the impact of body weight on occupational mobility and career development this paper examines the relationship between individuals weight and their employment decisions over the life cycle i estimate a dynamic stochastic model of individuals annual joint decisions of occupation hours worked and schooling the model allows body weight to affect non monetary costs switching costs and distribution of wages for each occupation and also allows individuals employment decisions to affect body weight i use conditional density estimation to formulate the distributions of wages and body weight evolution i find that heavier individuals face higher switching costs when transitioning into white collar occupations earn lower returns to experience in white collar occupations and earn lower wages in socially intensive jobs simulating the model with estimated parameters decreased occupational mobility accounts for 10 percent of the obesity wage gap while contemporaneous wage penalties for body weight are small the cost over the life cycle is substantial an exogenous increase in initial body mass by 20 percent leads to a 10 percent decrease in wages over the life course

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

long term and spillover effects of health shocks on employment and income abstract we use matching combined with difference in differences to identify the causal effects of sudden illness represented by acute hospitalizations on employment and income up to six years after the health shock using linked dutch hospital and tax register data an acute hospital admission lowers the employment probability by seven percentage points and results in a 5 percent loss of personal income two years after the shock there is no subsequent recovery in either employment or income there are large spillover effects household income falls by 50 percent more than the income of the disabled person

socio economic status health and lifestyle abstract the role of lifestyle in mediating the relationship between socio economic characteristics and health has been discussed extensively in the epidemiological and economic literatures previous analyses have not considered a formal framework incorporating unobservable heterogeneity in this paper we develop a simple economic model in which health is determined partially by lifestyle which depends on preferences budget and time constraints and unobservable characteristics we estimate a recursive empirical specification consisting of a health production function and reduced forms for the lifestyle equations using maximum simulated likelihood msl for a multivariate probit mvp model with discrete indicators of lifestyle choices and self assessed health sah on british panel data from the 1984 and 1991 health and lifestyle survey hals we find that sleeping well exercising and not smoking in 1984 have dramatic positive effects on the probability of reporting excellent or good sah in 1991 and that these effects are much larger having accounted for endogeneity the failure of epidemiological analyses to account for unobserved heterogeneity can explain their low estimates of the relevance of lifestyle in the socio economic status health relationship indicators for prudent alcohol consumption and eating breakfast in 1984 are not found to be statistically significant determinants of sah in 1991

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

evaluation of the subjective probabilities of survival in the health and retirement study in the health and retirement study respondents were asked about the chances they would live to 75 or to 85 we analyze these responses to determine if they behave like probabilities of survival if their averages are close to average probabilities in the population and if they have correlations with other variables that are similar to correlations with actual mortality outcomes we find that generally they do behave like probabilities and that they do aggregate to population probabilities most remarkable however is that they covary with other variables in the same way actual outcomes vary with the variables for example respondents with higher socioeconomic status give higher probabilities of survival whereas respondents who smoke give lower probabilities we conclude that these measures of subjective probabilities have great potential use in models of intertemporal decision making under uncertainty

inter linking issues and dimensions in sustainability reporting during the last decade sustainability reporting sr has been increasingly adopted by corporations worldwide this is evidenced by the adoption of several guidelines such as the iso 14000 series the social accountability 8000 standard and the gri sustainability guidelines sr shows promise to help corporate leaders and their employees to contribute towards achieving sustainable societies however most of the guidelines and standards address sustainability issues through comparmentalisation thereby leading to the separation of the economic environmental and social dimensions due to these divisive approaches holistic assessments of the effects of their efforts are seldom properly integrated into coporate decisions and procedures to make improvements for example through cleaner production worker health and safety consumer safety and reductions in the negative short and long term social and environmental impacts this paper analyses sr reports from three companies with the help of grounded theory s constant comparative analysis this analytical framework helped the authors to systematically assess the degree to which the companies addressed economic ecological and social issues separately or in an integrated and inter linked manner from the inter linkages found a new category is proposed to be added to future sr this new category can help corporate sr planners and researchers on sustainability reports to better understand how the company leaders understand their responsibilities with regard to sd these inter connectednesses are highly relevant in many short and long term dimensions of supply chain management global warming ecological disruption and societal equity issues especially with regard to the local national and global energy issues of fuels and oils the central themes of the conference at which this paper was originally presented it also plays a key role in real long term changes towards sustainability where the time dimension plays a key role in human survival on planet earth

