measuring human capital in the labor market the supply of experience in 8 oecd countries abstract to investigate the evolution of the supply side of the labor market i derive a methodology to measure an important component of the human capital level of the workforce the experience of the labor market based on the perpetual inventory method a stock of experience is estimated for eight oecd countries it appears that during the last three decades the oecd labor markets have faced a decline in the supply of experience by the labor market participants with a minimum in the early 1980s for most countries and a recovery in the 1990s some implications regarding relative wages relative unemployment and schooling are discussed

shifting priorities in degrowth research an argument for the centrality of human needs we present an argument for the deprioritization of subjective well being and a prioritization of human needs within degrowth research first we discuss empirical evidence methodological problems and theoretical shortcomings of subjective well being concepts while data for one country over time suggest a flattening of the happiness curve relative to gdp growth cross country comparisons reveal that the richest and most environmentally unsustainable countries are also the happiest methodologically we point to the issue of adaptability a limitation in the use of positional goods is unlikely to be accompanied by short term increases in subjective well being theoretically we question happiness where it helps promote growth and disguise structural relationships of inequality secondly we sketch out an alternative degrowth research agenda oriented at the satisfaction of human needs here doyal and gough s theory of human needs is especially useful due to its systematic account of environmental limits and the policy auditing approach that follows from it finally we illustrate such a needs based research agenda at the example of food by reviewing recent research on the environmental impacts of different diets and kinds of food production and on how these forms compare in terms of scale and land use

employer matching and 401 k saving evidence from the health and retirement study abstract employer matching of employee 401 k contributions is often touted as a powerful incentive to save for retirement and is a key component in pension plan design in the united states using detailed administrative contribution earnings and pension plan data from the health and retirement study this analysis formulates a life cycle consistent econometric specification of 401 k saving and estimates the determinants of saving accounting for non linearities in the household budget set induced by matching the participation estimates indicate that an increase in the match rate by 25 cents per dollar of employee contribution raises 401 k participation by 5 percentage points the parametric and semi parametric estimates for saving indicate that an increase in the match rate by 25 cents per dollar of employee contribution raises 401 k saving by 365 in 1991 dollars overall the analysis reveals that the 401 k saving response to matching is quite inelastic and hence matching is a rather poor policy instrument with which to raise retirement saving

quantile selection models with an application to understanding changes in wage inequality we propose a method to correct for sample selection in quantile regression models selection is modeled via the cumulative distribution function or copula of the percentile error in the outcome equation and the error in the participation decision copula parameters are estimated by minimizing a method of moments criterion given these parameter estimates the percentile levels of the outcome are readjusted to correct for selection and quantile parameters are estimated by minimizing a rotated check function we apply the method to correct wage percentiles for selection into employment using data for the uk for the period 1978 2000 we also extend the method to account for the presence of equilibrium effects when performing counterfactual exercises

collective bargaining and regional wage differences in spain an empirical analysis this article analyses the importance of labour market institutions and in particular collective wage bargaining in shaping regional wage differences in the spanish labour market using microdata from the spanish structure of earnings survey our results reveal that there are significant inter regional wage differences for similarly skilled workers these differences are present throughout the whole wage structure and can be explained by both competitive and non competitive factors such as insufficient competition in product markets in this context industry level collective bargaining plays a major role in accounting for regional wage differences a role that in the spanish case is enhanced due to its unusual regional dimension

trouble in the tails what we know about earnings nonresponse thirty years after lillard smith and welch earnings nonresponse in household surveys is widespread yet there is limited knowledge of how nonresponse biases earnings measures we examine the consequences of nonresponse on earnings gaps and

degrowth through income and wealth caps abstract in the degrowth literature maximum caps on wealth and or income are frequently mentioned among the policy instruments that could support transitions towards ecologically and socially sustainable societies yet an in depth discussion of concrete policy proposals has yet to be initiated to facilitate such a discussion the present paper reviews several proposals for placing caps on wealth and or income some of these proposals consider environmental limits others focus exclusively on social inequality the paper moreover raises various critical issues concerning the introduction of maximum caps on wealth and income in a degrowth context discussing the role of the state the impact on economic growth and the risk of emigration of high skilled employees and capital flight we conclude that while in an ecologically constrained world there is an argument for imposing limits on wealth and income above a certain level it is crucial not to dictate such policies as mere top down measures but to develop and deliberate them in democratic forums

estimating the returns to education in argentina using quantile regression analysis 1992 2002 espanoluna gran cantidad de estudios ha intentando estimar el retorno promedio a educarse examinando el efecto que tiene un ano adicional de educacion sobre la esperanza condicional de salarios trabajos internacionales recientes sugieren que en varios paises incrementos en los anos de educacion pueden resultar en cualquier efecto sobre la distribucion condicional de salarios y no solo el de incrementar la media es por esto que este trabajo examina dicho fenomeno para el caso de argentina a lo largo de un periodo de diez anos se estiman los retornos a educarse en diferentes partes de la distribucion condicional de salarios utilizando el metodo de regresion por cuantiles se analiza la posible existencia de retornos heterogeneos individuales y se encuentra que a lo largo del tiempo mientras los hombres tienen retornos educativos mayores cuanto mas arriba se encuentren en la distribucion las mujeres que experimentan los mayores retornos estan ubicadas en los cuantiles mas bajos obteniendo mayores beneficios por educarse estos resultados tienen implicancias potenciales para la expansion de las oportunidades educativas en argentina englishthere are countless estimates of the average returns to education which looks at the effect of an additional year of schooling on the conditional mean distribution of salaries recent international works suggest that there are variations from the average return to education across the population that is why in this paper we examine this possibility for the case of argentina over a ten year period we estimate returns to schooling at different quantiles of the conditional distribution of wages using quantile regression method we test whether there is individual heterogeneity in returns to education and find that over time while males have higher returns to schooling at the higher quantile women s returns are highest at the lowest quantile the evidence is suggesting that while lower ability women may benefit more from schooling the reverse is true for men our findings have potential implications for the expansion of educational opportunities in argentina

decomposing changes in wage distributions a unified approach over the last fifteen years many researchers have attempted to explain the determinants and changes of wage inequality i propose a simple procedure to decompose changes in the distribution of wages or in other distributions into three factors changes in regression coefficients the distribution of covariates and residuals the procedure requires only estimating standard ols regressions augmented by a logit or probit model it can be extended by modelling residuals as a function of unmeasured skills and skill prices two empirical examples showing how the procedure works in practice are considered in the first example sources of differences in the wage distribution in alberta and british columbia are considered in the second sources of change in overall wage inequality in the united states 1973 99 are re examined finally the proposed procedure is compared with existing procedures jel classification j3 la decomposition des changements dans les distributions de salaires une approche unifee au cours des quinze dernieres annees nombre d etudes se sont penchees sur les determinants et les changements de la distribution des salaires ce memoire propose une procedure pour decomposer les changements de la distribution des salaires en trois elements les changements dans les coefficients de regression la distribution des regresseurs et les changements residuels cette procedure ne necessite que l estimation de regressions par moindre carres ordinaires et d un modele probit ou logit l auteur montre aussi comment modeliser les residus en fonction de competences non mesurees la procedure proposee est mise en application dans le contexte de deux exemples la distribution des salaires en alberta et en colombie britannique et les changements dans la distribution des salaires de 1973 a 1999 aux etats unis le memoire examine aussi comment cette procedure se compare aux methodes proposees par d autres chercheurs

