household demand in rural china a two stage les aids model a complete demand system of chinese rural households is estimated using a two stage les aids model and pooled provincial and time series data from 1982 to 1990 for commodity groups food clothing fuel housing and other commodities demand is price inelastic housing and other commodities are luxury goods while clothing and food are necessities within the food group price elasticities range from 0 005 to 0 63 expenditure elasticities are lower for grains and higher for meat tobacco and alcohol the results imply a gap between food demand and supply growth therefore china will face pressure to import food

indices of household welfare and the value of leisure time i introduction a true leisure inclusive welfare index indicates the compensatory change in wage rates goods consumption or nonlabor income required to enable the household to attain some reference period utility given an exogenous change in wage rates and prices although these indices are theoretical constructs for the measurement of individual or household welfare changes empirical analyses of these indices have relied upon aggregate time series data these data provide information on national average changes in wage rates goods consumption and hours worked but do not capture changes in hours worked at the household level due to increased labor market participation while the entry of many new part time workers into the labor market may decrease the national average of hours worked per week there may be a decrease in leisure for many households in addition the aggregate time series approach ignores differences across households in demographic attributes and the occupations and industries in which household members are employed to address these issues two large cross sections of household data the 1972 and 1980 bls consumer expenditure surveys u s bureau of labor statistics 1978 were used to calculate three types of leisure inclusive welfare indices the real wage index goods consumption and nonlabor income indices for each of six household demographic groups households comprising a husband and wife with zero or more dependent non working children were considered as the basic decisionmaking units in this household approach two real wage indices could be constructed that of the husband and that of the wife since the labor services of the two individuals may be valued differently the remainder of the paper is organized as follows in section ii the leisure inclusive welfare indices are developed theoretically the fixed weight bounds on the true indices and the limitations of these indices in the context of a more general but as yet undeveloped intertemporal behavior framework is discussed in section iii the data and empirical results are discussed and analyzed a summary and conclusions follow in section iv along with suggestions for future research

sustainability of diets from concepts to governance abstract the production of food for consumption produces environmental stress and raises ethical issues as humans are able to choose different foodstuffs in their diets food consumption guidance may have large benefits for the environment meat consumption is often identified as the most environmentally harmful foodstuff to produce and animal welfare and rights issues are receiving ever more attention by combining both issues this article proposes a conceptual framework for combining alternative dietary habits and agricultural production styles in general environmental policy strategies two means to lower meat consumption are proposed 1 redeveloping the pigouvian food taxation system introduced by goodland 1997 in which foodstuffs are taxed according to their environmental burden an elaborated version could also include an ethical tax that incorporates consumers attitudes on animal welfare and a coefficient that takes into account the inherent value of animals 2 taking the composition of a national stockpile as a starting point and designing the agricultural production system from a combined environmental and ethical perspective in this system the environmentally and ethically preferable foodstuffs would be purchased by the government and sold to the global markets the premiums between these two prices would constitute the subsidies for the national production

substitution between goods and leisure in a developing country the paper explores the substitutability between goods female leisure and male leisure we find that goods and leisure are not separable we then adapt the almost ideal demand system aids to include leisure in the system in the same manner as commodities the model is not sensitive to variations in the assumption of total time available for each individual s work and leisure results from sri lanka indicate the marginal propensity to consume leisure is quite high especially in rural areas this finding has important implications for transfer programs designed to raise food consumption a somewhat surprising complementarity between male and female leisure was also observed a number of goods were found to be complements to both male and female leisure

the welfare effects of disarmament on the united states under nato and the warsaw pact this paper develops a model of disarmament by incorporating rationing theory into the economic theory of alliance in order to provide an econometric measure of welfare gain from a disarmament treaty the author employs the cost functions predicated on rationed and unrationed demand systems by combining the economic theory of foreign aid with that of alliance the author examines the impact of disarmament on the developed economies foreign aid to developing countries as a peace dividend the model is applied to the case of the u s economy under mutual disarmament between nato and the warsaw pact copyright 1996 by mit press

the intergenerational transmission of employers we find that about 40 of a cohort of young canadian men have been employed at some time with an employer for which their father also worked and 6 9 have the same employer in adulthood the intergenerational transmission of employers is positively related to paternal earnings particularly at the very top of the earnings distribution and to the presence of self employment income and the number of employers with which the father has had direct contact it has an important influence on nonlinear patterns in the intergenerational elasticity of earnings

fiscal and spending behavior of local governments identification of price effects when prices are not observed this paper analyzes local public fiscal andspending behavior in a setting where localgovernments represented by the dominantparty or coalition are treated as utilitymaximizing agents the econometricanalysis which is based on a modifiedversion of eles recognizes total spendingas well as total income as endogenousvariables identification of the priceeffects is achieved by utilizing data onenvironmental cost factors and localtastes the performance of the estimatedmodel is investigated by testing itsability to make out of sample predictionsof local government behavior

labour supply incentives and the taxation of family income taxing family income richard blundell and ian walker will lower marginal rates of income tax increase incentives to work the traditional theoretical argument ignores the fact that many individuals are members of households with more than one potential participant in paid employment the theory of optimal income tax is utilized to argue that the tax system should discriminate between individuals in the same household if their labour supply responses are different empirically the response of labour supply to changes in after tax wages is largest for secondary workers particularly married women hence the largest beneficial incentive effect is obtained if such individuals face lower tax rates since these individuals typically have below average pre tax earnings this suggests a simple way to implement our proposal establish a progressive income tax with individual earnings as the basis of assessment this might have additional advantages of fairness but its primary purpose would be to ensure that low earning but highly responsive individuals face low marginal tax rates while high earning but relatively unresponsive individuals face higher marginal tax rates contrary to popular wisdom a flat rate tax system would be less favourable for work incentives we illustrate this theoretical argument using an empirical model of labour supply embedded in a micro computer programme capable of simulating alternative tax systems

why are more women working in britain in britain female labor force participation rose steadily from the second world war to 1977 to explain this we estimate a pooled time series cross section supply function for single year age groups of women the life cycle pattern is explained quite well by the presence of children at a second stage we try to explain the rising level of the cohort intercepts estimated at the first stage real wage growth may be an explanatory factor as cross section evidence suggests it should be finally we point to the 15 rise in the relative pay of women in the mid 1970s caused by the equal pay act this did not cause the expected decline in the relative demand for female employees

horizontal equity income taxation and self selection with an application to income tax credits abstract this paper investigates the relationship between utilitarianism and horizontal equity in models of income taxation in particular and self selection in general an example involving well behaved individual preferences is constructed in which a maximization of a utilitarian social welfare function leads via income taxation to horizontal inequities sufficient conditions for utilitarianism to bring horizontal equity are derived the results are applied to the question of whether income tax credits are an appropriate way to treat differences in family size

