decision costs in legislative bargaining an experimental analysis we conduct an experiment to assess the effects of different decision rules on the costs of decision making in a multilateral bargaining situation specifically we compare the amount of costly delay observed in an experimental bargaining game under majority and unanimity rule our main finding is that individual subjects are more likely to reject offers under unanimity rule this higher rejection rate as well as the requirement that all subjects agree leads to more costly delay this result provides empirical support for a classic argument in favor of less than unanimity decision rules put forth by buchanan and tullock the calculus of consent logical foundations of constitutional democracy university of michigan press ann arbor 1962

measuring earnings inequality and median earnings in the tourism industry abstract the purpose of this paper is two fold to measure the degree of earnings inequality in tourism employees in south korea using the gini coefficient and the lorenz curve and to examine the level of earnings based on median earnings the results show that tourism generates a moderately equal distribution of earnings in general tourism performs earnings distribution better than secondary and tertiary industries but it performs poorly as compared with primary industry the results also indicate that tourism is more likely to improve living standards for the lower income class than secondary and tertiary industries the analysis of median earnings however indicates that tourism is a low wage industry the labor intensive nature of the tourism industry absorbing many unskilled and semi skilled workers might be attributed to its low wage structure it is interesting to note that tourism was found to be advantageous to female workers in terms of earnings inequality and the level of earnings

understanding the family gap in pay for women with children as the gender gap in pay between women and men has been narrowing the family gap in pay between mothers and nonmothers has been widening one reason may be the institutional structure in the united states which has emphasized equal pay and opportunity policies but not family policies in contrast to other countries that have implemented both the authors now have evidence on the links between one such family policy and women s pay recent research suggests that maternity leave coverage by raising women s retention after childbirth also raises women s levels of work experience job tenure and pay

marriage motherhood and wages we explore several problems in drawing causal inferences from cross sectional relationships between marriage motherhood and wages we find that heterogeneity leads to biased estimates of the direct effects of marriage and motherhood on wages i e effects net of experience and tenure first difference estimates reveal no direct effect of marriage or motherhood on women s wages we also find statistical evidence that experience and tenure may be endogenous variables in wage equations instrumental variables estimates suggest that both ordinary least squares cross sectional and first difference estimates understate the direct negative effect of children on wages

when does unreliable grid supply become unacceptable policy costs of power supply and outages in rural india abstract despite frequent blackouts and brownouts extension of the central grid remains the indian government s preferred strategy for the country s rural electrification policy this study reports an assessment that compares grid extension with distributed generation dg alternatives based on the subsidies they will necessitate and costs of service interruptions that are appropriate in the rural indian context using cross sectional household expenditure data and region fixed effects models average household demand is estimated the price elasticity of demand is found to be in the range of 0 3 to 0 4 interruption costs are estimated based on the loss of consumer surplus due to reduced consumption of electric lighting energy that results from intermittent power supply different grid reliability scenarios are simulated despite the inclusion of interruption costs standalone dg does not appear to be competitive with grid extension at distances of less than 17 km however backing up unreliable grid service with local dg plants is attractive when reliability is very poor even in previously electrified villages introduction of energy efficient lighting changes these economics and the threshold for acceptable grid unreliability significantly reduces a variety of polices to promote accelerated deployment and the wider adoption of improved end use efficiency warrant serious consideration

the effects of market organization on conspiracies in restraint of trade abstract mindful of the market structure conduct performance paradigm fundamental to industrial organization research this paper uses laboratory experimental techniques to study the impact of conspiratorial opportunities on market performance we compare posted offer markets where sellers but not buyers are all conspiratorial opportunities with observations from three control groups 1 posted offer markets without conspiratorial opportunities 2 double auction markets with conspiratorial opportunities and 3 posted offer markets with true single seller monopolists the basic conclusions generated by our experimental design are 1 seller conspiracies in posted offer markets tend to raise prices but not profits relative to similarly organized markets without conspiracies 2 posted offer conspiracies tend to generate higher prices but not profits than double auction conspiracies and 3 posted offer monopolies tend to generate higher profits but not prices then posted offer conspiracies

are you experienced british evidence on age earnings profiles using uk data evidence is provided that the widely used quadratic earnings function may fare badly as indicated by recent work in the usa using data from pooled time series of cross sections from the general household survey the suitability of the quadratic specification alongside higher order polynomials is investigated on samples of men and for the first time in work of this type women working full time it is found that the quadratic specification understates earnings growth at low levels of experience especially for those workers with few formal qualifications the usage of higher order polynomials provides a better fit

