differential fertility human capital and development using micro data from 48 developing countries this paper studies changes in crosssectional patterns of fertility and child investment over the course of the demographic transition before 1960 children from larger families obtained more education in large part because they had richer and more educated parents by century s end these patterns had reversed consequently fertility differentials by income and education historically raised the average education of the next generation but they now reduce it while the reversal is unrelated to changes in gdp per capita women s work sectoral composition or health roughly half is attributable to rising aggregate education in the parents generation the results support a model in which rising skill returns lowered the minimum income at which parents invest in education

the demographic transition and the position of women a marriage market perspective we present international evidence on the marriage market implications of cohort size growth and set out a theoretical model of how marriage markets adjust to imbalances since men marry younger women secular growth in cohort size in the second phase of the demographic transition worsens the position of women this e ect has been substantial in many asian countries earlier and continues to be true in sub saharan africa with fertility decline cohort are now shrinking in east asia improves the position of women these demographic trends can explain the increase and spread in dowries in south asia and the persistence of polygyny in sub saharan africa we show that the age gap at marriage will not adjust in order to equilibrate the marriage market in response to persistent imbalances even though it accommodates transitory shocks jel categories j12 j13 j16

why the marriage squeeze cannot cause dowry inflation an influential explanation for rising dowry payments is the marriage squeeze the present paper shows this explanation to be internally inconsistent the marriage squeeze argument for inflation relies on the fact that population growth leads to an excess supply of brides in the marriage market this excess supply is resolved by some women postponing marriage so that the average age of brides increases in previous studies the argument is stated informally here a matching model of marriage is developed to formally analyze the link between dowry payments and population growth it is shown that a marriage squeeze cannot yield dowry inflation in fact when women who do not find matches at the desirable marrying age re enter the marriage market as older brides a marriage squeeze is shown to imply dowry deflation population change is therefore not a promising explanation for the observed increases in dowry payments

high technology exports of eec countries persistence and diversity of specialization patterns high tichnology export of eec countries is considered the analysis relies on a bundle of products selected from the eurostat database comext high technology goods are considered as an innoviate output indicator a test of the hypotheses of hystersis and divesity of trade patterns at country level has been performed to verify some claims made by the evolutionary theory of innovation and trade the theree mode principal component analysis carried out confirms the persistence of specialization patterns of each eec country in high techonology export and highlights their sharp differences

the eu 2020 innovation indicator a step forward in measuring innovation outputs and outcomes in october 2013 the european commission presented a new indicator intended to capture innovation outputs and outcomes and thereby support policy makers in establishing new or reinforced actions to remove bottlenecks that prevent innovators from translating ideas into products and services that can be successful on the market this article aims to evaluate the usefulness of the new indicator against the background of the difficulties in measuring innovation outputs and outcomes we develop a unique conceptual framework for measuring innovation outcomes that distinguishes structural change and structural upgrading as two key dimensions in both manufacturing and services we conclude that the new indicator is biased towards a somewhat narrowly defined high tech understanding of innovation outcomes we illustrate our framework proposing a broader set of outcome indicators capturing also structural upgrading we find that the results for the modified indicator differ substantially for a number of countries with potentially wide ranging consequences for innovation and industrial policies

is there a causal effect of working part time on current and future wages in this paper i study the causal effects of part time work on current and future wages to estimate these effects i use a random effects model with a wage equation capturing the employment history and a dynamic multinomial probit component for the choice of employment status exclusion restrictions from the institutional context are exploited to support identification the results suggest that working part time with few hours has a large causal effect on current wages but more extensive part time work does not reduce current wages however both types of part time work lead to negative long term wage effects