engel curves for fair trade consumption and development perspectives for producers evidence from data on real fairtrade purchases while fairtrade sales have exhibited two digit growth rates over recent decades their capacity to become large enough to generate substantial gains for producers is still uncertain estimating fai

the employment of married women in the united kingdom 1970 83 the proportion of married women in employment in the united kingdom grew rapidly during the 1970s rising from around 50 to 60 per cent the paper investigates this change using a time series of cross sections from the family expenditure survey an attempt is made to assess how much of the change was due to trends in the observable characteristics of the population and what part was played by changes in behavioural and other factors reflected in the coefficients of the model a technique of growth accounting is proposed and used to this purpose excerpt

local governments in kind transfers and economic inequality abstract we examine how in kind transfers provided by local governments affect economic inequality the allocation of in kind transfers to households and the adjustment for differences in needs are derived from a model of local government spending behavior the model distinguishes between fixed and variable costs in production as well as mandatory programmatic spending components versus discretionary spending on different service sectors and target groups to estimate the model we combine norwegian data from municipal accounts and administrative registers for the period 1982 2013 we find that economic inequality is considerably lower when taking in kind transfers into account while the poor benefit from receiving a relatively large share of public services the equalizing effect of in kind transfers tends to be smaller than the equalizing contribution from public cash transfers when examining the time trends in inequality we find that local governments attenuated the growth in cash income inequality by re allocating in kind transfers to low income families this reduction in inequality is mostly due to changes in spending priorities across service sectors and target groups while the contribution from re allocation of resources across municipalities is much smaller

estimation of a labour supply model with censoring due to unemployment and underemployment this study proposes and implements a method of labour supply estimation which is appropriate when the sample contains unemployed and underemployed workers the estimation method consists of excluding unemployed and underemployed workers from the sample and then using to avoid selection bias an extension of heckman s approach to the case where two correlated selection rules generate the sample hausman s specification test is then used to determine whether ignoring constrained workers has led to biases in traditional labour supply estimates and the empirical results suggest that previous estimates of several important parameters are biased since the biases go in the direction that would be predicted by the hypothesis that the unemployed and underemployed are constrained the results support this hypothesis

price and income elasticities of residential energy demand in germany we apply a quadratic expenditure system to estimate price and expenditure elasticities of residential energy demand electricity and heating in germany using official expenditure data from 1993 to 2008 we estimate an expenditure elasticity for electricity of 0 3988 and of 0 4055 for space heating the own price elasticity for electricity is 0 4310 and 0 5008 in the case of space heating disaggregation of households by expenditure and demographic composition reveals that the behavioural response to energy price changes is weaker stronger for low income top income households there are considerable economies of scale in residential energy use but scale effects are not well approximated by the new oedc equivalence scale real increases in energy prices show a regressive pattern of incidence implying that the welfare consequences of direct energy taxation are larger for low income households the application of zero elasticities in assessments of welfare consequences of energy taxation strongly underestimates potential welfare effects the increase in inequality is 22 smaller when compared to the application of rich and disaggregated behavioural response patterns as estimated in this paper

modelling the joint determination of household labour supplies and commodity demands in addition to choosing the allocation of total expenditure between commodities households may also be able to make decisions over the allocation of their time between market work and leisure in both theoretical and empirical work it has often been the case that these decisions have been analysed separately in this paper we stress the theoretical attractions of considering the joint determination of the allocation of time between work and leisure and the allocation of total expenditure between commodities in a utility maximising framework using a sample of individual households we attempt to evaluate the empirical importance of the joint determination model over the separate determination of labour supplies and commodity demands our approach follows that of abbott and ashenfelter i976 phlips i978 barnett i979 deaton and muellbauer i980 and atkinson and stern i980 here we pay particular attention to the following four important aspects of household decision making over commodity demand and labour supply the first concerns the commonly assumed restriction on the household s preferences of weak separability between goods and leisure this assumption allows the estimation of commodity demand systems and engel curves that exclude wage rate variables in cross section household budget data with large variation in wage rates across the sample the invalidity of this assumption would involve a serious mis specification any correlation between the excluded wage variable and the included price income and demographic variables would lead to biased parameter estimates and hence biased estimated elasticities similarly this assumption allows the estimation of labour supply curves that exclude relative price variables and its invalidity could produce biased labour supply elasticities a second aspect of household decision making which we wish to highlight arises from the suspicion commonly alluded to in labour economics texts that primary male workers may not be free to choose their hours of work thus we estimate a matched pair of rationed and unrationed systems following the work of neary and roberts i 980 and deaton and muellbauer i 979 the separability restriction is not unrelated to this point since without it we will see that the rationed hours of work enter demand systems in a complex fashion in effect

a micro analysis of business travel demand this study tests two hypothesis 1 that tax deductibility and the dual benefit nature of goods on the business pleasure borderline increases the demand for business travel and 2 that this dual benefit decreases price elasticity the study uses expenditure microdata and contrasts the behaviour of business travellers and pleasure travellers both groups are assumed to have indentical tastes but the expenditure behaviour of business travellers is modified by the role of the business trip as a factor of production the linear expenditure system les allocation model is applied to expenditures on individual goods at a particular tourist destination business travellers are shown to have higher expenditures than pleasure travellers for food lodging and local transportation minimum quantities estimated by the les are also higher for business travellers uncompensated price elasticities of business travellers are significantly smaller than that of pleasure travellers for local transportation clothing a

aggregate consumer behaviour and the measurement of inequality this paper presents an approach to inequality measurement based on an econometric model of aggregate consumer behaviour the novel feature of this model is that systems of individual demand functions can be recovered uniquely from the system of aggregate demand functions we present methods for evaluating social welfare based on an explicit social welfare function this social welfare function incorporates measures of individual welfare based on indirect utility functions for all consumer units we develop indexes of inequality based on actual and potential levels of social welfare

strategic public policy around population thresholds abstract political economists have long maintained that politicians respond to both re election and financial incentives this article contributes to the latter literature by analysing whether when and how local office holders respond to the economic incentives embedded in exogenously imposed population thresholds leading to an increased number and remuneration of local politicians building on insights from the urban economics and public finance literatures we argue that local politicians may strategically adjust fiscal and housing policies to stimulate in migration when approaching a population threshold where their remuneration increases using data from all 589 belgian municipalities over the period 1977 2016 our results confirm that approaching important population thresholds causes lower local tax rates and the granting of additional building permits particularly for apartments these policy changes occur early in the election cycle and at least for housing policy are restricted to incumbent mayors themselves expecting to benefit from crossing the population threshold

