financial intermediation reserve requirements and inside money a general equilibrium analysis abstract reserve requirements are examined in a general equilibrium context the paper develops a simple general equilibrium model that includes diverse opportunities for investment and a role for financial intermediaries two versions of the model are considered one is a thought experiment in which currency serves purely to satisfy legal reserve requirements the other is more realistic the model is used to analyze the comparative static effects of changes in reserve requirements the effects of changes in other parameters of the economy in the presence of reserve requirements and some qualitative issues raised by reserve requirements

women as policy makers evidence from a randomized policy experiment in india this paper uses political reservations for women in india to study the impact of women s leadership on policy decisions since the mid 1990 s one third of village council head positions in india have been randomly reserved for a woman in these councils only women could be elected to the position of head village councils are responsible for the provision of many local public goods in rural areas using a dataset we collected on 265 village councils in west bengal and rajasthan we compare the type of public goods provided in reserved and unreserved village councils we show that the reservation of a council seat affects the types of public goods provided specifically leaders invest more in infrastructure that is directly relevant to the needs of their own genders

corruption a review as is increasingly recognised in academic literature and by international organisations corruption acts as a major deterrent to growth and development the aim of this survey is to organise and summarise existing theoretical and empirical work on corruption with a view to identifying opportunities for further research the paper begins with a brief overview of key definitions of corruption and then turns to a review of the factors that favour or deter the growth of corruption together with a brief look at related models this is followed by an examination of the consequences of corruption for society and the consideration of measures that might help to reduce corruption the paper ends with suggestions for future research and includes summaries of data sources and key variables for use in this research

egalitarianism and the returns to education during the great transformation of american education secondary school education greatly expanded in the united states from 1910 to 1940 setting its schooling attainment apart from that of all other countries barely 10 percent of youth were high school graduates in 1910 but by the mid 1930s the median youth had a high school diploma in some regions by the 1930s enrollment and graduation rates rose to levels that were as high as they would be two decades later the issue addressed here concerns the economic impact of the large increase in the supply of educated labor evidence is presented concerning the sharp decline in the wage premium to ordinary white collar workers with the expansion of the high school large numbers of americans competed for positions in the coveted white collar sector although the return to a year of high school remained considerable on the eve of world war ii egalitarianism had evened the playing field for a substantial segment of americans

india s missing girls biology customs and economic development we review the evidence on the sex ratio among children below the age of six international evidence shows that the sex ratio at birth is slightly biased towards boys but boys suffer greater mortality a pattern consistent with darwinian evolution with economic development the male bias in the child sex ratio increases south and east india show levels and trends in the child sex ratio that are consistent with this evidence however unbalanced sex ratios in the northern and western states since the first censuses indicate discrimination against girls technological developments permitting sex selective abortions have seriously aggravated the imbalances in these states economic modelling of parental choice regarding a child s gender suggests that gender imbalances may be consistent with individual maximization and marriage market equilibrium nevertheless these choices have adverse welfare consequences which will be aggravated by the decline in population growth and consequent relaxation of the marriage squeeze

a framework for monetary and banking analysis one of the benefits of monetary instability is that it reminds us both by inducing change in financial institutions and by bringing out the monetary cranks that the monetary arrangements we take for granted are not immutable in this paper i set out and analyse a simple model of money banking and price level determination the model is first used to illustrate recent developments in the theory and analysis of banking the assumptions are then extended to analyse price level determination in an economy becoming an inside money economy as high powered money goes out of use the paper concludes by raising the major unresolved questions about banking money and price level determination the topics i shall discuss have only recently again become popular in the united states but they have a long history at the centre of monetary and macro economics the contributions of wicksell 1936 original in 1898 patinkin 1965 the radcliffe commission 1960 tobin 1963 and gurley and shaw 1963 are the best known of the classic analyses more recently black 1970 fama 1980 and others have returned to the questions of what if anything distinguishes banks from other financial intermediaries how an inside money economy would operate and what monetary arrangements other than current fiat money systems might be developed