the welfare effects of lotto evidence from the uk abstract this paper estimates the demand for lottery tickets using pooled cross section data that contain individual incomes and extensive information about characteristics one of the cross sections corresponded to a draw which was a double rollover the jackpot was enhanced by adding the two previous draws jackpots which had not been won together these datasets provide sufficient observations facing different prices to allow us to estimate the price elasticity as well as the income elasticity of demand we estimate tobit and other specifications and use the estimates to evaluate the welfare effects arising from the introduction of the lottery

schooling and the distribution of wages in the european private and public sectors international research has shown that schooling enhances within groups wage dispersion this assessment is typically based on private sector data and up to date the inequality implications of schooling have not been documented for the public sector this article uses recent data from eight european countries to explicitly take into account differences between the private and public sectors using quantile regression the article describes the effects of schooling on the location and shape of the conditional wage distribution in each sector while the average impact of schooling on wages is similar across sectors the impact of schooling on within groups dispersion is found to be substantially larger in the private sector than in the public sector this finding warns that the effects of the european educational expansion on overall within groups dispersion may be lower than previously thought

matching as a tool to decompose wage gaps abstract this paper presents a methodology that uses matching comparisons to explain gender wage differences the approach emphasizes gender differences in the supports of the distributions of observable characteristics and provides insights into the distribution of unexplained gender pay differences this nonparametric alternative to the blinder oaxaca bo decomposition does not require the estimation of earnings equations and divides the gap into four additive elements two of these are analogous to the elements of the bo decomposition but computed only over the common support of the distributions of characteristics while the other two account for differences in the supports

is transient poverty different evidence for rural china we define transient poverty as the component of time mean consumption poverty at household level that is directly attributable to variability in consumption this can be thought of as a measure of vulnerability to falling consumption the non transient component then depends solely on mean consumption over time and we call this chronic poverty using robust semi parametric methods and household panel data for rural china we test whether transient poverty is determined by a process that is similar to chronic poverty commonly identified causes of poverty in this setting have weak explanatory power for transient poverty and some of the factors determining transient poverty do not matter to chronic poverty or even have the opposite effect successful policy responses to chronic poverty may still leave considerable transient poverty

national health insurance and precautionary saving evidence from taiwan abstract by reducing uncertainty about future medical expenses comprehensive health insurance can reduce households precautionary saving we examine this effect using taiwan micro data spanning the 1995 introduction of national health insurance the effects of national health insurance are identified using employment based variation in prior insurance coverage replacement of the households prior insurance coverage with national health insurance is exogenous to the household so our estimates are not subject to selection bias compared with the preceding government insurance programs national health insurance reduced saving by an average of 8 6 13 7 with the largest effects for households with the smallest saving

the dynamics of changes in the female wage distribution in the usa a quantile regression approach this paper examines the female wage structure focusing on changes at different points in the wage distribution newly developed quantile regression methods are used in analysing data from the march current population survey the results show that while the most significant changes for the less skilled women took place at the bottom of the wage distribution for the more skilled groups changes occurred at both ends of the distribution consequently wage inequality decreased for the high school graduates and increased for the younger college graduates furthermore the more highly skilled women experienced the steepest gain in wages regardless of their position in the distribution 1998 john wiley sons ltd

micro economic determinants of tourist expenditure a quantile regression approach abstract we assess the effect of the main determinants of tourist expenditure by applying both linear and quantile regression models to individual micro data collected by a survey addressed to non resident tourists who spent their holidays in sardinia during the period april october 2012 we find that in addition to income and foreign nationality tourist expenditure is crucially driven by trip related party size stay length accommodation sea and sun typology and transport modality and psychographic characteristics repeated visits and holiday motivations moreover our results indicate that the effects vary with respect to the expenditure component and the level of spending thus confirming the high complexity of the tourism product higher positive effects were found for heavy spenders in the case of foreign nationality previous visits and notoriety motivated holidays while party size and the number of visited sites contribute to reducing the level of expenditure for light spending tourists

understanding urban wage inequality in china 1988 2008 evidence from quantile analysis this paper examines change in wage gaps in urban china from 1988 to 2008 by estimating quantile regressions on chips data it applies the machado and mata 2005 decomposition finding sharp increases in inequality largely due to changes in the wage structure during 2002 08 changes in the returns to education and experience have been equalizing however changes in other categories of wage differential by sex occupation ownership industrial sector and province widened inequality the gender gap continued to rise as did the gap between white collar and blue collar workers and between manufacturing and other sectors

cigarette demand and tax policy for race groups in south africa this paper calculates cigarette demand for race groups in south africa elasticities are the most important information a tax policy analyst can have elasticities determine how the tax base will change with a change in the tax rate and thus how government revenues will respond to the tax elasticities also determine the excess burden that consumers will bear as a result of the tax as such own price crossprice and expenditure elasticities are calculated along with government revenue maximizing tax rates and total and excess burdens parametric and semiparametric estimation techniques are used and compared results show that a tax on cigarettes will discourage nonsmokers from starting to smoke and mainly raise revenue from current smokers furthermore it is found that consumption behaviours between groups are different implying different government revenue maximizing tax rates for each group affecting the distribution of income

on the distribution of exchange rate regime treatment effects on international trade abstract this paper provides evidence of heterogeneous treatment effects on trade for six different types of exchange rate regime transitions utilizing data on 218 643 country pair year observations all together previous research mainly focused on the currency union effect on trade and widely assumed that country pairs with identical observable characteristics receive the same effect we test the hypothesis of a homogeneous treatment effect empirically and find substantive statistical support for the presence of effect heterogeneity moreover we characterize the probability distribution of effect heterogeneity among observationally equivalent country pairs by way of a random coefficients model we estimate selected features of the empirical distributions of the treatment effects for each of the six different types of exchange rate regime transitions under two different sets of assumptions about the probability distribution of effect heterogeneity our findings suggest that the immediate effects on trade from switching to an exchange rate regime different from the one in the outset have wide waists and exhibit large positive extreme values we estimate the probability of two countries to experience an immediate positive effect on the growth of bilateral trade due to the adoption of any new exchange rate regime tighter or not to be approximately one half

differences in wage distributions between canada and the united states an application of a flexible estimator of distribution functions in the presence of covariates we construct a tractable flexible functional form estimator of cumulative distribution functions for non negative random variables which admits large numbers of covariates the estimator adopts and extends techniques from the spell duration literature for estimating hazard functions to distribution functions for wages earnings and income we apply these methods to investigate sources of wage inequality for full time male workers between canada and the united states finding that the canadian wage density has a thinner left tail because low educated workers have higher pay and a thinner right tail because of a lower proportion of highly educated workers unions appear to play a large role in these outcomes

