changing inequality in markets for workplace amenities among u s industries where earnings rose relatively from 1979 1995 injury rates declined relatively obversely during the 1960s narrowing interindustry wage differentials were associated with an increase in the relative risk of injury in high wage industries evidence from the nlsy suggests similar results among full time workers between 1988 and 1996 between 1973 and 1991 the disamenity of evening night work was increasingly borne by low wage male workers changing earnings inequality has understated changing inequality in the returns to work assuming skill neutral changes in the cost of reducing these disamenities estimates of the implied income elasticities of demand for amenities are well above unity

learning wage dynamics and firm specific human capital we introduce a dynamic and fully strategic model of wage determination in the presence of firm specific human capital in this model human capital is interpreted as information we show that equilibrium exists and is efficient and that it gives rise to a unique distribution of the social surplus we show further that the equilibrium wage is determined by three factors consideration of these factors allows us to determine when and how the market mechanism enables the worker to capture some of the returns to firm specific human capital we relate our findings to the ongoing empirical debate concerning the return to tenure

taxation in matching markets what is the impact of taxation in matching markets in matching markets because agents have heterogeneous preferences over potential partners welfare depends on which agents are matched to each other in equilibrium taxes in matching markets can generate inefficiency by changing who is matched to whom even if the number of workers at each firm is unaffected for markets in which workers refuse to match without a positive wage higher taxes decrease match efficiency however in more balanced matching markets where transfers may flow in either direction such as the student college market lowering taxes may decrease match efficiency because an agent can transfer enough to buy an inefficient partner only to be bought back when taxes are lowered further simulations show that in matching markets traditional deadweight loss estimates based on the change in taxable income can be substantially biased in either direction jel classification h20 j24 c78 d13

heterogeneous wage effects of apprenticeship training the relatively small average wage effects of employer and occupation changes after apprenticeship training mask large differences between occupation groups and apprentices with different schooling backgrounds people who change employer and occupation within industrial occupations enjoy large wage advantages whereas apprentices in commerce and trading occupations as well as in construction and crafts occupations face wage losses from an occupation change the differences between the firms that provide the apprenticeship training are found to be small or insignificant in this paper we reconcile the differences between previous findings by comparing and replicating the empirical estimation strategies used this demonstrates that selectivity in occupations and changes unobserved heterogeneity between occupations and sample selection do matter

wages experience and seniority in this paper we study the sources of wage growth we identify the contribution to such growth of general sector specific and firm specific human capital our results are interpretable within the context of a model where the returns to human capital may be heterogeneous and where firms may offer different combinations of entry level wages and firm specific human capital development we allow for the possibility that wages are match specific and that workers move jobs as a result of identifying a better match to estimate the average returns to experience sector tenure and firm specific tenure within this context we develop an identification strategy which relies on the use of firm closures our data source is a new and unique administrative data set for germany that includes complete work histories as well as individual characteristics we find positive returns to experience and firm tenure for skilled workers the returns to experience for unskilled workers are small and insignificant after 2 years of experience their returns to sector tenure are also zero however their returns to firm tenure are substantial in this paper we study the growth of wages of young workers in germany knowing the extent and reasons for individual wage growth over the life cycle is important for a number of areas in economics just to mention two examples first it is a key element to understanding and designing active labour market programmes many such programmes offer temporary and often subsidized work opportunities examples are the new deal in the u k and the swedish programmes as well as a number of programmes in germany these programmes are based on the assumption that general skills are sufficiently enhanced while working so as to render the workers employable without a wage subsidy thus the success of these programmes depends on how skills improve on the job for the target population and whether this skill enhancement is transferable across jobs second it is a key to understanding the benefits and costs of job mobility this in turn matters for a number of policy issues including the design of pension policies relating for example to final salary schemes as a result of this widespread interest a large body of empirical research has focused on obtaining estimates for the returns of experience and seniority 1 our study uses a new and unique administrative data set with a number of features that are important for our analysis and allow us to avoid many problems encountered in earlier work in this field in our model wages grow due to learning by doing which may be heterogeneous across individuals moreover since firms offer different career profiles and because we allow for match specific effects on wages investments take the form of searching for the firm with the most desirable learning by doing characteristics career structure 2

econometric issues in estimating consumer preferences from stated preference data a case study of the value of automobile travel time this paper explores a number of methodological issues related to the econometric analysis of stated preference data in the context of estimating the value of automobile travel time estimates of parameters and the willingness to pay wtp to save time are obtained using conventional ordered probit and rank ordered logit models and an innovation called mixed logit we find that the average wtp is low and does not exhibit much variation among motorists although our findings using data on respondents rankings of alternatives are robust we find that caution should be used in estimating stated preferences based on respondents ratings

long run effects of public sector sponsored training in west germany between 1991 and 1997 west germany spent on average about 3 6 bn euro per year on public sector sponsored training programmes for the unemployed we base our empirical analysis on a new administrative data base that plausibly allows for selectivity correction by microeconometric matching methods we identify the effects of different types of training programmes over a horizon of more than seven years using bias corrected weighted multiple neighbours matching we find that all programmes have negative effects in the short run and positive effects over a horizon of about four years however for substantive training programmes with duration of about two years gains in employment probabilities of more than 10 points appear to be sustainable but come at the price of large negative lock in effects