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

health behavior health knowledge and schooling the positive correlation between schooling and good health is well documented one explanation is that schooling helps people choose healthier life styles by improving their knowledge of the relationship between health behaviors and health outcomes that is schooling improves the household s allocative efficiency in producing health this empirical study uses direct measures of health knowledge to test this explanation part of the relationship between schooling and the consumption of cigarettes alcohol and exercise is explained by differences in health knowledge however most of schooling s effects on health behavior remain after differences in knowledge are controlled for

accounting for net entry into greek manufacturing by establishments of varying size adopting the view that size matters in understanding entry exit patterns this research explores the nature and causes of net entry patterns of various size defined groups of establishments in the case of a less industrialised country greece the hypothesis to be tested is that the determinants of entry are not independent of firm size throughout this paper the analysis has had to confront difficulties arising from the use of net entry rates defined at the size class level the degree of size disaggregation used in this paper is considerably finer than used before five employment defined size classes have been used instead of sliding cut off points discriminating between small and large firms unlike other research using pooled models to explain variation in entry exit rates across industries the data used here are characterised by the absence of significant industry specific systematic variation overall the results obtained in this paper indicate that there is a gradation in the responses of different size classes to stimuli defined at the industry level evidence is offered that small firms are different in that they manage to overcome entry barriers perhaps adopting different survival strategies and that large firms are well aware of market conditions and are in an advantageous position to overcome many of the problems imposed by entry barriers size classes in the middle of the size class distribution offer a rather mixed result due to size related advantages and disadvantages

the determinants of earnings a behavioral approach we survey the determinants of earnings and propose a framework for understanding labor market success we suggest that the advantages of the children of successful parents go considerably beyond the benefits of superior education the inheritance of wealth or the genetic inheritance of cognitive ability we suggest that noncognitive personality variables such as attitudes towards risk ability to adapt to new economic conditions hard work and the rate of time preference affect both earning and the transmission of economic status across generations

the importance of noncognitive skills lessons from the ged testing program it is common knowledge outside of academic journals that motivation tenacity trustworthiness and perseverance are important traits for success in life thomas edison wrote that genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration most parents read the aesop fable of the tortoise and the hare to their young children at about the same time they read them the story of the little train that could numerous instances can be cited of high iq people who failed to achieve success in life because they lacked self discipline and low iq people who succeeded by virtue of persistence reliability and self discipline the value of trustworthiness has recently been demonstrated when market systems were extended to eastern european societies with traditions of corruption and deceit it is thus surprising that academic discussions of skill and skill formation almost exclusively focus on measures of cognitive ability and ignore noncognitive skills the early literature on human capital e g gary becker 1964 contrasted cognitive ability models of earnings with human capital models ignoring noncognitive traits entirely the signaling literature e g michael spence 1974 emphasized that education was a signal of a one dimensional ability usually interpreted as a cognitive skill most discussions of ability bias in the estimated return to education treat omitted ability as cognitive ability and attempt to proxy the missing ability by cognitive tests most assessments of school reforms stress the gain from reforms as measured by the ability of students to perform on a standardized achievement test widespread use of standardized achievement and ability tests for admissions and educational evaluation are premised on the belief that the skills that can be tested are essential for success in schooling a central premise of the educational testing movement since its inception much of the neglect of noncognitive skills in analyses of earnings schooling and other lifetime outcomes is due to the lack of any reliable measure of them many different personality and motivational traits are lumped into the category of noncognitive skills psychologists have developed batteries of tests to measure noncognitive skills e g robert sternberg 1985 these tests are used by companies to screen workers but are not yet used to ascertain college readiness or to evaluate the effectiveness of schools or reforms of schools the literature on cognitive tests ascertains that one dominant factor g summarizes cognitive tests and their effects on outcomes no single factor has yet emerged to date in the literature on noncognitive skills and it is unlikely that one will ever be found given the diversity of traits subsumed under the category of noncognitive skills studies by samuel bowles and herbert gintis 1976 rick edwards 1976 and roger klein et al 1991 demonstrate that job stability and dependability are traits most valued by employers as ascertained by supervisor ratings and questions of employers although they present no direct evidence on wages and educational t discussants susan mayer university of chicago cecilia rouse princeton university nan maxwell california state university hayward janet currie university of california los angeles