the prerequisites for a degrowth paradigm shift insights from critical political economy abstract what would it take for a degrowth paradigm shift to take place drawing on contemporary critical political economy scholarship this article identifies four prerequisites for socio economic paradigm shifts deep crisis an alternative political project a comprehensive coalition of social forces promoting the project in political struggles and broad based consent it is argued that on the one hand there is much to suggest that current crises cannot be resolved under existing institutional frameworks and that degrowth is a political project that provides solutions to some of the key problems currently facing humanity on the other hand the prospects for a degrowth paradigm shift remain bleak unlike political projects that became hegemonic in the past degrowth has neither support from a comprehensive coalition of social forces nor any consent to its agenda among the broader population

impact of the 2008 2009 twin economic crises on the philippine labor market summary this study examines how the 2008 2009 surges in international food and fuel prices and the coinciding global financial crisis impacted the philippine labor market regression estimates using repeated quarterly waves of the labor force survey indicate small declines in employment probabilities while real wages fell more dramatically about 6 during the price surges and 3 4 during the financial crisis men experienced slightly larger wage declines and women marginally greater employment cuts workers across education and age groups experienced wage drops especially less educated men women with high school degrees and older workers

changes in human capital and earnings inequality recent evidence from brazil 1 abstract this paper estimates changes in the rates of return to human capital across the earnings distribution using data from over a 10 year period for brazil it uses these estimates to simulate the separate impacts of changes in returns to skills and changes in the supply of skills on earnings inequality evidence points strongly to growing inequality in rates of return to education in brazil this finding suggests that recent macroeconomic and trade reforms have been of most benefit to the skilled rather than the unskilled supporting evidence points to an improved competitiveness in the labour market with workers increasingly rewarded for productivity however although increases in returns to education are more pronounced at the top of the earnings distribution this did not in practice led to increased inequality this is because levels of education and other labour market rewarded endowments have increased and offset the rate of return effect appropriate education policy is therefore an essentia

the use of quantile regressions in estimating gender wage differentials a case study of the philippines quantile regressions are used to analyse the size components and nature of the gender earnings differentials as well as the returns to education by gender in the philippines over the entire conditional distribution of earnings using data from the 1999 apis survey this approach allows more focused conclusions about the nature of gender earnings differentials incorporating the quantile regression approach to the oaxaca blinder decomposition allows the localization of gender discrimination to particular quantiles of the earnings distribution and permits more targeted policy intervention

reaching for the stars who pays for talent in innovative industries innovative firms need to hire and motivate highly talented workers this article connects the potential returns to innovation to the structure of compensation for skilled employees we show that the software firms that operate in software sectors with high potential upside gains to innovation pay more to star workers than do other firms that operate in stable markets firms operating in product domains with highly skewed positive returns pay employees more in up front starting salaries and offer higher compensation growth the large estimated effects on earnings are robust to the inclusion of a wide range of controls for worker and firm characteristics

changes in the u s wage structure 1963 1987 application of quantile regression the 1980 s witnessed rapid changes in the structure of wages in the united states in this study recently developed techniques for quantile regression are applied to every march current population survey since 1964 and changes in the return to schooling and experience at different points of the wage distribution are examined the quantile regression technique parsimoniously describes the entire conditional wage distribution this conditional distribution is used to examine changes in within group wage inequality as measured by the difference between conditional quantiles two linear models are considered a simple one group model and a 16 group model the results suggest that the returns to schooling and experience differ across quantiles of the wage distribution but their patterns of change are similar significant differences in wage inequality are also found across the various skill groups the paper also presents a new imputation method for cps data

wage dispersion and decentralization of wage bargaining this article studies how decentralization of wage bargaining from sector to firm level influences wage levels and wage dispersion we use detailed panel data covering a period of decentralization in the danish labor market the decentralization process provides variation in the individual worker s wage setting system that facilitates identification of the effects of decentralization we find a wage premium associated with firm level bargaining relative to sector level bargaining and that the return to skills is higher under the more decentralized wage setting systems using quantile regression we also find that wages are more dispersed under firm level bargaining compared to more centralized wage setting systems

financial development and long run growth is the cross sectional evidence robust in a seminal paper levine loayza and beck llb 2000 provide cross sectional evidence showing that financial development has positive average impact on long run growth using a sample of 71 countries we argue that the evidence is sensitive to the presence of outliers

food aid allocation policies coordination and responsiveness to recipient country needs we employ censored least absolute deviations and multivariate tobit estimators to investigate whether food aid flows from the main donor countries respond to recipient country needs as reflected in low food availability low income or both we also explore the hypothesis that donor countries specifically coordinate their food aid shipments to recipient countries our findings show that food aid in aggregate and from each donor is significantly targeted at poorer countries and is highly persistent over time food aid responses to food availability shortfalls natural disasters and violent conflicts are common but more modest and uneven across donors finally we find strong evidence of donor coordination in food aid allocation

changes in the structure of earnings during the polish transition abstract we document changes in the structure of earnings during the economic transition in poland we find that inequality in labor earnings increased substantially from 1988 to 1996 a common view is that the reallocation of workers from a public sector with a compressed wage distribution to a private sector with much higher wage inequality accounts for the bulk of increased earnings inequality during transition see e g the models of aghion and commander 1999 aghion philippe commander simon 1999 on the dynamics of inequality in the transition economics of transition 7 275 2898 and commander and tolstopiatenko 1998 commander simon tolstopiatenko andrei 1998 the role of unemployment and restructuring in the transition in commander simon ed enterprise restructuring and unemployment in models of transition the world bank washington pp 169 192 however our decomposition of the sources of the increase in inequality suggests that this compositional effect accounts for only 39 of the increase fully 52 of the increase is due to the increase in the variance of wages within sectors that is earnings inequality within both the private and public sectors grew substantially and by similar amounts this is consistent with prior work suggesting that even state owned enterprises in poland moved towards competitive wage setting as they restructured see e g pinto et al 1993 pinto brian belka marek krajewski stefan 1993 transforming state enterprises in poland evidence on adjustment by manufacturing firms brookings papers on economic activity 213 70 commander and dhar 1998 commander simon dhar sumana 1998 enterprises in the polish transition in simon commander ed enterprise restructuring and unemployment in models of transition the world bank washington pp 109 142 a substantial part of the increase in earnings inequality was between group due largely to increased education premiums however changes in inequality within education experience gender groups account for about 60 percent of the increase in overall earnings inequality the increases in within group inequality were very different across skill groups with much larger increases for highly educated workers these patterns hold in both the private and public sectors although increases in education premiums were somewhat greater in the private sector

does school quality matter returns to education and the characteristics of public schools in the united states this paper estimates the effects of school quality measured by the pupil teacher ratio average term length and relative teacher pay on the rate of return to education for men born between 1920 and 1949 using earnings data from the 1980 census we find that men who were educated in states with higher quality schools have a higher return to additional years of schooling rates of return are also higher for individuals from states with better educated teachers and with a higher fraction of female teachers holding constant school quality measures however we find no evidence that parental income or education affects average state level rates of return