seigniorage banking and the optimal quantity of money abstract this paper discusses seigniorage in an economy with imperfect competition in the banking sector the amount of total seigniorage and its division between the central bank and the banking sector are derived by using the opportunity cost concept of seigniorage the paper analyzes the impact of changes in inflation reserve requirements competition and technology on the division of seigniorage and on the welfare loss and relates the analysis to the concept of the optimal quantity of money

optimal seigniorage and financial liberalization abstract this paper analyzes the effect of financial integration for countries relying on the taxation of their domestic financial system a two country model with overlapping generations and explicit financial intermediation is used goverments derive revenues from seigniorage and set optimally but non cooperatively the rate of inflation and the level of required reserves on bank deposits a financial liberalizations leads to lower reserve ratios higher inflation rates and larger stocks of government debt when the liberalization is anticipated governments may temporarily increase the reserve ratios before the liberalization occurs jel f30 e60

deposit insurance and money market freezes in the presence of deposit insurance a rise in counterparty risk may cause a freeze in interbank money markets we show this in a general equilibrium model with regionally segmented bank based retail financial markets in which money markets facilitate the reallocation of funds across banks from different regions counterparty risk creates an asymmetry between banks in savings rich regions which remain marginally financed by the abundant regional insured deposits and in savings poor regions which have to pay large spreads in money markets this asymmetry distorts the aggregate allocation of credit and in the presence of demand externalities can cause large output losses

what s different among banks abstract based on commercial paper being a nearly perfect substitute for certificates of deposits cds and cd reserve requirements creating a higher cost of funds for banks fama shows that the banking industry must have some monopoly power relative to other financial institutions his analysis does not resolve whether this monopoly power is vested in banks collectively vis a vis other financial institutions or if the monopoly power extends to the level of individual banks using an event study framework to examine the elimination of a reserve requirement we find significant evidence of monopoly power at the level of individual banks

reconsidering the impact of the environment on long run growth when pollution influences health and agents have a finite lifetime using an overlapping generation model a la blanchard 1985 j polit econ 93 223 247 with human capital accumulation we demonstrate that the influence of the environment on optimal growth in the long run may be explained by the detrimental effect of pollution on life expectancy we also show that in such a case greener preferences are growth and welfare improving in the long run even if the ability of the agents to learn is independent of pollution and utility is additively separable finally we establish that a minimum environmental policy is required to obtain a sustainable equilibrium in the market economy and that it is possible to implement a win win environmental policy

monetary policy banking and growth i introduction fischer and modigliani 1978 exhaustively list the costs associated with inflation in recent years a growing body of evidence is consistent with the notion that slower output growth may be added to the fischer modigliani list specifically analyses by kormendi and meguire 1985 fisher 1991 degregario 1992 gomme 1993 wynne 1993 barro 1996 and others find a negative correlation between the inflation rate and output growth both across countries and over time 1 moreover the studies consistently find that the growth rate response to a change in the inflation rate is quite large the different studies produce a range of correlation coefficients a country in which the inflation rate is 10 will grow between 1 4 and 3 4 percentage points slower than a country in which the inflation rate is 0 the purpose of this paper is to determine whether a reasonably calibrated model economy can account for the size of the regression coefficients the model economy is a modified version of a member of the ak class in which bank deposits are used to finance capital accumulation in this model economy fiat money is valued because the bank is required to hold reserves against its deposits throughout this paper bank deposits is used in a narrow sense to include only those deposits against which a reserve requirement applies because monetary policy has two tools at its disposal it is possible to conduct two separate policy experiments the results from these experiments particularly the inflation rate experiment sheds light on the potential importance on the share of investment financed through bank deposits researchers have long been interested in the interaction between financing and growth schumpeter 1911 argued that the financial sector more specifically its stage of development affected a country s growth rate 2 cameron 1967 described financial development in scotland england and france in the late 18th and early 19th centuries cameron concluded that scotland and england entered the industrial revolution ahead of france because it had the financial infrastructure capable of financing capital accumulation on the needed scale king and levine 1993 find that countries with more developed financial sectors tend to grow faster than countries with less developed financial sectors it seems natural therefore to investigate whether the means of financing can yield any insights into the inflation growth relationship other researchers have also quantified the effect that movements in the inflation rate has on the growth rate in particular jones and manuelli 1995 use several variants of economies in which people hold fiat money to satisfy a cash in advance constraint they demonstrate that large growth rate effects cannot be accounted for in these model economies in these models inflation does not materially alter capital accumulation rates affecting instead the allocation between the credit good and cash good purchases jones and manuelli find small growth rate effects in an economy in which the tax code has nominally denominated depreciation rates in two papers that focus on inflation and growth chari jones and manuelli 1995 1996 consider economies in which capital accumulation can be financed through either bank deposits or directly as in the economy specified in this paper reserve requirements are applied against bank deposits agents can avoid the inflation tax by using the direct financing means more intensively consequently the growth rate effects are muted in the chari jones manuelli model economies and are too small to account for the size of the regression coefficients reported in kormendi and mcguire fischer and barro in this paper i assume that all investment is financed through bank deposits with this extreme assumption the model economy can account for the size of the growth rate effects observed in the data 3 thus there is a potentially useful lesson learned from the quantitative results in the all bank financing economy and those reported in chari jones manuelli

