reassessing the gender wage gap in madagascar does labor force attachment really matter abstract in the labor economics literature it has been argued that differences in labor force attachment across gender are important to explain the extent of the gender wage gap however measures of women s work experience are particularly prone to errors given discontinuity in labor market participation using proxy measures such as potential experience may lead to biased estimates of the returns to human capital such biases cannot be ignored since these returns are used in the standard decomposition techniques to measure the extent of gender based wage discrimination by matching two original surveys conducted in madagascar in 1998 a labor force survey and a biographical survey we built a unique data set that enabled us to combine the original information gathered from each of them particularly the earnings from current employment and the entire professional trajectories our results lead to a reassessment of the returns to human capital as potential experience always exceeds actual experience for b

emissions trading and competitiveness pros and cons of relative and absolute schemes emissions trading is a hot issue at national as well as supranational levels proposals for introduction of emissions trading schemes have been made this paper assesses alternative emissions trading schemes at domestic level 1 schemes where the total level of emissions is fixed absolute cap and trade 2 schemes where the allowable level of emissions per firm is related to some firm specific indicator relative cap and trade and 3 mixed schemes which combine elements of the above alternatives we present a quantitative assessment of these alternatives for climate change policy in the netherlands it is concluded that while relative cap and trade would avoid negative effects on competitiveness it would not reduce emissions at the lowest costs besides the addition of a trade system to existing relative standards does not result in additional emission reduction it should be combined with other policy measures such as energy taxes in order to realise further reduction absolute cap and trade leads to efficient emissions reduction but implemented at the national level its overall macroeconomic costs may be significant the mixed scheme has as drawback that it treats firms unequal which leads to high administrative costs we conclude that none of the trading schemes is an advisable instrument for domestic climate policy

panel estimates of male female earnings functions this paper applies single and simultaneous equation fixed effects fe and random effects re panel data estimation techniques to obtain male and female earnings function parameters using the panel study of income dynamics psid the paperfinds that earnings appreciation with experience and depreciation with labor market intermittency are comparable for men and women further skill atrophy rates increase not decrease once one controls for heterogeneity and endogeneity finally the unexplained male female wage differential declines from 40 percent to 20 percent when one adjusts for heterogeneity adjusting for endogeneity depends very much on the choice of instruments however when adjusting for endogeneity the gender earnings gap falls and approaches zero percent these results hold for two separate subsamples so that the estimates appear robust independent of sample selectivity

real and monetary cycles in models of keynes wicksell type abstract we formulate a descriptive dynamic macroeconomic model of the keynes wicksell type which incorporates goods labour and financial markets the model has well specified budget constraints with respect to the economic agents households firms and government within it we introduce some standard nonlinearities into the goods and labour markets the dynamics of the general model consist of five differential equations we analyse two and three dimensional subcases to show the existence of real and monetary cycles whose interaction will determine the full dynamics we use numerical simulation to study the dynamics of the full model and the impact of various government fiscal and monetary policies

equilibrium pollution taxes in open economies with imperfect competition abstract this paper argues that imperfect competition in global markets creates a strategic interaction between governments that can lead to the inefficient distortion of pollution taxes this distortion can be decomposed into a rent capture effect and a pollution shifting effect the rent capture effect lowers equilibrium taxes as each country attempts to gain a competitive advantage over its trading partner and thereby capture foreign rent through net exports the pollution shifting effect raises equilibrium taxes as each country attempts to transfer production and its associated pollution to the other country this effect vanishes if pollution is perfectly transboundary because shifted pollution causes as much damage to the domestic environment as does domestic pollution the net effect on symmetric equilibrium taxes is negative except in the special case of perfect competition with no transboundary pollution in this case the two effects are mutually offsetting and the nash equilibrium is efficient when pollution is at least partially transboundary there also arises the usual transboundary externality and this reinforces the negative net strategic effect giving rise to equilibrium taxes that are lower than what is globally efficient