natural groups and economic characteristics as driving forces of wage discrimination we investigate whether the origin of an employee provides different motives for wage discrimination in gift exchange experiments with students and migrant workers in china in a lab and an internet experiment subjects in the role of employers can condition their wages on the employees home provinces the resulting systematic differences in wages can be linked to natural groups and economic characteristics of the provinces in group favoritism increases wages for employees who share the same origin as the employer while an increased probability of being matched with an employee with a different ethnicity reduces wages furthermore wages in the laboratory increase with the actual wage level in the employees home province nevertheless employees effort is not influenced by these variables only the wage paid in the experiment influences effort

determinants of donations in private nonprofit markets abstract we estimate the responsiveness of donations to a number of economic variables including price advertising and the availability of revenue from such other sources as government grants and program service sales utilizing a set of irs data on individual nonprofit organizations in each of seven industries including hospitals and higher education for the years 1982 1994 we find distinct overall patterns as well as notable variation across industries a nonprofit organization s fundraising expenditures are estimated to exert two countervailing effects on donations the direct advertising and information effect augments donations while the indirect effect on the price of donating has a negative effect we do not find evidence that fundraising is carried to the profit maximizing levels in some industries fundraising is substantially short of that level while in other industries it is excessive implying that the marginal return to fundraising is exceeded by the cost focusing on whether revenue from other sources affects donations to a nonprofit organization we find evidence that revenue from either government grants or from the organization s own program sales activity generally does not crowd out private donations to the contrary in most industries there are significant positive effects

shaming the corporation the social production of targets and the anti sweatshop movement as social movements co evolve with changes in states and markets it is crucial to examine how they make particular kinds of actors into focal points for the expression of grievances and the demand for rights but researchers often bracket the question of why some kinds of organizations are more likely than others to become targets of social movement pressure we theorize the social production of targets by social movements rejecting a simple reflection model to focus on configurations of power and vulnerability that shape repertoires of contention empirically we extend structural accounts of global commodity chains and cultural accounts of markets to analyze the production of targets in the case of the anti sweatshop movement of the 1990s using a longitudinal firm level dataset and unique data on anti sweatshop activism we identify factors that attracted social movement pressure to particular companies firms power and positions strongly shaped their likelihood of becoming targets of anti swea

the estimation of wage gains and welfare gains in self selection models the authors modify the basic self sele ction model for the effects ofeducation training unions and other activities on wages by including heterogeneity of rewards to the activity i e diffe rences across individuals in the rate of return to the activity the authors sho w that such heterogeneity creates a new form of selectionbias they provide tes ts for its presence and draw out its implications for the wage and welfare gains to the activity an empirical application provides strong support for such hete rogeneityin one particular training program copyright 1987 by mit press

demand for charity donations in private non profit markets the case of the u k abstract this paper presents estimates of the demand for donations for u k charities in 1985 these estimates make demand depend upon price fund raising expenditure a quality index and alternative revenue sources the price elasticity of donations found here shows for the most part an elastic response and is consistent with previous studies using u s data our empirical results suggest that non profits in the u k unlike their counterparts in the u s are net revenue maximisers we discovered no significant evidence that public donations crowded out private donations in our sample of 300 charities

gender wage differentials and discrimination in the new south africa research into discrimination within south africa sa has focused on racial issues with gender issues being largely ignored this study aims to estimate gender wage differentials and through decomposition analysis understand the different problems faced by white black coloured and indian asian in 1995 it is found that white and asian females suffer greater gender discrimination than their black and coloured counterparts which could be a signal to future problems black and coloured females may encounter the largest gender wage differential is faced by white females whilst the lowest is encountered by coloured and black females a possible explanation for this finding is the low subsistence wages that the black and coloured population groups command relative to other population groups

the returns to schooling a selectivity bias approach with a continuous choice variable the essence of selection bias is that we do not observe nonoptimal choices this applies whether the choice variable is discrete or continuous this paper extends the selection bias methodology to the case where the choice variable is continuous and the choice set is ordered the leading practical application of this analysis is the schooling choice problem schooling is treated as a continuous choice variable and selectivity corrected rates of return are estimated the findings suggest selectivity is of considerable importance and support the comparative advantage hypothesis of willis and rosen 18

the effectiveness of targeted wage subsidies for hard to place workers targeted wage subsidies paid to employers are an important element of active labour market policies in germany this article uses propensity score matching to investigate their effect on the employment and unemployment rates of subsidized hard to place workers in a first scenario we estimate the average treatment effect of a subsidy on previously unemployed individuals a second scenario analyses the effects of a subsidy on employment probabilities conditional on taking up employment the third scenario investigates the additional effect of a subsidy on individuals who have participated in a short term training measure beforehand summing up and in line with the literature the results show that subsidies have a favourable effect on the employment prospects of participants