the legacy of u s educational leadership notes on distribution and economic growth in the 20th century the united states led all rich and industrialized countries in the establishment of mass secondary and higher education and it led all in europe by at least several decades for much of the 20th century the u s advantage in the schooling of its young produced by midcentury large differences between the educational stock of its labor force and that of other rich countries a result that would hardly be surprising except for the fact that the united states had absorbed millions of less educated immigrants only in recent decades have many rich countries caught up to and even exceeded the united states in years of education for young persons at the same time that the united states led the world in mass education in the 20th century it rapidly expanded its economic lead no single factor can account for the economic dominance of the united states in the 20th century and most of the favored explanations be they rooted in technological institutional or natural resource factors are complementary ones despite that admonition it would appear logical that part possibly a major part of the economic

effects of international sharing of pollution abatement burdens on income inequality among countries abstract improvements in environmental quality will boost output production and hence economic growth however although environmental abatement equally benefits all economies in the world it is shown that if the private productive resources are not yet accumulated sufficiently in low income economies income inequality among economies can be widened in the short term not only under equal burden sharing of pollution abatement but even under income proportional burden sharing when the marginal productivity is diminishing the negative effect of the burden is large relative to the positive effect of the improved environment in economies in which resources are not accumulated sufficiently

the position of women in uk academic economics this paper reports the results of the royal economic society women s committee 1998 survey on the gender balance in uk academic economics in 1998 female representation was 4 of professors 11 of senior lecturers or readers 17 of permanent lecturers 28 of fixed term lecturers and 33 of phd research students the main growth in female representation since 1996 has been in fixed term lectureships and in phd research students a 5 percentage point increase for each we suggest reasons for the low representation of women in academic economics and also argue that it is a cause for concern

economic growth population theory and physiology the bearing of long term processes on the this lecture sketches a theory of the secular decline in morbidity and mortality that takes account of changes induced in physiological functioning since 1700 the synergism between technological and physiological improvements has produced a form of human evolution biological though not genetic rapid culturally transmitted and not necessarily stable which is still ongoing in both oecd and developing countries thermodynamic and physiological aspects of economic growth are defined and their impact on growth rates is assessed implications of this theory for population forecasting measurement of national income demand for leisure pension policies and demand for health care are considered excerpt