the dynamics of health in the british household panel survey this paper considers the dynamics of a categorical indicator of self assessed health using eight waves 1991 1998 of the british household panel survey bhps our analysis has three focal points the relative contributions of state dependence and heterogeneity in explaining the dynamics of health the existence and consequences of health related sample attrition and the investigation of the effects of measures of socioeconomic status with a particular focus on educational attainment and income to investigate these issues we use dynamic panel ordered probit models there is clear evidence of health related attrition in the data but this does not distort the estimates of state dependence and of the socioeconomic gradient in health the models show strong positive state dependence and heterogeneity accounts for around 30 of the unexplained variation in health copyright 2004 john wiley sons ltd

entry barriers exit and sunk costs an analysis the relationship between entry rates entry barriers and sunk costs are examined across a set of four digit industry data results indicate that product differentiation barriers reduce entry rates and sunk capital costs reduce exit rates whether entry and exit are truly simultaneous however is not clear

the meaning of death some simulations of a model of healthy and unhealthy consumption simulations of a model of healthy and unhealthy consumption are used to investigate the impact of various terminal conditions on life span pathways of health related consumption and health a model in which life span and the death stock of health are fixed is compared to versions in which i the death stock of health is freely chosen ii life span is freely chosen iii both the death stock of health and life span are freely chosen the choice of terminal conditions has a striking impact on optimal plans results are discussed with reference to the existing demand for health literature and illustrate the application of iterative processes to determine optimal life span the role played by the marginal value of health capital in determining optimal plans and the importance of checking the second order conditions for the optimal choice of life span

a model of the demand for longevity and the value of life extension we specify a demand function for longevity or quantity of life along with corresponding demand functions for indicators of quality of life and a value of health and life extension function we show that the demand for health must be derived in conjunction with that for longevity and the related consumption plan and that all choices depend on initial individual endowments and terminal conditions our comparative dynamics predictions indicate that optimal health and longevity are increasing functions of endowed wealth rather than necessarily current income that improvements in opportunities to produce health can accentuate the differences between endowed health and attained longevity levels and that the value individuals ascribe to their health may be increasing over a good portion of their life cycle we use this model to analyze observed empirical variations in levels and trends of life expectancy and in exposure to health risks across different population groups

training wages and sample selection estimating sharp bounds on treatment effects this paper empirically assesses the wage effects of the job corps program one of the largest federally funded job training programs in the u s even with the aid of a randomized experiment the impact of a training program on wages is difficult to study because of sample selection a pervasive problem in applied microeconometric research wage rates are only observed for those who are employed and employment status itself may be affected by the training program this paper develops an intuitive trimming procedure for bounding average treatment effects in the presence of sample selection in contrast to existing methods the procedure requires neither exclusion restrictions nor a bounded support for the outcome of interest identification results estimators and their asymptotic distribution are presented the bounds suggest that the program raised wages consistent with the notion that the job corps raises earnings by increasing human capital rather than solely through encouraging work the estimator is generally applicable to typical treatment evaluation problems in which there is nonrandom sample selection attrition copyright wiley blackwell

what factors inspire the high entry flow in taiwan s manufacturing industries a count entry model approach why is the entry flow of the manufacturing sector extremely high in taiwan and does it contribute to the prevailing entrepreneurship this article aims to explore what factors inspire potential entrants to go into an industry based on a theoretical formulation of the poisson probability entry model a count data model is employed to investigate the determinants of entry flows the empirical results reveal that traditional entry barriers indeed lower the entry flow the entry incentives including price cost margin and industry growth play a lesser role at attracting new firms while alternatively the market size acts as a better proxy of an entry incentive in explaining entry flows incumbents responses to entry r d and advertising intensity are found to be associated with a significant negative impact on entry flows this article also finds that there is a higher bound of covariate of entry about 10 that can be attributed to the immeasurable personality of entrepreneurs entrepreneurship rather b

