virtual special issue editorial essay the shitty rent business what s the point of land rent theory in this introduction to a virtual special issue on land rent we sketch out the history of land rent theory encompassing classical political economy marx s political economy the marginalist turn and subsequent foundations for urban economics and the marxist consensus around rent theory during geography s spatial turn we then overview some of the contemporary strands of literature that have developed since the break down of this consensus namely political economy approaches centred on capital switching institutionalism of various stripes and the rent gap theory we offer a critical urban political economy perspective and a particular set of arguments run through the review first land is not the same as capital but has unique attributes as a factor of production which require a separate theorisation second since the 1970s consensus around land rent and the city dissipated the critical literature has tended to take the question of why how the payment exists at all for granted and so has ignored the particular dynamics of rent arising from the idiosyncrasies of land amongst the talk of an anthropocene and planetary urbanisation it is surprising that the economic fulcrum of the capitalist remaking of geography has fallen so completely off the agenda it is time to bring rent back into the analysis of land cities and capitalism

property market efficiency an institutional economics perspective this paper reassesses the debate around property market efficiency and introduces an institutional perspective it considers property market efficiency in terms of the specific characteristics of property itself and the processes through which property is used and traded it argues that the institutional dimension fundamentally alters the concept of efficiency and leads to a partial and contingent judgement on achieved efficiency instead of seeking a judgement on whether the property market as an entity is efficient the institutional approach allows the possibility that property market process may be efficient for some market participants but not for others it also introduces a time dimension suggesting the need to assess the adaptability of property market process as economic and social conditions change

o brother where art thou the effects of having a sibling on geographic mobility and labour market outcomes in most industrialized countries more people than ever are having to cope with the burden of caring for elderly parents this paper formulates a model to explain how parental care responsibilities and family structure interact in affecting children s mobility characteristics a key insight we obtain is that the mobility of young adults crucially depends on the presence of a sibling our explanation is mainly but not exclusively based on a sibling power effect siblings compete in location and employment decisions so as to direct parental care decisions at later stages towards their preferred outcome only children are not exposed to this kind of competition this causes an equilibrium in which siblings not only exhibit higher mobility than only children but also have better labor market outcomes using data from the german socio economic panel study soep and from the american national survey of families and households nsfh we find strong evidence that confirms these patterns the implications of our results are then discussed in the context of current population trends in europe and the united states

exploring the notional property developer as a policy construct this paper explores how far policy makers understand the structure of the development industry the perceived characteristics of developers and the extent to which such actors can be considered policy responsive if these matters are poorly understood the effectiveness of planning policy may be undermined especially where the private sector is responsible for undertaking most development the paper is based upon empirical research on the scottish executive s perceptions of and policy stances towards developers between 1999 and 2007 it finds that the executive appeared to have only limited understanding of what drives the development process or motivates individual developers and seemed unfamiliar with important differences within the industry sectorally and geographically instead the notional property developer was incorrectly conceived as a malleable and potentially compliant partner with shared objectives to the state the paper calls for a more thorough understanding of the development industr

beauty and the labor market the authors examine the impact of looks on earnings using interviewers ratings of respondents physical appearance plain people earn less than average looking people who earn less than the good looking the plainness penalty is 5 to 10 percent slightly larger than the beauty premium effects for men are at least as great as for women unattractive women have lower labor force participation rates and marry men with less human capital better looking people sort into occupations where beauty may be more productive but the impact of individuals looks is mostly independent of occupation suggesting the existence of pure employer discrimination copyright 1994 by american economic association

the role and behaviour of commercial property investors and developers in french urban regeneration the experience of the paris region summary this paper provides an analysis of the factors underlying private investment decisions concerning property development with specific reference to urban regeneration in the french context it is based on the results of a behavioural survey and mca analysis of the behaviour patterns and motivations of active private investors and developers in the french commercial property markets and their involvement in french urban regeneration initiatives the pattern of investment and development activity over the 1997 2002 french property market recovery period has been studied and a typology of actors set up based on their investment policy for these property markets the findings indicate that property investors in urban regeneration essentially seek speculative developments and short term investments