demand for collective goods in private nonprofit markets can fundraising expenditures help overcome free rider behavior abstract economic theory ascribes the primary role in the provision of public goods to government this emphasis on government overlooks the role of the not for profit sector in providing collective type goods in this paper we seek to determine the factors influencing charitable contributions to private nonprofit organizations by estimating a demand function for the output of these collective good providers specifically we test the hypothesis that voluntary giving is responsive to conventional market variables such as advertising expenditures price and quality overall the results are strongly supportive

learning by doing and investment in training a synthesis of two rival models of the life cycle this paper provides a theoretical synthesis of recent discussions of learning by doing and investment in training as alternative forms of human capital accumulation these theoretical notions relate to essentially different phenomena in particular pace becker and mincer investment in training does not completely encompass learning by doing the paper then develops a model in which human capital accumulation occurs via both training and learning by doing the joint training learning model since it is more general then pure models in which all accumulation occurs via either training or learning avoids certain restrictive and seemingly implausible implications of either kind of pure model however the joint model also has implications that while compatible with stylized facts about the life cycle are sharper than those of either kind of pure model for example the joint model implies that market time and earnings must rise early in the life cycle while neither pure model without corners does so finally the notion of learning by doing provides a rationale for an empirical finding that has recently received attention to the effect that the rate of depreciation of human capital is not constant but rather depends on the extent to which it is used in market activities

do wages rise with job seniority a reassessment the authors provide new estimates of the return to job seniority using a dataset similar to that employed in joseph altonji and robert shakotko do wages rise with job seniority review of economic studies 1987 and robert topel specific capital mobility and wages journal of political economy 1991 they consider the strengths and weaknesses of these studies treatment of economy wide trends their dating conventions for tenure and wages their handling of wage observations that might span multiple jobs and their estimation approaches re estimation points to an effect often years of tenure on the log wage equal to 11 which is above the preferred estimate of altonji and shakotko but far below that of topel changes in earnings distributions and in the employment relationship motivate the examination of more recent data perhaps surprisingly the return to tenure has probably increased over time

financial reporting quality and price competition among nonprofit firms donors increasingly rely on financial information reported by internal revenue service irs form 990 to allocate donations among nonprofit firms however competition among nonprofits creates an incentive for managers to under report management and fund raising expenditures to make their firms appear relatively efficient increasingly researchers suspect that information provided in the form 990 may not accurately portray the true financial condition of nonprofit firms inaccurate price information weakens the ability of donors to promote efficiency and discipline excess among nonprofit managers this article examines the reaction of donors to variation in form 990 reporting quality we find that donors reward nonprofit firms for investments in more accurate financial reporting additionally higher quality financial information sharpens the ability of donor markets to discipline nonprofit firms by increasing price sensitivity the primary implication of this study is that regulatory improvements in rep

the use of alternative preference elicitation methods in complex discrete choice experiments we analyse stated preference data over nursing jobs collected from two different discrete choice experiments a multi profile case best worst scaling experiment bws prompting selection of the best and worst among alternative jobs and a profile case bws wherein the respondents choose the best and worst job attributes the latter allows identification of additional utility parameters and is believed to be cognitively easier results suggest that respondents place greater value on pecuniary over non pecuniary gains in the multi profile case there is little evidence that this discrepancy is induced by the extra cognitive burden of processing several profiles at once in the multi profile case we offer thoughts on other likely mechanisms

promotion turnover and discretionary human capital acquisition this article explores human capital acquisition decisions when job placement helps determine competition for a worker with asymmetric information workers may invest in firm specific capital without long term contracts specific investment increases promotion chances and hence wage competition shifting competition back to a time when firms are symmetrically uninformed if general human capital is the efficient output maximizing investment then an equivalent firm specific investment maximizes expected career wages this is a general result for sellers in second price auctions sellers of labor invest to maximize the expected second highest bidder valuation wage not the winner s expected valuation

media legitimation effects in the market for initial public offerings in this study we argue that media provided information affects investors impressions of newly public firms in 225 initial public offerings ipos the volume of mediaprovided information had a negative diminishing relationship with underpricing and a positive diminishing relationship with stock turnover on the first day of trading the relationship between the tenor of media provided information and underpricing increases at a nonlinear rate and decreases similarly for turnover findings provide important evidence that publicly available information not only reflects ipos legitimacy but also adds to their legitimacy and influences investor behavior in the last 20 years an increasing amount of research on markets has been conducted from a social constructionist perspective emphasizing how social structures enhance the flow of useful and credible information that market participants use to reduce the uncertainty of market exchanges e g aldrich fiol 1994 zuckerman 1999 further recent organizational research has begun to stress the influence of information intermediaries such as financial analysts and the media on mar

using nonprofit organization level financial data to infer managers fund raising strategies abstract using irs data from 1982 to 1994 this study finds the typical fund raising elasticities in seven categories of nonprofit organizations to be between zero and one these results are consistent with most nonprofit managers following intermediate strategies between pure program service maximization and pure organization size maximization however the distribution of fund raising elasticities contains extreme observations that can disproportionately affect mean elasticities and standard deviations as a result prior researchers tests of the difference of mean elasticities from zero may not properly characterize the behavior of typical nonprofit organizations