the gender gap fertility and growth changes in fertility have long been recognized as important correlates of economic growth with the relationship between the level of fertility and the level of income per capita being one of the strongest observable correlations in cross country data this paper examines the linkages between fertility and growth theory the structure of the model is presented in sections on production couples decision making system dynamics and steady state equilibria the first component of the model is that increases in capital per worker raise womens relative wages since capital is more complementary to womens labor input than to mens the second component is that increasing womens relative wages reduces fertility by raising the cost of children more than household income finally lower fertility raises the level of capital per worker a positive feedback loop generates demographic transition a rapid decline in fertility accompanied by accelerated output growth

how do sex ratios affect marriage and labor markets evidence from america s second generation sex ratios i e relative numbers of men and women can affect marriage prospects labor force participation and other social and economic variables but the observed association between sex ratios and social and economic conditions may be confounded by omitted variables and reverse causality this paper uses variation in immigrant flows as a natural experiment to study the effect of sex ratios on the children and grandchildren of immigrants the flow of immigrants affected the second generation marriage market because second generation marriages were mostly endogamous i e to members of the same ethnic group the empirical results suggest that high sex ratios had a large positive effect on the likelihood of female marriage and a large negative effect on female labor force participation perhaps surprisingly the marriage rates of second generation men appear to be a slightly increasing function of immigrant sex ratios higher sex ratios also appear to have raised male earnings and the incomes of parents with young children the empirical results are broadly consistent with theories where higher sex ratios increase female bargaining power in the marriage market

technological intensity concept and measurement abstract technological intensity the degree to which scientific research effort contributes to an industry s productivity increase and or revenue enhancement is commonly measured by the industry s ratio of own performed research to its output if this r d output percentage is taken as an indicator of the need for public support it is seriously misleading an industry benefits as well by research undertaken by the foreign affiliates of its member firms by its first and higher round suppliers and by university and government laboratories this view is supported by evidence from canada

bequest as a public good within marriage a note bequest to and marriage of children can lead to a pareto inefficient allocation the inefficiency or market failure arises because one family making a bequest to its own child ignores the contribution to the utility of the other family whose child enters the marriage this note shows that an assortative mating rule based on bequests can improve or even restore pareto efficiency when parents take account of the rule in deciding the amount of bequests to their own children

intra household allocation of parental leave we introduce childcare sharing in a collective model of household behavior to investigate which factors make spouses increase or decrease their share of parental leave the concern about future consumption motivates parents to invest in their human capital and to limit their leave duration using relative income and the age difference between spouses as distribution factors we cannot reject pareto efficiency in childcare sharing higher relative incomes and larger age differences shift the conditional leave allocation towards the relatively poorer and younger partner respectively households with higher total income purchase more professional childcare

bride price and fertility decisions evidence from rural senegal abstractthis paper provides evidence about the relationship between bride price payments and fertility decisions in senegal higher bride price payments reduce the fertility pressure for women with results being robust to confounding socio economic and contextual factors the fertility reducing impact is greater for women who are economically dependent on their husbands in polygamous households and for arranged marriages a lower bride price increases fertility pressure while in monogamous households and for non arranged marriages the bride price does not affect fertility as bride price payments have less power over economically independent women empowerment will give leeway to girls in traditional societies

missing women age and disease relative to developed countries and some parts of the developing world most notably sub saharan africa there are far fewer women than men in india and china it has been argued that as many as a 100 million women could be missing the possibility of gender bias at birth and the mistreatment of young girls are widely regarded as key explanations we provide a decomposition of these missing women by age and cause of death while we do not dispute the existence of severe gender bias at young ages our computations yield some striking new findings 1 the vast majority of missing women in india and a significant proportion of those in china are of adult age 2 as a proportion of the total female population the number of missing women is largest in sub saharan africa and the absolute numbers are comparable to those for india and china 3 almost all the missing women stem from disease by disease comparisons and not from the changing composition of disease as described by the epidemiological transition finally using historical data we argue that a comparable proportion of women was missing at the start of the 20th century in the united states just as they are in india china and sub saharan africa today