the price of gold dowry and death in india abstract we provide evidence that dowry costs motivate son preferring behaviors in india since gold is an integral part of dowry we study parental responses to shocks in the world gold price exploiting monthly variation in gold prices across 35 years we find that monthly changes in gold prices lead to an increase in girl relative to boy neonatal mortality and that surviving girls are shorter after the introduction of prenatal sex determination technology we find that gold price shocks during pregnancy increase female foeticide

children of war the long run effects of large scale physical destruction and warfare on children this paper provides causal evidence on the long term consequences of large scale physical destruction on educational attainment health status and labor market outcomes of children i exploit the plausibly exogenous region by cohort variation in the intensity of world war two wwii destruction as a unique quasi experiment i find that exposure to destruction had long lasting detrimental effects on the human capital formation health and labor market outcomes of germans who were at school age during wwii an important channel for the effect of destruction on educational attainment is the destruction of schools whereas malnutrition is partly behind the estimated impact on health

perceiving prospects properly when an agent chooses between prospects noise in information processing generates an effect akin to the winner s curse statistically unbiased perception systematically overvalues the chosen action because it fails to account for the possibility that noise is responsible for making the preferred action appear to be optimal the optimal perception patterns share key features with prospect theory namely overweighting of small probability events and corresponding underweighting of high probability events status quo bias and reference dependent s shaped valuations these biases arise to correct for the winner s curse effect

the endowment effect as blessing we study the idea that seemingly unrelated behavioral biases can coevolve if they jointly compensate for the errors that any one of them would give rise to in isolation we pay specific attention to barter trade of the kind that was common in prehistoric societies and suggest that the endowment effect and the winner s curse could have jointly survived natural selection together we develop a new family of hybrid replicator selection dynamics and show that under such dynamics even if biases only partially compensate for each other individuals with both biases can survive in the population in the long run

the impact of obesity on wages abstract previous studies of the relationship between body weight and wages have found mixed results this paper uses a larger data set and several regres sion strategies in an attempt to generate more consistent estimates of the effect of weight on wages differences across gender race and ethnicity are explored this paperjnds that weight lowers wages for white females ols esti mates indicate that a difference in weight of two standard deviations roughly 65 pounds is associated with a difference in wages of 9 percent in absolute value this is equivalent to the wage effect of roughly one and a half years of education or three years of work experience negative cor relations between weight and wages observed for other gender ethnic groups appear to be due to unobserved heterogeneity i introduction several previous studies have found among females a negative cor relation between body weight and wages there exist three broad categories of ex planations for this finding the first explanation is that obesity lowers wages for example by lowering productivity or because of workplace discrimination the sec ond is that low wages cause obesity this would be true if poorer people consume

stature and the standard of living research on the standard of living now emphasizes alternatives or supplements to the national income accounts this paper reviews the results of two decades of research using stature as a measure of health aspects of human welfare after comparing and contrasting stature with per capita income i consider height patterns discovered by economic historians that challenge traditional beliefs about the past including long term trends cycles in heights and the dreadfully small stature of slave children that was followed by catch up growth the paper concludes with comparisons to work in development economics and suggestions for research

expanding the life cycle model precautionary saving and public policy one of the key puzzles in understanding saving behavior is not so much why people save the title of this session but why people don t save according to the familiar life cycle model households should accumulate wealth to provide for their retirement consumption the surprising result from the data is the sizable fraction of the population who have accumulated so little even among those nearing retirement given that earnings will almost surely decline when households retire such behavior can imply poor living standards for the elderly some might interpret the low wealth accumulation as being evidence of myopia irrationality or a failure of households to enforce mental accounting richard thaler 1994 while others might view the low level of wealth accumulation as evidence of high individual rates of time preference determining the underlying causes of low wealth is crucial for public policies that seek to alleviate low aggregate saving rates in the united states as well as policies that seek to buttress the adequacy of financial resources for the elderly in this paper we outline what we believe to be the causes of why many people do not save we conclude by speculating about government policies that may be most effective at encouraging saving much of the research examining levels of consumption saving and wealth as well as their responsiveness to policy has been done using a life cycle model with the simplifying assumption of perfect certainty alan auerbach and laurence kotlikoff 1987 for example developed a model with 55 overlapping generations of individual lifecycle households each with empirically plausible age earnings profiles and utility parameters and used the model to address tax policy and demographic issues in a regime in which all households are identical within a generation and all generations know future earnings and interest rates more recently a line of inquiry has examined the effects of uncertainty on saving generally in the context of highly stylized models this research has shown that in these models uninsured earnings uncertainty can alter optimal saving behavior in a variety of important ways for a partial review of this precautionary saving literature see hubbard et al 1994 in two recent papers hubbard et al 1993 1994 we have combined these two strands of the literature by examining the implications of a life cycle model of consumption saving and wealth accumulation subject to what we think are the three most important sources of uninsured idiosyncratic risk facing households uncertainty about earnings medical expenses and length of life our intent has been to create a realistic model in which families live for many periods working for part of their lives and retiring later in life to parameterize the uncertainty facing families we estimate tdiscussants christopher carroll federal reserve board john b shoven stanford university laurence kotlikoff boston university

