where has all the bias gone detecting gender bias in the intrahousehold allocation of educational expenditure abstract the reliability of the household consumption based engel curve methodology in detecting gender bias has been called into question because it has generally failed to confirm bias even where it exists this article seeks to find explanations for this failure by exploiting a data set that has educational expenditure information at the individual level and also by aggregation at the household level i find that in the basic education age groups the discriminatory mechanism in education is via differential enrollment rates for boys and girls education expenditure conditional on enrollment is equal for boys and girls the engel curve method fails for two reasons first it models a single equation for the two stage process second even when we make individual and household level expenditure equations as similar as possible the household level equation still fails to pick up gender bias in about one third of the cases where the individual level equation shows significant bias this article

aging and productivity among economists economists productivity over their careers and as measured by publication in leading journals declines very sharply with age there is no difference by age in the probability that an article submitted to a leading journal will be accepted rates of declining productivity are no greater among the very top publishers than among others and the probability of acceptance is increasingly related to the author s quality rather than the author s age

fairness price stickiness and history dependence in decentralized trade this chapter investigates the implications that social preferences have for the stationary strategic equilibrium of such a decentralized market agents are supposed to be averse to unfairly unfavorable as well as unfairly favorable deals in the spirit of fehr and schmidt 1999 but we stay rather close to standard individualistic preferences the negative weights on advantageous and disadvantageous deviations from what is considered as the fair benchmark are such that utility remains strictly increasing in own surplus share and in contrast to the original fehr schmidt model the fair split need not automatically be a 50 50 division any price between sellers cost and buyers willingness to pay may be the one which for whatever reasons is agents reference point in a given market this makes it possible to consider a more flexible notion of fairness than is usually done it is in line with cognitive dissonance theory from psychology and the noteworthy experiments of binmore et al 1991 1993 where subjects who were triggered to play different bargaining equilibria ended up considering very different surplus distributions as fair

banking the poor via savings accounts evidence from a field experiment abstract in a setting with low penetration of bank accounts i randomly gave access to bank accounts with zero fees at local bank branches to a large sample of female household heads in nepal the zero fees and physical proximity of the bank led to high take up and usage rates compared to similar studies in other settings however impact on income aggregate expenditures and assets are too imprecisely estimated to draw a conclusion i do find reallocation of expenditures across categories e g more spending on education and meat and fish and less on health and dowries and higher ability to cope with shocks on qualitative outcomes i find households report that their overall financial situation has improved the lack of a clear story on mechanisms yet strong result on aggregate self perception of financial wellbeing is consistent with access to quality savings accounts leading to household improvements via multiple mechanisms

human capital kuznets curve with subsistence consumption level abstract we examine the human capital kuznets curve in a simple model that does not assume increasing returns to scale in human capital formation with a utility function that specifies a subsistence consumption level consumption is a necessary good and education is a luxury good as the children of poor households receive a low level of education the gap in human capital endowments expands between poor and rich households eventually economic development increases income and expenditure for education and income inequality declines

what s different about banks abstract negotiable certificates of deposit cd s trade in the capital market in competition with other securities like commercial paper and bankers acceptances if cd s must pay lenders competitive monetary interest the reserve tax on cd s is borne by bank borrowers viability of the tax means there must be something special about bank loans that makes some borrowers willing to pay higher interest rates than those on other securities of equivalent risk moreover there must be something special about banks that prevents other intermediaries from competing to assure that it never pays to finance loans with cd s

does welfare enable family expenditures on human capital evidence from china summary using the national china household income project 2007 urban survey data and a propensity score matching method this article investigates whether welfare receipt helped enable low income families to spend more on human capital we find that welfare recipient families prioritized spending in health and education relative to their non recipient peers welfare particularly helped poor families afford medical care medicine tuition and fees for noncompulsory education private tutoring for children and purchasing of textbooks we find some evidence that welfare helped recipient families pay for maintenance fees for their residence but receiving welfare also deterred families from having leisure activities

the price of education and inequality abstract constructing a simple model that includes the price of education this paper shows that the educational expenditure of rich households could prevent poor households from escaping poverty the paper offers an explanation for persistent inequality

how much does having a bank account help the poor abstracthaving a bank account is widely regarded as the first step toward financial inclusion of the poor funds deposited in a bank account are also observed to lead to higher savings exploiting