going the same weigh spousal correlations in obesity in the united kingdom the obesity epidemic has received widespread media and research attention however the social phenomenon of obesity is still not well understood data from the british household panel survey bhps show positive and significant correlations in spousal body mass index bmi this article explores the three mechanisms of matching in the marriage market social learning and shared environment to explain this correlation we apply a novel method of testing for social learning by focusing on how the addition of individual and partner health and marriage length affects the correlation in spousal bmi results show the importance of matching in the marriage market in explaining correlated bmi outcomes there is significant correlation in partner bmi even after controlling for own health spouse health marriage length and regional effects suggesting evidence of a social influence however it does not appear to be a learning effect as the spouse health and marriage length are insignificant

the determinants of smes market share in 1991 taiwan manufacturers small and medium sized enterprises smes have become increasingly popular in recent decades having caused concern among scholars of various areas our line of research focuses on the determinants of smes market share this study explores the topic base on taiwan s manufacturers data collected in 1991 our empirical results indicate that taiwan has witnessed smes becoming prosperous in manufacturing industries with higher relative labor productivity low entry barriers prosperous subcontracting activities and young ages our results indicate that in the transitory process of industrial development taiwan s smes no longer can afford high wage payments when at the same time the quality of labor does not increase accordingly as taiwan approaches the status of a developed economy the beneficiaries of export activities have changed unlike 1986 in 1991 there was a smaller share of smes in taiwan s export oriented industries furthermore smes benefited from their efforts to increase their automation status the emphasis on issues concerning environmental protection proved to be another source of entry barrier that kept smes from prospering certain similarities arise when comparing our conclusions with those of the u s canada germany and japan all of whom represent industrialized countries we can conclude that as taiwan matures in her industrial development process smes also struggle to a certain maturity in theirs

obesity weight loss and employment prospects evidence from a randomized trial this study presents credible estimates for the causal effect of bmi growth on employment among the obese by exploring random assignment of a weight loss intervention based on monetary rewards i provide convincing evidence that weight loss positively affects the employment prospects of obese women but not of obese men consistent with this significant effects of weight loss on proxy variables for labor productivity are found only for obese women

an investigation into the givings by large corporate donors to uk charities 1979 86 this paper the first study of its kind to date carried out for the uk is concerned with the scale and determinants of charitable givings by large corporate donors in the uk the investigation is carried out using pooled information on 53 companies over the 8 years from 1979 to 1986 during which period the rate of corporation tax fell from 52 to 35 a result of particular interest is that contributions were related positively to the rate of tax

trends and determinants of corporate non financial disclosure in greece an increasing number of business organizations around the world engage in the accounting for and reporting on non financial aspects of performance mainly within the domains of social and environmental responsibility using a composite disclosure index this study investigates the status of the non financial disclosure practices of the top 100 companies operating in greece a number of determinants which potentially drive greek firms to publicly disclose such information are examined an investigation of the reporting practices of a subgroup of firms which is on the spotlight regarding their environmental performance is performed while overlapping perspectives for the greek case are outlined the analysis suggests that only a small group of leading greek firms appears to endorse a meaningful business and society dialogue as an instrument for stakeholder communication and the discharging of organizational accountability most other corporations still tend to treat such practices superficially and in an imprecise manner

wage and competition channels of foreign direct investment and new firm entry using a rich data set of the dutch manufacturing sector between 1995 and 2010 we investigate the effect of foreign direct investment fdi on domestic new firm entry the emerging empirical literature has focused on the direct relationship between fdi and entry but has not explored the mechanisms behind the observed effect drawing on a simultaneous equations model our analysis features both the direct effect of fdi as well as indirect effects through two channels industry competition and wages we estimate the parameters through 3sls and take into account the endogeneity of competition and wages with respect to entry our results show that there is a significant negative direct effect of fdi on entry at the same time fdi decreases competition and increases wage levels which then impact entry positively and negatively respectively the total effect of fdi is negative but small and virtually disappears after one year policy implications are discussed