common interest development and the changing roles of government and market in planning world wide common interest development cid and its governance homeowners associations hoas are developing rapidly however numerous conflicts have given rise to the need to redefine govern

intergenerational transmission of risk attitudes a revealed preference approach using data the german socio economic panel gsoep we investigate whether the willingness to take risks which is revealed via observed choices of occupation is transmitted from parents to children our approach resembles the one by dohmen et al 2008 who investigate the same question using stated preferences as risk variable we use earnings risk measured by the cross sectional coecient of residual variation obtained from mincerian wage regressions we nd that fathers riskiness of the job chosen is a signicant determinant of sons occupational risk our results are robust to dierent specications underpinning the hypothesis of intergenerational transmission of risk preferences

the labour market impact of body weight in china a semiparametric analysis while a positive wage effect of body mass index bmi is widely observed in low income developing countries a negative wage effect of bmi is often observed in high income developed countries to fill the gap between these previous findings we investigate the relationship between body weight and wages in transition economies we focus on china whose rapid economic growth of the 1990s was followed by a rapid increase in overweight and obesity while still experiencing significant food insecurity and underweight we first use several parametric regression strategies to obtain a consistent estimate of the wage effects of weight second we adopt a semiparametric partially linear model that allows for endogeneity of weight parametric regressions provide mixed results and the sign and magnitude of their estimates are sensitive to the choice of samples and regression strategies semiparametric estimates provide evidence of a wage penalty for very heavy and thin persons among both men and women the wage pena

the real estate markets players institutions and territories revealing the parties the processes and the institutions and consequently both the diversity and contingency of the real estate markets the existing increasing literature emphasises the contemporary numerous links and interdependencies between real estate land value planning and town planning policy and even the financial system this paper is an attempt to understand all the real estate markets from the most peripheral ones where the urban rent is the lowest to the most dense city centres to gain a better understanding of the real estate market a process of firstly deconstruction and then reconstruction is used the process of deconstruction involves identifying various market trends according to property type principally residential buildings players and institutions territorial situations and temporalities based on research conducted in switzerland we then developed a meta synthesis inspired by fernand braudel whose works put as much emphasis on day to day economic activity as on long term activity and on local as well as global issues

short criminals stature and crime in early america abstractwe consider the extent to which an individual s height affected the age at which he entered into criminal activity in early america using data on prisoners incarcerated in pennsylvania s nineteenth century prisons we show that prisoners were short relative to the contemporary population then using weibull continuous time duration econometric models we show that age at entry into criminal activity was negatively associated with an individual s height after controlling for several individual characteristics the results are consistent with recent research showing that shorter individuals face less attractive legitimate labor market opportunities because lower stature is associated with lower cognitive ability and because of general discrimination against shorter people

marriage specialization and the gender division of labor we consider why the gender division of labor is so often enforced by custom and why customary gender divisions of labor generally involve both direction and prohibition in our formal model agents first learn skills and then enter the marriage market we show that wasteful behavior may emerge due to strategic incentives in specialization choice and human capital acquisition and that both problems may be mitigated through a customary gender division of labor this division is not pareto improving both the distributional effects and welfare gains of a customary gender division of labor decrease as opportunities for market exchange increase

institutions in british property research a review this paper surveys approaches to the study of institutions as used in recent commercial property research in britain institutional analysis can be approached from mainstream economics power str

