the wage effects of cumulative job mobility this analysis of data from the national longitudinal survey of youth shows that cumulative job mobility had statistically significant effects on wages in the years 1979 88 the direction of the wage effects positive or negative and their magnitude varied depending on the type of cumulative mobility examined employee initiated versus employerinitiated separations economic versus family related quits layoffs versus discharges the results also indicate that although men and women had different mobility histories men for example had been discharged more often than women and women had quit for family related reasons more often than men the wage effects of each type of cumulative mobility economic quits family related quits layoffs and discharges were similar for men and women tn this paper we examine the impact of cumulative job mobility on the subsequent wages of young men and women most previous work on this subject has focused on the impact of specific mobility events such as quits or layoffs rather than on the impact of total job history on wages researchers looking at single mobility decisions have consistently reported evidence that a change in employers does affect a worker s subsequent wage therefore it is reasonable to ask whether the impact ofjob change is cumulative that is does a worker s current wage reflect the impact of all past mobility decisions quits layoffs and discharges also since most of the

statistical discrimination and the early career evolution of the black white wage gap this article develops and tests a simple dynamic model of statistical discrimination the model improves on earlier static models both by allowing ex ante uncertainty about worker productivity to be resolved as on the job performance is observed and by generating several testable empirical implications these predictions are tested using a sample of young men from the national longitudinal survey of youth producing mixed evidence for the model the main empirical result is that no black white wage gap exists at labor force entry but that one develops as experience accumulates mainly because blacks reap smaller gains from job mobility

does school quality explain the recent black white wage trend around 1980 the trend toward racial wage convergence essentially stopped i ask whether this break in the convergence trend can be explained by school quality department of education surveys provide earnings data for the high school class of 1972 in 1979 and the class of 1980 in 1986 both linked to data from the respondents high schools by several measures differences between schools attended by blacks and whites were already rather small in the 1970s furthermore i find that measurable school inputs generally have little effect on wages thus school quality explains little of the recent black white wage trend

job change patterns and the wages of young men this study uses data from the national longitudinal survey of youth to distinguish empirically between mover stayer search good and experience good models of job mobility we estimate wage models in which the pattern of overall job mobility affects both the level and tenure slope of the log wage path after controlling for the correlation between mobility patterns and time constant person and job specific unobservables we find that workers who undergo persistent mobility have lower log wage paths than less mobile workers this finding is consistent with models in which job mobility is driven by time varying unobservables such as experience good models where changes in perceived match quality cause turnover

experience tenure and wage growth of young black and white men this paper studies the source of differences in wage growth between young black and white workers focusing on terminal high school graduates from the national longitudinal survey of youth we estimate the returns to on the job tenure and general labor market experience using ordinary least squares altonji and shakotko and topel estimators results from all three estimators indicate that returns to general experience for black workers trail those for white workers but that black workers earn equal if not higher returns to tenure than do white workers

interpreting panel data on job tenure tenure responses in the panel study of income dynamics psid and the national longitudinal surveys are often inconsistent with calendar time these inconsistencies pose special problems in the psid because job changes cannot be identified directly so researchers must infer them from error ridden tenure data we use alternative rules for partitioning psid data into jobs and then estimate several wage and mobility models to assess the sensitivity of parameter estimates to the partitioning method we also assess the importance of replacing raw tenure data with imputed measures that are internally consistent

reexamining the wage tenure and experience relationship despite considerable empirical research a debate still rages about the relative importance of tenure and experience in determining wages given the existence of unobserved heterogeneity using a data set well suited to this problem the author finds after correcting for unobserved heterogeneity that tenure increases wages only in the first several years of employment the accumulated effect of general labor market experience increases wages substantially over the career this evidence suggests that specific human capital accumulation is relatively less important than some might believe this result is robust to different estimation techniques that have been suggested in the literature copyright 1991 by mit press