unemployment benefits and labor market transitions a multinomial logit model with errors in classification this paper utilizes validation data on survey response error in the current population survey to generalize the standard multinomial logit model to allow for spurious events that result from classification error the authors basic approach could be used with other stochastic models of discrete events as well they illustrate their algorithm by studying the effect of unemployment insurance on transitions from unemployment to employment and on labor force withdrawal their results confirm earlier work suggesting that unemployment insurance lengthens unemployment spells and show that correcting for classification error strengthens the apparent effect of unemployment insurance on spell durations copyright 1995 by mit press

the impact of stakeholder power on corporate reputation a cross country corporate governance perspective corporate reputation has roots in national beliefs about the role of the business corporation in society these beliefs are constructed in accordance with the preferences of powerful stakeholders building on a stakeholder power approach to corporate governance we investigate whether differences in the legal rights and protections of shareholders creditors and workers across countries affect the general public s reputation assessments of business corporations using a sample of 593 of the largest publicly traded companies in the world from 32 countries during 2007 to 2011 we find that in societies where shareholders enjoy a high degree of legal rights the impact of stock market returns on corporate reputation becomes more positive likewise the negative relationship between earnings volatility and reputation becomes greater when creditor rights are stronger contrary to expectations we found no evidence of an interaction effect between labor rights and corporate social performance on corporate repu

estimating labour supply responses using tax reforms the 1980 s tax reforms and the changing dispersion of wages offer one of the best opportunities yet to estimate labor supply effects nevertheless changing sample composition aggregate shocks the changing composition of the tax paying population and discontinuities in the tax system create serious identification and estimation problems we develop grouping estimators that address these issues our results reveal positive and moderately sized wage elasticities we also find negative income effects for women with children

valuing alternative work arrangements abstract we employ a discrete choice experiment in the employment process for a national call center to estimate the willingness to pay distribution for alternative work arrangements relative to tr

are emily and greg more employable than lakisha and jamal a field experiment on labor market discrimination we study race in the labor market by sending fictitious resumes to help wanted ads in boston and chicago newspapers to manipulate perceived race resumes are randomly assigned african american or white sounding names white names receive 50 percent more callbacks for interviews callbacks are also more responsive to resume quality for white names than for african american ones the racial gap is uniform across occupation industry and employer size we also find little evidence that employers are inferring social class from the names differential treatment by race still appears to still be prominent in the u s labor market jel j71 j64

a dynamic analysis of educational attainment occupational choices and job search this article examines career choices using a dynamic structural model that nests a job search model within a human capital model of occupational and educational choices wage growth occurs in the model because workers move between firms and occupations as they search for suitable job matches and because workers endogenously accumulate firm and occupation specific human capital simulations performed using the estimated model reveal that both self selection in occupational choices and mobility between firms account for a much larger share of total earnings and utility than the combined effects of firm and occupation specific human capital

ripples of fear the diffusion of a bank panic community reactions against organizations can be driven by negative information spread through a diffusion process that is distinct from the diffusion of organizational practices bank panics offer

a rank ordered logit model with unobserved heterogeneity in ranking capabilities in this paper we consider the situation where one wants to study the preferences of individuals over a discrete choice set through a survey in the classical setup respondents are asked to select their most preferred option out of a selected set of alternatives it is well known that in theory more information can be obtained if respondents are asked to rank the set of alternatives instead in statistical terms the preferences can then be estimated more e ciently however when individuals are unable to perform part of this ranking task using the complete ranking may lead to a substantial bias in parameter estimates in practice one usually opts to only use a part of the reported ranking in this paper we introduce a latent class rank ordered logit model in which we use latent segments to endogenously identify the ranking capabilities of individuals each segment corresponds to a difierent assumption on the ranking capability using simulations and an empirical application we show that using this model for parameter estimation results in a clear e ciency gain over a multinomial logit model in case some individuals are able to rank at the same time it does not sufier from biases due to ranking inabilities of some of the respondents

earnings and employment effects of continuous off the job training in east germany after unification the effects of continuous off the job training oft for east germans after unification are analyzed in terms of their earnings and employment probabilities using the potential outcome approach to causality as general framework different matching procedures are suggested for the estimation they allow for permanent and transitory shocks that influence oft participation and labor market outcomes the matching procedures also take account of individually different starting dates the data are taken from the german socio economic panel gsoep 1990 1994 this dataset is very informative with respect to factors influencing the participation in training the results show no positive effects of training

the gender salary gap in british academia this paper considers salary determination and the gender salary gap in the academic labour market utilizing a particularly detailed data set of academics from five old established universities results reveal an aggregate gender salary differential for academic staff of 15 most of this differential can however be explained by our model evidence suggests a limited opportunity for female academics to combine career and family despite the flexibility of an academic job and emphasizes the importance of mobility to the male career publication record is found to be an important determinant of salary