is there an animal welfare kuznets curve abstract the concept of a kuznets curve has been applied to income inequality and to the environment the kuznets curve takes an inverted u shape with income or gdp on the x axis and environmental degradation or inequality on the y axis it is hypothesized here that an animal welfare kuznets curve may exist with harm to animals initially rising with economic growth followed by improvement in the treatment of animals after some peak value why an animal welfare kuznets curve might theoretically exist is explored empirical evidence supporting or refuting the existence of such a curve is also examined the evidence is both quantitative and qualitative in nature since some issues in welfare cannot be easily quantified the evidence and theoretical presentation explores multiple areas of concern to animals including animal agriculture the use of animals in laboratories companion animals pets and the fur industry the conclusion is that evidence is mixed with some measures indicating a turning point while other measures showing no sign of peaking improving animal welfare

self recruitment in the legal profession we argue that lawyers sons follow in their parents footsteps because the occupation lends itself to low cost transfer of relevant skills and knowledge from one generation to the next especially in the context of the family law practice analysis of project talent data reveals that knowledge about the law is transmitted from lawyers to their children and that this transmitted knowledge is a significant factor in a son s decision to follow in his father s legal footsteps second generation lawyers who receive these human capital transfers experience greater earnings than lawyers who have not received such transfers

family model of contributions to non profit organizations and labour supply in this article a model is presented in which the family decides the labour supply of both spouses and their time donations to non profit organizations for the estimation spanish data was used which showed that family size and pre school children influence decisions made about time distribution of husband and wife women with fewer family responsibilities work longer hours and donate more time whilst the effect on men is the contrary also monetary donations by the family are directly related to time donations by the spouses

consumer behaviour theory and empirical evidence a survey this survey is designed to emphasize the relationship between empirical a nd theoretical considerations in the analysis of consumer behavior a lthough it focuses primarily on analysis at the individual or micro l evel it tries where possible to draw implications for the estimati on of aggregate relationships the importance of micro level analysis stems from the rapid expansion in available panel and survey data se ts this development has generated its own theoretical and empirical issues many of which are raised in this survey copyright 1988 by royal economic society

the impact of tax reforms designed to encourage healthier grain consumption in this paper we simulate the effects of tax reforms aimed at encouraging healthier grain consumption we use a rich data set on household grain consumption in 2003 from the market research institute gfk sweden combined with information on the nutritional content of the consumption we estimate behavioral parameters which are used to simulate the impact on the average household of tax reforms entailing either a subsidy on commodities particularly rich in fiber or a subsidy of the fiber density in grain products our results suggest that to direct the fiber intake towards nutritional recommendations reforms with a substantial impact on consumer prices are required regardless of the type of subsidy implemented the increase in the intake of fiber is accompanied by unwanted increases in nutrients that are often overconsumed fat salt and sugar funding the subsidies by taxing these nutrients or less healthy commodities helps to counteract such developments

the joint demand for health care leisure and commodities implications for health care finance and access in vietnam abstract this paper explores linkages between the demand for health care providers and the consumption of food non food goods and leisure in vietnam using a mixed continuous discrete dependent variable model cross price elasticities calculated from the model suggest there are strong substitution effects between health care leisure and certain commodities the model allows us to explore the implications of replacing user fees with alternative forms of health care finance such as commodity taxes in particular the results suggest financing public health care services with a non food sales tax rather than user fees would be more progressive and would improve access to care

intergenerational mobility in the very long run florence 1427 2011 we examine intergenerational mobility in the very long run across generations that are six centuries apart we exploit a unique dataset containing detailed information at the individual level for all people living in the italian city of florence in 1427 these individuals have been associated using their surnames with their pseudo descendants living in florence in 2011 we find that earnings elasticity is about 0 04 much higher than predicted by traditional models of intergenerational mobility we also find an even stronger role for real wealth inheritance and evidence of persistence in belonging to certain elite professions our results are confirmed when we account for the quality of the pseudo links and when we address the potential selectivity bias due to the differential survival rates across surnames we argue that the quasi immobility of pre industrial society and the positional advantages in the access to certain professions might explain in part the long lasting effects of ancestors socioeconomic status

whose preferences are revealed in hours of work it has become orthodox in economics research to interpret the association between hourly earnings and working hours as the expression of the preferences of workers this convention originated in h gregg lewis explanation for the decline in hours of work since the nineteenth century his explanation rested on an explicit resolution of the identification problem inherent in any quantity hours price wage relation for over 40 years researchers have neglected this identification problem with the result that the findings in the purported labor supply literature are of questionable value jel j22 j23 c13

income risk the tax benefit system and the demand for children because children represent an irreversible commitment parents might hedge against higher income risk by having fewer children we show that under plausible assumptions recent increases in income risk might have reduced prudent parents desired fertility responses to this via the tax benefit system are considered introducing an expected revenue neutral transfer cum child benefit system under proportional taxation which lets the government share the household s income risk increases desired fertility for parents who would choose to have small families in this system s absence pound for pound the targeted child benefit enhances fertility more than the lump sum transfer

inside the family firm the role of families in succession decisions and performance this paper uses a unique dataset from denmark to investigate the impact of family characteristics in corporate decision making and the consequences of these decisions on firm performance we focus on the decision to appoint either a family or an external chief executive officer ceo the paper uses variation in ceo succession decisions that result from the gender of a departing ceo s first born child this is a plausible instrumental variable iv as male firstchild firms are more likely to pass on control to a family ceo relative to female first child firms but the gender of a first child is unlikely to affect firms outcomes we find that family successions have a large negative causal impact on firm performance operating profitability on assets falls by at least four percentage points around ceo transitions our iv estimates are significantly larger than those obtained using ordinary least squares furthermore we show that family ceo underperformance is particularly large for firms in high growth industries and for relatively large firms overall the empirical results demonstrate that professional non family ceos provide extremely valuable services to the organizations they head

fertility and the tax benefit system a reconsideration of the theory of family taxation the author examines the simultaneous nature of the decision to have children the decision to spend money on them and the decision to seek employment it will be argued that the children income trade off emphasised by the present paper is more relevant to most family decisions than the income leisure trade off on which much of the policy debate has been centred in order to do that we shall bring together the recently developed economic theory of the family or new home economics with the microeconomic branch of the theory of public finance a model of family choice is developed the main message of the present paper is that if as the evidence suggests parents have some control over the number of children they put into the world then the effect of taxes and subsidies on the familys allocation of time and money will be generally weaker and in some respects the opposite of what it would be if the number of children were physiologically constrained or exogenously given another is that if parents derive utility from having children this has to be taken into account in any welfare calculation fertility may thus affect the design of optimal policy in two ways indirectly through its effect on market behaviour and directly through its effect on welfare excerpt