the determinants of black white differences in early employment careers search layoffs quits and endogenous wage growth this paper studies the transition from school to full time employment and subsequent labor mobility during the first five postschooling years for several recent cohorts of black and white male terminal high school graduates using unique data from the 1979 youth cohort of the national longitudinal surveys of labor market experience a constrained optimization model of labor force dynamics is implemented empirically integrating features of models previously described in the literature the estimates of the model provide quantitative evidence on underlying structural differences in labor market constraints faced by blacks and whites for example while blacks have overall a substantially smaller wage return to work experience and face a less disperse wage offer distribution blacks face a higher probability of receiving job offers

empirical age earnings profiles the human capital earnings function in which earnings are expressed as a quadratic in potential experience is probably the most widely accepted empirical specification in economics in spite of its widespread acceptance the human capital earnings function provides a very poor approximation of the true empirical relationship between earnings and experience the standard formulation understates early career earnings growth by about 30 50 and overstates midcareer growth by 20 50 however simple alternative specifications that fit the data are available

managed competition and consumer price sensitivity in social health insurance this paper examines whether the introduction of managed competition in dutch social health insurance has resulted in effective price competition among insurance funds we find evidence of limited price competition which may be caused by low consumer price sensitivity using aggregate panel data from all insurance funds over the period 1996 1998 estimated premium elasticities of market share are 0 3 for compulsory coverage and 0 8 for supplementary coverage these elasticities are much smaller than in managed competition settings in us group insurance this may be explained by differences in switching experience and higher search costs associated with individual insurance

wage differentials among black hispanic and white young men this paper uses the 1979 national longitudinal survey of youth labor market experience to examine whether as freeman has contended wage differentials based on race have largely vanished from the

discrimination bayesian updating of employer beliefs and human capital accumulation i introduction can labor market discrimination persist over time how do employer beliefs influence minority groups and their choices previous theoretical models of discrimination can be grouped into two distinct categories based upon the source of the discrimination the most common method of modelling discrimination follows the work of becker 1972 in which the employer manager or other employees receive disutility from associating with members of a particular group in a second class of models referred to as statistical discrimination initially proposed by phelps 1972 discrimination results from differences in the groups ability to signal output or capabilities this result can be reproduced as a special case of the model presented here this paper proposes an alternative model in which discrimination results initially from differences in the employer s prior opinion of average group ability using a bayesian updating model we analyze the dynamic effects of this prior belief on human capital acquisition and the potential for continued discrimination previous research provides an abundance of evidence that society s initial perceptions about numerous characteristics including those affecting productivity differ by group for example smith 1990 summarizes the results of the general social survey which asked individuals to rank ethnic groups on a scale of one to seven in various categories 1 the survey found a significant portion of those surveyed believed that african americans hispanics and white southerners lagged behind the rest of society in intelligence and work effort in fact 53 2 percent of those surveyed ranked african americans below whites in intelligence unless employers differ systematically from the rest of society this evidence implies that the initial or prior employer assessment of ability will be lower for members of these groups in addition to strong evidence that such general priors exist numerous studies find that prior beliefs influence the evaluation of employee ability the urban institute recently conducted a study comparing the evaluation of black and hispanic workers to that of equally qualified white workers 2 given equal resumes the black and hispanic job candidates trailed white candidates at every stage in the job seeking process from receiving fewer initial interviews to a lower number of job offers similar biases have been found in experiments in which identical resumes were evaluated differently simply due to the race or gender of the applicant 3 furthermore even if worker output is unambiguously observed and evaluated in an unbiased setting studies find that success of males is attributed to ability while that of females is more likely to be attributed to luck 4 this adherence to initial perceptions suggests that agents believe strongly in their initial beliefs and hence would require substantial evidence to alter their perceptions our model incorporates the strength of the prior beliefs through a variance parameter surrounding the initial belief of mean ability level a lower variance implies a decreased willingness to admit error in one s prior beliefs and update accordingly discrimination in our model results from the entrepreneur s sincere although perhaps incorrect beliefs concerning the distribution of ability levels of a particular group although empirical results provide strong evidence of labor market discrimination persisting over many years cain 1986 most existing theoretical models of discrimination are static designs used to explain only within period discrimination we propose a dynamic model in which a bayesian employer learns about an employee s ability over time based on output observed up to a stochastic error term thus updating prior beliefs concerning both the individual and the group in each period viewing output as a signal of ability it is clear that traditional statistical discrimination models are embedded within ours the special case in which one group s signal is less reliable than another s can produce the statistical discrimination results