food insecurity in vulnerable populations coping with food price shocks in afghanistan we use the case of afghanistan during the 2007 08 food price crisis to illustrate the impact of staple food price increases on household food security using the unconditional quantile regression estimator to identify separate effects for households across the distribution we find evidence of divergent behavior the most vulnerable households with low calorie diets cannot afford to make substantial cuts to caloric intake since they are close to or below the minimum daily energy requirements accordingly we find no decline in per capita daily caloric intake as a result of the price increases such households may be sacrificing diet quality to maintain calories with a potential for serious and long term health consequences households with high calorie diets who can afford to cut back on calories experience the largest declines we find evidence of declines in dietary diversity across the entire distribution of households with slightly larger declines observed for those with the least diversity moving beyond the price responses for the average household can inform policy makers of how the most vulnerable groups are affected such information is particularly salient in a country like afghanistan where decades of war political instability and recurring droughts have led to a precarious state of food insecurity and poverty

allocation of human capital and innovation at the frontier firm level evidence on germany and the netherlands this paper examines how productivity eects of human capital and innovation vary at dierent points of the conditional productivity distribution our analysis draws upon two large unbalanced panels of 6 634 enterprises in germany and 14 586 enterprises in the netherlands over the period 2000 2008 considering 5 manufacturing and services industries that dier in the level of technological intensity industries in the netherlands are characterized by a larger average proportion of high skilled employees and indus tries in germany by a more unequal distribution of human capital intensity except for low technology manufacturing average innovation performance is higher in all industries in germany and the innova tion performance distributions are more dispersed in the netherlands in both countries we observe non linearities in the productivity eects of investing in product innovation in the majority of indus tries frontier rms enjoy the highest returns to product innovation whereas the most negative returns to process innovation are observed in the best performing enterprises of most industries in both countries we nd that the returns to human capital increase with proximity to the technological frontier in industries with a low level of technological intensity strikingly a negative complementarity eect between human capital and proximity to the technological frontier is observed in knowledge intensive services which is most pronounced for the netherlands suggestive evidence for the latter points to a winner takes all interpretation of this nding

estimation of semiparametric censored regression models an application to changes in black white earnings inequality during the 1960s building on the work of chay 1995 this study examines the impact of civil rights policies on black economic progress using individual level panel data many earnings records are censored and the degree of censoring changed during the period of interest consequently valid estimates of the program effects must account for this censoring maximum likelihood estimation can be used if the error terms of the model are identically normally distributed we investigate the value of using weaker assumptions on the error process to estimate the laws impact the analysis shows that there was significant black white earnings convergence in the south during the 1960s we also find that semiparametric estimation methods are informative in pinpointing which parts of the model are mis specified

child labor and the wealth paradox the role of altruistic parents abstract using data from pakistan we study the effect of family wealth on the utilization of child labor we find evidence of a positive relationship between land wealth and child labor only for children in the upper quantiles of the distribution we hypothesize that the so called wealth paradox in child labor is driven by parental preferences

does membership payoff for covered workers a distributional analysis of the free rider problem this paper examines the union membership wage premium among private sector employees covered by collective bargaining agreements using current population survey data for 2000 2003 the author not only estimates the conditional mean wage premium the metric on which most previous research has focused but also employs recently developed instrumental quantile regression techniques to estimate the wage effect of membership across the wage distribution members enjoyed on average a wage premium of 9 over comparable covered nonmembers further analyses find no evidence that this mean premium is explained either by unobserved differences or by measurement error the author also finds that a narrow focus on the mean impact partially masks heterogeneity in the impact across the distribution notably membership wage effects were considerably more pronounced for low wage earners than for high wage earners

changes in compulsory schooling education and the distribution of wages in europe using data from 12 european countries and the variation across countries and over time in the changes of minimum school leaving age we study the effects of the quantity of education on the distribution of earnings we find that compulsory school reforms significantly affect educational attainment especially among individuals belonging to the lowest quantiles of the distribution of ability there is also evidence that additional education reduces conditional wage inequality and that education and ability are substitutes in the earnings function

factors affecting the transmission of earnings across generations a quantile regression approach in this paper we estimate intergenerational earnings mobility models using quantile regressions quantile regression is a less restrictive estimation approach than more commonly used methods such as ordinary least squares and instrumental variables which only estimate the mean effects of intergenerational earnings correlation further we investigate the role of education as an intergenerational transmission mechanism for earnings we find that the intergenerational earnings correlation is greater at the bottom of the son s conditional earnings distribution than at the top and that controlling for son s education reduces the intergenerational earnings correlation we also find that education is relatively more valuable at the bottom of the conditional earnings distribution and thus tends to compress the distribution

labor unions and the distribution of wages and employment in south africa few countries have higher wage inequality than south africa where wages of african and white workers differ by a factor of five using survey data collected in 1993 the authors analyze the complex effect of unions on this wage gap among male african workers in the bottom decile of the wage distribution union membership was associated with wages that were 145 higher than those of comparable nonunion workers and among those in the top decile the differential was 19 regression estimates also indicate that returns to observed productive characteristics of workers such as education and experience were larger for nonunion than union workers if the large union relative wage effect were cut in half the authors estimate that employment of african youth age 16 29 would increase by two percentage points and their labor force participation rate would also increase substantially

changes in the distribution of house prices over time structural characteristics neighborhood or coefficients quantile hedonic house price function estimates imply that appreciation rates were higher between 1995 and 2005 for high priced homes in chicago decompositions of temporal changes in the house price distribution suggest that the types of homes sold and their location do not account for the change in the price distribution rather higher appreciation rates for high priced homes are explained by differences in the quantile regression coefficients over time

millionaire migration and taxation of the elite evidence from administrative data a growing number of u s states have adopted millionaire taxes on top income earners this increases the progressivity of state tax systems but it raises concerns about tax flight elites migrating from high tax to low tax states draining state revenues and undermining redistributive social policies are top income earners transitory millionaires searching for lower tax places to live or are they embedded elites who are reluctant to migrate away from places where they have been highly successful this question is central to understanding the social consequences of progressive taxation we draw on administrative tax returns for all million dollar income earners in the united states over 13 years tracking the states from which millionaires file their taxes our dataset contains 45 million tax records and provides census scale panel data on top income earners we advance two core analyses 1 state to state migration of millionaires over the long term and 2 a sharply focused discontinuity anal

box cox quantile regression and the distribution of firm sizes using the box cox quantile regression model we analyse the size distribution of firms in portuguese manufacturing during the 1980s specifically we estimate the effect of selected industry attributes on the location scale skewness and kurtosis of the conditional size distributions of firms we find that industry attributes affect the size of firms in the same direction across the distribution but the effects of these variables are typically much greater at the largest quantiles over time the distribution shifted towards smaller firms due mainly to the way the economy responds to industry characteristics rather than to changes of the level of these characteristics the prediction of lognormality implied by gibrat s law is soundly rejected by the observed distribution of firm sizes however we found that at least in 1983 lognormality is a reasonable description of the conditional size distribution copyright 2000 john wiley sons ltd

skills schooling and household income in ghana this article examines the impact of cognitive skills on the income of households in ghana it uses scores on mathematics and english tests to measure cognitive skills and estimates the returns to these skills based on farm profit off farm income and total income the article uses powell s censored least absolute deviations and symmetrically trimmed least squares estimators to estimate farm and off farm income in contrast to heckman s two step or the tobit estimator powell s estimators are consistent in the presence of heteroscedasticity and are robust to other violations of normality the results show that cognitive skills have a positive effect on total and off farm income but do not have a statistically significant effect on farm income