science high technology and the competitiveness of eu countries high technology is not a well defined issue in economics in this paper it is divided into very high r d intensive so called leading edge and high level technology i e above average r d intensive products the similarity of exports and imports in both subdivisions of high technology is compared between the eu countries by linking trade data on high technology with other indicators of disembodied knowledge such as scientific publications and patents it is shown that very r d intensive competition needs more science inputs than does high level technology as industrial property expressed by patents is an important prerequisite for above average r d intensive trade though less so for leading edge technology the policy conclusions point to the importance of non uniformity in high tech europe c 1995 academic press inc copyright 1995 by oxford university press

why dowry payments declined with modernization in europe but are rising in india in contrast to most dowry oriented societies in which payments have declined with modernization those in india have undergone significant inflation over the last five decades this paper explains the difference between these two experiences by focusing on the role played by caste the theoretical model contrasts caste and non caste based societies in the former there exists an inherited component to status caste that is independent of wealth and in the latter wealth is the primary determinant of status modernization is assumed to involve two components increasing average wealth and increasing wealth dispersion within status or caste groups the paper shows that in caste based societies the increases in wealth dispersion that accompany modernization necessarily lead to increases in dowry payments whereas in non caste based societies increased dispersion has no real effect on dowry payments and increasing average wealth causes the payments to decline

impact of first birth career interruption on earnings evidence from administrative data abstractthis article makes use of unique administrative data to expand the understanding of the role women s intermittency decisions play in the determination of her wages we demonstrate that treating intermittency as exogenous significantly overstates its impact the intermittency penalty also increases in the education level of the woman the penalty for women with a high school degree with an average amount of intermittency during 6 years after giving birth to her first child is roughly half the penalty for college graduates we also demonstrate the value of making use of an index to capture multiple dimension of the intermittency experience and illustrate the importance of firm dynamics in the determination of a woman s wage

sex equality and growth abstract we set up a model of economic and demographic long run development where inequality in income and reproductive success polygynous mating plays a central role the model generates a slow and gradual compression of the income gap between landholders and landless together with rising levels of human capital this process spurts at some stage as society endogenously transits into sustained growth simultaneously inequality in income and reproductive success drops society becomes monogamous

marriage laws and growth in sub saharan africa many sub saharan african countries are extremely poor it has been argued that the marriage system in particular polygyny is one contributing factor to the lack of development in this region polygyny leads to low incentives to save depressing the capital stock and output enforcing monogamy might seem like an obvious solution however such a law will have winners and losers in this paper we investigate the transition from a polygynous to a monogamous steady state we find that the initial old men will be big losers the reason is that they had married many wives in anticipation of the brideprice that future daughters will fetch however due to the marriage reform the value of daughters depreciates rapidly as the brideprice changes from positive to negative this increases savings and thereby the aggregate capital stock the interest rate falls and the initial young suffer a loss in capital income thus all men alive during the reform period experience a loss in utility young women and all future generations will benefit however the future gains are not enough to compensate the losers this may explain why many african countries experience strong resistance to changing their marriage laws

accounting for racial differences in marriage and employment what can account for the differences in marriage and employment decisions across blacks and whites to answer this question i develop a dynamic equilibrium model of marriage two explanations for the racial differences in behavior are considered differences in population supplies and wages black white differences in population supplies explain one fifth of the difference in marriage rates and between one fifth and one third of the differences in employment rates across race removing the racial gap in wages eliminates the differences in employment but increases the differences in marriage rates

a note on marriage market clearing abstract we provide a formula for marriage sex ratios based on birth sex ratios and dynamic factors like the marriage age gap and gender specific mortality we show that ignoring dynamic considerations can lead to faulty conclusions about scarcity in marriage markets

the rising price of husbands a hedonic analysis of dowry increases in rural india dowries in south asia have steadily risen over the last 40 years and now often amount to over 50 percent of a household s assets this paper attempts to investigate the reasons behind this increase it adapts rosen s implicit market model to the indian marriage market and tests predictions from the model with data from six villages in south central india and from the indian census it is found that a marriage squeeze caused by population growth resulting in larger younger cohorts and hence a surplus of women in the marriage market has played a significant role in the rise in dowries