the efficiency of housing search previous research in the housing market has largely focused on housing market outcomes e g the quantity of housing services demanded or supplied or the determination of equilibrium prices scant attention has been directed at the processes producing these outcomes recently economists have developed models of buyer and seller search processes in housing markets 6 22 but almost no empirical testing of these models has been done the importance of search in economic markets has been discussed by lippman and mccall 15 the difficulties encountered by deterministic theories of economic markets in explaining different prices for identical commodities and persistent positive levels of unemployed resources are overcome when search is introduced search may be of even greater importance in housing markets than in most other economic markets housing generally accounts for the largest item of consumption for most households for homeowners housing is usually the household s largest asset housing is a heterogeneous commodity that is traded in highly decentralized markets 2 the costs of moving can be substantial reducing the gains from relocation the consumption of housing also involves externalities that add to the heterogeneity of the consumption bundle finally recent theoretical work by courant 6 suggests that the rational search behavior of households facing discrimination in housing markets might act to perpetuate adverse market conditions facing such households given the importance of housing as a consumption commodity and as an asset and the above characteristics of housing and housing markets previous descriptive examinations

intergenerational occupational mobility in great britain and the united states since 1850 abstract the us tolerates more inequality than europe and believes its economic mobility is greater than europe s though they had roughly equal rates of intergenerational occupational mobility in the late twentieth century we extend this comparison into the nineteenth century using 10 000 nationally representative british and us fathers and sons the us was more mobile than britain through 1900 so in the experience of those who created the us welfare state in the 1930s the us had indeed been exceptional the us mobility lead over britain was erased by the 1950s as us mobility fell from its nineteenth century levels jel j62 n31 n32 n33 n34

the demand for non durable goods and endogenous labour supply cointegration procedures are used to estimate and test a model in which the demand for non durable consumption goods depends on relative prices the real wage rate and real full income the estimated parameters are plausible but the homogeneity lack of money illusion condition is rejected

a generalization of working s model abstract working s 1943 model states that budget shares are linear functions of the logarithm of income it implies constant differences between corresponding marginal and budget shares a one parameter generalization is proposed which allows each marginal share to be a linear function of the corresponding budget share this model can be further extended with one extra parameter so that all goods are either specific substitutes or specific complements

possibilities for including the opportunity cost of time in recreation demand systems recreation demand modelers have attempted to identify and incorporate the opportunity cost of an individual s time in travel and on site in the model larson 1993b focused on the value of leisure time in a model where individuals face a fixed work week in this paper we examine the connection between labor supply and recreation demands and focus on conditional demand systems we illustrate that corner solution models are not needed to explain several interesting time related recreation issues

on the optimal taxation of two person households abstract this paper generalises the optimal commodity tax formulae for households containing one person to cover the empirically relevant case of two person households we provide an appropriate framework for the empirical estimation of the optimal tax structure and argue that this may be largely determined by female labour supply behaviour

an emprical model of the demand for a varied diet this study attempts to measure some aspects of the household s demand for a varied die by invesigaing how he number of individual foods consumed b he household is affeced b is preferences and food expendiure a heoriical model suggesed b household production theory is adopted to empirical data from a cross section of households it is found that the number of individual foods consumed is strongly responsive to househjold expenditure on all foods

allocation inflexibilities female labor supply and housing assets accumulation are women working to pay the mortgage this article uses data from the 1986 canadian family expenditures survey to estimate a life cycle consistent model of household labor supply and commodity demand that incorporates a mortgage qualification constraint based on earnings both the parametric and nonparametric implications of the model suggest that the labor supply of a nontrivial percentage of married women is constrained by mortgage commitments the results of generalized selectivity models of female labor force participation and labor supply show that the positive effect of a high debt service ratio exceeds the negative effect of young children

the efficiency of demand oriented housing programs generalizing from experimental findings typical production oriented housing programs offer potential recipients a highly limited set of previously unattainable commodity bundles from the household s viewpoint such programs have been highly inefficient from society s viewpoint such housing programs are generally horizontally inequitable and inefficient given that housing programs are not likely to be fully cashed out and incorporated into general income maintenance could housing programs be restructured to increase their efficiency this paper examines this question results indicate that demand oriented housing programs are substantially more efficient than are production oriented programs in fact in the aggregate the former programs approach unrestricted cash payments in their transfer efficiency

carbon tax simulations using a household demand model abstract the main objective of this paper is to analyse consumer response and welfare effects due to changes in energy or environmental policy to achieve this objective we formulate and estimate an econometric model for non durable consumer demand in sweden that utilises micro and macro data in the simulations we consider two revenue neutral scenarios that both imply a doubling of the co2 tax one that returns the revenues in the form of a lower vat and one that subsidise public transport one conclusion from the simulations is that the co2 tax has regional distribution effects in the sense that household living in sparsely populated areas carry a larger share of the tax burden

modelling demand systems with demographic effects based on the modifying function approach abstract we follow review of economic studies 52 1985 1 approach to modify the standard consumer demand theory so that socio demographic variables can be formally incorporated into the demand systems our modified theory not only includes all previous approaches to this problem as special cases but also allows the useful interpretations of household production and subsistence expenditure

on using linear regressions in welfare economics this article consists of two parts the first part shows that the ordinary least squares regression coefficient is a weighted average of slopes between adjacent sample points when applied to a linear regression with income as the independent variable the regression coefficient depends heavily on the slopes of high income groups the weight of the highest income decile may well exceed that of the other nine deciles this may be undesirable especially if the regression is used for welfare analysis because the marginal propensities to consume attributed to the commodities are determined by the high income groups the second part of the article proposes alternative estimators the extended gini estimators that enable investigators to control the weighting scheme and to incorporate their social views into the weighting scheme of the estimators

sensitivity of optimal commodity taxes to relaxing leisure goods separability and to the wage rate abstract this paper uses a new labour augmented demand functional form to calculate optimal commodity taxes for india the optimal taxes which are far from uniform are extremely sensitive to deviation from leisure goods separability and to variation in the wage rate parameter