why do firms train theory and evidence this paper offers a theory of training whereby workers do not pay for the general training they receive the superior information of the current employer regarding its employees abilities relative to other firms creates ex post monopsony power and encourages this employer to provide and pay for training even if these skills are general the model can lead to multiple equlibria in one equilibrium quits are endogenously high and as a result employers have limited monopsony power and provide little training while in another equilibrium quits are low and training is high using microdata on german apprentices we show that the predictions of our model receive some support from the data

an evaluation of the swedish system of active labour market programmes in the 1990s we investigate the presence of short and long term effects from joining a swedish labor market program vis a vis more intense job search in open unemployment overall the impact of the program system is found to have been mixed joining a program has increased employment rates among participants a result robust to a misclassification problem in the data on the other hand it has also allowed participants to remain significantly longer on unemployment benefits and more generally in the unemployment system this being particularly the case for those entitled individuals entering a program around the time of their unemployment benefits exhaustion

part time work and the hiring of older workers this research uses german establishment data to examine the relationship between back loading compensation the hiring of older workers and their part time status we confirm that establishments that defer compensation are less likely to hire older workers we demonstrate for the first time that establishments that defer compensation are more likely to limit older workers to part time jobs when they do hire them thus deferred compensation plays a larger role in reducing the chances of older workers being hired into full time jobs than would be inferred from past estimates simply examining their odds of being hired at all

insiders and outsiders in wage determination a firm starts with a group of insiders or seasoned workers there is also a large pool of outsiders who are initially less productive but are transformed into insiders after one period of employment the firm gains from having a large pool of insiders some of whom may be laid off in bad years insiders gain from keeping their numbers small if the insiders set their wage unilaterally they will choose a path that in this extreme case prevents employment of outsiders even if future employment prospects are good if the wage path is set by bilateral bargaining the extra advantage to the firm permits employment of some outsiders in some situations

charity donations in the uk new evidence based on panel data abstract this paper presents a set of panel data estimates for 159 of the most prominent uk charities for the period 1983 1990 in evaluating alternative specifications we settle on a fixed effects estimation social welfare charities are shown to fund raise short of the point at which net revenues are maximized whereas health and overseas charities are found to net revenue maximize religious charities maximize total revenues estimates of price and fund raising elasticities are presented for charities overall and for four cohorts for alternative income sources no evidence of crowding out is found

shopping at the labour market a real tale of fiction abstract this paper presents results from a survey in which employers in the netherlands reveal the way they select applicants the survey uses descriptions of fictitious lower skilled job seekers who do not have a job the data are analyzed by means of logit models the results show a strong preference for young healthy native dutch men employers hardly care about qualities as education and experience or even about the wage rate questions are raised about the cost efficiency of the observed preferences

disentangling the multiple effects of affiliate reputation on resource attraction in new firms past research has established that new firms can enhance their attractiveness to prospective resource providers by affiliating with more reputable firms but research on this process has yet to fully account for two critical realities underscored by recent research 1 firms need to acquire resources from different groups of resource providers and 2 reputation is multidimensional drawing on the organizational reputation literature and on information processing theory we propose that two groups of resource providers will respond differently to new firms affiliations in accordance with differences in the groups abilities to recognize and interpret reputation related signals we also propose that within a single group of resource providers distinct characteristics of the affiliate will exert different influences we test these propositions using longitudinal data from belgian firms that affiliated with venture capital vc investors consistent with our predictions we find that characteristics of a

the sports business as a labor market laboratory with superior data on compensation and productivity as well as the occurrence of abrupt dramatic market structure and player allocation rules changes sports labor markets offer an excellent setting in which to test economic hypotheses this paper reviews evidence from sports in four areas employer monopsony discrimination the coase theorem and incentive contracts supervision and performance there is considerable evidence of monopsony as well as for the existence of some forms of discrimination against minority athletes incentive contracts have strong effects on player performance and behavior and there is mixed evidence on the predictions of the coase theorem

dynamic labour force participation of married women and endogenous work experience this paper presents and estimates a dynamic model of married women s labour force participation and fertility in which the effect of work experience on wages is explicitly taken into account because current participation alters future potential earnings the investment return to work will be an important factor in the current work decision in any forward looking behavioural model the model is estimated using the national longitudinal surveys mature women s cohort we use the estimates of our model to predict changes in the lifecycle patterns of employment due to changes in schooling fertility husband s income and the magnitude of the experience effect on wages we find that although work experience increases the disutility of further work the effect is overwhelmed by the positive effect of experience on wages leading to persistence in the employment patterns of these women in addition we find that an increase in young children and in husband s income substantially reduces participation while increased schooling has a powerful positive impact on participation this paper presents an estimable structural dynamic model of married women s labour force participation and fertility in which wages are stochastic and work experience or cumulative participation is endogeneous the model is structural in the sense that the parameters which are estimated are contained in the fundamental relationships governing behaviour namely the utility function and the constraints the model is contained in the class of models which describe the life cycle capital accumulation process with endogeneous labour supply such as weiss 1972 and heckman 1976 it is closest in spirit to that of weiss and gronau 1981 1 the basic feature of their model and ours is that labour market participation affects future wages which then affects future participation the investment return to current work will necessarily be taken into account in any forward looking optimizing model as weiss and gronau note estimates of labour supply models have ignored the inherent behavioural dynamics associated with a positive wageexperience profile there is no adequate empirical treatment of the human capital investment dimension of the labour force participation decision in the literature heckman and willis 1977 have studied a sequential discrete choice model of the labour force participation of married women in a reduced form framework their work