the obsession for competitiveness and its impact on statistics the construction of high technology indicators abstract high technology is a concept much in vogue in oecd countries for it is a symbol of an advanced economy this paper looks at why and how the concept and its indicator acquired such fame it explains that the reason has to do with the fact that the indicator emerged in the context of debates on the competitiveness of countries and their efforts to maintain or improve their positions in world trade the first part looks at the early statistics behind the indicator r d sales statistics developed in official analyses of industrial r d surveys before the 1950s the second part traces the evolution of the r d sales ratio in the 1960s through its use as an indicator of research or technological intensity the third part discusses the internationalization of the indicator via the oecd

efficiency with endogenous population growth in this paper we generalize the notion of pareto e ciency to make it applicable to environments with endogenous populations two di erent e ciency concepts are proposed p e ciency and a e ciency the two concepts di er in how they treat people that are not born we show how these concepts relate to the notion of pareto e ciency when fertility is

taxes and the timing of births because the tax savings of having a child are a realized only if the birth takes place before midnight january 1 the incentives for the marginal birth are substantial using a sample of children from the national longitudinal survey of youth we find that the probability that a child is born in the last week of december rather than the first week of january is positively correlated with tax benefits we estimate that increasing the tax benefit of having a child by 500 raises the probability of having the child in the last week of december by 26 9 percent

the quantitative role of child care for female labor force participation and fertility consistent with facts for a cross section of oecd countries i document that the labor force participation rate of west german mothers with children aged zero to two exceeds the corresponding child care enrollment rate whereas the opposite is true for mothers with children aged three to mandatory school age i develop a life cycle model that explicitly accounts for this age dependent relationship through various types of non paid and paid child care the calibrated version of the model is used to evaluate two policy reforms concerning the supply of subsidized child care for children aged zero to two these counterfactual policy experiments suggest that the lack of subsidized child care constitutes indeed for some females a barrier to participate in the labor market and depresses fertility

do generous parental leave policies help top female earners generous government mandated parental leave is generally viewed as an effective policy to support women s careers around childbirth but does it help women to reach top positions in the upper pay echelon of their firms using longitudinal employer employee matched data for the entire norwegian population we address this question exploiting a series of reforms that expanded paid leave from 30 weeks in 1989 to 52 weeks in 1993 the representation of women in top positions has only moderately increased over time and career profiles of female top earners within firms are significantly different from those of their male counterparts the reforms did not affect and possibly decreased the probability for women to be at the top over their life cycle we discuss some implications of this result to put into perspective the design of new family friendly policy interventions

strategic choices in polygamous households theory and evidence from senegal this paper proposes a strategic framework to account for fertility choices in polygamous households a theoretical model specifies the main drivers of fertility in the african context and describes how the fertility of one wife might impact the behavior of her co wives it generates predictions to test for strategic interactions exploiting original data from a household survey and the demographic and health surveys in senegal empirical tests show that children are strategic complements one wife raises her fertility in response to an increase by the other wife because children are the best claim to resources controlled by the husband this result is the first quantitative evidence of a reproductive rivalry between co wives it suggests that the sustained high level of fertility in africa does not merely reect women s lack of control over births as is often argued but also their incentives to have many children this paper also contributes to the literature on household behavior as one of the few attempts to open the black box of non nuclear families

female labour supply and household employment shocks maternity leave as an insurance mechanism this paper investigates the role of unpaid maternity leave in providing household insurance against paternal employment shocks the main outcome is the timing of a mothers return to work after having a child exploiting the us family and medical leave act we find that mothers eligible for maternity leave speed up their return to work in response to a paternal shock with the conditional probability of being in work 49 higher than in households with no unpaid maternity leave further evidence is provided on the insurance role of unpaid maternity leave through i no significant interaction between paid maternity leave and the paternal shock and ii smoothing of consumption effects of the shock for households covered by unpaid leave