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

business cycles and the relationship between concentration and price cost margins using a newly constructed panel data base we examine changes in price cost margins in 284 manufacturing industries between 1958 and 1981 a key finding is a dramatic narrowing of the spread between the margins of concentrated and unconcentrated industries over this period we provide evidence that this narrowing is a result of the greater sensitivity of price cost margins in more concentrated industries to demand fluctuations this finding is robust to the inclusion of other industry variables and to measures of import competition the results indicate that cross sectional estimates of the concentration margins relationship are likely to be both biased and misleading

joint r d in low carbon technology development in china a case study of the wind turbine manufacturing industry abstract china faces the dual challenges of climate change and increased energy demand these challenges in turn increase the demand for wind energy development along with rapid growth in manufacturing capacity chinese companies have aspired to increase their innovation capacity in order to enhance their competitiveness in the market joint research and development r d is an attractive path for chinese companies striving to advance their r d capacity this paper examines joint r d between chinese wind turbine manufacturing companies and foreign design firms assessing the performance of joint r d activities in china using the structure conduct performance scp framework the study found that joint r d has improved chinese companies technical capacity human resources and financial growth however the effect on chinese companies innovation capacity is still limited because of unequal technical capacities of the two sides in collaboration as well as their preference for augmenting profits rather than technical capacity current joint r d mode is only the extension of licensing mode in wind turbine manufacturing industry

why are some people healthy and others not the determinants of health of populations each topical chapter in this volume crystallizes the findings of a five year study under the auspices of the population health program of the canadian institute for advanced research that probed the links between social hierarchy the macroenvironmental factors in illness patterns the quality of the microenvironmental and other determinants of health in its aggregate this volume will prove essential to an understanding of the underlying public health issues for the next several decades

modelling entrepreneurship unifying the equilibrium and entry exit approach two approaches can be distinguished with respect to modelling entrepreneurship i the approach focusing on the net development of the number of entrepreneurs in an equilibrium framework and ii the approach focusing on the entries and exits of entrepreneurs in this paper we unify these approaches to arrive at a model explaining the equilibrium and actual number of entrepreneurs and the entry and exit rate of entrepreneurs simultaneously and consistently we apply our unified approach to the netherlands using self employment data for the 1960 1999 period we find error correction of about 20 per year and a very different situation in terms of disequilibrium before and after the early 1980s periods of high unemployment appear to be characterized by both high entry and high exit rates

moral hazard and selection among the poor evidence from a randomized experiment not only does economic theory predict high risk individuals to be more likely to purchase insurance but insurance coverage is also thought to crowd out precautionary activities in spite of stark theoretical predictions there is conflicting empirical evidence on adverse selection and evidence on ex ante moral hazard is very scarce using data from the seguro popular experiment in mexico this paper documents patterns of selection on observables into health insurance as well as the existence of non negligible ex ante moral hazard more specifically the findings indicate that i agents in poor self assessed health prior to the intervention have all else equal a higher propensity to take up insurance and ii insurance coverage reduces the demand for self protection in the form of preventive care curiously however individuals do not sort based on objective measures of their health

uncertainty and the demand for medical care abstract this paper provides an analysis of the effects of uncertainty on the demand for medical care using a simplified version of grossman s human capital model of the demand for health two types of uncertainty are analysed the uncertainty surrounding the incidence of illness and the uncertainty surrounding the effectiveness of medical care in the first the consumer s basic level of health is assumed to be a random variable in the second the effectiveness of medical care is assumed to be random comparative static results are reported indicating the effects on the demand for medical care of both increases in the means of these distributions and mean preserving spreads of the distributions

births deaths nexus of firms estimating var with panel data this paper investigates dynamic interrelationships between the births and deaths of firms at the level of the 88 finnish subregions during 1989 1993 the births deaths nexus of firms is analysed using vector autoregressions var and an instrumental variable estimator the main findings are first that the firm births equation has a two year lag structure which means that firm deaths cause firm births and firm births cause subsequent births following two year lags and second that according to the firm deaths equation which has a one year lag structure firm births do not cause firm deaths but firm deaths cause subsequent deaths a further finding is that the use of the ordinary least squares estimator produces inconsistent and clearly different results from those produced by the instrumental variable estimator