a matter of opinion how ecological and neoclassical environmental economists and think about sustainability and economics abstract the differing paradigms of ecological and neoclassical environmental economics have been described in various articles and books and are also embedded in different professional associations however we cannot take for granted that the paradigm debates described in the literature are actually mirrored in exactly the same way in the perceptions and opinions of researchers looking at sustainability from an economic perspective this paper presents empirical results from a german case study on how economists and others involved in sustainability research from different schools of thought think about the issues of sustainability and economics how they group around these issues how they feel about the current scientific divide and what they expect to be future topics of sustainability research we analyze the data using cluster analysis based on a literature survey we generated forty sustainability economics related statements and asked 196 sustainability researchers about their degree of agreement or disagreement with these statements in evaluating our survey results we discuss to what extent the clusters that we identified do or do not represent the two schools of thought of ecological and neoclassical environmental economics we also propose some fields of research that can help to bridge the gaps amongst sustainability economics researchers while clearly marking others that are more suitable for a scientific competition of ideas key results of the study are we identify two primary scientific clusters one clearly confirming the existence of the ecological economics school of thought and the other largely capturing the neoclassical environmental view yet there are some surprising exceptions both schools of thought share a conceptual definition of sustainability that is integrative in considering ecological societal and economic dimensions three pillar concept and is geared at preserving the development potentials of society we also find a shared critique of pure economic growth strategies in our sample these shared opinions may provide bridging concepts between the schools of thought also both clusters agree with respect to a wide range of future fields of sustainability economics research yet the research agenda of the ecological economics cluster contains a large number of additional topics primarily related to social distributional and evolutionary aspects of sustainable development strong divides between the clusters that seem to be more suitable for a scientific competition of ideas are primarily related to the question of how to achieve sustainability including appropriate environmental policies

recovering individual preferences for non market goods a collective travel cost model traditional recreation demand models do not make a distinction between a household and an individual as the reference decision making unit thus assuming that a family maximizes a single utility function even if the family consists of different individuals such models ignore the possibility of family members divergent preferences for non market goods this study proposes a novel approach the collective travel cost model ctcm to eliciting individual preferences for a non market good such as a recreation site by using revealed preference data this approach accounts for the intra household resource allocation and the role of each household member s preferences we show that the collective travel cost model can be applied to estimating a recreation demand model that yields individual welfare estimates appropriate for policy analysis of non market goods such as the willingness to pay to access a recreation site we find that how resources are distributed within the household reflects significant differences in welfare measures

a cross country tabulation of own price elasticities of demand abstract this paper tabulates frisch slutsky and cournot own price elasticities for each of 10 goods at the per capita real income levels of 30 countries ranging from india to the united states

the ces utility function non linear budget constraints and labour supply results on female participation and hours the most recent efforts in the study of labour supply decisions have concentrated on the estimation of explicit utility indices as a means to overcome the specification and endogeneity problems created by non linear budget constraints the presence of non convexities and the interest in making welfare comparisons between individuals are additional reasons that make the use of explicit utility functions in either direct or indirect form an essential requirement for labour supply studies it is therefore important to consider carefully the available possibilities from a utility index we want flexibility and ease of estimation the stonegeary function has proved its relative worth in consumption studies but its performance has been disappointing when leisure is incorporated into the set of commodities abbot and ashenfelter i976 found that for part of their sample estimated available time was less than hours worked and these results have pervasively reappeared in subsequent studies using this function hausman i980 has recently proposed a utility function which yields a linear hours function this is an important contribution which facilitates the task of estimation enormously this paper argues that the ces utility function despite not generating a linear hours function is also very convenient for estimation purposes in fact it is shown below that to estimate the parameters of the utility function there is no need whatsoever for any explicit hours function labour supply responses by married women have been previously estimated with british data but none of the available results has taken full account of the joint decision on participation and hours and of the non linear shape of the budget constraint that the tax system generates layard et al i980 consider the joint decision in their estimation procedure but ignore the tax system greenhalgh i980 takes into account the non linearity of the budget constraint but estimates labour supply responses by a method which treats participation and hours of work as separate and independent decisions in the present paper on the other hand using an explicit utility index we propose an estimation method which takes into account both the tax system and the joint hours participation decision

dynasties in professions and the role of rents and regulation evidence from italian pharmacies abstract this paper provides causal evidence concerning the role of rents in explaining dynasties in professions it focuses on the italian pharmacist labor market and exploits discontinuities established by law in the relationship between the number of pharmacies that should serve a city and the population using a regression discontinuity design it shows that a reduction in rent proxied by the pharmacy to population ratio has a significant and negative impact on the propensity of pharmacists children to follow their parents career in contrast pharmacy rents do not affect the career choices of non pharmacists children who face higher entry barriers i e they do not inherit the family business further evidence shows that rents and lower exposure to competition are associated with stronger family ties also among other professions and within firms

demographic variables in demand analysis in this paper the authors discuss five procedures for incorporating demographic variables into theoretically plausible demand systems translating scaling and the gorman reverse gorman and implicit prais houthakker procedures these five procedures are used to incorporate a single demographic variable the number of children in a household into the generalized ces demand system using household budget data for the united kingdom for the period 1966 1972 excerpt

food and life cycle energy inputs consequences of diet and ways to increase efficiency food consumption is one of the most polluting everyday activities when impacts during product life cycles are considered greenhouse gas emissions from the food sector are substantial and need to be lowered to stabilise climate change here we present an inventory of life cycle energy inputs for 150 food items available in sweden and discuss how energy efficient meals and diets can be composed energy inputs in food life cycles vary from 2 to 220 mj per kg due to a multitude of factors related to animal or vegetable origin degree of processing choice of processing and preparation technology and transportation distance daily total life cycle energy inputs for diets with a similar dietary energy consumed by one person can vary by a factor of four from 13 to 51 mj current swedish food consumption patterns result in life cycle energy inputs ranging from 6900 to 21 000 mj per person and year choice of ingredients and gender differences in food consumption patterns explain the differences up to a third of the total energy inputs is related to snacks sweets and drinks items with little nutritional value it is possible to compose a diet compatible with goals for energy efficiency and equal global partition of energy resources however such a diet is far from the swedish average and not in line with current trends

green recovery policies for the covid 19 crisis modelling the impact on the economy and greenhouse gas emissions the covid 19 pandemic induces the worst economic downturn since the second world war requiring governments to design large scale recovery plans to overcome this crisis this paper quantitatively assesses the potential of government investments in eco friendly construction projects to boost the economy and simultaneously realise environmental gains through reduced energy consumption and related greenhouse gas emissions the analysis uses a computable general equilibrium model that examines the macroeconomic impact of the covid 19 crisis in a small open economy belgium subsequently the impact of the proposed policy is assessed through comparative analysis for macroeconomic parameters as well as co2 equivalent emissions for four scenarios our findings demonstrate that the covid 19 pandemic damages economies considerably however the reduction in emissions is less than proportionate still well designed public policies can reverse this trend achieving both economic growth and a disproportionally large decrease in emissions moreover the positive effect of such a decoupling policy on gdp is even stronger during the pandemic than compared to the pre covid 19 period this is the result of a targeted investment induced green transition towards low energy intensive economic activities finally this paper describes how the net effect on the government budget is positive through the indirect gains of the economic uptake