counterfactual decomposition of changes in wage distributions using quantile regression we propose a method to decompose the changes in the wage distribution over a period of time in several factors contributing to those changes the method is based on the estimation of marginal wage distributions consistent with a conditional distribution estimated by quantile regression as well as with any hypothesized distribution for the covariates comparing the marginal distributions implied by different distributions for the covariates one is then able to perform counterfactual exercises the proposed methodology enables the identification of the sources of the increased wage inequality observed in most countries specifically it decomposes the changes in the wage distribution over a period of time into several factors contributing to those changes namely by discriminating between changes in the characteristics of the working population and changes in the returns to these characteristics we apply this methodology to portuguese data for the period 1986 1995 and find that the observed increase in educational levels contributed decisively towards greater wage inequality copyright 2005 john wiley sons ltd

the grocery stores wage distribution a semi parametric analysis of the role of retailing and labor market institutions abstract how and why has the wage distribution in u s grocery stores changed between 1984 and 1994 unlike other industries in this time period the important change in the wage distribution is not risinginequality but that real wages fell across the entire wage distribution changes in labor market institutionsexplain more than half of the change in the wage distribution in grocery stores specifically the decline inthe real value of the minimum wage explains little of the decline in the mean real wage but much of thechange in the shape of the distribution between 1984 and 1994 and 95 percent of the decline at the lowest10th percentile the decline in union coverage in grocery stores and the narrowing of the union nonunionwage gap explain much of the decline above the 25th percentile a third institutional change the use ofpart time employees is not associated with changes in grocery industry wage outcomes one might think that the major changes in operations and technologies that occurred during thisperiod are at least contributing factors but we find quite the contrary if average store size weeklyoperating hours and the use of scanning technology had remained at their lower 1984 levels the real wagedecline would have been even greater than that actually seen and for the entire wage distribution changesin grocery retailing prevented an even greater decline in real wages again unlike many other industries skill biased technological change does not appear important for grocery industry wage outcomes the basis of our analysis is a statistical technique which combines nonparametric kernel densityestimation with a parametric re weighting applied to current population survey data supplemented withsecondary data sources on the grocery industry

who owns the wealth in tax havens macro evidence and implications for global inequality abstract drawing on newly published macroeconomic statistics this paper estimates the amount of household wealth owned by each country in offshore tax havens the equivalent of 10 of world gdp is held in tax havens globally but this average masks a great deal of heterogeneity from a few percent of gdp in scandinavia to about 15 in continental europe and 60 in gulf countries and some latin american economies we use these estimates to construct revised series of top wealth shares in ten countries which account for close to half of world gdp because offshore wealth is very concentrated at the top accounting for it increases the top 0 01 wealth share substantially in europe even in countries that do not use tax havens extensively it has considerable effects in russia where the vast majority of wealth at the top is held offshore these results highlight the importance of looking beyond tax and survey data to study wealth accumulation among the very rich in a globalized world

a dynamic mincer equation with an application to portuguese data this article argues in favour of a dynamic specification of the mincer equation where the past observed earnings play the role of additional explanatory variable for current observed earnings a dynamic approach offers an explanation why the return to schooling in terms of observed earnings is not independent of labour market experience as suggested by some recent empirical evidence for the united states

the threat of rent extraction in a resource constrained future abstract ecological economists aim to transform our economic institutions so that society can flourish within planetary boundaries the central message of this article is that private rent extraction forms a key barrier to the realisation of that goal i define rent as an economic reward which is sustained through control of assets that cannot be quickly and widely replicated and which exceeds proportionate compensation for the labour of the recipient i argue that unless we close opportunities for rent extraction and socialise unavoidable rents our governments will be compelled to pursue output growth regardless of its environmental consequences in order to prevent spiralling inequality and unemployment the positive proposition in this article is that the concept of rent can help us to identify and build democratic support for the institutional transformations necessary to prepare for a resource constrained future measures to reduce and redistribute rentier power could be emancipatory for the poorest in society whilst making more feasible many proposals that have been advocated already in this journal including reduced working hours and resource caps by contrast if environmental protections are introduced before opportunities for private rent extraction are closed we could see intensified rent seeking asset price bubbles poverty and economic insecurity

the evolution of the returns to education and wage differentials in brazil a quantile approach this paper uses quantile regression techniques to analyze the returns to education across the conditional distribution of wages from individuals separated both by gender and skin color while accounting for the endogeneity of the education decisions using data from the brazilian households survey pnad for the years of 1988 and 1996 the results indicate that the returns to education are significantly heterogeneous across the distribution of earnings as well as the wage gap between the groups according to gender and skin color moreover there has been a significant improvement in the wage differentials between the groups across the years

kin groups and reciprocity a model of credit transactions in ghana this paper studies kinship band networks as capital market institutions membership in a community where individuals are dynastically linked has two effects on informal credit first the nonanonymity of the dynastic link allows to sanction the defaulters offspring and induce compliance even in short term interactions social enforcement second preferential agreements can arise in which kin members condition their behavior on the characteristics of a player s predecessor expecting others to do the same with their offspring reciprocity these effects are incorporated in an olg game with endogenous matching between lenders and borrowers and tested using household level data from ghana

the great divide in scientific productivity why the average scientist does not exist we use a quantile regression approach to estimate the eects of age gender research funding teaching load and other observed characteristics of academic researchers on the full distribution of research performance both in its quantity publications and quality citations dimension exploiting the panel nature of our dataset we estimate a correlated random eects quantile regression model accounting for unobserved heterogeneity of researchers we employ recent advances in quantile regression that allow its application to count data estimation of the model for a panel of biomedical and exact scientists at the ku leuven in the period 1992 2001 shows strong support for our quantile regression approach revealing the dierential impact of almost all regressors along the distribution we also nd that variables like funding teaching load and cohort have a dierent impact on research quantity than on research quality jel classi cation c14 c23 l31 o31 o32

gender time use and change this article uses survey data from ecuador to examine the effects of women s employment on the allocation of paid and unpaid labor within the household i compare a region with high demand for female labor with a similar region in which demand for female labor is low the comparison suggests that market labor opportunities for women have no effect on women s total time in labor but increase men s time in unpaid labor the increase in men s time in unpaid work reflects women s increased bargaining power in the home

school quality and returns to education of u s immigrants using the u s labor market as a common point of reference this article investigates the influence of source country school quality on the returns to education of immigrants based on 1980 and 1990 census data we first estimate country of origin specific returns to education results reveal that immigrants from japan and northern europe receive high returns and immigrants from central america receive low returns next we examine the relationship between school quality measures and these returns holding per capita gdp and other factors constant immigrants from countries with lower pupil teacher ratios and greater expenditures per pupil earn higher returns to education