why beauty matters we decompose the beauty premium in an experimental labor market where employers determine wages of workers who perform a maze solving task this task requires a true skill which we show to be unaffected by physical attractiveness we find a sizable beauty premium and can identify three transmission channels a physically attractive workers are more confident and higher confidence increases wages b for a given level of confidence physically attractive workers are wrongly considered more able by employers c controlling for worker confidence physically attractive workers have oral skills such as communication and social skills that raise their wages when they interact with employers our methodology can be adopted to study the sources of discriminatory pay differentials in other settings

blowing up money the earnings penalty of smoking in the 1970s and the 21st century abstract we analyze the earnings penalty of smoking among swedish twins in two social contexts the 1970s when smoking was common and widely accepted and when there were relatively few tobacco laws aiming to reduce smoking and the 2000s when smoking had become more expensive stigmatizing and less common and when tobacco laws and regulations had intensified the results show that the short term earnings penalty of smoking was much higher in the 21st century than in the 1970s for men for women smokers had on average higher annual earnings compared to nonsmokers in the 1970s but lower annual earnings in the 2000s in the long run there was an earnings gap for men between never smokers and continuous smokers whereas there was a pronounced earnings bonus of smoking cessation for women the results emphasize the importance of social context and the long term horizon when evaluating the consequences of smoking for earnings

job finding and separation rates in the oecd abstract we provide a set of comparable estimates of average monthly job finding and separation rates for over 20 oecd countries that can be used for the cross country analysis of labor markets

factors influencing voluntary annual report disclosures by u s u k and continental european multinational corporations this study examines factors influencing the voluntary disclosures of three types of information strategic nonfinancial financial contained in the annual reports of mncs from the u s u k and continental europe while company size country region listing status and to a lesser extent industry are the most important factors explaining voluntary disclosures overall the importance of the factors varies by information type

does voluntary carbon reporting meet investors needs abstract through initiatives such as the carbon disclosure project investors have encouraged companies to report on their climate change related risks and opportunities their greenhouse gas emissions and their climate change management systems and processes despite the large number of companies that now report climate change related information investors have consistently criticised companies for not providing information that can be readily used in investment decision making companies in turn have criticised investors for not utilising the information that they provide this article taking the case of the uk retail sector analyses the reasons for this debate between companies and their investors it concludes that there are two factors at play the first is that while investors have encouraged companies to report they have at least to date paid much less attention to the quality of the reported information the second is that company reporting on climate change falls far short of the quality required for investors to make meaningful comparisons between companies this in turn has limited investor interest in these data the article considers the potential for mandatory reporting to address these problems and concludes that mandatory reporting is at best a partial solution and that it is a combination of voluntary and mandatory reporting underpinned by active investor interest in the data being reported that offers the greatest potential for progress

estimating a household production function heterogeneity the demand for health inputs and their effects on birth weight the household production literature emphasizes that technical or biological processes condition input selection by households in their production activities along with prices and income exogenous variations in health to the extent that they are perceived by individuals heterogeneity lead to correlations between inputs and health outcomes that cannot be used to derive causal conclusions therefore estimates of health technology must be obtained from a behavioral model in which health inputs are themselves choices consistent estimates are reported of the effect of endogenous inputs such as medical care smoking and fertility on birth weight and fetal growth in the presence of health heterogeneity

determinants of taiwan s trade liberalization the case of a newly industrialized country abstract this paper attempts to account for the success of policy reform in taiwan s trade liberalization through an investigation of the periods 1986 92 and 1992 95 the objective is to undertake an empirical examination of haggard et al s the political feasibility of adjustment in developing countries development centre of the oecd oecd paris 1995 strategies for minimizing the political costs involved in implementing policy reforms empirical evidence supports the haggard et al arguments that is indirect compensation is used to facilitate the implementation of trade liberalization for downstream industries while the speed of trade liberalization within certain specific industries is comparatively slow furthermore in a democratic regime the pressure brought to bear by well organized domestic interest groups along with the pressure from international interest groups can strongly influence the pattern of trade liberalization policies