the quiet revolution that transformed women s employment education and family the modern economic role of women emerged in four phases the first three were evolutionary the last was revolutionary phase i occurred from the late nineteenth century to the 1920s phase ii was from 1930 to 1950 phase iii extended from 1950 to the late 1970s and phase iv the quiet revolution began in the late 1970s and is still ongoing three aspects of women s choices distinguish the evolutionary from the revolutionary phases horizon identity and decision making the evolutionary phases are apparent in time series data on labor force participation the revolutionary phase is discernible using time series evidence on women s more predictable attachment to the workplace greater identity with career and better ability to make joint decisions with their spouses each of these series has a sharp break or inflection point signifying social and economic change these changes moreover coincide by birth cohort or period the relationship between the development of modern labor economics and the reality of women s changing economic role is explored the paper concludes by assessing whether the revolution has stalled or is being reversed women who graduated college in the early 1980s did not opt out but recent cohorts are too young to evaluate this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

do women shy away from competition do men compete too much we examine whether men and women of the same ability differ in their selection into a competitive environment participants in a laboratory experiment solve a real task first under a noncompetitive piece rate and then a competitive tournament incentive scheme although there are no gender differences in performance men select the tournament twice as much as women when choosing their compensation scheme for the next performance while 73 percent of the men select the tournament only 35 percent of the women make this choice this gender gap in tournament entry is not explained by performance and factors such as risk and feedback aversion only playa negligible role instead the tournament entry gap is driven by men being more overconfident and by gender differences in preferences for performing in a competition the result is that women shy away from competition and men embrace it

the early development of intellectual property institutions in the united states the u s was a pioneer in establishing the world s first modern intellectual property system that system was distinguished by the provision of broad access to and strict enforcement of property rights in new inventions coupled with the requirement of public disclosure and it was effective at stimulating the growth of a market for technology and technical change more generally far from being static fundamental modifications were introduced over time in response to changing circumstances that such adjustments so often proved to be constructive owes partly to a private market being a central feature of the system and partly to the democratic structure of u s institutions

money creation and the shadow banking system many explanations for the rapid growth of the shadow banking system in the mid2000s focus on money demand this paper asks whether the short term liabilities of the shadow banking system behave like money we rst present a simple model where households demand money services which are supplied by three types of claims deposits treasury bills and asset backed commercial paper abcp the model provides predictions for the price and quantity dynamics of these claims as well as the behavior of the banking system in terms of issuance and the monetary authority in terms of open market operations consistent with the model the empirical evidence suggests that the shadow banking system does respond to money demand

seigniorage old and new policy issues introduction abstract seigniorage is at the crossroad of many avenues of research a summary survey of older and more recent developments from the static allocative approach in the differential taxation framework to policy analyses of the effects of joining the ems for high deficit countries shows that there may be some disorderly traffic and that definite policy conclusions can hardly be drawn from models which so often neglect relevant markets and variables and in particular the financial sectors and financial assets

the real bills doctrine versus the quantity theory a reconsideration two competing monetary policy prescriptions are analyzed within the context of overlapping generations models the real bills prescription is for unfettered private intermediation or central bank operations designed to produce the effects of such intermediation the quantity theory prescription in contrast is for restrictions on private intermediation designed to separate money from credit although our models are consistent with quantity theory predictions about money supply and price level behavior under these two policy prescriptions the models imply that the quantity theory prescription is not pareto optimal and the real bills prescription is

women in economics moving up or falling off the academic career ladder copyright 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 by the american economic association

multiple reserve requirements this paper investigates the consequences of government imposition of multiple reserve requirements on commercial banks in particular it examines a situation in which banks are required to hold some fraction of their customer s deposits in the form of domestic currency and another fraction in the form of interest bearing government bonds proponents of such requirements claim that for a given deficit a multiple reserve scheme leads to a lower rate of inflation than would occur under a single reserve regime i construct a model which provides a framework for analyzing this view the analysis does not focus exclusively on the inflationary effect of alternative reserve regimes the model also allows for welfare analysis copyright 1995 by ohio state university press