predictable behavior in financial markets some evidence in support of heiner s hypothesis recently ronald heiner 1983 has proposed a theory of predictable behavior which has its roots in what heiner labels a competence difficulty gap hereafter called a c d gap this gap is a measure of the spread between an economic agent s competence to make an optimizing decision and the difficulty of the decision problem heiner argues that as the c d gap widens the agent is increasingly likely to follow rule governed behavior and it is this rule governed behavior that produces observed regularities in economic behavior if there is no c d gap heiner argues that rule governed behavior would disappear and along with it the observed regularities instead unpredictable behavior characterized by constant perturbation would replace predictable behavior furthermore the dynamic properties of heiner s theory are characterized in his words by sudden switching behavior this switching behavior is described as a sudden reversal of previous behavior and a persistent movement in another direction or behavior of a different kind one of the casual or intuitive examples heiner offers for support of his theory is the switching between buying and selling strategies in financial markets resulting in sudden movement in stock prices p 582 this paper explores this idea and argues that there is more than intuitive support for heiner s speculation that in fact the behavior of daily price changes in financial markets conforms better to the prediction of heiner s theory than to standard efficient market theory predictions

a longitudinal analysis of white women s wages according to human capital theory women s work participation decisions will strongly affect their wages and wage growth we test human capital predictions about how labor force withdrawals both past and prospective part time work experience and working in male rather than in female jobs affect wages and wage growth for white women we do this by estimating a wage change model for the years 1967 1979 for a national sample of white women we find that wages drop immediately following withdrawals but that this is followed by a rapid wage growth so that the net loss in wages from dropping out of the labor force is small we further find that wage growth is not significantly lower in female than in male jobs but that part time work experience does not lead to significant wage growth in either male or female jobs

bubbles crashes and endogenous expectations in experimental spot asset markets1 spot asset trading is studied in an environment in which all investors receive the same dividend from a known probability distribution at the end of each of t 15 or 30 trading periods fourteen of twenty two experiments exhibit price bubbles followed by crashes relative to intrinsic dividend value when traders are experienced this reduces but does not eliminate the probability of a bubble the regression of changes in mean price on lagged excess bids number of bids minus the number of offers in the previous period p pt a f b 1 o l supports the hypothesis that a e d the one period expected value of the dividend and that f 0 where excess bids is a surrogate measure of excess demand arising from homegrown capital gains losses expectations thus when bt 1 o goes to zero we have convergence to rational expectations in the sense of fama 1970 that arbitrage becomes unprofitable the observed bubble phenomenon can also be interpreted as a form of temporary myopia tirole 1982 from which agents learn that capital gains expectations are only temporarily sustainable ultimately inducing common expectations or priors tirole 1982 four of twenty six experiments all using experienced subjects yield outcomes that appear to the chart s eye to converge early to rational expectations although even in these cases we get 0 and small price fluctuations of a few cents that invite scalping

self selection bias in longitudinal estimation of wage gaps cross sectional regression analyses of wage gaps may be biased by omission of unobserved worker characteristics recent studies therefore have used longitudinal data to difference out the effects of such variables this paper however shows that self selection of job changers may cause longitudinal estimation of wage gaps to be inconsistent

a nonparametric decomposition of the mexican american average wage gap this paper shows that average wage gap decompositions between any two groups of workers can be carried out using nonparametric wage structures it also proposes an algorithm to correct for sample selection in nonparametric models known as tree structures this paper studies the wage gap between third generation mexican american and non hispanic white workers in the southwest it is shown that the decomposition heavily depends on functional assumptions and that different aproaches to flexibility may render sufficiently good and similar results copyright 2008 john wiley sons ltd

factors affecting levels and growth rates in the wage rates of women evidence from nursing using data from two surveys of nurses 1981 and 1989 the study examines the factors affecting the levels and growth rates in the wage rates paid to women especially married women who were licensed as registered nurses our results indicate that the influence of such household characteristics as marital status age and number of children and spouse s characteristic tended to diminish over the 1980s the evidence further suggests that the penalties for frequent switches in employment state were larger at the end of the decade than at the beginning further wages paid to nurses with baccalaureates were statistically the same as those paid to nurses with lesser formal education the return to the baccalaureate appears to be in the form of the higher wages and salaries earned by those who obtain post baccalaureate degrees