does education raise productivity or just reflect it education has an important effect on wages but it not clear whether this is because education raises productivity or because education is simply a signal of ability we implement a number of existing tests for discriminating between these two explanations and find that they do not support the signalling hypothesis however we have severe reservations about these results and we propose an alternative test based on changes in education incentives caused by changes in the minimum school leaving age in the 1970s using this idea we find that uk data appear to strongly support the human capital explanation an important issue in the economics of education is that an individual s education has an effect on wages paid in the labour market for example blundell et al 2003 uses detailed education and subsequent earnings information for a cohort of male individuals born in 1958 to estimate that the returns to a uk degree typically of 3 year duration relative to graduating from high school at 18 with 2 a level qualifications a necessary but not sufficient condition for admission to university is a 24 wage premium human capital explanations pioneered by becker 1962 and schultz 1963 suggest that the correlation between education and wages is due to education enhancing productivity however earnings may rise in response to education not because of any effect on productivity but simply because education may act as a signal of productivity employers believing that education is correlated with productivity will screen workers for their education and pay higher wages to the more educated the employers beliefs will be confirmed by their experience if it is the case that high productivity individuals signal this by choosing high levels of education it will be optimal for individuals to behave in this way if the cost of acquiring education is less for high productivity individuals than it is for low productivity individuals thus under reasonable conditions the market will be characterised by a separating equilibrium where higher productivity individuals choose higher levels of education than lower productivity workers and earn correspondingly higher wages the theory is largely due to spence 1973 1979 and the subsequent empirical literature was reviewed by groot and oosterbeek 1994 riley 2001 provides an excellent modern survey chevalier harmon and walker are fellows of iza in bonn and are affiliated with the institute for the study of social change issc in dublin this paper is part of the issc policy evaluation programme chevalier and walker are also affiliated with the centre for the economics of education at the london school of economics lse the support of all of these bodies for facilitating our collaboration is acknowledged harmon is grateful to university college london for their hospitality during his nuffield foundation new career development fellowship in the social sciences comments from steve machin and three anonymous referees greatly improved the exposition of this paper we are also grateful to richard blundell and to seminar participants at the lse and the tinbergen institute in amsterdam for their comments and to vincent o sullivan for excellent research assistance the usual disclaimer applies

economic volatility and returns to education in venezuela 1992 2002 preliminary evidence suggests that the rates of return to education in venezuela have been declining since the 1970s this study rigorously estimates the returns to education in venezuela for the period 1992 to 2002 and links them to earlier available estimates from the 1980s consistent cross sections from the encuesta de hogares por muestro are used to document falling returns to schooling and educational levels until the mid 1990s followed by increasing returns thereafter quantile regression analysis is used to provide further insight into the within skill group changes in returns over time

the effects of taxes on purchases of sugar sweetened carbonated soft drinks a quantile regression approach the consumption of large quantities of sugar sweetened carbonated soft drinks sscsd may lead to obesity which is associated with health problems such as diabetes cardiac diseases and mental health problems the effects of increasing the value added tax vat on purchases of sscsd are estimated obesity is more likely among heavy drinkers than among light or moderate drinkers therefore the effects on high and low purchasing households are estimated by using quantile regressions qrs on norwegian household purchase data since many households did not purchase sscsd during each survey period censored as well as ordinary qrs are used our results suggest that a vat increase from 13 to 25 will have the highest percentage effect among low purchasing households but the absolute effect is highest among high purchasing households low purchasing households will reduce their purchases by about 5 l while the reduction is almost 20 l among high purchasing households however the effects among high purchasi

heterogeneity in the intergenerational transmission of alcohol consumption a quantile regression approach abstract this paper addresses the question of whether the effect of parental drinking on children s later consumption of alcohol which is frequently found to be of positive sign exhibits a certain pattern of heterogeneity in particular if this effect is more prominent in the upper tail than elsewhere in the distribution of children s alcohol consumption conventional regression analyses that focus on the mean effect may substantially underrate parental drinking as a risk factor for children s later alcohol abuse in our empirical application we address this issue by applying censored quantile regression methods to german survey data the supposed pattern of heterogeneity is indeed found in the data at least for daily parental drinking in addition the intergenerational transmission of alcohol consumption exhibits gender specific heterogeneity

precautionary saving by young immigrants and young natives 1 introduction and literature review foreign born population accounted for approximately 9 of the total population residing in the united states by the mid 1990s and including their children they were responsible for approximately 51 of the u s population growth martin 1995 these dramatic changes in the u s population have prompted much economic research on the immigrant population but despite the great deal of attention that has been paid to the labor market progress of immigrants little is known about their saving and wealth accumulation patterns 1 many studies requiring information on the saving behavior of immigrants simply assume that immigrant savings parallel that of natives macurdy nechyba and bhattacharya 1998 however it may be the case that immigrants behave differently have different motives different opportunities and different needs with respect to saving and wealth accumulation vis a vis natives most of the limited literature on the saving behavior of immigrants is inspired by european and middle eastern guest worker migration and consequently is geared to the behavior of temporary migrants 2 three papers that focus on the saving behavior of immigrants in general are the papers by galor and stark 1990 carroll rhee and rhee 1994 and dustmann 1997 galor and stark note that immigrants and natives differ from one another in their migration probabilities because immigrants have ties to other countries it is more likely that they emigrate relative to the native born worker 3 using an overlapping generations model galor and stark show that the higher the probability of emigration the higher is the level of savings hence they predict immigrants save more than the native born dustmann models precautionary savings and assumes that immigrants maximize expected lifetime utility from consumption in the host and home country proportionally to the lifetime spent abroad and at home 4 under appropriate restrictions 5 dustmann shows that if labor markets in the home and host countries are uncorrelated immigrants will carry out more precautionary savings relative to a comparable native worker because immigrants will be subject to greater income risk in the host country 6 however it is also possible in dustmann s formulation to have immigrants engaging in less precautionary saving relative to native workers for example if economic conditions across the two countries are correlated immigrants could be subject to less lifelong income risk than natives given their ability to diversify away labor market risk by operating in two markets rather than just one as in the case of natives additionally if the risk preferences of natives and immigrants are different then the precautionary saving motive could be more or less pronounced in one group relative to the other all else equal carroll rhee and rhee 1994 use the canadian survey of family expenditures to compare saving behavior of immigrants to canada from different regions of the world they conclude that immigrant saving does not significantly differ by country of origin however they do find that recent immigrants save less than do canadian born and that immigrants saving behavior approaches the pattern of the canadian born over time overall the theoretical literature tends to favor the hypothesis that immigrants carry out more precautionary savings than natives which could result in immigrants accumulating more wealth than natives immigrants face greater uncertainty regarding their labor market participation labor market progress and health care coverage these factors along with geographic distance may make it more difficult to obtain financial support from family members in times of necessity requiring that immigrants maintain larger stocks of precautionary saving but dustmann s model in consonance with a widely held view also allows for immigrants to be more risk tolerant than natives since they are willing to undergo higher uncertainties and risks when they decide to migrate to a new country barsky et al

the impact of education in rural ghana examining household labor allocation and returns on and off the farm most of the human capital literature pertaining to developing countries focuses on the returns to education in either farm work or wage work few studies examine how education affects the allocation of time between these activities this paper estimates the returns to education in farm and off farm work and consequently the role of education in determining the allocation of labor the results from this study show that off farm work has a much higher return to education than does farm work and suggest that this divergence in returns affects the allocation of labor in farm households between farm and off farm work