marriage institutions and sibling competition evidence from south asia using data from south asia this article examines how arranged marriage cultivates rivalry among sisters during marriage search parents with multiple daughters reduce the reservation quality for an older daughters groom rushing her marriage to allow sufficient time to marry off her younger sisters relative to younger brothers younger sisters increase a girls marriage risk relative to younger singleton sisters younger twin sisters have the same effect these effects intensify in marriage markets with lower sex ratios or greater parental involvement in marriage arrangements in contrast older sisters delay a girls marriage because girls leave school when they marry and face limited earning opportunities when they reach adulthood the number of sisters has well being consequences over the life cycle younger sisters cause earlier school leaving lower literacy a match to a husband with less education and a less skilled occupation and marginally lower adult economic status data from a broader set of countries indicate that these cross sister pressures on marriage age are common throughout the developing world although the schooling costs vary by setting

why do married men earn more productivity or marriage selection injae lee using data from the current population survey march supplement 1999 this study examines why married men earn more than men who have never married we find that the marriage wage premium cannot be attributed to the unobservable higher earnings capability of married men instead wage gains from marriage are explained by the degree of specialization within the household our findings cast doubt on the argument that the selection of high ability men into marriage is the cause of the marriage wage premium jel j12 j31 i introduction labor economists have devoted considerable effort to explaining why married men earn higher wages than men who have never married a number of theoretical hypotheses have been advanced to explore the nature of this marriage wage premium the dominant theory is the productivity hypothesis which argues that marriage makes men more productive becker 1991 married men have greater opportunities to specialize in labor market activities when their wives specialize in home production the marriage wage premium reflects a productivity gap between married and never married men stemming from different conditions for human capital accumulation in market work a competing argument is the selection hypothesis nakosteen and zimmer 1987 1997 this reverses the direction of causality proposing that men with a higher earnings capability are valued more in the marriage market and are thus more likely to marry the marriage premium mirrors the marriage selection pattern married men are more productive not because they become more productive after marriage but because they were more productive before marriage 1 while there is compelling evidence that married men have higher earnings than never married men hill 1979 the relative merits of the productivity and selection arguments in explaining the existence of the marriage premium remain to be established nakosteen and zimmer 1987 argue that the marriage premium is a statistical artifact arising from a sorting process in which high wage males tend to be selected into marriage when selection effects are accounted for in their wage regression the marriage premium remains numerically large but becomes statistically insignificant however korenman and neumark 1991 show that the selection hypothesis is an incomplete explanation of the marriage premium they find that less than one half of the marriage premium vanishes when unobservable individual factors affecting both wages and marriage are removed the remaining premium is interpreted as the productivity enhancing effects of marriage later studies examine the validity of the productivity explanation using measures for the household division of labor such as a wife s labor market hours and the number of children in the household the studies investigate the effects of household specialization on a husband s earnings according to the productivity hypothesis men whose wives specialize in home production should have a larger premium than men whose wives work in the labor market the evidence for this is mixed daniel 1992 and gray 1997 find that the marriage premium is negatively associated with the wife s labor market hours whereas loh 1996 and jacobsen and rayack 1996 find little evidence that the marriage premium is explained by productivity differences past work tries to clarify the relationship between marriage household specialization and a husband s earnings but it does not allow us to reach an empirical consensus about the cause of the marriage premium in this article we present a new empirical framework to test the relative merits of two competing but not mutually exclusive hypotheses first we develop a switching regression model with endogenous marriage selection the selection hypothesis is founded on the premise that a man s attractiveness as a potential mate depends upon his observed earnings as well as unobservable individual traits that are positively related to his earnings potential