the optimal initial allocation of pollution permits a relative performance approach the initial allocation of pollution permits is an important aspect of emissions trading schemes we generalize the analysis of bohringer and lange 2005 eur econ rev 49 8 2041 2055 to initial allocation mechanisms that are based on inter firm relative performance comparisons including grandfathering and auctions as well as novel mechanisms we show that using firms historical output for allocating permits is never optimal in a dynamic permit market setting while using firms historical emissions is optimal only in closed trading systems and only for a narrow class of allocation mechanisms instead it is possible to achieve social optimality by allocating permits based only on an external factor which is independent of output and emissions we then outline sufficient conditions for a socially optimal relative performance mechanism

the effects of sons and daughters on men s labor supply and wages in this paper we estimate the effects of children and the differential effects of sons and daughters on men s labor supply and hourly wage rates the responses to fatherhood of two cohorts of men from the psid sample are examined separately and we use fixed effects estimation to control for unobserved heterogeneity we find that fatherhood significantly increases the hourly wage rates and annual hours of work for men from both cohorts most notably men s labor supply and wage rates increase more in response to the births of sons than to the births of daughters

the trend in the male female wage gap in the united states despite the rise in the feminist movement the enactment of equal opportunity legislation and the rapid increase in women s labor force participation a substantial sex differential in wages has persisted in the united states for at least 4 decades measured by hourly earnings of year round workers this wage gap was 31 in 1955 widened to a 35 37 range by the 1960s and early 1970s and then narrowed to 33 by 1982 this paper examines the extent to which changes in the characteristics of men and women in the labor force and other factors can account for the observed pattern the main finding is that increases in women s labor force participation were initially associated with a declining skill level of employed women relative to employed men where skill is measured by years of schooling and job tenure more recently the work experience of employed women has been increasing which helps account for the recent narrowing trend in the wage gap during the 1970s the wage gap probably woul have narrowed m

exploring the effect of cap and trade mechanism on firm s production planning and emission reduction strategy abstract cap and trade mechanism has a significant effect on firm s production and operation decisions and carbon emissions this study develops a mathematical model to examine the effect of cap and trade mechanism on firm s production planning and emission reduction strategy based on the model the firm s critical production planning decisions such as the optimal production quantity optimal allowance selling price and the maximum profit under the cap and trade mechanism are derived firstly then based on the cost benefit analysis the conditions under which the firm makes the optimal emission reduction strategy between buying carbon allowance from the carbon trading market and conducting low carbon processing are identified the result suggests that when the low carbon processing cost is greater than the potential opportunity benefit the firm is inclined to purchase carbon allowance from the carbon trading market and vice versa finally a numerical analysis is conducted to investigate the effects of relevant factors such as carbon quotas carbon emission rate low carbon processing cost and transaction cost on firm s production and operation decisions the results indicate that under the cap and trade mechanism the transaction cost has a positive effect on allowance selling price the firm s optimal production quantity and maximum profit is positively related to carbon quotas while negatively related to carbon emission rate and low carbon processing cost this research contributes to enrich related literature and knowledge with regard to carbon emissions reduction at the firm level and highlight the critical importance of cap and trade mechanism in reducing carbon emissions

climate policy instruments and industry effects and potential responses in the swedish context efficient policy instruments for reducing the emission of greenhouse gases are essential for the realization of a successful climate policy general economic policy instruments have the potential for providing efficient emission reduction as they equalise marginal costs for emission reduction between different actors they also provide incentives for a great variety of responses such as energy efficiency improvements fuel substitution and reduced consumption of carbon intensive products however as a result of the fact that it has so far been impossible to implement policy instruments on a global scale these instruments are often adapted in such a way that some of their potential advantages are eliminated in this paper the possibility of different policy instruments to contribute to reductions in industrial co2 emissions while preserving the competitiveness of industry is evaluated theoretically the consequences of increasing the cost of co2 emission in various industrial sectors are also discussed attention is directed towards carbon taxes emission trading and regulation co2 taxes without tax reductions and emission trading with allocation through auctioning have theoretical advantages in a global climate regime but may lead to significant disadvantages if implemented in a single or a small groups of countries emission trading with free intensity based allocation would in this case have a major advantage in combining incentives for emission reductions through efficiency improvements and fuel substitution with little impact on production levels less