entry and exit from manufacturing industries symmetry turbulence and simultaneity some empirical evidence from greek manufacturing industries 1982 1988 the interdependence between entry and exit of firms into manufacturing industries is the focus of this research when both entry and exit equations are estimated separately the results support the existence of strong symmetry in their determinants when however entry and exit are estimated within a simultaneous equation framework the empirical evidence does not offer sufficient grounds to support the notion that entry and exit are simultaneously linked instead it seems that they are two contemporaneously related processes which respond in like fashion to the structural characteristics found in particular industries their linked response is also extended to factors unaccounted for by the individual entry and exit formulations and this expresses itself in significant contemporaneous correlation between the entry and exit equation residuals the change in the identities of firms operating implied by the positive correlation between entry and exit may then be attributed to industry turbulent condition

moving forward balancing the financial and emotional costs of business failure why do owner managers delay business failure when it is financially costly to do so in this paper we acknowledge that delaying business failure can be financially costly to the owner manager and the more costly the delay the more difficult the recovery but we complement this financial perspective by introducing the notion of anticipatory grief as a mechanism for reducing the level of grief triggered by the failure event which reduces the emotional costs of business failure we propose that under some circumstances delaying business failure can help balance the financial and emotional costs of business failure to enhance an owner manager s overall recovery some persistence may be beneficial to recovery and promote subsequent entrepreneurial action

longevity genes and efforts an optimal taxation approach to prevention this paper applies the analytical tools of optimal taxation theory to the design of the optimal subsidy on preventive behaviours in an economy where longevity varies across agents and depends on preventive expenditures and on longevity genes public intervention can be here justified on three grounds corrections for misperceptions of the survival process and for externalities related to individual preventive behaviour and redistribution across both earnings and genetic dimensions the optimal subsidy on preventive expenditures is shown to depend on the combined impacts of misperception externalities and self selection it is generally optimal to subsidize preventive efforts to an extent depending on the degree of individual myopia on how productivity and genes are correlated and on the complementarity of genes and preventive efforts in the survival function

determinants of inward investment in the uk a panel analysis this paper develops an inter industry model of inward investment using a fixed effects approach this demonstrates that when inward investment is investigated in such a framework previous findings relating to the specification of measures of location advantage and ownership advantages no longer hold this also shows that there are some industries that have attracted significant inward investment over time and continue to do so while others are noticeably less successful reasons for this and potential policy measures are briefly discussed

intergenerational health mobility an empirical approach based on the echp despite the importance of the study of health mobility few attempts have been made to measure intergenerational mobility not only in the european union but also in other countries such as united states this article is focused on the study of intergenerational health mobility using data from the european community household panel echp in particular the relationships between self assessed health of parents and their sons are analysed the evidence obtained suggests that in spain sons reported health depends significantly on the self assessed health of their fathers

simple analytics of productive consumption productive consumption adds to utility and income at the same time the shadow price of a productive good is equal to its money price less its marginal product as more of the good is consumed its shadow price rises because of diminishing productivity and the consumer s full income also rises because the marginal product is positive this paper uses a simple method to derive the comparative statics of the demand system when shadow prices and full income are endogenous the direction of the overall bias induced by endogenous prices and income is found to be determinate we demonstrate that the demand for productive goods tends to be relatively unresponsive to exogenous changes in prices and income we also show that labor supply will be relatively unresponsive to wage and unearned income if market work causes fatigue

chronic diseases and labour force participation in australia we examine the impact of several chronic diseases on the probability of labour force participation using data from the australian national health surveys an endogenous multivariate probit model is used to account for the potential endogeneity of the incidence of chronic conditions such as diabetes cardiovascular diseases and mental illnesses the cross equation correlations are significant rejecting the exogeneity of the chronic illnesses marginal effects of exogenous socio demographic and lifestyle variables are estimated through their direct effects on labour market participation and indirect effects via the chronic diseases the treatment effects of chronic diseases on labour force participation are estimated via conditional probabilities using five dimensional normal distributions the estimated effects differ by gender and age groups although computationally more demanding these treatment effects are compared with results from a univariate model treating the chronic conditions exogenous and the structural effects from the multivariate probit model both significantly overestimate the effects