welfare maximization entices participation abstract we consider randomized public good mechanisms with optional participation preferences over lotteries are modeled using skew symmetric bilinear ssb utility functions a generalization of classic von neumann morgenstern utility functions we show that every welfare maximizing mechanism entices participation and that the converse holds under additional assumptions as a corollary we obtain a characterization of an attractive randomized voting rule that satisfies condorcet consistency and entices participation this stands in contrast to moulin s well known no show paradox j of econ theory 45 53 64 1988 which shows that no deterministic voting rule can satisfy both properties simultaneously

probabilistic social choice based on simple voting comparisons a social choice procedure is developed for selecting an alternative from a finite set on the basis of paired comparison voting ballot data are used to construct a lottery on the alternatives that is socially as preferred as every other lottery the constructed lottery is then used to select a winner an axiomatization of social preferences among lotteries that justifies the procedure is included the procedure will always select a consensus majority alternative when one exists and it will never select an alternative that is pareto dominated by another alternative

matching turnover and unemployment this paper develops the view that workers move into and out of the labor market because of changes in the perceived value of their market opportunities a search model is combined with a matching model to yield movement of workers from job to job and into and out of employment

early career work experience and gender wage differentials we estimate a wage model that includes an array of variables measuring the fraction of time worked during each year of the career this array fully characterizes past employment experience regardless of how sporadic it has been our model yields substantially higher estimated returns to experience and lower returns to tenure than do models that measure experience cumulatively and use the standard quadratic functional form we find that the data reject the standard model but fail to reject our model furthermore we find that 12 of the male female wage gap is due to differences in the timing of work experience

the philosophy of intransitive preference this paper argues against the proposition that rationality necessarily requires preferences to be transitive attention is given predominantly to the logic of the arguments purporting to show that rational agents must adhere to transitivity the paper builds on previous work in the area of economics and philosophy by clarifying and sharpening the normative case for and against this basic assumption copyright 1993 by royal economic society

the invention of the independence condition for preferences this paper discusses the history and interrelations of three central ideas in preference theory the independence condition in decision under risk the sure thing principle in decision under uncertainty and conjoint independence for multiattribute decisions and consumer theory independence was recognized as an important component of decision under risk in the late 1940s by jacob marschak john nash herman rubin and norman dalkey and first appeared in publication in marschak marschak j 1950 rational behavior uncertain prospects and measurable utility econometrica18 111 141 and nash nash j f 1950 the bargaining problem econometrica18 155 162 the sure thing principle can be credited to savage savage l j 1953 une axiomatisation du comportement raisonnable face i l incertitude colloq internal centre national rech sci 40 econometrie 29 40 savage l j 1954 the foundations of statistics wiley new york 2nd edn dover new york 1972 conjoint independence for consumer theory was introduced by sono sono m 1943 the effect of price changes on the demand and supply of separable goods in japanese kokumin keisai zasshi74 1 51 and leontief leontief w w 1947a a note on the interrelation of subsets of independent variables of a continuous function with continuous first derivatives bull amer math soc 53 343 350 leontief w w 1947b introduction to a theory of the internal structure of functional relationships econometrica51 361 373 a form of it can also be recognized in samuelson samuelson p a 1947 foundations of economic analysis harvard university press cambridge ma presented earlier in samuelson samuelson p a 1940 foundations of analytical economics the observational significance of economic theory ph d dissertation harvard university boston ma independence and the sure thing principle are equivalent for decision under risk but in a less elementary way than has sometimes been thought the sure thing principle for decision under uncertainty and conjoint independence are identical in a mathematical sense the mathematics underlying our three preference conditions has an older history the independence condition for decision under risk can be recognized in the characterization of associative means and conjoint independence for multiattribute decisions in solutions to the generalized associativity functional equation