determinants of price elasticities for private labels and national brands of cheese an almost ideal demand system model is developed and used to estimate price elasticities for us cheese sold at retail growing consumption of cheese coupled with fierce competition between private labels and national brands serves as motivating factors for this study per capita consumption of cheese grew by 75 during 1980 2004 and private labels captured a rising share of this growth private labels today account for 35 of market share national brands for the remaining 65 kraft accounts for 45 of national brands but price increases for kraft brands led to a sizeable price gap between its brands and private labels this gap helped to stimulate growth of private labels marketing managers seek to capitalize on both growing cheese sales and price gaps for brands relevant information for marketing managers is consumer sensitivity to price changes this study uses 69 weeks of scanner data with consumers segmented by income levels to derive price elasticities for both lower and higher income consumer

in kind transfers and work incentives recent developments in rationing theory are used to examine the differences between the effects of in kind and cash transfers on labor supply it is not possible to tell a priori which type of transfer will cause the greater reduction in hours of work the answer depends on the extent to which in kind transfers distort consumption choices and on the relationship between the transferred commodities and leisure hicks allen complements can cause greater reductions in labor supply than equally generous cash transfers while strong hicks allen substitutes can induce increases in market work

the effects of male and female labor supply on commodity demands we examine the effects of male and female labor supply on household demands and present a simple and robust test for the separability of commodity demands from labor supply using data on individual households from six years of the uk fes we estimate a demand system for seven goods which includes hours and participation dummies as conditioning variables allowance is made for the possible endogeneity of these conditioning labor supply variables we find that separability is rejected furthermore we present evidence that ignoring the effects of labor supply leads to bias in the parameter estimates

selection criteria for a microeconometric model of labour supply the wide variety of observed behaviour that is displayed in survey data suggests that microeconometric models should allow a reasonable degree of flexibility in specification however since these models are generally used for policy analysis they are required to satisfy some degree of theoretical consistency this requirement has generally led to the adoption of rather simple inflexible models based on additive preferences or linear labour supply responses we estimate and test a sequence of models for the labour supply of married working women emphasizing the importance of testing both the thecretical and statistical assumptions underlying the models

is there curvature in the slutsky matrix d o the poor substitute among commodities more flexibly than the rich when relative prices change even when compensated for the income effects of the price changes is it necessary to add a third dimension to the slutsky substitution matrix to identify household income in short do the terms of the slutsky elasticity matrix curve smoothly from poor households to rich households in such a way that equation 1 is meaningful

environmental sustainability in agriculture diet matters abstract there is no agreement that diet matters for environmental sustainability in the agriculture sector much current agriculture is unsustainable and worsening the environmental impact of agriculture degrades natural capital e g loss of topsoil waste and pollution of water nutrient loss extinction of species cattle raising is one of the most damaging components of agriculture livestock now eat about half of global grain production there is limited scope for improving food supply and what scope there is will further damage the environment all means to improve nutrition especially for the poor will be needed as population increases one such means is to improve diets of the rich by eating lower down the food chain while most people in the world thrive on mainly grain based diets carnivory is high in oecd and is increasing in ldcs in order to reduce food wastage and to improve health and food availability a food conversion efficiency tax is proposed the least efficient converters pork beef would be highly taxed more efficient converters poultry eggs dairy would be moderately taxed most efficient converters ocean fish would be taxed lowest grain for human food would not be taxed while coarse grains might be modestly subsidized non food agriculture also would be taxed highest on tobacco and on starches destined for alcoholic beverages produced from land suitable for food production

functional forms for labor supply and commodity demands with and without quantity restrictions one of the most important current questions in economic analysis is whether or not labor markets clear in the short run to answer this it is necessary to be able to distinguish between restricted and unrestricted behavior by consumers supplying labor this paper investigates the forms of preferences which lie behind linear models of labor supply and derives the functional forms for commodity demands which accompany them both with and without quantity restrictions in the labor market simple linkages between restricted and unrestricted demands are also considered as is the question of perfect aggregation over consumers in the presence of quantity restrictions

the household s decision to accept or reject a conditional transfer offer households deemed by society to have insufficient resources to purchase an adequate commodity bundle are often offered aid i e additional resources conditional upon the households purchasing a given level of some commodity e g food fuel or housing such conditional transfers attempt to modify the households normal behavior i e if the households would normally purchase the required level of the designated commodity upon receipt of the transfer the constraint would not be necessary how these incentives and constraints interact to affect the households behavior determines in large part the number and type of eligibles aided by the program aggregate program costs given payment levels and the types of commodity bundles purchased by the recipient households clearly understanding the decision to accept or reject a conditional transfer offer has widespread implications for the costs of the transfer program the impact on eligible households and the attainment of society s objectives numerous studies have investigated the size and distribution of recipient benefits in conditional transfer programs 1 3 6 8 9 14 16 21 to this author s knowledge however no analysis has estimated a model of the household s decision to participate in a conditional transfer program using household data and a theoretically appropriate measure for the household s net gain to overcome this gap in our understanding of the household s

the estimation of marginal utility of income for application to agricultural policy analysis abstract a quality of life index qli a proxy measure of utility is constructed by factor weighted and simple summation weighted aggregation of socio psychological measures of well being the socio psychological measures were constructed from quality of life domains taken from selected years of the general social surveys general social surveys 1972 1993 cumulative code book principal investigator james a davis director and co principal investigator tom w smith chicago national opinion research center 1993 national data program for the social sciences series no 13 the quality of life indices qli indices are regressed on selected socio demographic variables using quadratic cobb douglas square root and semilog functional forms qli is much influenced by income education and health as measured here qli is not much influenced by year of measurement sector or by region of residence much variability in the qli is unique to individuals and our results are suited to predict group rather than individual well being practitioners computing the benefit cost ratio for a public program project or policy can weight dollars by income groups with marginal utilities derived from this study that methodology will matter even the conservative quadratic equation indicates that the marginal utility of income mui for families with very low incomes is half as large as for families with median incomes

estimation of complete demand systems from household budget data the linear and quadratic expenditure systems in this paper we explore two issues in empirical demand analysis the estimation of complete systems of demand equations using household budget data section i and the incorporation of demographic characteristics into such systems section ii although there are numerous studies which use time series data to estimate complete demand systems and many which estimate engel curves from household budget data there are virtually none which combine budget data from different periods to estimate complete systems since each budget study corresponds to a single price situation one might conjecture that estimation of complete systems would not be possible unless budget studies were available from a large number of periods this is incorrect in section i we argue that interesting complete demand systems can be estimated from a small number of budget studies despite the limited price variability represented in such data to demonstrate this we use budget study data for two periods to estimate a pair of related demand systems the familiar linear expenditure system les and a quadratic expenditure system qes a generalization of les in which the demand equations are quadratic in total expenditure the inclusion of demographic variables in the analysis of household consumption patterns is desirable because there are likely to be systematic differences in the consumption behavior of households with different demographic characteristics but the effects of demographic characteristics have seldom been studied within the framework of complete demand systems in section ii we propose translating as a general method for incorporating demographic variables into complete systems of demand equations this method has not previously been discussed as a general technique for bringing demographic variables into demand systems although it has been employed in several studies to improve the estimates of the les and the qes presented in section i we reestimate these two systems using translating to incorporate family size