financial intermediation and the optimal tax system in this paper a stylized general equilibrium model is constructed to analyze the relative efficiency of taxing financial intermediaries a crucial feature of the model is that tax collection costs are endogenous i e they result from primitive assumptions about information and transaction costs instead of being assumed ad hoc the model provides useful insights into the welfare costs and incidence of banks reserve requirements or equivalently of a tax on deposits in particular it is shown that a tax on bank deposits can be part of an optimal tax system provided banks monopoly power is significant however if the banking industry is perfectly competitive the first dollar of revenue is more efficiently collected by a uniform capital income tax although a strictly positive welfare loss is incurred

marriage and divorce changes and their driving forces the family is not a static institution in recent decades marriage rates have fallen divorce rates have risen and the defining characteristics of marriage have changed the economic approach to the family seeks to explain these trends by reference to models that can also explain how and why families form gary becker s 1981 treatise on the family proposed a theory based on production complementarities in which husband and wife specialize in the market and domestic spheres respectively production complementarities also arise in the production and rearing of one s own children however production complementarities at least as initially described are decreasingly central to modern family life increased longevity and declining fertility mean that most of one s adult life is spent without one s own children in the household also the rise in marital formation at older ages including remarriage means that many families form with no intention of producing children moreover increases in female labor force participation suggest that household specialization has either declined or at least taken on a different meaning these changes have come about as what is produced in the home has been dramatically altered both by the emergence of labor saving technology in the home and by the development of service industries that allow much of what was once provided by specialized homemakers to be purchased in the market the availabil

the nation in depression t he economic cataclysm of the 1930s was an international phenomenon experienced by countries in all parts of the globe countries as diverse as the united states germany chile and japan all experienced significant depressions in the 1930s thus the title of charles kindleberger s classic book the world in depression 1973 captures an important feature of the great depression these international aspects especially the importance of the gold standard in causing the downturn and transmitting depression from one country to another have been emphasized in recent years in excellent books by peter temin 1989 and barry eichengreen 1992 these books have rightly received widespread attention and have successfully changed the focus of much analysis of the great depression from the united states to the world economy while such a change from american provincialism is surely healthy and warranted adopting an international perspective on the great depression risks losing sight of the many ways in which the u s depression differed in timing and severity from depressions elsewhere more important it may obscure the many uniquely american causes of america s great depression this paper examines the ways in which the u s experience during the 1930s resembled that of other countries in some regards and fundamentally differed in other aspects i also evaluate the evidence on the causes of the great depression in the united states and the sources of the eventual recovery i suggest that the path of american output and unemployment before 1931 can be explained quite well with only domestic factors even after 1931

exploring the present through the past claudia goldin is one of the world s leading economists and economic historians and has made a series of outstanding and original contributions particularly to the cliometric or the new economic history literature in this interview professor goldin discusses with brian snowdon who first provides a background introduction several important issues relating to her research on economic history and cliometrics the economics of slavery us economic history corruption in america the role of human capital and education in us economic development wage inequality female labour force participation and the quiet revolution the influence of the contraceptive pill women s surnames the reversal of the college gender gap and women in the economics profession

are reserve requirements relevant for economic stabilization abstract the level of the required reserve ratio and the payment of interest on required reserves are irrelevant for economic stability 1 when the central bank appropriately adjusts its interest elasticity of supply of reserves or currency to offset changes in the required reserve ratio or in the interest rate paid on required reserves or 2 when economic agents form their price level expectations rationally conditional on the current interest rate

nonseparable utility and the double dividend debate reconsidering the tax interaction effect the literature on the use of environmental taxes inthe presence of distortionary labor taxes warns thata partial equilibrium pigouvian tax analysis is notappropriate because increasing the price of dirtygoods can futher aggravate the prexisting distortions this argument is most frequently made assuming thatlabor is taxed to meet a fixed revenue requirement when a dirty good is also taxed others argue thatthis lowers workers real wages causing people toreduce their labor supply below its already suboptimallevel aggravating labor market distortions however most papers ignore the effect that a cleanerenvironment can have on labor supply that is mostpast work has assumed that the quality of theenvironment is weakly separable in the utilityfunction we argue that a cleaner environment canincrease labor supply at least partially offsettingany incentive for workers to decrease their laborsupply further we show explicitly how relaxing theseparability assumption affects the standardresults