looking for boy girl discrimination in household expenditure data the ability to test for discrimination in the allocation of goods between boys and girls is hampered by a lack of data on intrahousehold distribution the analysis presented here allows inferences about intrahousehold allocation to be made from householdlevel expenditure data for a given level of income families with children will spend less on adult goods in order to purchase children s goods if household purchasing favors boys over girls smaller expenditures on adult goods would be made by families with boys as compared with those with girls a method for determining adult goods is described and the procedure for detecting gender bias is applied to data from c6te d lvoire and thailand the data show no evidence of discriminatio n between boys and girls in c6te d lvoire and a small and statistically insignificant bias in favor of boys in thailand how commodities are allocated among the members of a household has recently occasioned a good deal of interest assessments of poverty and income distribution based on household incomes or expenditures will be misleading if allocation within the household is unequal the position of women and girls has been of particular concern and there is a considerable amount of empirical evidence much of it from the indian subcontinent that documents discrimination against females see in particular bhagwati 1973 sen 1984 sen and sengupta 1983 miller 1981 bardhan 1982 and kynch and sen 1983 as well as survey papers by behrman 1987 and harriss 1987 much of the evidence is concerned with measurements of nutritional outcomes mortality and health status rather than with the direct allocation of goods by gender the difficulty in trying to determine the intrahousehold allocation of goods is that household budget surveys the obvious source of data record consumption not of individuals but of households and while attempts can be made to the author is a professor of public affairs and of economics and international affairs at princeton university and is a consultant to the population and human resources department of the world bank the author thanks dwayne benjamin who provided for excellent research assistance he is grateful to him and to members of the economic growth center at yale university for helpful comments this is a revised and shortened version of living standards measurement study working paper 39 the allocation of goods within the household adults children and gender june 1987 the results from thailand were not included in the working paper 1989 the international bank for reconstruction and development the world bank

reputation and earnings the roles of quality and quantity in academe we examine the determinants of professional reputation does quantity of exposures raise reputation independent of quality does quality of the most important exposure have extra effects on reputation in a very large sample of academic economists there is little evidence that a scholar s most influential work provides any extra enhancement of reputation quality rankings matter more than absolute quality quantity has a zero or even negative effect on proxies for reputation data on salaries however show positive effects of quantity independent of quality we test explanations for the differences between the determinants of reputation and salary jel l14 j31

contract costs and financing decisions like bondholders most agents contract for fixed payoffs thus corporate capital structures which are less than 50 percent debt are less levered than overall contract structures in which about 90 percent of total flows are fixed payoffs the hypothesis analyzed here is that loans and bonds lower contract costs by delegating the monitoring and bonding of the default risks of fixed payoffs to credible specialists financial intermediaries bond holder trustees rating agencies and auditors other agents can then focus on their specialties that is efficient supply of labor materials and other services and the contract problems of these specialties copyright 1990 by the university of chicago

viewpoint replication in economics this examination of the role and potential for replication in economics points out the paucity of both pure replication checking on others published papers using their data and scientific replication using data representing different populations in one s own work or in a comment several controversies in empirical economics are used to illustrate how and how not to behave when replicating others work the incentives for replication are examined and proposals aimed at journal editors and authors are advanced that might stimulate an activity that most economists applaud but few perform

animal spirits financial crises and persistent unemployment this article uses a rational expectations model with multiple equilibrium unemployment rates to explain financial crises the model has equilibria where asset prices are unbounded above i argue that this is an important feature of any rational agent explanation of a financial crisis since for the expansion phase of the crisis to be rational investors must credibly believe that asset prices could keep increasing forever with positive probability i explain the sudden crash in asset prices that precipitates a financial crisis as a large shock to expectations that leads to a permanent increase in the unemployment rate

financial intermediation and delegated monitoring this paper develops a theory of financial intermediation based on minimizing the cost of monitoring information which is useful for resolving incentive problems between borrowers and lenders it presents a characterization of the costs of providing incentives for delegated monitoring by a financial intermediary diversification within an intermediary serves to reduce these costs even in a risk neutral economy the paper presents some more general analysis of the effect of diversification on resolving incentive problems in the environment assumed in the model debt contracts with costly bankruptcy are shown to be optimal the analysis has implications for the portfolio structure and capital structure of intermediaries

risk shifting through nonfinancial contracts effects on loan spreads and capital structure of project finance deals we study capital structure negotiation and cost of debt financing between sponsors and lenders using a sample of more than 1 000 project finance loans worth around us 195 billion closed between 1998 and 2003 we find that lenders i rely on the network of nonfinancial contracts as a mechanism to control agency costs and project risks ii are reluctant to price credit more cheaply if sponsors are involved as project counterparties in the relevant contracts and finally iii do not appreciate sponsor involvement as a contractual counterparty of the special purpose vehicle when determining the level of leverage