population dynamics and consumer demand the authors analyze the effects on consumption in the united states of 11 demographic variables including regional location and the urban rural base of the household its age size race sex and marital characteristics and the education and the employment status of the household head and the spouse data are from the 1972 1973 consumer expenditure survey the expenditure functions are first specified followed by descriptions of the data sources and the empirical estimates of expenditure functions for various items of consumption spending excerpt

labour supply estimation and public policy abstract economists devote considerable energies towards refining their econometric techniques to overcome difficulties connected with conducting empirical research despite advances in technique it is not clear whether further refinement in this direction is worthwhile for policy purposes it may be that no further amount of statistical adjustment of inadequate data will increase understanding and that better data is simply necessary to add to our knowledge but rarely is sufficient credit paid to new forms of data in short econometric technique is emphasized to the neglect of data innovation as if new data were merely lying about waiting for an ingenious suggestion for use this paper surveys advances of the last twenty five years in estimating labour supply for policy purposes with a view towards appreciating the relative contribution of both improvements in econometric technique as well as developments of new data after briefly detailing the key parameters which economists have sought to estimate we describe the early first generation research circa 1970 which is plagued by problems of unobservable variables measurement errors truncation and selectivity bias and non linear budget constraints second generation research constitute attempts to resolve one or more of these difficulties and the respective contribution of econometric technique and new data is acknowledged and assessed including the contribution of data generated by large scale social experiments in which participants are randomly assigned to different guaranteed income plans and their labour supply behaviour measured

using maimonides rule to estimate the effect of class size on scholastic achievement the twelfth century rabbinic scholar maimonides proposed a maximum class size of 40 this same maximum induces a nonlinear and nonmonotonic relationship between grade enrollment and class size in israeli public schools today maimonides rule of 40 is used here to construct instrumental variables estimates of effects of class size on test scores the resulting identiecation strategy can be viewed as an application of donald campbell s regression discontinuity design to the class size question the estimates show that reducing class size induces a signiecant and substantial increase in test scores for fourth and efth graders although not for third graders when asked about their views on class size in surveys parents and teachers generally report that they prefer smaller classes this may be because those involved with teaching believe that smaller classes promote student learning or simply because smaller classes offer a more pleasant environment for the pupils and teachers who are in them mueller chase and walden 1988 social scientists and school administrators also have a longstanding interest in the class size question class size is often thought to be easier to manipulate than other school inputs and it is a variable at the heart of policy debates on school quality and the allocation of school resources in many countries see e g robinson 1990 for the united states ofsted 1995 for the united kingdom and moshel ravid 1995 for israel this broad interest in the consequences of changing class size

measuring the costs of children an alternative approach abstract the cost of a child or the general equivalence scale as it is more commonly known is a concept of considerable importance in matters relating to public policy and welfare it has played a crucial part in numerous theoretical and empirical studies relating to poverty income distribution dietary needs income maintenance programs supplementary and child benefits and other forms of social security payments in a welfare state and in assessing the horizontal equity of income taxation in spite of a long tradition of estimating the scale from observed household budget data there remain severe problems in estimation and interpretation of the scales this paper proposes a new methodology for calculating the scale using a framework which is consistent with utility theory and which overcomes the identification problem without having to enforce the arbitrary prior assumptions of recent studies the proposed method allows easy calculation of not only the basic scale parameter but also how it varies with price and reference utility we illustrate the usefulness of the procedure by estimating on u k budget data at two different levels of aggregation and employing two sets of quite different functional forms the results are plausible compare favourably with one another and hence confirm the robustness and usefulness of the proposed procedure

the origins of intergenerational associations lessons from swedish adoption data we use unique swedish data with information on adopted children s biological and adoptive parents to estimate intergenerational mobility associations in earnings and education we argue that the impact from biological parents captures broad prebirth factors including genes and prenatal environment and the impact from adoptive parents represents broad postbirth factors such as childhood environment we find that both pre and postbirth factors contribute to intergenerational earnings and education transmissions and that prebirth factors are more important for mother s education and less important for father s income we also find some evidence for a positive interaction effect between postbirth environment and prebirth factors

environmental impacts of changes to healthier diets in europe food consumption causes together with mobility shelter and the use of electrical products most life cycle impacts of consumption meat and dairy are among the highest contributors to environmental impacts from food consumption a healthier diet might have less environmental impacts using the e3iot environmentally extended input output database developed in an eu study on environmental impacts of products eipro this paper estimates the difference in impacts between the european status quo and three simulated diet baskets i e a pattern according to universal dietary recommendations the same pattern with reduced meat consumption and a mediterranean pattern with reduced meat consumption production technologies protein and energy intake were kept constant though this implies just moderate dietary shifts impact reductions of up to 8 were possible in reduced meat scenarios the slightly changed food costs do not lead to significant first order rebound effects second order rebounds were estimated by applying the capri partial equilibrium model this analysis showed that european meat production sector will most likely respond by higher exports to compensate for losses on the domestic meat market higher impact reductions probably would need more drastic diet changes 2011 elsevier b v

labour supply commodity demand and marginal tax reform this paper examines the implications of extending the ahmad stern model of indirect tax reform to include labour supply the inclusion of labour supply alters the basic measure of marginal revenue cost mrc of indirect taxation and introduces the possibility of calculating a mrc for direct taxation the paper derives the expressions for these revised mrcs and provides estimates from irish data it then examines the sensitivity of the results to assumptions regarding functional form and in particular goods leisure sc parability in setting optimal tax rates policy makers face considerable difficulties explicit assumptions must be made regarding the underlying preferences of the consumer i e the functional form for the utility and demand functions and also about how expenditures are distributed sensitivity to underlying preferences is discussed by deaton i 98 i and is empirically examined by ray i986 and ebrahimi and heady i988 policy makers also face the problem that even when they do provide explicit forms for demand functions they face difficulties regarding the reliability of estimates and are also evaluating demand responses at a point possibly quite far away from the optimum the difficulties outlined above led to the development of the marginal tax reform literature with the seminal paper in this area by ahmad and stern i984 this approach has the considerable advantage of not requiring the choice of explicit utility functions nor of distributions of expenditure but instead merely requiring information on the actual position of the economy at a single point in time using actual consumption and distributions of expenditure it must be noted that tax reform does require information on demand responses so that results in this area can still be sensitive to the specification of consumer preferences and demand systems however tax reform results appear to be less sensitive than do tax design results to this