gender time use and change the impact of the cut flower industry in ecuador this article uses survey data from ecuador to examine the effects of women s employment on the allocation of paid and unpaid labor within the household the reader compares a region with high demand for female labor with a similar region in which demand for female labor is low the comparison suggests that market labor opportunities for women have no effect on women s total time in labor but increase men s time in unpaid labor the increase in men s time in unpaid work reflects women s increased bargaining power in the home

racial discrimination and professional basketball salaries in the 1990s racial differences in professional basketball player salaries are examined to determine whether the 20 premium paid to whites in the mid 1980s has persisted into the 1990s ols and tobit regressions indicate no difference between white and black salaries controlling for player and team characteristics for the 1994 95 season however censored quantile regressions show substantial racial differences at certain points in the salary distribution whites earn less than blacks at the lower end of the distribution although the difference is not statistically significant and varies with minutes played in contrast whites receive a significant premium 18 at the upper end of the salary distribution these findings are consistent with a form of consumer discrimination in which sports fans prefer to see white star players all else equal

precautionary motives and portfolio decisions theory predicts that under certain restrictions on preferences prudent consumers will allocate relatively more funds to riskless assets when there is uninsurable background risk this paper analyzes empirically the relevance of precautionary motives for the structure of household wealth to this end a new and rich data source from the netherlands is exploited the question of primary concern is what impact if any does the presence of income uncertainty have on the structure of dutch households portfolios we employ various semi parametric estimators both for cross sections and for panel data to assess the response of households portfolios to uninsurable background risk we find some but not unanimous support for the view that portfolios become less risky as income uncertainty increases

education returns across quantiles of the wage function alternative explanations for returns to education by race in south america private wage returns to schooling in south africa in 1993 are twice as high for nonwhites as for whites and substantially higher at advanced levels of schooling for both races to explore how these returns might be expected to change as the proportion of africans with secondary and higher education increases quantile regressions for the wage function are estimated for african males and white males if the residuals based on a standard wage function specification are interpreted as omitted ability and it is assumed that ability increases decreases returns to schooling then we expect quantile returns to increase decrease at higher quantiles this is not observed for africans at the higher and secondary school level but is evident among whites at higher educational levels the opposite pattern of differential returns favoring the least able i e lowest deciles is reported for the lower tail of the educational distribution that is for africans at the level of primary school and for whites at secondary school authors

vocational training and earnings in portugal this paper examines the relationship between wages and vocational training in portugal for this purpose we estimate a semi logarithmic wage equation using ols and quantile regression techniques the results indicate that in some cases vocational training has a positive impact on wages this is valid for the mean ols and for each conditional quantile of the wage distribution the paper casts some doubt on the market value of the skills acquired within the apprenticeship system and in the vocational training schools the results also suggest that the effect of training on wages is not statistically different across different quantiles of that distribution therefore there is no loss of information when we only use the ols estimator keyworks wage equation vocational training quantile regression university of amsterdam address roetersstraat 11 1018 wb amsterdam the netherlands e mail hartog fee uva nl faculdade de economia da universidade nova de lisboa address tv estevao pinto 1099 032 lisboa portugal e mail ppereira fe unl pt universidade dos acores address rua mae de deus 9500 p delgada portugal e mail josevieira notes uac pt acknowledgements we are thankful to an anonymous referee for helpful suggestions financial support from program praxis xxi grant praxis 2 2 1 csh 781 95 sapiens 99 grant 33089 99 and feder is acknowledged

semiparametric censored regression models aregression model is censored when the recorded data on the dependent variable cuts off outside a certain range with multiple observations at the endpoints of that range when the data are censored variation in the observed dependent variable will understate the effect of the regressors on the true dependent variable as a result standard ordinary least squares regression using censored data will typically result in coefficient estimates that are biased toward zero traditional statistical analysis uses maximum likelihood or related procedures to deal with the problem of censored data however the validity of such methods requires correct specification of the error distribution which can be problematic in practice in the past two decades a number of semiparametric alternatives for dealing with censored data have been proposed in a semiparametric approach part of the functional form of the model usually the regression function is parametrically specified by the researcher based upon plausible assumptions while the rest of the model is not parameterized 1 while the theoretical literature has produced several semiparametric estimators for the censored data model published applications of these estimators to empirical problems in economics have lagged far behind this paper reviews the intuition and computation of a handful of semiparametric estimators proposed for the censored regression model the various estimators are used to examine changes in black white earnings inequality during the

where has all the education gone cross national data show no association between increases in human capital attributable to the rising educational attainment of the labor force and the rate of growth of output per worker this implies that the association of educational capital growth with conventional measures of total factor production is large strongly statistically significant and negative these are on average results derived from imposing a constant coefficient however the development impact of education varied widely across countries and has fallen short of expectations for three possible reasons first the institutional governance environment could have been sufficiently perverse that the accumulation of educational capital lowered economic growth second marginal returns to education could have fallen rapidly as the supply of educated labor expanded while demand remained stagnant third educational quality could have been so low that years of schooling created no human capital the extent and mix of these three phenomena vary from country to country in explaining the actual economic impact of education or the lack thereof

the impact of income shocks on health evidence from cohort data we study the eect of permanent income innovations on health for a prime aged population using information on more than half a million individuals sampled over a twenty five year period in three dierent cross sectional surveys we aggregate data by date of birth cohort to construct a synthetic cohort dataset with details of income expenditure socio demographic factors health outcomes and selected risk factors we then exploit structural and arguably exogenous changes in cohort incomes over the eighties and nineties to uncover causal eects of permanent income shocks on health we find that such income innovations have little eects on health but do aect health behaviour and mortality

changes in wage structure in urban india 1983 2004 a quantile regression decomposition summary this paper utilizes individual level earnings data from urban india to examine the evolution of wages during 1983 2004 across the entire wage distribution quantile regression analysis reveals that the effects of many covariates are not constant across distribution returns to secondary and tertiary education not only increased in the 1990s but also became more heterogeneous suggesting wage inequality may increase further in near future as more workers get higher education moreover the quantile regression decomposition suggests that the increase in returns has been the driving force behind the increase in wages in both the 1980s and 1990s

far away from a skill biased change falling educational wage premia in italy in this article we apply quantile regressions to investigate the evolution of educational wage premia ewp in italy from 1993 to 2004 using the survey of the household income and wealth shiw bank of italy and different classifications for educational attainments we show that in the private sector ewp have generally decreased over time considering both continuous and categorical specifications for education at all quantiles of the wage distribution different patterns are observed in the public sector where ewp remain basically stable over time a number of robustness checks and various econometric specifications are also applied in order to address sample selection issues our findings provide additional evidence in favour of the thesis that the increasing patterns in inequality and ewp and the related interpretations concerning skill biased changes are much less pronounced in continental europe than in anglo saxon countries