capital structure and debt structure using a novel dataset that records individual debt issues on the balance sheets of public firms we demonstrate that traditional capital structure studies that ignore debt heterogeneity miss substantial capital structure variation relative to high credit quality firms lowcredit quality firms are more likely to have a multi tiered capital structure consisting of both secured bank debt with tight covenants and subordinated non bank debt with loose covenants we discuss the extent to which these findings are consistent with existing theoretical models of debt structure in which firms simultaneously use multiple debt types to reduce incentive conflicts jel g32

the determinants of econometric society fellows elections we study the results of elections of fellows of the econometric society we aremotivated largely by the question of whether these elections are fair where our de ni tion of fairness is that votes are based solely on the quality of the candidates if so thenconditional on quality other characteristics of the candidates such as geographic locationor subspecialty should not in uence the probability of election we nd that conditionalon a number of measures of the quality of the candidates other characteristics do sig ni cantly predict election for example an australian econometrician is less likely to beelected than a north america based economic theorist this is true whether or not wecontrol for quality measures one might object that even fully informed individuals may differ in their assessment ofquality and that neither the voters nor the authors of this study are fully informed aboutcandidates quality this is true in any study of the impact of ascriptive characteristics onoutcomes we discuss various interpretations of our ndings in the conclusion but readersmust draw their own conclusions about what the results imply about the roles of qualityand fairness in this electoral process 1 the electoral institutionmost members of the economics profession consider election as a fellow as an honor it recognizes prior professional achievements within what are the more technical areasof economics there are roughly 500 living fellows names are placed on the ballot inone of two ways i by the nominating committee of the society or ii by petition ofat least three members who need not be but usually are current fellows the ballotcontains the candidate s name and current af liation a list of at most six publications ashort statement of the candidate s contribution to economics and an indication of whetherthe nomination was by committee or by endorsers and if the latter from 1990 through2000 the names of all the endorsers the ballot deadline is april 30 the electorate dues paying current fellows receive the ballot in early autumn alongwith the nomination form for each candidate mark their ballots and return them tothe society s of ce results are announced in december names on the ballot are inalphabetical order with a different starting point in each annual election voters checkthe names of individuals whom they wish to be elected a candidate is elected who isapproved on at least 30 percent of the ballots returned typically about half the eligiblefellows cast votes losing candidates can be nominated in later years by either of thetwo methods but the process must be undertaken de novo

monitoring and structure of debt contracts this paper presents a theory of optimal debt structure when the moral hazard problem is severe the main idea is that the optimal debt contract delegates monitoring to a single senior lender and that seniority allows the monitoring senior lender to appropriate the full return from his monitoring activities the theory explains i why debt contracts are prioritized ii why short term debt is senior to long term debt and iii why financial intermediaries usually hold short term senior debt whereas long term junior debt is widely held another implication of the theory is that covenant and maturity structures will be set to conform to the seniority structure

the evolution of the scientific productivity of highly productive economists this paper studies the evolution of research productivity of a sample of economists working in the best 81 departments in the world in 2007 the main novelty is that in so far as a productivity distribution can be identified with an income distribution we measure productivity mobility in a dynamic context using an indicator inspired in an income mobility index suggested by fields 2010 for a two period world productivity is measured in terms of publications weighted by the citation impact of the journals where each article is published in the periodical literature we study the evolution of average productivity productivity inequality the extent of rank reversals and productivity mobility for seven cohorts as well as the population as a whole we offer new evidence confirming previous results about the heterogeneity of the evolution of productivity for top and other researchers however the major result is that contrary to what was expected for our sample of very highly productive scholars the effect of rank reversals between the two periods on overall productivity mobility offsets the effect of an increase in productivity inequality from the first to the second period in the youngest five out of seven cohorts jel a11 a12 b41 d63 i32

what is discrimination gender in the american economic association 1935 2004 we illustrate problems of measuring discrimination using elections to aea offices with a new econometric technique we find female candidates have a much better than random chance of victory this advantage is either reverse discrimination or reflects beliefs that women are more productive the former interpretation could be explained by an unchanging median voter whose preferences were not satisfied by suppliers of candidates but there was a structural change in voting behavior in the mid 1970s the results suggest it is generally impossible to claim differences in rewards for different groups measure the extent of discrimination or even its direction jel a11 d72 j16

top management compensation and capital structure the interrelationship between top management compensation and the design and mix of external claims issued by a firm is studied the optimal managerial compensation structures depend on not only the agency relationship between shareholders and management but also the conflicts of interests which arise in the other contracting relationships for which the firm serves as a nexus we analyze in detail the optimal management compensation for the cases when the external claims are 1 equity and risky debt and 2 equity and convertible debt in addition to the role of aligning managerial incentives with shareholder interests managerial compensation in a levered firm also serves as a precommitment device to minimize the agency costs of debt the optimal management compensation derived has low pay performance sensitivity with convertible debt instead of straight debt the corresponding optimal managerial compensation has high pay to performance sensitivity a negative relationship between pay performance sensitivity and leverage is derived our results provide a reconciliation of the puzzling evidence of jensen and murphy 1990 with agency theory other testable implications include 1 a relationship between the risk premium in corporate bond yields and top management compensation structures and 2 the announcement effect of adoption of executive stock option plans on bond prices the model yields implications for management compensation in banks and federal deposit insurance reform our results explain the dynamics of top management compensation in firms going through financial distress and reorganization