a review of the stern review on the economics of climate change the stern review calls for immediate decisive action to stabilize greenhouse gases because the benefits of strong early action on climate change outweighs the costs the economic analysis supporting this conclusion consists mostly of two basic strands the first strand is a formal aggregative model that relies for its conclusions primari ly upon imposing a very low discount rate concerning this discount rate aspect i am skeptical of the review s formal analysis but this essay points out that we are actual ly a lot less sure about what interest rate should be used for discounting climate change than is commonly acknowledged the review s second basic strand is a more intuitive argument that it might be very important to avoid possibly large uncertain ties that are difficult to quantify concerning this uncertainty aspect i argue that it might be recast into sound analytical reasoning that might justify some of the review s conclusions the basic issue here is that spending money to slow global warming should perhaps not be conceptualized primarily as being about consump tion smoothing as much as being about how much insurance to buy to offset the small change of a ruinous catastrophe that is difficult to compensate by ordinary savings

optimal reserve requirements deposit taxation and the demand for money abstract we study welfare and equivalence relationships between two schemes for financing a recurrent real expenditure reserve requirement augmented seigniorage rrs and seigniorage deposit tax combinations sd the model we employ includes overlapping generations fiat currency and a risky physical asset its implications depend critically on whether it is specified so as to be diversifying so that fiat currency has value when the expenditure is financed via optimal taxation of asset returns if the specification is diversifying rrs is broadly equivalent to sd and an interior reserve ratio can be part of an optimal financing scheme if it is not the best rrs scheme involves an extreme reserve ratio produces a hyperinflation and is pareto dominated by a pure deposit tax scheme

an analysis of out of wedlock childbearing in the united states this paper relates the erosion of the custom of shotgun marriage to the legalization of abortion and the increased availability of contraception to unmarried women in the united states the decline in shotgun marriage accounts for a significant fraction of the increase in out of wedlock first births several models illustrate the analogy between women who do not adopt either birth control or abortion and the hand loom weavers both victims of changing technology mechanisms causing female immiseration are modeled and historically described this technology shock hypothesis is an alternative to welfare and job shortage theories of the feminization of poverty excerpt

what makes people think like economists evidence on economic cognition from the survey of americans and economists on the economy abstract the positive economic beliefs of economists and the general public systematically differ what factors make noneconomists think more like economists using the survey of americans and economists on the economy this paper shows people think more like economists 1 if they are well educated 2 if they are male 3 if their real income rose over the last 5 years 4 if they expect their real income to rise over the next 5 years or 5 if they have a high degree of job security however neither high income nor ideological conservatism have this effect my findings for education gender and income have close parallels in political science on tests of objective political knowledge the better educated and males score higher controlling for numerous other variables and the independent effect of income is minor

outside offers and the gender pay gap empirical evidence from the uk academic labour market using a unique data source on academic economist labour market experiences we explore gender pay and promotions in addition to earnings and productivity measures we have information on outside offers and perceptions of discrimination we find both a gender promotions gap and a within rank gender pay gap a driving factor may be outside offers men receive more outside offers than women of comparable characteristics and gain higher pay increases in response this may arise due to discrimination we find that perceptions of discrimination and also outside job applications correlate with an individual receiving earnings below that expected given their characteristics

health nutrition and economic growth today the most remarkable instances of rapid economic growth are in asian and latin american countries which together represent more than half of the population of the world this vast expansion of modern economic growth did not get under way until after world war ii but since then has proceeded with lightning speed these changes first became evident in the improvement in life expectancy in the case of india for example life expectancy at birth increased from 29 years in 1930 to 60 years in 1990 an increase of that magnitude required two and a half centuries in england and france the sharp drop in the death rates of developing nations led to an enormous surge in the growth of population which in turn led to widespread fears that the food supply could not keep up with population growth and that industrialization would be thwarted excerpt