in and out of the labour market long term income consequences of child related interruptions to women s paid work why do canadian mothers have lower incomes than women who have never had children microdata from the 1995 gss allow examination of two hypotheses 1 mothers have spent more time out of the labour force thus acquiring less human capital 2 higher levels of unpaid work lead to fatigue and or scheduling difficulties measuring work history does little to account for the family gap the estimated child penalty is reduced by allowing for human capital depreciation and controlling for unpaid work hours but the two hypotheses together cannot entirely explain the gap jel classification j0 j3 entrees et sorties marche du travail et consequences a long terme des interruptions dans l experience sur le marche du travail a cause des enfants ce memoire se demande pourquoi les femmes canadiennes qui ont eu des enfants ont des revenus plus bas que ceux des femmes qui n en ont pas eus les microdonnees de l enquete sociale generale de 1995 de statistiques canada permettent d examiner deux hypotheses 1 les meres ont passe plus de temps en dehors de la main d oeuvre active et donc ont accumule moins de capital humain ou 2 des niveaux plus eleves de travail non remunere peuvent entrainer fatigue ou difficultes d organisation du temps des efforts pour construire une meilleure image de l experience de travail des femmes ne permettent pas d expliquer cet ecart familial meme si la possibilite qu il y ait depreciation du capital humain reduit la penalisation attachee au fait d avoir un enfant en particulier si l interruption dans l experience sur le marche du travail est suivie d un changement d emploi le nombre hebdomadaire d heures de travail non paye est relie negativement aux revenus et si l on normalise pour tenir compte des heures de travail non paye cela reduit la penalisation attachee au fait d avoir un enfant cependant les deux hypotheses combinees ne suffisent pas pour expliquer l ecart

the formation of price forecasts in experimental markets this study utilizes laboratory experimental methods to evaluate the empirical validity of 1 muthian rational expectations assumptions 2 an adaptive expectations model and 3 an extrapolative expectations model over 5 00 price forecasts from 146 participants in twelve experimental double auction m arkets with a cash reward structure are analyzed the forecasting objective is t hemean price over a sequence of trading periods governed by stationary market parameters the price forecasts are found to be inconsistent with strict muthian rational expectations and the extrapolative modelis not supported by the data however the forecasts generally support the adaptive expectations model copyright 1987 by ohio state university press

the marriage earnings premium as a distributed fixed effect wage equations using cross sectional data typically find an earnings premium in excess of 10 percent for married men one leading hypothesis for the premium is that marriage facilitates specialization that enables married men to become more productive than single men another is that the premium is attributable to an unobserved fixed effect married men possessing qualities that are valued in the labor market as well as the marriage market this paper suggests that the premium is attributable to an unobserved timedistributed fixed effect that emerges and grows with the approach of marriage and continues to grow for some years after marriage a similar distributed fixed effect is found in the case of women but it is smaller and declines after a few years of marriage the results appear to cast doubt on the specialization hypothesis

a near rational model of the business cycle with wage and price inertia this paper presents a model in which insignificantly suboptimal behavior causes aggregate demand shocks to have significant real effects the individual loss to agents with inertial price wage behavior is second order in terms of the parameter describing the shock while the effect on real economic variables is first order thus significant changes in business activity can be generated by anticipated money supply changes provided that some agents are willing to engage in nonmaximizing behavior which results in small losses

economic integration and the environment effects on members and non members the paper analyses the effects of economic integration and national environmental policies in a three country world there are two factors of production an environmental good and capital which is internationally mobile two of the countries create an internal market this is modelled by a reduction in mobility costs this process of economic integration leads to a relocation of the factors of production the welfare effects of factor relocation are analysed for different types of environmental policies special emphasis is placed on the issue of international externalities such as transboundary pollution spill overs

does household labour impact market wages this study investigates the hypothesis that women s greater home responsibilities contribute directly to their lower wages because household labour time reduces their market effort ols regressions show a significant negative effect of household labour hours on market wages for white married women but not for other groups of women single black or men regressions correcting for endogeneity of household hours in the wage equation or heterogeneity among women indicate there is no significant effect of household labour hours on wages for any demographic group these results suggest that the evidence in support of the hypothesis is not compelling