early gender gaps among university graduates abstract we use data from six cohorts of university graduates in germany to assess the extent of gender gaps in college and labor market performance twelve to eighteen months after graduation men and women enter college in roughly equal numbers but more women than men complete their degrees women enter college with slightly better high school grades but women leave university with slightly lower marks immediately following university completion male and female full timers work a very similar number of hours per week but men earn more than women across the pay distribution with an unadjusted gender gap in full time monthly earnings of about 20 log points on average including a large set of controls reduces the gap to 5 10 log points the single most important proximate factor that explains the gap is field of study at university

what is the case for paid maternity leave abstract we assess the case for generous government funded maternity leave focusing on a series of policy reforms in norway that expanded paid leave from 18 to 35 weeks we find the reforms do not crowd out unpaid leave and that mothers spend more time at home without a reduction in family income the increased maternity leave has little effect on children s schooling parental earnings and labor force participation completed fertility marriage or divorce the expansions whose net costs amounted to 0 25 of gdp have negative redistribution properties and imply a considerable increases in taxes at a cost to economic efficiency

waiting for mr right rising inequality and declining marriage rates abstract this paper demonstrates that women search longer for their first or second husband in cities with higher male wage inequality and examines several alternative explanations a causal link is established by controlling for city fixed effects and city specific time trends and by using inequality in the woman s state of birth as a proxy for local male inequality increasing inequality explains about 25 of the marriage rate decline over the last few decades and this is not due to the endogenous moving or labor force decisions of women nor to the marital decisions of men in reaction to changes in their own wages

policy making in science policy the oecd model unveiled abstract this article addresses the issue of the development of national science policies in oecd countries in the 1960s it argues that the organisation for economic and co operation and development oecd acted as a policy innovator playing a central role in the development and adoption of what we call the oecd model of science policy making through a detailed analysis of the oecd country reviews we reveal the oecd model and its seven key functions horizontal coordination and advice planning and budgeting priority setting resources allocation and administration through analysis of oecd archives we extract the reasons why oecd changed its role in the absence of a reference point against which to benchmark national situations it highlights the ways the pre existing mode of operation of oecd centred on country reviews and peer pressure was modified and how effective these changes have been in the diffusion of the model among oecd members

science accounting and statistics the input output framework abstract statistics on science are often framed within an input output framework inputs are invested into research activities that produce outputs this framework is a pure accounting framework based on the anticipated economic benefits of science this paper asks where the framework comes from it shows that the semantics on input and output in science can be traced back to the economic literature and its analyses of growth via an econometric equation called the production function used extensively by economists in the mid 1950s to study science and its relationship to the economy the semantics immediately offered official statisticians a conceptual framework for organizing statistics on science this is due to the fact that the framework was perfectly aligned with policy discussions on the efficiency of the science system

back to work parental benefits and mothers labor market outcomes in the medium run the authors estimate policy impacts of a generous parental benefit in germany by using a natural experiment and german census data they estimate policy effects for the short run first two years a

the mystery of monogamy we examine why developed societies are monogamous while rich men through out history have typically practiced polygyny wealth inequality naturally pro duces multiple wives for rich men in a standard model of the marriage market however we demonstrate that higher female inequality in the marriage market reduces polygyny moreover we show that female inequality increases in the process of development as women are valued more for the quality of their chil dren than for the quantity consequently male inequality generates inequality in the number of wives per man in traditional societies but manifests itself as inequality in the quality of wives in developed societies jel j12 j16 j24 z13

dowry and wife s welfare a theotrical and empirical analysis becker attributes the existence of marital transfers to inflexibility in the division of joint product within the marriage if that were the only reason we would not have observed the coexistence of dowries and bride prices this paper offers an alternative analysis while becker s interpretation is retained for bride prices a dowry is now represented as a premortem bequest by altruistic parents for a daughter it not only increases the wealth of the new conjugal household but also enhances the bargaining power of the bride in the allocation of the output within the household thereby safeguarding here welfare using micro data from taiwan we found that a dowry improves the bride s welfare whereas a bride price has no effect these empirical results support the theoretical predictions of the model