employment and earnings effects of awarding training vouchers in germany participation in intensive training programs for the unemployed in germany is allocated by awarding training vouchers using rich administrative data for all vouchers and actual program participation the authors provide first estimates of the short run and long run employment and earnings effects of receiving a training voucher award based on a selection on observables assumption the results imply that after the award voucher recipients experience long periods of lower labor market success compared to had they not received training vouchers small positive employment effects and no gains in earnings were observed four to seven years after the receipt of the voucher award in addition the findings suggest stronger positive effects both for all low skilled individuals who were awarded and redeemed a voucher and for low skilled and medium skilled individuals who chose to take degree courses than for higher skilled recipients

using cost observation to regulate firms the paper emphasizes the use of accounting data in regulatory or procurement contracts when the supplier 1 has superior information about the cost of the project and 2 invests in cost reduction the main result states that under risk neutrality the supplier announces an expected cost and is given an incentive contract linear in cost overruns this optimal contract moves toward a fixed price contract as the announced cost decreases an investment choice is then introduced and the use of a rate of return regulation is studied

rank ordered logit models an empirical analysis of ontario voter preferences this study provides a bayesian investigation of rank ordered multinominal logit models employing conjugate priors for standard multinomial logit models as well as other priors also considered is a specification test of the independence of irrelevant alternatives assumption the proposed techniques are demonstrated in an empirical investigation of ontario voter preferences before the 1988 canadian federal election

evidence on discrimination in employment codes of color codes of gender there is substantial racial and gender disparity in the american economy as we will demonstrate discriminatory treatment within the labor market is a major cause of this inequality the evidence is ubiquitous careful research studies that estimate wage and employment regressions help wanted advertisements audit and correspondence studies and discrimination suits that are often reported by the news media yet there appear to have been periods of substantial reductions in economic disparity and discrimination for example donohue and heckman provide evidence that racial discrimination declined during 1965 1975 1 gottschalk has produced statistical estimates that indicate that discrimination against black males dropped most sharply between 1965 and 1975 and that discrimination against women declined during the interval 1973 1994 2 but some unanswered questions remain why did the movement toward racial equality stagnate and eventually decline after the mid 1970s what factors are most responsible for the remaining gender inequality what is the role of the competitive process in the elimination or reproduction of discrimination in employment

does unmeasured ability explain inter industry wage differentials this paper provides empirical assessments of the two leading explanations of measured inter industry wage differentials 1 true wage differentials exist across industries and 2 the measured differentials simply reflect unmeasured differences in workers productive abilities first we summarize the existing evidence on the unmeasured ability explanation second we construct a simple model which shows that if matching is important then endogenous job change decisions can create important self selection biases even in first differenced estimates of industry wage differentials third we analyze a sample that approximates the experiment of exogenous job loss we find that i the wage change experienced by a typical industry switcher closely resembles the difference in the relevant industry differentials estimated in a cross section and ii pre displacement industry affiliation plays an important role in post displacement wage determination

field experiments of discrimination in the market place controlled experiments using matched pairs of bogus transactors to test for discrimination in the marketplace have been conducted for over 30 years and have extended across 10 countries significant persistent and pervasive levels of discrimination have been found against non whites and women in labour housing and product markets rates of employment discrimination against non whites in excess of 25 have been measured in australia europe and north america a small number of experiments have also investigated employment discrimination against the disabled in britain and the netherlands and against older applicants in the united states

do wages rise with job seniority many previous studies have found a strong positive effect of job seniority tenure on wages this paper re examines the evidence using a simple instrumental variables scheme to deal with the fact that tenure is likely to be related to unobserved individual and job characteristics that affect the wage we use the variation of tenure over a given job match as the principal instrumental variable for tenure the variation in tenure over the job is uncorrelated by construction with the fixed individual and job match specific components of the error term of the wage equation our main finding is that the partial effect of tenure on wages is small and that general labour market experience and job shopping account for most wage growth over a career the strong cross section relationship between tenure and wages is due primarily to heterogeneity bias prior researchers see mincer and jovanovic 1981 bartel and borjas 1981 borjas 1981 cline 1979 and mellow 1981 and many others have established that job seniority has a strong positive relationship with wage rates in a cross section or a cross section time series of individuals in this paper we re evaluate the evidence concerning the partial effects on wages of job seniority tenure and total labour market experience the extent to which wages rise with tenure is important for several reasons first and foremost the wage tenure profile is a fundamental question about the structure of earnings over careers second the wage tenure profile is a key determinant of the extent to which the earnings power of individuals is tied to specific jobs and it is important for assessment of the losses suffered by displaced workers hamermesh 1984 third evidence that wages rise with job tenure has been used to explain the decline in quits with tenure since the wage growth on the current job lowers the probability that the worker will locate a superior alternative a growing theoretical literature surveyed in parsons 1984 has taken the evidence of a strong wage tenure profile at face value and sought to provide an explanation for the relationship the most prominent explanation is the theory of specific human capital oi 1962 becker 1962 mincer 1974 parsons 1972 kuratani 1973 and hashimoto 1980 in which the growth of wages with tenure holding experience constant is attributed to the worker s share of investments in firm specific skills more recently lazear 1981 has presented a supervision model of wage growth in which firms defer compensation as a means of inducing workers not to shirk freeman 1977 and harris and holmstrom 1982 provide an explanation for wage growth based on an insurance motive salop and salop 1976 nickell 1976 and guasch and weiss 1982 present adverse selection models of wage growth in which firms use a wage tenure profile as a