land use planning and the housing market a comparative review of the uk and the usa this paper provides a review of some of the key articles and research examining the relationship between planning regulation and its impact on the housing market in the uk and the us in both count

housebuilder networks and residential land markets the commercial prospects of speculative housebuilders depend crucially on successful land acquisitions this paper presents new evidence revealing the importance housebuilders attach to networks with other important actors in securing future land supplies since networks depend on trust reputation and voluntary collaboration they indicate the importance of social relations within the industry the paper argues that uk speculative housebuilders rely more on networks than markets to source land and that they structure those networks to enhance their own competitive positions reflecting granovetter s belief in the strength of weak ties the paper emphasises the breadth not depth of housebuilder networks and contends that social relations within the industry are primarily dependent on pragmatic considerations of mutual self interest

the increasingly mixed proportional hazard model an application to socioeconomic status health shocks and mortality we introduce a duration model that allows for unobserved cumulative individual specific shocks which are likely to be important in explaining variations in duration outcomes such as length of life and time spent unemployed the model is also a useful tool in situations where researchers observe a great deal of information about individuals when first interviewed in surveys but little thereafter we call this model the increasingly mixed proportional hazard imph model we compare and contrast this model with the mixed proportional hazard mph model which continues to be the workhorse of applied single spell duration analysis in economics and the other social sciences we apply the imph model to study the relationships among socioeconomic status health shocks and mortality using 19 waves of data drawn from the german socio economic panel soep the imph model is found to fit the data statistically better than the mph model and unobserved health shocks and socioeconomic status are shown to play

prospect theory as efficient perceptual distortion the paper proposes a theory of efficient perceptual distortions in which the statistical relation between subjective perceptions and the objective state minimizes the error of the state estimate subject to a constraint on information processing capacity the theory is shown to account for observed limits to the accuracy of visual perception and then postulated to apply to perception of options in economic choice situations as well when applied to choice between lotteries it implies reference dependent valuations and predicts both risk aversion with respect to gains and risk seeking with respect to losses as in the prospect theory of kahneman and tversky 1979

does land property structure affect local development patterns evidence from a greek tourist area this paper attempts to clarify the institutional context and local framework of landed property relations in the local development patterns of a rural space converted into an urban tourist resort on the island of rhodes greece through the diachronic analysis of cadastral data on land property ownership and non market land property transfers and acquisitions direct and indirect state policies land property structures inherited from the past formal and informal institutions enabled agents to establish enterprises of varying types and size socially dispersed landownership is a structural resource that through agency influences local development patterns and land property is repeatedly implicated in the local production and reproduction system

the s shaped value function as a constrained optimum almost since the expected utility hypothesis euh was first introduced evidence has accumulated that decision makers systematically violate it in various ways one early response to the evidence was to develop ad hoc alternatives the best known of which is prospect theory daniel kahneman and amos tversky 1979 1 more recent responses have relaxed the independence axiom or other axioms underlying the euh see mark machina 1987 for a very readable survey of the evidence and responses despite the high intellectual caliber of much of this work there is an important sense in which it has been retrograde theory is adjusted to the evidence by weakening not strengthening its predictive power in other areas such as the theory of the firm or the theory of money economists have followed a different research strategy more subtle constraints such as transactions costs or informational imperfections are sought to explain data that seem anomalous according to received theory when successful such a strategy more clearly delineates the realm in which the older theory is applicable and makes new testable predictions outside that realm thus theory is progressively strengthened to my knowledge only jonathan leland 1986 1988 has adopted such a progressive strategy in a theoretical investigation of euh anomalies the key assumptions of his approximate expected utility theory aeu are 1 inexperience and or cognitive limitations make the true utility function inaccessible so some approximation must be used but 2 decision makers efficiently allocate finite resources so as to minimize the resulting errors he formalizes these assumptions which he applies to probability assessments as well as to utilities in terms of a constraint on the number n of steps allowed in a step function approximation with the optimal approximation defined as that minimizing expected squared error his aeu theory is able to explain many of the major euh anomalies and reduces to ordinary euh in areas in which relevant experience accumulates for example in competitive markets as noted by peter knez vernon l smith and arlington w williams 1985 and don l coursey john l hovis and william d schultze 1987 the prevalence and magnitude of anomalies seems to decline in such settings the purpose of this note is to present a variant on leland s aeu i propose an approximate utility function or value function in which utility increments are weighted by a sensitivity function the resource constraint is that overall sensitivity is limited but prior to observable decisions it can be allocated freely along the continuum of potential wealth increments my approach has three advantages it predicts an s shaped value function when agents maximize expected sensitivity at actual choice opportunities given very plausible assumptions regarding the distribution of such opportunities recall that the assumption that decision makers maximize an s shaped value function such as that depicted in figure 1 is the centerpiece of prospect theory economics department university of california santa cruz ca 95064 i appreciate the comments of jonathan leland amos tversky and two anonymous referees on earlier drafts of this paper the usual caveat definitely applies ithe authors of prospect theory call their model descriptive as opposed to normative but do not consider it ad hoc because of its connections with the psychophysical literature however no substantial connections of prospect theory with generally accepted economic principles for example optimality have previously been demonstrated it is in this narrow economist s sense that i use the term ad hoc the more recent work of ariel rubinstein 1988 and tversky and kahneman 1986 underscores the difficulty of reconciling such a descriptive approach to the expected utility hypothesis