legal origins and female hiv more than one half of all people living with hiv are women and 80 percent of all hiv positive women in the world live in sub saharan africa this paper demonstrates that the legal origins of these formerly colonized countries significantly determine current day female hiv rates in particular female hiv rates are significantly higher in common law sub saharan african countries compared to civil law ones this paper explains this relationship by focusing on differences in female property rights under the two codes of law in sub saharan africa common law is associated with weaker female marital property laws as a result women in these common law countries have lower bargaining power within the household and are less able to negotiate safe sex practices and are thus more vulnerable to hiv compared to their civil law counterparts exploiting the fact that some ethnic groups in sub saharan africa cross country borders with different legal systems we are able to include ethnicity fixed effects into a regression discontinuity approach this allows us to control for a large set of cultural geographical and environmental factors that could be confounding the estimates the results of this paper are consistent with gender inequality the feminization of aids explaining much of its prevalence in sub saharan africa

the new economy what the concept owes to the oecd abstract in the last two decades concepts have appeared that have influenced and even defined entire science and technology policies in western countries high technology national system of innovation information economy knowledge based economy and the new economy in all these policy developments the oecd acting as a think tank for its member countries has been an important promoter of the concepts turning them into buzzwords this article looks at the concept of the new economy as the culmination of decades of work on technology and productivity and explores the crucial role of the oecd in its dissemination and above all the role statistics have played in shaping science and innovation policies

public child care and mothers labor supply evidence from two quasi experiments abstract public child care is expected to assist families in reconciling work with family life yet empirical evidence for the relevance of public child care to maternal employment is inconclusive we exploit the introduction of a legal claim to a place in kindergarten in germany which was contingent on day of birth cut off dates and resulted in a marked increase in kindergarten attendance of three year olds in the following years instrumental variable and difference in differences estimations on two individual level data sets yield positive effects of public child care on maternal employment a set of placebo treatment tests corroborate the validity of our identification strategies

differntial fecundity markets and gender roles women are fecund for a shorter period of their lives than men this paper investigates how differential fecundity interacts with marriage labor and financial markets to affect gender roles the main findings of the paper are as follows i fecund women are relatively scarce men will behave differently than women in response to this scarcity in the most fundamental way demand and supply conditions in the marriage market affect gender roles ii differential fecundity does not have any market invariant gender effect gender roles depend on the way in which marriage labor and financial markets interact iii gender differences in the labor market can occur without corresponding differences in labor market opportunities productivities in child rearing or social norms iv with uncertainty in human capital accumulation and no insurance against this uncertainty the model s predictions are consistent with observed gender roles

changes and trends in the world trade in high technology products high technology industries make special contributions to a nation s long term economic performance and competition among the most advanced countries for high technology production has increased strongly over the past two decades the present paper using an original data base and taxonomy for trade flows in high technology products demonstrates that in the period from 1970 to 1990 there were significant changes in the competitive positions of the united states japan and the former ec now eu countries japan undoubtedly achieved the highest gains whereas us competitiveness has experienced a process of relative decline and eu industry has suffered sharp losses in domestic and international markets particu larly in electronics this general evolution however has been sharply differentiated with respect to the various product groups included in the high technology category the evidence of the paper seems to suggest that these changes constitute long term competitive trends and may be attributed to structural factors as well as to macroeconomic and exchange rate fluctuations