the contributions of search and human capital to earnings growth over the life cycle abstract this paper presents and estimates a unified model where both human capital investment and job search are endogenized this unification enables us to quantify the relative contributions of each mechanism to life cycle earnings growth while investigating potential interactions between human capital investment and job search within the unified framework the expectation of rising rental rates of human capital through job search gives workers more incentive to invest in human capital in addition unemployed workers reduce their reservation rental rates and increase their search effort to leave unemployment quickly to take advantage of human capital accumulation on the job the results show both forces are important for earnings growth and the interactions are substantial human capital accumulation accounts for 50 of total earnings growth job search accounts for 20 and the remaining 30 is due to the interactions of the two

labor supply estimation biases from disregarding nonwage benefits labor supply models and research underpinned by labor supply decisions typically assume the agents choices are functions of wage and wage offers however there is evidence that these selections are not only wage driven but at least in part depend on non wage benefits encompassed in jobs and occupations in this paper i develop and estimate a stochastic dynamic model of occupational and job choice where non wage benefits are directly incorporated into the decision alongside wages a nested model within this is a wage model representing common practice in the literature where non wage benefits are disregarded i separately estimate the full model and the nested wage model in order to compare the implications of omitting non wage benefits three analyses are compared elasticities economy wide structural changes in occupations and inequality reduction intervention policies i find that while disregarding non wage benefits generally causes biases there are cases when the two models predict very similar outcomes and have close estimates such as in occupational specific elasticities and job transition elasticities however i demonstrate that these special cases are products of canceling biases and that the same estimates on subpopulations are biased these results suggest that in most cases ignoring non wage benefits will bias estimates by overestimating the importance of wage in the selection process and so any intervention or change in wages will be over emphasized and by disregarding changes in relative prices between wage and non wage benefits such as happens through changes in wage taxes or in non wage benefits these biases can be severe the results suggest that ignoring non wage benefits in labor supply decisions is appropriate only in the special case in which subpopulation biases negate each other which is atypical i would like to thank moshe buchinsky and maria casanova for their invaluable and continual help in this project as well as rosa matzkin arturo harker seth kerstein dan ben moshe peter bergman anonymous referees at review of economics and statistics and seminar participants at ucla rand syracuse university the bureau of labor statistics and the census bureau for numerous helpful comments and suggestions

school characteristics and teacher turnover assessing the role of preferences and opportunities job characteristics can affect worker turnover through their effect on utility and through their effect on outside job opportunities the aim of this study is to identify and estimate the roles of these two channels separately our method exploits information on job changes and relies on an augmented sample selection correction to illustrate our approach we use an exhaustive register of dutch primary school teachers and show a detailed picture of preferences for school characteristics we also find that the dependence between current and outside job attributes can affect turnover and thus the allocation of teachers across schools

do the skilled and prime aged unemployed benefit more from training effect heterogeneity of public training programs in germany this study analyses the treatment effects of public training programmes for the unemployed in germany based on propensity score matching methods we extend the picture that has been sketched in previous studies by estimating the treatment effects of medium term programmes for different skill and age groups our results indicate that programme participation has a positive impact on employment probabilities and earnings for almost all sub groups we find little evidence for the presence of heterogeneous treatment effects and the magnitude of the differences is quite small our results thus at least in part conflict with the strategy to provide training increasingly to individuals with better employment prospects

identifying effect heterogeneity to improve the efficiency of job creation schemes in germany previous empirical studies of job creation schemes in germany have shown that the average effects for the participating individuals are negative however we find that this is not true for all strata of the population identifying individual characteristics that are responsible for the effect heterogeneity and using this information for a better allocation of individuals therefore bears some scope for improving programme efficiency we present several stratification strategies and discuss the occurring effect heterogeneity our findings show that job creation schemes do neither harm nor improve the labour market chances for most of the groups exceptions are long term unemployed men in west and long term unemployed women in east and west germany who benefit from participation in terms of higher employment rates

estimating workers marginal willingness to pay for job attributes using duration data this paper develops and applies a method for estimating workers marginal willingess to pay for job attributes when workers job choices are characterized by imperfect information and labor market search as an application this paper analyzes the job durations of white males using data from the national longitudinal survey youth cohort and the dictionary of occupational titles estimates of workers willingness to pay derived from the job duration model are compared with those derived from an hedonic wage model