health human capital height and wages in china abstract we estimate the returns to height using data from 12 chinese cities we present both ordinary least squares ols and two stage least squares tsls estimates in the latter height is instrumented using proxies for health human capital accumulated in childhood and adolescence which influence adult height the tsls estimates are much higher reflecting the fact that the ols estimates are determined by the random genetic factors influencing height while the tsls estimates also take into account returns from investment in health human capital during childhood and adolescence these results imply considerable returns to investment in health human capital

stature skills and adult life outcomes evidence from indonesia abstractwe investigate the effect of height on earnings occupational choices and a subjective measure of wellbeing among indonesian men we explore the extent to which height captures the effects of endowments set before entry in the labour market physical and cognitive skills co determined with stature early in life do not explain much of the height earnings premium directly yet human capital more broadly including cognition educational attainment and other factors related to childhood conditions explains around half of the height premium and does so through occupational sorting indeed taller workers tend to have more education and educated workers tend to work in more lucrative occupations that require brain and social skills not brawn the unexplained share of the height earnings premium may reflect a specific role of stature on social interaction labour market advantages or self assurance we also find a height premium in happiness half of which simply accounts for the educational and e

beauty productivity and discrimination lawyers looks and lucre we propose models with an ascriptive characteristic generating earnings differentials and causing sectoral sorting allowing us to distinguish among sources producing such differentials we use longitudinal data on a large sample of graduates from one law school and measure beauty by rating matriculation photographs 1 betterlooking attorneys who graduated in the 1970s earned more than others after 5 years of practice an effect that grew with experience 2 attorneys in the private sector are better looking than those in the public sector differences that rise with age these results support theories of dynamic sorting and customer behavior

how basic are behavioral biases evidence from capuchin monkey trading behavior behavioral economics has demonstrated systematic decision making biases in both lab and field data do these biases extend across contexts cultures or even species we investigate this question by introducing fiat currency and trade to a colony of capuchin monkeys and recovering their preferences over a range of goods and gambles we show that capuchins react rationally to both price and wealth shocks but display several hallmark biases when faced with gambles including reference dependence and loss aversion given our capuchins inexperience with money and trade these results suggest that loss aversion extends beyond humans and may be innate rather than learned

institutions in theories of land markets illustrated by the dutch market for agricultural land theories of land markets should be intellectually sound and should be able to explain and predict market outcomes such as price and volume of transactions changes in these and locations of different land uses theories based on neo classical economics which largely ignore the role of institutions are not intellectually sound because it is known that markets cannot work without institutions nor do these theories predict outcomes satisfactorily moreover they assume market mechanisms and do not investigate them critically this paper explores how institutions may be taken into account in theories of land markets and whether that leads to better theories both of market outcomes and of market processes new institutional economics provides the tools to investigate how the interactions between market actors are influenced by institutions and the old institutional economics emphasises how institutions influence the motivations and preferences of those actors the conclusion is that there cannot be a general theory of land markets only theories with a limited applicability and scope such theories can be used to explain the effects of small changes and to predict the effects of marginal changes in institutions in that latter use these theories can be used for designing land policy how institutions can be incorporated into theory is illustrated by analysing the dutch market for agricultural land this shows how institutions affect the outcomes in that market and the consequences for the transformation of land from agriculture to urban use