the impact of technological innovation on international trade patterns the evidence reconsidered abstract this paper presents some new evidence in relation to the role of technical change in particular industrial innovation on the international competitiveness of the various oecd countries its originality consists primarily of a using a technology output indicator to measure technological performance b presenting and comparing various measures of trade and technological performance for each individual oecd country with the exception of iceland c analysing at a relatively high level of product industry disaggregation the relationship between export performance and technological performance at the same time the very limited scope of the paper has to be emphasized a the analysis is purely static all the evidence presented relates to one year 1977 b most of the results obtained are preliminary and should be further substantiated by more detailed empirical and theoretical research c as a consequence little attention has been paid to policy implications which it was felt could only be discussed properly in a later stage the paper consists of four sections a brief review of the state of the art section 1 a discussion on definitions of technology intensity section 2 the development of the best technology output indicator section 3 and the empirical analysis itself section 4 the following most important results emerge from these various sections a there are serious shortcomings in using average technology intensity as bench mark for classifying products or industries in technology intensive or nontechnology intensive categories b there is a substantial difference between technology intensity as measured on the basis of a technology input proxy rd c yet as between countries the most traditional output and input indicators the number of patents granted and the amount spent on rd d foreign patenting in particular foreign patenting in the united states figs 1 and 2 section 3 is a more reliable technology output proxy than domestic patenting e in terms of technological comparative advantage as opposed to technology intensity it is the small oecd countries as opposed to the large ones which seem to base their trade comparative advantage on technological comparative performance table 7 section 4 1 f at the individual industry level it is found that i for most technology intensive industries defined however in a less restrictive way than us r d intensities a close relation exists between technological performance and export performance and ii that as compared to other country specific resource variables technological performance is the most important trade explanatory variable its elasticity increasing with the technology intensity of industries tables 11 and 12 section 4 2 space constraints prevented us from presenting the data in relation to the inter industry and inter country analysis these can however be obtained from the author

on the state of the union an overlapping generations model of marriage and divorce is constructed to analyze family structure and intergenerational mobility agents differ by sex marital status and human capital single agents meet in a marriage market and decide whether to accept or reject proposals to wed married couples must decide whether to separate or not parents invest in their children depending on their wherewithal a simulated version of the theoretical prototype can generate an equilibrium with a significant number of female headed families and a high degree of persistence in income across generations to illustrate the model s mechanics the effects of two antipoverty policies namely child support and welfare are investigated

polygyny fertility and savings sub saharan africa has a high incidence of polygyny it is also the poorest region of the world in this paper i ask whether banning polygyny could play any role for development using a quantitative model of polygyny i find that enforcing monogamy lowers fertility shrinks the spousal age gap and reverses the direction of marriage payments polygyny leads to high bride prices to ration women which makes buying wives and selling daughters a good investment thus crowding out investment in physical assets for reasonable parameter values i find that banning polygyny decreases fertility by 40 percent increases savings by 70 percent and increases output per capita by 170 percent

expansions in maternity leave coverage and mothers labor market outcomes after childbirth this article analyzes the impact of five major expansions in maternity leave coverage in germany on mothers labor market outcomes after childbirth to identify the causal impact of the reforms we use a difference in difference design that compares labor market outcomes of mothers who give birth shortly before and shortly after a change in maternity leave legislation in years of policy changes and years when no changes have taken place each expansion in leave coverage reduced mothers postbirth employment rates in the short run the longer run effects of the expansions on mothers postbirth labor market outcomes are however small

the economic consequences of parental leave mandates lessons from europe this study investigates the economic consequences of rights to paid parental leave in nine european countries over the 1969 through 1993 period since women use virtually all parental leave in most nations men constitute a reasonable comparison group and most of the analysis examines how changes in paid leave affect the gap between female and male labor market outcomes the employment to populations ratios of women in their prime childbearing years are also compared with those of corresponding aged men and older females parental leave is associated with increases in women s employment but with reductions in their relative wages at extended durations

polygyny women s rights and development many sub saharan african countries are extremely poor it has been argued that the marriage system in particular polygyny is one contributing factor to the lack of development in this region however enforcing monogamy has proved to be very difficult in this paper i argue that transferring the right of choosing a husband from fathers to daughters might be an alternative policy that could potentially be easier to enforce i use a calibrated general equilibrium model of polygyny to analyze such a policy i find that giving daughters more choices has similar economic effects as a ban on polygyny both policies decrease the return on wives for men and thereby raise the incentive to invest in alternative assets this increases the capital stock and hence gdp per capita quantitatively however i find that enforcing monogamy has much larger effects jel e0 o11 o55 j12 j13