the cost of job loss this article identifies an equilibrium theory of wage formation and endogenous quit turnover in a labour market with on the job search where risk averse workers accumulate human capital through learning by doing and lose skills while unemployed optimal contracting implies the wage paid increases with experience and tenure indirect inference using german data determines the deep parameters of the model the estimated model not only reproduces the large and persistent fall in wages and earnings following job loss a new structural decomposition finds foregone human capital accumulation while unemployed is the worker s major cost of job loss

multichoice logit modeling incomplete preference rankings of classical concerts in this article we develop an econometric model to analyze data on incomplete information on preferences the available information consists of groups of alternatives that are preferred to other groups of alternatives only for the most preferred group is a full ranking observed the resulting model is estimated on data concerning preferences on classical concerts

character conformity or the bottom line how and why downsizing affected corporate reputation the aim of this study is to illuminate reputational change processes and identify the underlying theoretical mechanisms we draw upon extant literature to develop three distinct explanations for reputational change respectively emphasizing criteria of organizational character symbolic conformity and technical efficacy we evaluate these explanations by examining the reputational consequences of corporate downsizing our results show that downsizing exerted a strong negative effect on reputation consistently with the character explanation however significant moderation of this negative effect by other factors including stock market reaction and downsizing s overall prevalence indicates the need for a multitheoretical approach to reputational change

the declining fortunes of the young since 2000 abstract we document that successive cohorts of college and post college degree graduates experienced an increase in the probability of obtaining cognitive jobs both at the start of their careers and with time in the labor market in the 1990s however this pattern reversed for cohorts entering after 2000 profiles of the proportion of a cohort in cognitive occupations since school completion fall and become flatter with successive cohorts since cohort wage profiles display a similar pattern these findings appear to fit with a strong increase in demand for cognitive tasks in the 1990s followed by a decline in the 2000s

wages or fringes some evidence on trade offs and sorting the two key predictions of hedonic wage theory are that there is a trade off between wages and nonmonetary rewards and that the latter can be used as a sorting device by firms to attract and retain the kind of employees they desire we use the vignettes method to estimate individuals willingness to pay for fringe benefits and job amenities we find negative wage fringe trade offs considerable heterogeneity in willingness to pay for fringe benefits and signs of sorting

an empirical study of age discrimination in norway and germany using a questionnaire and a sample of students and personnel managers we establish the existence of age discrimination in the hiring process in germany and norway as expected age discrimination is more prominent in germany where the hiring probability of equally qualified applicants is reduced by about 22 percentage points due to an age differential of 14 years as opposed to only 12 percentage points in norway within both countries the tendency to discriminate does not differ between students and personnel managers and does not depend on the age of the decision maker the phenomenon of unemployment among older workers is characterized less by the risk of becoming unemployed than by the problem of remaining unemployed and failing to find new work frerichs and naegele 1998 p 59

courses or individual counselling does job search assistance work how does labour market policy affect welfare recipients and long term unemployed people we investigate whether job search assistance jsa helps disadvantaged individuals to find jobs and whether courses or individual counselling is more successful in reaching this goal to evaluate individual employment effects we apply a quasi experimental design and construct suitable comparison groups using propensity score matching methods we compare participants to nonparticipants as well as participants of both schemes directly our article benefits from access to rich administrative data from the german federal employment agency when comparing participants to nonparticipants results suggest that the individual jsa does not affect participants employment prospects at all and that the course jsa even decreased their employment chances at the same time differences in these effects can be ascribed to programme design differences and to differences in the groups of participants therefore we compare both progr

labor market institutions and long term effects of youth unemployment graduating from a school during a time of adverse economic conditions has a persistent harmful effect on workers subsequent employment opportunities an analysis of panel data from oecd countries during the 1960 2010 periods reveals that a worker who experiences a 1 percentage point higher unemployment rate while the worker is 16 24 years old has a 0 14 percentage point higher unemployment rate at ages 25 29 years and 0 03 percentage points higher at ages 30 34 years the persistence of this negative effect is stronger in countries with stricter employment protection legislation a composite index for labor market rigidity is constructed and the index is shown to have positive correlation with the persistence moderating macroeconomic fluctuations is more important in countries that have more persistent labor market entry effects on subsequent outcomes

limited choice sets local price response and implied measures of price competition it is becoming increasingly evident that a consumer s brand choice decision in low involvement categories does not involve full search evaluation and comparison of price information of all brands available at point of purchase global price response the authors propose a two stage choice process in which the consumer first identifies a subset of brands within the universal set of brands called the choice set and then evaluates only those brands that are in the choice set relative to one another to select a single brand the authors find that consistent with reports of the extent of external price search of consumers response to shelf price variations is limited to the brands in the choice set local price response their results indicate that employing the assumption of global price response may lead to biased estimates of price elasticity and derived measures of clout and vulnerability to enable a managerially meaningful and useful assessment of a brand s competitive clout and vulnerability the