a transitional institution for the emerging land market in urban china chinese economic reforms since 1978 have been a continuous process of fundamental institutional change the new institution of ambiguous property rights over state owned urban land evolves from the

physiology and development why the west is taller than the rest we hypothesise that the timing of the fertility transition is an important determinant of comparative physiological development in support we provide a model of long run growth that elucidates the links between population size average body size and income during development industrialisation is shown to be accompanied by a reduction in family size and an intensification of nutrition per child early transition countries are therefore expected to be more developed today economically and physiologically empirically the timing of the fertility transition is strongly correlated with average body size across countries

making sense of the labor market height premium evidence from the british household panel survey we use data from the british household panel survey to examine the labor market premium in height most of the premium is explained by higher average educational attainment and sorting into higher status occupations and industries by those who are taller

a note on the height wage differential in the uk cross sectional evidence from the bhps abstract using bhps data for the first time evidence for the height earnings relationship is updated for the uk in contrast to prior findings baseline height differentials mainly vanish once individuals occupation and non linear height gradients are accounted for

performing housing markets this paper offers an interpretation of how housing markets work which complements more traditional economic approaches building on a wider movement within cultural economy and economic sociology it considers how housing markets are variously performed in the power filled negotiations of buyers sellers and market professionals this is part of a larger undertaking but here the focus is particularly on the role of legal financial and information intermediaries in shaping local cultures of property exchange this is a social rather than economic analysis of housing markets it is a qualitative rather than a quantitative study it is designed to shed light on how markets are made though it might in the end change the way they are modelled

the long run educational cost of world war ii an important component of the long run cost of a war is the loss of human capital suffered by school age children who receive less education austrian and german individuals who were 10 years old during the conflict or were more directly involved through their parents received less education than comparable individuals from nonwar countries such as switzerland and sweden we also show that these individuals experienced a sizable earnings loss some 40 years after the war which can be attributed to the educational loss caused by the conflict the implied consequences in terms of gross domestic product loss are calculated

height health and cognitive function at older ages research across a number of disciplines has highlighted the role of early life health and circumstance in determining health and economic outcomes at older ages nutrition in utero and in infancy may set the stage for the chronic disease burden that an individual will face in middle age david j barker 1998 barker et al 1989 johann eriksson et al 2001 childhood health may also have significant effects on economic outcomes in adulthood collectively a set of childhood health measures can account for a large fraction of the explained variance in employment and social status observed among a british cohort followed from birth into adulthood anne case angela fertig and christina paxson 2005

does inflation kill exposure to food inflation and child mortality abstract unlike extreme malnutrition shocks such as famine and drought which grab the attention of the media international aid organizations and policymakers malnutrition due to food price hikes are often neglected and their impacts on children are not well known it is well established that malnutrition during the critical periods of early life between conception and the first 1000 days after birth has lasting consequences on health and mortality in this paper using a uniquely constructed data from ethiopia that takes advantage of high frequency local retail food prices we examine the impact of early life exposure to food price inflation on child mortality following survival events since conception we estimate the causal impact of exposure to inflation during in utero and infancy the results show that exposure to a 10 percent inflation in staple food prices during in utero decreases the survival of children under the age of five by about 5 4 percent we also find that the impacts are non linear depending on the specific month of exposure and substantially vary by observable characteristics and the type of staple food

health nutrition and economic development the relationship between health and economic development is explored focusing on nutrition based health indicators the spotlight is placed on the inter related feedbacks between the influence of health on productivity on one hand and the influence of income on health status on the other disentangling causality in these relationships has preoccupied much of the literature we evaluate different empirical strategies that have been adopted and assess the results there is now a body of evidence based on careful empirical studies that demonstrates a causal relationship between health and labor productivity there is also evidence that at least among the very poor additional income is spent on improved nutrition there are two issues that have received little attention although we argue they are likely to be very important first measurement of health is discussed in detail evidence is presented on how taking into account differences in the extent of measurement error is critical for interpreting the impact of health on wages the same theme emerges in studies of the effect of income on health specifically calorie intake the key role of non linearities in these relationships is highlighted and we demonstrate that a good deal of the variation in estimates of income elasticities of demand for calories can be ascribed to the role of measurement and functional form authors