strategies for sustainable agricultural development in the ethiopian highlands this paper investigates the impacts of population growth market access agricultural credit and technical assistance programs land policies livelihood strategies and other factors on changes in land management natural resource conditions and human welfare indicators since 1991 in the northern ethiopian highlands based on a survey of 198 villages we find that population growth has contributed significantly to land degradation poverty and food insecurity in this region in contrast better market access and some credit and technical assistance programs were associated with improvement or less decline in land quality wealth and food security suggesting the possibility of win win win development outcomes with appropriate interventions land redistribution was associated with adoption of inorganic fertilizer but also with declining use of fallow and declining soil fertility we find also that different land management practices are adopted where different livelihood strategies are pursued suggesting the importance of considering livelihood strategies in technical assistance programs development strategies should be tailored to the different comparative advantages of different locations no one size fits all strategy will work everywhere this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

the impact of school quality on earnings and educational returns evidence from a low income country abstract the expansion of education has been widely adopted as a key element in the development strategies of low income countries while there is substantial evidence on the benefits of greater educational attainment for subsequent labor market earnings empirical evidence on the role played by school quality is scarce this paper combines household survey data with unique data on school quality from honduras to study the importance of school quality as a determinant of earnings our objective measures of school quality capture teacher training school infrastructure and school crowding the results display strong positive effects of school quality on earnings and on educational returns these effects persist across a variety of model specifications

educational mismatch and the earnings distribution thanks to the participants of the 2015 new directions in human capital theory workshop at the university of birmingham uk the 2016 midwestern economic society annual meetings the 2017 scottish economic society annual conference seminar participants at the university of aberdeen and to the editor and the two referees for helpful comments on the paper the usual disclaimer applies

assessing the degrowth discourse a review and analysis of academic degrowth policy proposals abstract debates on ecological and social limits to economic growth and new ways to deal with resource scarcity without compromising human well being have re emerged in the last few years central to many of these is a call for a degrowth approach in this paper a framework is developed to support a systematic analysis of degrowth in the academic literature this article attempts to present a clearer notion of what the academic degrowth literature explores by identifying organising and analysing a set of proposals for action retrieved from a selection of articles the framework is applied to classify proposals according to their alignment to ecological economics policy objectives sustainable scale fair distribution and efficient allocation type of approach top down versus bottom up and geographical focus local national or international a total of 128 peer reviewed articles focused on degrowth were reviewed and 54 that include proposals for action were analysed the proposals identified align with three broad goals 1 reduce the environmental impact of human activities 2 redistribute income and wealth both within and between countries and 3 promote the transition from a materialistic to a convivial and participatory society the findings indicate that the majority of degrowth proposals are national top down approaches focusing on government as a major driver of change rather than local bottom up approaches as advocated by many degrowth proponents the most emphasised aspects in the degrowth literature are related to social equity closely followed by environmental sustainability topics such as population growth and the implications of degrowth for developing nations are largely neglected and represent an important area for future research moreover there is a need for a deeper analysis of how degrowth proposals would act in combination

are risk regulators rational evidence from hazardous waste cleanup decisions a large literature in economics and social science focuses on how people reason about risks reactions of individuals to risk frequently depart from behavior predicted by full information variants of expected utility theory risk regulators are human and are subject to political pressures that are reflective of people s attitudes toward risk as a result the public policies they espouse may reflect errors in judgment about risk many biases stem from misperceptions of risk individuals overestimate small probabilities overestimate the risks associated with highly publicized dangers and have preferences over the manner not just the magnitude in which risks arise environmental risks associated with hazardous waste sites may be particularly prone to such errors since they involve small risks that are highly publicized indeed the general public ranks hazardous waste sites as the leading environmental risk a growing literature also analyzes how the decisions of risk regulators depart from choices predicted in a standard benefit cost framework as roger g noll and james e krier 1990 point out since regulators are both human and political their decisions may reflect risk biases regulators may exhibit these biases as individuals and because their constituents will express regulatory demands based on risk perceptions risk regulators may take into account the identity of the parties exposed to risk the level of scrutiny by interest groups the nature of congressional representation of affected constituents and the degree of political activity by potentially exposed individuals 3 errors in risk perceptions and risk decisions cause individuals to diverge from expected utility maximization similar errors by policy makers and the influence of risk politics cause regulators to diverge from social welfare maximization this paper examines decisions made by federal and state regulators at hazardous waste sites addressed by the superfund program to determine how their decisions diverge from those predicted by expected utility theory and benefitcost analysis we analyze whether risk perceptions and politics influence two decisions central to the how clean is clean debate at superfund sites the selection of chemical cleanup targets and the expenditure of remediation funds at these contaminated sites we also explore the interactive influence of risk perception factors and political demands previous research on the regulation of chemical risks in standard setting indicates that decisions reflect evidence of risk biases and responsiveness to political factors in assessing the determinants of the epa s decision to cancel pesticide registration maureen l cropper et al 1992 found that the epa was more likely to cancel a pesticide in instances featuring higher risks to the maximally exposed individual user lower benefits associated with continued use of the pesticide higher values of intervention by environmental groups mea viscusi harvard law school harvard university cambridge ma 02138 hamilton sanford institute of public policy duke university durham nc 27708 we have benefited from the comments from two referees and the excellent research assistance of jason bell kristen blann jahn hakes and robert malme research support was provided under cooperative agreement no cr 823604 01 from the u s environmental protection agency office of policy planning and evaluation dr alan carlin and dr suzanne giannini spohn served as contract officers all views and errors expressed are our own l see u s environmental protection agency epa 1987 for a report on this survey evidence 2 this theme is also articulated in richard j zeckhauser and viscusi 1990 noll 1989 provides a more general assessment of the interaction between political concerns and regulatory policy which is a central theme of this paper 3political factors have long played a prominent role in local hazardous waste policies see among others linda cohen 1981 howard kunreuther and douglas easterling 1990 1992 and kunreuther and rajeev gowda 1990

educational attainment and the changing u s wage structure dynamic implications on young individuals choices we present a dynamic model of individuals educational investments that allows us to explore alternative modeling strategies for forecasting future wage distributions the key innovation we propose is an approach to forecasting that relies only on the information that would be available at the actual time decisions are made and which incorporates the role of parameter uncertainty into the decision making process we compare the performance of our method with alternative models of forecasting behavior based on cps data over the period 1964 2004

using quantile smoothing splines to identify employment subcenters in a multicentric urban area abstract the goal of this paper is to provide a statistically based definition of employment subcenters for multicentric urban areas in particular we examine the shape of the employment density function using quantile smoothing splines as a nonparametric empirical specification this approach allows inspection of the employment gradient at the upper tail rather than the center of the employment density distribution as a result our definition of employment subcenters extends previous work as it allows us to condition on distance from the central business district relies on the extent to which a subcenter influences surrounding areas yet still emphasizes areas with high employment densities

industrial blackmail dynamic tax competition and public investment a dynamic model of intergovernmental competition for a large plant is presented when local productivity is uncertain one firm determines the location of its plant in each period by conducting an auction soliciting bids from local governments equilibrium subsidies from the local governments are derived the author also consider a two stage game where local governments first choose a level of costly infrastructure then participate in the sequential auction even when costs are identical across locations investing in different levels of infrastructure is a nash equilibrium moreover when infrastructure is endogenous in this manner it is chosen efficiently