government turnover in parliamentary democracies in this paper we consider a dynamic model of government formation and termination in parliamentary democracies that accounts for the following phenomena 1 cabinet terminations due to replacement or early election 2 cabinet reshuf es 3 minority and surplus governments 4 the relative instability of minority governments

a bargaining model of collective choice we present a general model of legislative bargaining in which the status quo is an arbitrary point in a multidimensional policy space in contrast to other bargaining models the status quo is not assumed to be bad and delay may be pareto efficient we prove existence of stationary equilibria the possibility of equilibrium delay depends on four factors risk aversion of the legislators the dimensionality of the policy space the voting rule and the possibility of transfers across districts if legislators are risk averse if there is more than one policy dimension and if voting is by majority rule for example then delay will almost never occur in one dimension delay is possible if and only if the status quo lies in the core of the voting rule and then it is the only possible outcome this core selection result yields a game theoretic foundation for the well known median voter theorem our comparative statics analysis yield two noteworthy insights i if the status quo is close to the core t hen equilibrium policy outcomes will also be close to the core a moderate status quo produces moderate policy outcomes and ii if legislators are patient then equilibrium proposals will be close to the core legislative patience leads to policy moderation

inefficiency in legislative policymaking a dynamic analysis this paper develops an infinite horizon model of public spending and taxation in which policy decisions are determined by legislative bargaining the policy space incorporates both productive and distributive public spending and distortionary taxation the productive spending is investing in a public good that benefits all citizens e g national defense and the distributive spending is district specific transfers e g pork barrel spending investment in the public good creates a dynamic linkage across policymaking periods the analysis explores the dynamics of legislative policy choices focusing on the efficiency of the steady state level of

new evidence on sex segregation and sex differences in wages from matched employee employer data we use new matched employer employee data to estimate the contributions of sex segregation and wage differences by sex within occupation industry establishment and occupation establishment cells to the overall sex gap in wages in contrast to earlier data used to study this question our data cover all industries and occupations across all regions of the united states we find that segregation of women into lower paying occupations industries establishments and occupations within establishments accounts for a sizable fraction of the sex gap in wages nonetheless approximately one half of the sex gap in wages remains attributable to the individual s sex

earnings differentiation in the tourism industry gender human capital and socio demographic effects abstract this paper draws attention to a somewhat neglected field within tourism research namely the production side of tourism set within a human capital framework the purpose of the study is to examine if and how the variables education work experience and the socio demographic variables parenthood and marriage affect norwegian tourism employees annual wages in the 1994 2002 period furthermore the study specifically examines how the variables gender and time affect these wages among several findings four are of major importance 1 male tourism employees receive about 20 higher wages annually than their female counterparts ceteris paribus 2 there is a concave i e inverted u relationship between work experience and annual wages for both female and male employees but this pattern is much less distinct for females 3 both parenthood and marriage affect wages but their effects differ between male and female employees 4 all tourism employees experience a positive annual wage development in the period studied

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

why are the returns to schooling higher for women than for men many studies have found that the impact of schooling on earnings is greater for females than for males despite the fact that females tend to earn less both absolutely and controlling for personal characteristics this study investigates possible reasons for this effect using data from the national longitudinal survey of youth 1979 one explanation is that education appears to have a double effect on the earnings of women it increases their skills and productivity as it does with men and in addition it appears to reduce the gap in male and female earnings attributable to factors such as discrimination tastes and circumstances the latter appear to account for about half of the differential in the returns to schooling

gender and trade aspects of labour markets we provide a comprehensive up to date review of the large body of theory and evidence on the linkages between trade liberalisation and gender inequality in income as well as two of the latter s key underlying determinants wages and employment on balance the evidence for developing countries points to an overall beneficial impact of trade expansion on female employment both relative to male employment and in absolute terms although largely concentrated in unskilled manufacturing by contrast the bulk of the evidence suggests a widening gender wage gap as a result of freer trade

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

theory and experiments on spatial competition we present theoretical and experimental results on spatial competition between two firms firms choose locations simultaneously along a line representing a linear market identical consumers with non increasing demand functions are uniformly distributed along this line we solve for symmetric equilibrium payoffs in an infinitely repeated game for the case of linear demand and an arbitrary discount factor the set of equilibriums found includes both competitive and collusive payoffs in laboratory experiments in which the final period was unknown to the players in advance we observed both competitive and collusive outcomes non binding communication led to collusion

the economics of rural electrification projects abstract this paper focuses on the economics of rural electrification and project selection the broad criteria for preliminary screening of re projects are described in relation to national policy objectives the economic justification is the key step in the project processing cycle and depends on the present discounted value of benefits exceeding costs a comprehensive analytical model for identifying benefits is presented and the practical problems of evaluating them are described finally the paper contains the detailed economic evaluation of an re project in malaysia