dynamic portfolio choice and asset pricing with narrow framing and probability weighting this paper shows that the framework proposed by barberis and huang 2009 to incorporate narrow framing and loss aversion into dynamic models of portfolio choice and asset pricing can be extended to also account for probability weighting and for a value function that is convex on losses and concave on gains we show that the addition of probability weighting and a convex concave value function reinforces previous applications of narrow framing and cumulative prospect theory to understanding the stock market non participation puzzle and the equity premium puzzle moreover we show that a convex concave value function generates new wealth effects that are consistent with empirical observations on stock market participation

wage gains associated with height as a form of health human capital height is consulted as a latent indicator of early nutrition and lifetime health status height is observed to increase in recent decades in populations where per capita national income has increased and public health activities have grown height is determined by genetic make up and realized in part through satisfactory nutrition and health related care and conditions alternative instrumental variables iv are explored which proxy price and income constraints which are expected to influence the latter reproducible human capital investments in height i report ols and iv estimates of the partial effect of height on log hourly wages in recent national surveys from three countries ghana brazil and the united states i conclude that the human capital productivity effect of height estimated by parent education ivs in the us and ghana are many times larger than the ols estimates and in ghana and brazil the regional price ivs estimates also imply a substantially larger human capital wage effects of height compared with the ols estimates the ols estimates of height effects on wages are dominated by the genetic variation in height and appear to understate substantially the human capital returns to health and nutrition inputs which increase adult height this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

the effect of adolescent experience on labor market outcomes the case of height taller workers receive a wage premium net of differences in family background the disparity is similar in magnitude to the race and gender gaps we exploit variation in an individual s height over time to explore how height affects wages controlling for teen height essentially eliminates the effect of adult height on wages for white men the teen height premium is not explained by differences in resources or endowments the teen height premium is partially mediated through participation in high school sports and clubs we estimate the monetary benefits of a medical treatment for children that increases height

liberalization and rent seeking in china s labor market communist party membership can generate labor market benefits in at least two ways first the party may hand out direct benefits to favored groups in the form of higher earnings alternatively the party may function in much the same way as education in western countries screening workers for talent and motivation we find very little evidence of earnings premiums to party membership or to cadre status prior to chinese market liberalization with liberalization comes less emphasis on being red and a greater capacity to earn wages that reflect ability both observed through schooling and identified by the party we find that party premiums are inversely related to education modest premiums to cadre status appear in 1995

height and earnings the role of cognitive and noncognitive skills we use large scale register data on 450 000 swedish males who underwent mandatory military enlistment at age 18 and a subsample of 150 000 siblings to examine why tall people earn more we show the importance of both cognitive and noncognitive skills as well as family background and muscular strength for the height earnings relationship in addition we show that a substantial height premium remains after these factors have been accounted for which originates from very short people having low earnings this is mostly explained by the sorting of short people into low paid occupations which may indicate discrimination by stature

evolution of time preferences and attitudes toward risk this paper explores a general model of the evolution and adaption of hedonic utility it is shown that optimal utility will be increasing strongly in regions where choices have to be made often and decision mistakes have a severe impact on fitness several applications are suggested in the context of intertemporal preferences the model offers an evolutionary explanation for the existence of conflicting short and long run interests that lead to dynamic inconsistency concerning attitudes toward risk an evolutionary explanation is given for s shaped value functions that adjust to the decision maker s environment jel d81 d83 this paper is based on the hypothesis that individual decisions are guided by hedonic util ity an individual who faces several alternatives will choose the one that promises the greatest pleasure or happiness then given that the properties of a hedonic utility function determine individual behavior and individual behavior determines biological fitness evolutionary forces will have shaped our utility during the long time in which the modern human being evolved in this sense hedonic utility can be considered as a reward system that induces individuals to make optimal choices a view that is supported both by theory and evidence from neuroscience 1 as irving kupfermann eric r kandel and susan iversen 2000 express it pleasure is unques tionably a key factor in controlling the motivated behaviors of humans 1007 for the econo mist the interesting question is then about the properties of the evolutionary optimal reward system and how these properties adapt to the environment in which individuals make choices the present paper reconsiders and solves a general model of the evolution of utility suggested by arthur j robson 2001a which predicts how cardinal properties of utility functions should adapt to the decision environment it turns out that the optimal utility function will be steep in regions where decisions have to be made frequently and where wrong decisions would lead to large losses in fitness in those regions even small changes in consumption will cause large changes in happiness the evolution of context specific utility functions is then shown to be optimal whenever the decisions our ancestors had to make arrived in distinct choice situations the model can also be extended to incorporate learning about evolutionary relevant attributes of available options