international and intergenerational environmental externalities we examine a world in which policymakers actions in a given country at a given time have long lived effects on a common resource the global environment we consider the first best in which long lived planners behave cooperatively then examine the allocation of resources when there is non cooperation across countries across time or both finally we analyze the dynamic behavior of the economy along balanced growth paths it is found that while long lived international institutions are necessary to internalize all externalities cooperation at a point in time may be harmful to future generations

competitive banks and the inflation tax abstract the purpose of this note is to show that the presence of a competitive banking sector has important quantitative implications for the revenue maximizing rate of inflation

monetary policy and bank regulations in an economy with financial innovations this is a study of financial innovations and moves towards the cashless society in a general equilibrium cash in advance model it is assumed that a subset of goods cash goods and check goods

multiple reserve requirements an irrelevance result abstract this paper examines the rationale for multiple reserve requirements in the context of a general equilibrium model of financial intermediation developed by romer 1985 financial intermediation reserve requirements and inside money a general equilibrium analysis journal of monetary economics 16 175 194 in this framework it is shown that the existence of a bond reserve requirement is irrelevant adding a bond reserve requirement to the model is no different than adjusting the currency reserve requirement

optimal financing of the government s budget taxes bonds or money financing of the government s budget in particular we consider taxation bond issuance and money creation as alternative means of financing these issues are not new some of them were extensively explored in the public finance literature some of them were explored in the monetary theory literature what we believe to be new however is that our work integrates the relevant elements from both strands of literature into a unified general equilibrium framework with this approach we are able to jointly determine the optimal combination of tax rates the rate of inflation and the interest rate on government bonds this type of analysis enables us to ask whether the rate of inflation should be positive or negative and to provide simple conditions on compensated demand elasticities which determine the answer it also enables us to reconsider milton friedman s optimum quantity of money rule in a public finance framework without lump sum taxes and to show how this rule should be modified in addition we provide insight into the desirability of a social security scheme by showing that such a program is undesirable when social security payments are financed

competitiveness in a globalised world michael porter on the microeconomic foundations of the competitiveness of nations regions and firms in this paper we provide the text of an interview with professor michael porter discussing his research and ideas relating to the microeconomic foundations of global competitiveness the discussion provides a microeconomic perspective on some of the key issues relating to recent research on competitiveness productivity clusters us economic leadership economic growth and development

catching up with the economy in his presidential address five years ago zvi griliches 1994 called attention to the severe difficulties that beset current attempts to measure the growth of labor productivity in the american economy because of these difficulties it is likely that the true rate of economic growth is substantially underestimated the root of the problem is the difficulty in measuring output in the service sector which now represents two thirds of the economy in such sectors as health care and information services the contribution to gross domestic product gdp is measured by inputs rather than outputs a procedure that makes it impossible to gauge accurately improvements in the quality of output thus in the case of computers which are transforming american society economists have been unable so far to find a measurable contribution of computers to the rise in labor productivity an astonishing paradox i want to follow up on this problem of mismeasurements my thesis is that the profession

macroeconomic activity and monetary policy actions some preliminary evidence monetary policy is conducted through open market operations loans at the discount window and changes in the reserve requirement structure the purpose of this paper is to formally investigate the notion that the effect of changes in reserve requirement ratios is different from the effect of other policy tools this is accomplished by decomposing the monetary base into those changes caused by changes in reserve requirement ratios and those caused by other monetary policy actions some preliminary evidence suggesting differential real effects from the policy tools is provided copyright 1992 by ohio state university press

the american family and family economics abstract gary becker s path breaking treatise on the family 1981 subjected individuals decisions about sex marriage childbearing and childrearing to rational choice analysis the american family has changed radically in recent decades we survey these changes as well as the ongoing effort to understand partnering parenting and care of the elderly as results of maximizing choices made by individuals first we describe the recent changes in the american family the separation of sex marriage and childbearing fewer children and smaller households converging work and education patterns for men and women class divergence in partnering and parenting strategies and the replacement of family functions and home production by government programs and market transactions second we examine recent work in family economics that attempts to explain these changes third we point out some challenging areas for further analysis and highlight issues of commitment in two primary family relationships those b

