formation of lobbying in the region is incomplete as long as the weight the politicians assign to social welfare is larger than 0 7 the proximity of the politically and socially optimal locations is preserved we interpret the above results as supportive of the hypothesis of an effective political solution to the nimby conflict

using choice question formats to determine compensable values the case of a landfill siting process abstract siting noxious facilities such as community landfills is a challenging problem for local planners who recognize the importance of economic efficiency and equity political acceptance and meeting federal regulatory standards meeting these criteria requires technical and socio economic analyses in conjunction with public input planners may also recognize that political acceptance requires compensation for the host community either in the form of monetary or in kind transfers following breffle and rowe breffle w s rowe r d 2002 comparing choice question formats for evaluating natural resource tradeoffs land econ 78 2 298 314 we use a resource to resource paired comparison survey method to estimate compensatory values associated with an in county landfill for both the host and non host communities our results indicate that while a host community household s minimum willingness to accept payment for hosting a landfill may exceed a non host community household s maximum willingness to pay a large difference in population sizes between the two communities enables the landfill to pass a kaldor potential compensation test

publish or teach analysis of the professor s optimal career path abstract this paper analyzes how faculty members dynamically allocate their efforts between improving their research and teaching skills taking into account the organizational structures and incentives implemented by academic institutions the model builds on the assumption that organizational structures have an impact on the nature of spillover effects between teaching and research competencies we analyze the dynamic equilibrium under unilateral and bilateral spillovers using the no spillover case as a benchmark the bilateral spillover case is the most appealing as it achieves the highest overall performance however the nature of the equilibrium and the career paths can be quite different depending on the parameters of the problem such as the obsolescence of competencies or the strength of the spillover effect this finding provides interesting insights on what could be the most productive configuration of a higher education institution

asymmetric information bargaining problems with many agents a yes or no decision must be made about some issue all agents must agree the coase theorem asserts that the efficient outcome will always result suppose the value positive or negative that an individual attaches to an affirmative decision is privately known to that individual it is proved under very mild conditions that with independent types as the number of agents increases the probability of an affirmative efficient decision goes to zero an example in which it is common knowledge that an affirmative decision is efficient and yet the probability of such a decision goes to zero is given

politics and social costs estimating the impact of collective action on hazardous waste facilities firms that generate negative externalities may consider the effects of their location on the surrounding environment because of the right of their prospective neighbors to demand compensation for pollution and raise the transaction costs of location since communities vary both in the value individuals place on the environment and in the ability of residents to organize politically locations that generate the least political opposition may not be the locations that result in the lowest externalities this article tests whether the degree to which firms internalize their externalities depends on the ability of affected communities to engage in collective action the results indicate that firms processing hazardous waste when deciding where to expand capacity do take into account variations in the potential for collective action to raise their costs

entry level salaries of academic economists does gender or age matter i introduction since the mid 1970s earnings differentials in academic labor markets have been extensively investigated with particular attention focused on salary differentials between males and females the leading studies use similar methodologies but differ in terms of the time period analyzed data sources and whether a single academic discipline or multiple disciplines are considered for example johnson and stafford 1974 investigate several academic professions in 1970 jusenius and scheffler 1981 consider a single discipline economics in 1973 and include a cross section of universities and professorial ranks as well as race several investigators including katz 1973 hirsch and leppel 1982 rickman 1984 and raymond sesnowitz and williams 1988 focus on a single college or university and include diverse academic disciplines the latter two studies raise the question of whether gender continued to matter in academic labor markets in the 1980s and reach opposite conclusions a consistent finding transcending early studies of academic labor markets is that earnings differentials are smallest between men and women who are at the beginning of their careers for example johnson and stafford in a widely cited study state the most important finding is that the salaries of females start out at not much less than those of males 4 to 11 percent in the six disciplines in our sample and then decline 1974 901 this paper investigates entry level salaries in a single academic discipline by considering a cross section of newly hired economists the primary source of labor market information is a unique survey of entry level salaries in the 1987 88 academic year it might seem that by the late 1980s gender differentials should have disappeared at the entry level but like johnson and stafford s 1974 earlier result our survey reveals newly hired females received 1060 3 4 percent less than males our principal purpose is to determine whether this gender differential and the effects of age are significant once other determinants of earnings are taken into account for example we consider and control for terminal degree status the quality of the ph d granting department field of specialization highest degree offered by the hiring department differences in cost of living across areas and other institutional factors that can influence beginning entry level salaries we first describe the data set developed primarily from a survey which is used to estimate entry level earnings equations we also briefly compare our survey to other surveys providing information on market outcomes for economists we then present estimates of the determinants of entry level salaries and discuss the influence of gender age and other determinants of earnings ii the survey a total of 469 u s economics departments were surveyed in the summer and fall of 1987 with 258 departments responding 55 percent 1 the 1987 88 academic year salary of each new hire was requested of each department demographic information age sex and human capital characteristics ph d granting university primary field of specialization and degree status were also requested for each new hire in addition the survey included questions on whether the hiring college university is privately or publicly supported the administrative reporting channel of the economics department highest degree offered and number of entry level persons hired the identities of the hiring department and the university at which the newly hired economist did his or her graduate work are used to construct two measures of quality the quality of the department where the ph d work was done is the first measure and the quality of the hiring department is the second 2 the survey was designed to provide microdata on individual entry level economists for the purpose of estimating earnings equations in an effort to maximize responses the questionnaire was intentionally brief only questions directly relevant to estimating the earnings equation of entry level economists were included

hysteresis vs natural rate of unemployment new evidence for oecd countries abstract the paper tests hysteresis effects in unemployment using panel data for 19 oecd countries we apply a sequential procedure based in two multivariate augmented dickey fuller test adf type panel unit root tests in a sure framework we strongly reject the joint null of hysteresis and find that only seven countries present evidence of hysteresis

customer ownership and quality provision in public services under asymmetric information the implementation of projects producing external effects is often a source of disagreement and conflict between hosting and nonhosting communities the article focuses on the impact of participatory ownership on conflict resolution and social welfare in the presence of asymmetric information and imperfect quality monitoring we show that in such situations the participatory solution may help solve deadlocks that money transfers to a for profit operator cannot solve the analysis highlights three main factors behind this fact first a customer owned cooperative internalizes at least partially the external effects generated by the project second the alignment of cooperative members preferences with those of the social planner reduces in some cases eliminates the distortions caused by information asymmetries third cooperatives require less costly monitoring than their for profit counterparts we also show that cooperatives productive inefficiency with respect to for profits may emerge endogenously as a consequence of a lower pressure to compete on costs for the market

women in the economics profession this article discusses evidence from recent literature on gender literature on gender differences among ph d economists it finds many gender similarities in accomplishments including undergraduate grades publication rates ceteris paribus and labor market commitment it finds no evidence of disadvantages for women in admissions to ph d programs or in nonacademic salaries yet gender differences remain ceteris paribus in gre scores attrition from ph d programs non tenure track academic jobs academic salaries and academic promotion rates the paper suggests that trends toward increasing percentage of females may be peaking particularly given recent drops in female undergraduate economics majors