returns to education in china we were fortunate in having access to a survey of 800 adults in nanjing that was conducted by the international wool secretariate in 1986 the survey was intended for market research e g brand recognition but questions were asked about the respondent s age occupation income and education level these questions though not ideally worded were sufficient for the undertaking of a returns to education study we believe the data to be unique and of course the issue of interest is whether a member of the workforce in china faces investment decisions on education similar to those faced elsewhere the influence of sex and marital status on the level of income achieved by an individual was also examined the basic equation modeled personal income as a nonlinear function of schooling and experience but multicollinearity problems were encountered as a result a production function approach was successfully adapted to the returns toeducation model the collinearity problem was overcome and this approach allowed the ease of substitution of education for experience in income generation to be examined more formally an additional problem of errors in variables arose from a failing in questionnaire design and was handled statistically

a theoretical framework for the functioning of the dutch property market in this article a theoretical framework will be presented to aid understanding of the functioning of property markets more particularly the dutch property market it will be argued that traditional urban economic theories are not able to explain the structure and processes of the built environment in the dutch case we are confronted with two problems first to find a way in which urban economic theories designed for a context of cities in great britain and the us can be used to explain urban development that takes place in the different context of dutch cities and secondly to formulate a set of hypotheses appropriate for the dutch property market the hypotheses concern the strategies of individual actors on the property market and the underlying factors it is concluded that in general the relation between institutional structure and property development has been neglected both because of insufficient attention from economic scientists and because empirical research is very complicated

sorting by height education and economic outcomes of women in less developed countries abstracttaller height is commonly found to correlate with educational and economic outcomes most studies focus on a relationship to earnings and consider samples from individual countries this p

market opportunities genetic endowments and intrafamily resource distribution child survival in rural india the authors examine how intrafamily resource allocations respond to changes in economic conditions and to genetic differences in children by estimating the determinants of variations in the sex specific survival differentials of rural indian children based on standard census and household survey data they explore in particular the hypothesis that such differences are related to the relative returns to survival with households selectively allocating resources to children in response to variation in sex differences in their expected earnings opportunities as adults data are from the 1961 census and a 1971 household survey excerpt

the earnings effects of health and health related activities a panel data approach we investigate the effects of health and health related habits on earnings in china using panel data to control for unobserved heterogeneity related to individual traits and job characteristics health related habits include smoking cigarettes drinking tea frequency of drinking alcohol and physical exercising we find a significant and large impact of health status on earnings controlling for schooling experience and the unobserved individual heterogeneity and job heterogeneity we also find that smoking has a strong negative effect on earnings net of health status while the estimated effects of other health related activities are statistically insignificant

absolute income relative income income inequality and mortality we test whether mortality is related to individual income mean community income and community income inequality controlling for initial health status and personal characteristics the analysis is based on a random sample from the adult swedish population of more than 40 000 individuals who were followed up for 10 17 years we find that mortality decreases significantly as individual income increases for mean community income and community income inequality we cannot however reject the null hypothesis of no effect on mortality this result is stable with respect to a number of measurement and specification issues explored in an extensive sensitivity analysis

stature obesity and portfolio choice using multiple u s and european data sources we show that observed physical attributes are related to participation in financial markets specifically we find that individuals who are relatively tall and of normal weight are more likely to hold stocks in their financial portfolios we consider several potential mechanisms that could drive the relation between physical attributes and portfolio decisions we find that teenage social experiences as well as genetic and prenatal endowments that are fixed at birth are the two channels through which height affects financial decisions furthermore we find that the relation between body mass index and portfolio decisions is largely driven by education and race data as supplemental material are available at http dx doi org 10 1287 mnsc 2016 2508 this paper was accepted by wei jiang finance