when individual preferences defy sustainability can merit good arguments close the gap in this paper we discuss how merit good arguments may contribute to discussions about sustainability to this end we clarify how merit good arguments deviate from individual preferences and relate the justification for deviations from individual preferences to two conceptions of well being an informed preference satisfaction and a perfectionist conception building on this framework we analyze how merit good arguments can be helpful for discussing sustainability as justice what challenges merit good arguments pose to future generations and whether they can serve as a normative justification for green nudges the analysis yields two main insights first a reflection on the concept of merit goods is helpful in sorting out the different justifications that sustainability interventions may rely on in particular it allows separating the challenges of redistribution internalization of externalities and increasing individual consumption of particular merit goods such as health care or education more clearly second the precise notion of merit goods by itself however only offers a limited contribution and does not represent a blank check to justify deviations from individual preferences

determinants of food consumption in rural sierra leone abstract this paper reports the application of a quadratic expenditure system with demographic variables to the household consumption leisure choice component of a household firm model a system of seven commodities is estimated including five foods non food and leisure appropriate for such a level of disaggregation a demand system is used the quadratic expenditure system which allows for a flexible relationship between full income and commodity expenditures without sacrificing parsimony in parameters demographic data on households are explicitly incorporated into the model allowing for a richer specification than can be achieved by using per capita variables the data are from a cross section survey of households in rural sierra leone price variation exists by region permitting estimation of a complete demand system engel curves are found to be significantly non linear with marginal expenditure on rice the major staple declining with higher income most foods are found to be reasonably price responsive with sizeable own price substitution effects declining with higher income aggregate labor supply is found to be price inelastic

household labour supply with rationing in spain this paper provides new empirical evidence on household labour supply with rationing to that end we use the latest spanish data in order to estimate three flexible functional forms namely the nles the quadratic and the hausman ruud forms and calculate the income and wage elasticities we find that the number of dependants has a negative effect on the labour supply of the female moreover the north and the east spanish regions have a clearly positive effect on the labour supply of the female whilst the north has the same effect on that of the male the elasticities of three functional forms are very similar male labour supply is slightly decreasing with the wage whilst for the female it is increasing leisure is a normal good for both spouses as expected whilst the labour hours are net substitutes

a model of female labour supply in the presence of hours restrictions abstract we develop a discrete choice model of female labour supply in finland using a data set constructed by merging the 1980 labour force survey and housing and population census this contains observations on the perceived incidence of constraints in the labour market and allows us to identify the effects of such constraints on observed labour supply approximately one in five women appears to be seriously constrained in her choice of hours of work our estimated model implies that the response of labour supply to variation in tax and wage rates is rather small

estimating labour supply functions under the rationing constraints of over and under employment in this study explicit parametrizations of labour supply are specified and estimated on a sample of single unattached individuals using data from the panel study of income dynamics and a generalized tobit maximum likelihood method which is consistent under the assumption that employed hours are exogenous the estimation methodology explicitly incorporates information on the existence and degree of over employment and under employment for the cases examined it is found that increased generality in the representation of preference is to be desired when estimating labour supply a surprising finding is that the labour supply responsiveness of a group of single american women who live alone and have no dependants is on a par with estimates for married women examined in earlier studies and is significantly higher than estimated for american men

careers and motherhood policies for compatibility this paper examines the economic issues relevant to policy debates that surround the increasing labour force participation of mothers we review the main changes in women s labour market participation in britain the main source of increase in women s participation rates has come from mothers returning to work after child birth after progressively shorter intervals the major influences on this behaviour and the length of time spent out of work over the first childbirth and the associated empirical work are also reviewed these changes have raised issues relevant to maternity and parental leave childcare provision employers family friendly working arrangements and children s welfare the paper makes some recommenda tions about how to further gender equity in a form compatible with family life

intergenerational top income mobility in sweden capitalist dynasties in the land of equal opportunity this paper presents new evidence on intergenerational mobility at the top of the income and earnings distributions using a large dataset of matched father son pairs in sweden we find that intergenerational transmission is very strong at the top more so for income than for earnings at the extreme top top 0 1 income transmission is remarkable with an intergenerational elasticity of approximately 0 9 we also study potential transmission mechanisms and find that iq non cognitive skills and education of the sons are all unlikely channels in explaining the strong transmission within the top percentile increases in the income of the fathers if they are related at all are negatively associated with these variables wealth on the other hand has a significantly positive association our results suggest that sweden known for having relatively high intergenerational mobility in general is a society in which transmission remains strong at the very top of the distribution and wealth is the most likely channel

analyzing the extent and influence of occupational licensing on the labor market this study examines occupational licensing in the united states using a specially designed national labor force survey estimates from the survey indicated that 35 of employees were either licensed or certified by the government and that 29 were licensed another 3 stated that all who worked in their job would eventually be required to be certified or licensed bringing the total that are or eventually must be licensed or certified by government to 38 we find that licensing is associated with about 18 higher wages but that the effect of governmental certification on pay is much smaller

a household production specification of demographic variables in demand analysis empirical investigations into the expenditure and time allocation decisions of households usually allow the variation in demographic characteristics across households in particular the number and ages of dependent children to affect these decisions the motivation for allowing such demographic effects is two fold first it permits the researcher to pool observations from households with differing demographic characteristics secondly it has been argued that it allows the researcher to construct an index normally called an equivalence scale to show the full income required by a household with some given composition to attain the same level of utility as some reference household and hence permits comparisons of welfare levels across households there are two areas of controversy surrounding this literature which directly relate to its two sources of motivation first what is the appropriate demographic specification second can the estimated parameters be used to undertake welfare comparisons a series of demand studies including barten 1964 blundell 1980 blundell and walker 1982 gorman 1976 muellbauer 1974 1977 hurd and pencavel 1981 pollak and wales 1978 1981 and ray 1983 have attempted to answer the first problem by considering the current allocation of goods and in some cases household time conditional on demographic structure this literature treats demographic variables as exogenous whereas in contrast the neoclassical fertility literature see for example the contributions in schultz 1973 treats the numbers and ages of children as endogenous nonmarket goods within a lifecycle optimising framework the second problem has been raised by pollak and wales 1979 who argue convincingly whether household composition is the result of endogenous decisions or not it is impossible to compare the welfare of households with different compositions using the results of empirical demand analysis since market decisions do not reveal how the households feel about the presence or absence of children thus estimated equivalence scales are necessarily based on the households preferences conditional on their demographic compositions the object of this paper is to suggest a new approach to the problem of demographic specification and to show that this approach both highlights the problem of making welfare comparisons and at least in part resolves it