separate and unequal occupation establishment sex segregation and the gender wage gap the authors report the first large scale empirical investigation of within job wage differences between men and women in the same occupation and establishment using data first on blue collar and clerical employees from 16 u s industries in 1974 83 and second on employees in 10 professional and administrative occupations the authors report three findings first wage differences at the occupation establishment level were small even without controls for individual level characteristics hence within job wage discrimination was much less important than occupation establishment segregation for observed wage differences second establishment segregation was an important cause although not as important as occupational segregation of wage differences third establishment segregation was extensive as was occupational segregation

wage differences in the hospitality sector abstract the article examines the origin of differences between wages in the hospitality sector and the rest of the private sector in spain the evidence obtained for the 2002 2010 period shows that the wage disadvantage of hospitality presents an increasing profile along the wage distribution so that it is particularly relevant for those earning comparatively higher salaries in contrast with other low wage sectors lower wages in hospitality are explained almost entirely by the specific characteristics of its workers and jobs particularly their lower educational qualifications and their higher presence in low skilled occupations and not by the existence of lower rewards to those characteristics highly qualified individuals are however an exception since they suffer a wage penalty for working in the sector furthermore the analysis shows that pay inequality is substantially lower in the hospitality sector and that it is not due to the relative characteristics of its workers and jobs

evaluation of choices for sustainable rural electrification in developing countries a multicriteria approach abstract rural electrification re can be modelled as a multifactorial task connected to a large number of variables decision makers need to choose the appropriate options by considering not only the techno economic competitiveness but also socio cultural dynamics and environmental consequences making the task intricate many rural electrification projects have failed due to lack of attention to the issues beyond financial and technical dimensions this paper presents a standardized approach for decision making concerning the extension of electricity services to rural areas this approach first determines whether the supply provision should be grid expansion or off grid on the basis of levelized cost of delivered electricity if the grid expansion is found nonviable over off grid options then a multicriteria decision aiding tool smaa 2 stochastic multicriteria acceptability analysis will evaluate off grid technologies by aggregating 24 criteria values while applying this approach the delivered costs of electricity by the grid in remote areas within the 1 25 km distances vary in a range of 0 10 7 85 us kw h depending on the line lengths and load conditions in the off grid evaluation the solar pv photovoltaic and biogas plants are found as the most preferable alternatives with 59 and 41 acceptability in their first rank respectively

viewpoint male female wage differentials how can that be abstract the paper outlines the main empirical procedures that are used to document the male female wage differential and the extent to which it reflects discrimination it then discusses the evidence on male female wage differentials their existence the extent to which they reflect discrimination their changes over time and the factors that influence the gap particular attention is paid to more recent studies that control for a wider range of conventionally unobserved factors theoretical perspectives are then outlined focusing on the issue of how discriminatory wage differentials can survive given the forces of competition the impacts of policy initiatives are also discussed

philippine electric demand and equivalence scales the literature on residential electricity demand in developing countries is small based principally on latin american experience and with the exception of westley 24 25 employs highly aggregated data price elasticities are generally found to be less than u s elasticities 26 39 one explanation by westley is that energy substitution possibilites may be more limited in latin american countries he further suggests that since the household budget share of electricity is smaller in these countries the slutsky equation would imply an own price elasticity closer to the compensated elasticity and less influenced by income elasticity as a refinement westley also suggests that substitute fuels are more available in rural versus urban settings and that as a result price elasticity may be larger empirically however he found no difference 25 257 261 26 125 income elasticity findings on the other hand are varied pindyck s 17 evidence and inferences are that these elasticities are larger in developing than developed countries and in both cases decline with per capita income bemdt and samaniego 3 find results for mexico that agree in the first part with pindyck in fact when electric system connection rates are considered they suggest that their findings show an income elasticity greater than one 2

communication in multilateral bargaining one of the most robust phenomena in the experimental literature on multilateral bargaining is the failure of proposers to extract equilibrium rents however all previous experiments have overlooked the fact that outside the lab committee members are allowed to and do engage in sometimes intense communication processes prior to voting on a proposal we conduct an experimental test of the baron ferejohn model in which we allow committee members to engage in unrestricted cheap talk communication before a proposal is submitted we find that proposers extract a significantly higher share of resources when communication is allowed communication increases proposer power through two channels first it mitigates the uncertainty surrounding the amount a coalition member is willing to accept second it allows potential coalition members to compete for a place in the coalition by lowering this stated price