a review of the stern review on the economics of climate change how much and how fast should we react to the threat of global warming the stern review argues that the damages from climate change are large and that nations should undertake sharp and immediate reductions in greenhouse gas emissions an examination of the review s radical revision of the economics of climate change finds however that it depends decisively on the assumption of a near zero time discount rate combined with a specific utility function the review s unambiguous conclusions about the need for extreme immediate action will not survive the substitution of assumptions that are consistent with today s marketplace real interest rates and savings rates

career and marriage in the age of the pill genuine change in the economic and social status of u s women did not emanate simply from their increased labor force participation but rather from their increase in professions and as career women those changes first began in the late 1960 s and early 1970 s we examine here one factor of momentous importance in this break with the past the economist 31 december 1999 recently named it the greatest science and technology advance in the twentieth century it is the oral contraceptive known worldwide by its moniker the pill in 1960 18 4 percent of professionals were women as were 4 7 percent of high powered professionals by 1998 36 4 percent of professionals and 25 1 percent of the high powered subset were women we explore in this article a series of connections that link the birth control pill to the increase of women in professional occupations our evidence for the impact of the pill relies largely on the timing of various changes changes in laws giving minors certain adult rights and lowering the age of majority enabled young and unmarried women to obtain the pill young women s control over their fertility directly reduced the costs to them of engaging in long term career investments the pill also served to increase the age at first marriage and thus indirectly reduced a potential penalty of delaying marriage to pursue professional education and training all of these changes began in the late 1960 s and early 1970 s the late 1960 s and early 1970 s were years of tumultuous social and political change how can we separate the impacts of affirmative action the resurgence of feminism changes in social norms and abortion reform from the impact of the pill the simple answer is that the timing of several of these changes is far less convincing than is that of the pill in affecting career investment but that is not the complete answer the economic impact of the pill did not occur in isolation legal change made it possible for young women to obtain contraceptives these changes paradoxically did not stem primarily from concerns regarding access to contraception they were instead part of the larger political movement of the 1960 s the pill moreover unleashed social change by enabling an increase in the age at first marriage there is also no doubt that the rebirth of feminism long in the making served to complement and reinforce the pill s impact our argument for the importance of the pill in affecting women s career decisions relies on the correspondence among breaks in various time series and in the logic of the relationships among the pill career and marriage we will begin with the time series on career and marriage which can be viewed as the dependent variables the evidence on the diffusion of the pill the independent variable is taken up next the logic of our argument relating pill use career and marriage follows and finally we present our defense for why we believe the pill packed considerable power in altering the social and economic status of american women

accounting for the effect of health on economic growth i use microeconomic estimates of the effect of health on individual outcomes to construct macroeconomic estimates of the proximate effect of health on gdp per capita i employ a variety of methods to construct estimates of the return to health which i combine with cross country and historical data on height adult survival rates and age at menarche using my preferred estimate eliminating health differences among countries would reduce the variance of log gdp per worker by 9 9 percent and reduce the ratio of gdp per worker at the 90th percentile to gdp per worker at the loth percentile from 20 5 to 17 9 while this effect is economically significant it is also substantially smaller than estimates of the effect of health on economic growth that are derived from cross country regressions

the origins of american industrial success 1879 1940 the united states became the world s preeminent manufacturing nation at the turn of the twentieth century this study considers the bases for this success by examining the factor content of trade in manufactured goods surprisingly the most distinctive characteristic of u s manufacturing exports was intensity in nonreproducible natural resources furthermnore this relative intensity was increasing between 1880 and 1920 the study then asks whether resource abundance reflected geological endowment or greater exploitation of geological potential it was mainly the latter jel 042 recent thinking about american economic performance has been marked by alarm over the country s loss of its competitive edge most of this discussion is not rooted in an understanding of the historical origins of the economic leadership now thought to be in jeopardy modern economists tend to assume that the american advantage has been technological and

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