towards an economics of awards awards are a widespread phenomenon they cater to the fundamental desire for social recognition and serve as a valuable incentive to influence behaviour the study of awards such as medals prizes and titles has in recent years gained momentum in economics complementing the longstanding focus on material incentives to evaluate the effectiveness of awards as a motivator is difficult as the effect of awards must be separated from the fact that awards are meant to be given to the best we show how research on awards has advanced over the last couple of years thus providing points of departure for future work

on the adjustment speed of smes to their optimal capital structure the aim of this paper is to analyse the speed of adjustment of small and medium sized enterprises smes to the target leverage by applying a system gmm technique to spanish panel data collected during the period 1995 2005 we estimate a partial adjustment model in which both target leverage and speed of adjustment are simultaneously endogenized we provide empirical evidence on the determinants of target leverage and the speed of adjustment more specifically the rate of financial flexibility growth opportunities and size are positively related to the speed of adjustment whereas the distance to the optimal ratio of debt shows a negative impact our findings demonstrate that in terms of sample mean a high percentage of spanish smes adjust rationally to their target additionally the smes analysed appeared to be over levered and fairly motivated to adjust annual adjustment speed 26

the economic consequences of labor unionization evidence from stock price crash risk this study investigates the impact of labor unionization on stock price crash risk we find that labor unionization is negatively associated with stock price crash risk such negative relation is more pronounced when firms can intimate more credible evidence on unfavorable prospects and when firms face more powerful labor unions our findings are consistent with the notion that firms take strategic actions to reduce the bargaining advantages enjoyed by labor unions and that labor unions force firms to take less risky investments and discontinue underperformed projects more timely which leads to lower stock price crash risk

technological competition uncertainty and oligopoly abstract in an oligopoly context the present technological choice of a firm which expects to receive private revelant information just prior to the uncertain market stage has both a flexibility value and a strategic commitment value in contrast to some common wisdom ideas we provide a natural two stage competition framework in which an increase in uncertainty always raises the commitment value of the technological choice of the firm and may decrease its flexibility value when the increased uncertainty takes the form of more variable beliefs the first result tends to reinforce therefore the findings of the strategic commitment literature under certainty

valuation effect of capital account liberalization evidence from the chinese stock market this paper examines the valuation effect of capital account liberalization using an event study approach and the policy announcement for rmb qualified foreign institutional investors short for rqfii as the event date we find that overall the stock market responded positively to the capital account liberalization announcement in addition we provide some heterogeneity that firms with more stringent financing constraints earn higher returns than their counterparts finally existing local institutions play an important role in determining announcement returns

remittances household expenditure and investment in guatemala the author uses a large household data set from guatemala to analyze how the receipt of internal remittances from guatemala and international remittances from the united states affects the marginal spending behavior of households on various consumption and investment goods contrary to other studies the author finds that households receiving remittances actually spend less at the margin on consumption food and consumer goods and durables than do households receiving no remittances instead of spending on consumption households receiving remittances tend to spend more on investment goods like education health and housing the analysis shows that a large amount of remittance money goes into education at the margin households receiving internal and international remittances spend 45 and 58 percent more respectively on education than do households with no remittances these increased expenditures on education represent investment in human capital like other studies the author finds that remittance receiving households spend more at the margin on housing these increased expenditures on housing represent a type of investment for the migrant as well as a means for boosting local economic development by creating new income and employment opportunities for skilled and unskilled workers

citations in economics measurement uses and impacts i describe and compare sources of data on citations in economics and the statistics derived from them constructing data sets of the post publication citation histories of articles published in the top five journals in the 1970s and 2000s i examine distributions and life cycles of citations compare citation histories of articles in different subspecialties in economics and present evidence on the history and heterogeneity of those journals impacts and the marginal citation productivity of additional coauthors i use a new data set of the lifetime citation histories of over 1 000 economists from thirty universities to rank economics departments by various measures and demonstrate the importance of intra and interdepartmental heterogeneity in productivity throughout the discussion summarizes earlier work including the impacts of citations on salaries and nonmonetary rewards and how citations reflect judgments about research quality in economics and the importance of economic ideas