the necessity of delaying economic adjustment abstract i give an explanation for why agents react with a delay to decision and expectation parameters by showing that imperfect agents must adjust very slowly relative to optimally adjusting agents if they begin reacting as soon as the latter agents would react the results follow from the hypothesis of imperfect choice alone irrespective of whether there are any information search transaction or other costs of adjusting decisions the results thereby provide a general reason for observing inertially lagged behavior and also agree with recent asset market experiments whose dynamics are governed by adaptive rather than rational expectations

incentives and prices in an emissions trading scheme with updating abstract emissions trading schemes where allocations are based on updated baseline emissions give firms less incentive to reduce emissions for a given quota or allowance price nevertheless according to bohringer and lange on the design of optimal grandfathering schemes for emission allowances europ econ rev 49 2005 2041 2055 such allocation schemes are cost effective if the system is closed and allocation rules are identical across firms in this paper we show that the cost effective solution may be infeasible if marginal abatement costs grow too fast moreover if a price cap or banking borrowing is introduced the abatement profile is no longer the same as in the case with an auction or lump sum allocation in addition we show that with allocation based on updated emissions the quota price will always exceed marginal abatement costs possibly misguiding policy makers and investors about abatement costs numerical simulations indicate that the quota price most likely will be several times higher than marginal abatement costs unless a significant share of allowances is auctioned

transaction costs and tradeable permits abstract tradeable permit systems are at the center of current interest and activity in market based reforms of environmental policy because these systems can offer significant advantages over conventional approaches to pollution control unfortunately claims made for their relative cost effectiveness have often been exaggerated transaction costs which may be significant in these markets reduce trading levels and increase abatement costs in some cases equilibrium permit allocations and hence aggregate control costs are sensitive to initial permit distributions providing an efficiency justification for politicians typical focus on initial allocations

specialization then and now marriage children and the gender earnings gap across cohorts in this paper we examine the evolution of the gender gap associated with marriage and parental status comparing cohorts born between 1936 and 1985 the model of household specialization and division of labor introduced by becker posits that when forming households couples will exploit the gains from trade by having one spouse specialize in market work while the other specializes in household work given the historical advantage of men in the labor market the model predicts specialization by gender and therefore an earnings advantage for married men and an earnings disadvantage for married women is this model of specialization useful for understanding the evolution of the gender gap across generations of women and what about children academic papers have shown that wages of mothers are significantly lower than those of non mothers with similar human capital characteristics we do not attempt to build a structural model here but rather document how changing associations between marriage and earnings and between children and earnings have contributed to the gender gap in an accounting sense

origin of predictable behavior further modeling and applications economic theory is founded on the assumption that agents act as if they are able to maximize according to well behaved preferences regardless of how complex their decision problems might be consequently the theory has never investigated the consequences of a genuine gap between an agent s decision making competence and the difficulty of a decision problem called a c d gap in a recent paper 1983 hereafter called the origin paper i outlined a general theory for investigating the latter possibility a major theme was that recurrent pattern in behavior arises because of decision making uncertainty due to a c d gap so that uncertainty becomes the basic source of predictable behavior here i discuss certain theory topics that were only sketched in the origin paper and briefly suggest a few related applications to pursue these objectives i begin with a short restatement of the reliability condition introduced in the origin paper

the origin of predictable dynamic behavior abstract nonlinear dynamic theory implies optimal decisions often behave like random chaos such random target motion is impossible for imperfect agents to follow without error however they can still gradually approach the optimal target if and only if they partially adjust toward its perceived location so as to induce their behavior to converge to an equilibrium reducing dynamic errors through partial adjustment thereby induces a stable regularity in behavior that otherwise may never evolve this result agrees with the stability properties observed in experimental markets including cobweb auction and asset markets whose dynamics before reaching equilibrium exhibit adaptive rather than rational expectations

sources of bias in women s wage equations results using sibling data we use data on sisters to jointly address heterogeneity bias and endogeneity bias in estimates of wage equations for women this analysis yields evidence of biases in ols estimates of wage equations for white and black women some of which are detected only when the two sources of bias are addressed simultaneously for both white and black women there is evidence of upward bias in the estimated returns to schooling bias corrected estimates of the effect of marriage on wages for white women suggest a positive marriage premium we also use the sibling data to identify our models and test a number of other commonly used identifying assumptions as overidentifying restrictions