where do markets come from production markets have two sides producers are a fully connected clique transacting with buyers as a separate but aggregated clique each producer is a distinctive firm with a distinctive product each side continually monitors reactions of the other through the medium of a joint social construction the schedule of terms of trade each producer is guided in choice of volume by the tangible outcomes of other producers not by speculation on hypothetical reactions of buyers to its actions each producer acts purely on self interest based on observed actions of all others summarized through a feedback process the summary is the terms of trade schedule which reduces to constant price only in limiting cases the market emerges as a structure of roles with a differentiated niche for each firm explicit formulae both for firms and for market aggregates are obtained by comparative statics methods for one family of assumptions about cost structures and about buyers evaluations of differentiated products not just any set of firms can sustain terms of trade with any set of buyers there prove to be three main kinds of markets and three sorts of market failure within a parameter space that is specified in detail one sort of market paradox has a madison avenue flavor another is more conventional grind and a third crowded is a new form not included in any existing theory of markets current american industrial markets are drawn on for 20 illustrations of which three are presented in some detail inequality in firms market shares measured by gini coefficients is discussed

selection investment and women s relative wages over time in theory growing wage inequality within gender should cause women to invest more in their market productivity and should differentially pull able women into the workforce our paper uses heckman s two step estimator and identification at infinity on repeated current population survey cross sections to calculate relative wage series for women since 1970 that hold constant the composition of skills we find that selection into the female full time full year workforce shifted from negative in the 1970s to positive in the 1990s and that the majority of the apparent narrowing of the gender wage gap reflects changes in female workforce composition we find the same types of composition changes by measuring husbands wages and national longitudinal survey iq data as proxies for unobserved skills our findings help to explain why growing wage equality between genders coincided with growing inequality within gender

the social structure of a national securities market in this article a national securities market the stock options market is characterized as a social structure represented by the networks of actors who traded options on the floor of a major securities exchange trading among actors exhibited distinct social structural patterns that dramatically affected the direction and magnitude of option price volatility the argument that this market is socially structured is constructed in four parts behavioral assumptions about the nature of economic actors models of micronetworks models of macronetworks and price consequences in the ideal typical model of the market actors are assumed to be hyperrational and never to act opportunistically with these behavioral assumptions the micronetworks of actors should be expansive a condition which would result in undifferentiated and homogeneous macronetworks such macronetworks would tend to reduce the volatility of option prices but in the empirical market studied here actors are subject to bounded rationality a

expert opinion and compensation evidence from a musical competition pianists who achieve high scores in the queen elizabeth musical competition are rewarded by subsequent success this is not surprising in itself but it is not immediately clear whether this is caused by the score or because those who have high scores are better pianists data on eleven consecutive competitions make it possible to distinguish between the two explanations since an unexpected situation allows us to use an instrumental variable the randomly assigned order in which musicians appear at the competition uncorrelated with ability but correlated with the results of the competition

a status based model of market competition this article explores the significance of status processes for generating and reproducing hierarchy among producers in a market it develops a conception of a market as a status order in which each

research on the motion picture industry state of the art and new directions off the beaten track away from theatrical release the motion picture industry has been subject of extensive academic research over the last decades however most scholars focused on the u s theatrical motion picture market the number of research activities regarding even more profitable release windows such as home video or television has been substantially lower although international distribution is essential for a motion picture project to break even there has been little significant re search on most other markets this paper aims at summarizing the current state of research on the motion picture industry particularly from marketing and management perspective revealing research gaps and proposing recommendations for future research endeavors therefore a three pillar scheme is developed to systemize previous findings research on intraorganizational decision making contractual relationships between national stakeholders and international market competition are differentiated since these insights are mainly derived from u s theatrical exhibition they can hardly be applied to other markets and exhibition windows thus potential research areas are identified to expand knowledge of posttheatrical and international markets

rising u s earnings inequality and family labor supply the covariance structure of intrafamily earnings this paper studies the labor supply contributions to individual and family earnings inequality during the period of rising wage inequality in the early 1980 s working couples have positively correlated labor market outcomes which are almost entirely attributable to permanent factors an intertemporal family labor supply model with this feature is used to estimate labor supply elasticities for husbands of 0 05 and wives of 0 40 this implies that labor supply explains little of the rising annual earnings inequality for married men but over 20 percent of the rise in family inequality and 50 percent of the modest rise in female inequality

close but no cigar the bimodal rewards to prize seeking this article examines the economic effects of prizes with implications for the diversity of market positions especially in cultural fields many prizes have three notable features that together yield an emergent reward structure 1 consumers treat prizes as judgment devices when making purchase decisions 2 prizes introduce sharp discontinuities between winners and also rans and 3 appealing to prize juries requires costly sacrifices of mass audience appeal when all three conditions obtain winning a prize is valuable but seeking it is costly so trying and failing yields the worst outcome a logic we characterize as a tullock lottery we test the model with analyses of oscar nominations and hollywood films from 1985 through 2009 we create an innovative measure of prize seeking or oscar appeal on the basis of similarity to recent nominees in terms of such things as genre plot keywords and release date we then show that oscar appeal has no effect on profitability however this zero order relationship conceals that returns to strong oscar appeals are bimodal with super normal returns for nominees and large losses for snubs we then argue that the effect of judgment devices on fields depends on how they structure and refract information

the role of the family in immigrants labor market activity an evaluation of alternative explanations comment most research on the labor market outcomes of immigrants has studied the behavior of individuals focusing primarily on the wage assimilation process or the excess returns to experience which immigrants obtain in their destination country s labor market e g barry r chiswick 1978 george j borjas 1985 recently however attention has been directed to analyzing immigrant labor market outcomes in a family context an approach which combines information about an individual s own labor market opportunities and the family context in which labor market decisions take place in a previously published paper in this review michael baker and dwayne benjamin 1997 evaluate alternative explanations for the observed labor supply patterns of canadian immigrants in the 1986 1991 period specifically when immigrant husbands arrive in canada they typically work less than comparable natives however immigrant wives work more than natives other things equal with assimilation the labor supply of immigrant husbands eventually catches up to that of natives while immigrant wives labor supply falls relative to comparable natives and is ultimately overtaken by that of natives the authors take these patterns to be most consistent with a family investment model in this scenario upon arrival husbands invest in their human capital while wives work to provide the family with liquidity during this investment period with increased time in canada husbands labor supply increases rapidly due to their growing skills in the canadian labor market while wives labor supply falls off in part because they originally took dead end jobs upon arrival in order to finance their husbands investments in human capital interestingly while most of the findings reported by baker and benjamin are consistent with the family investment model their estimated wage equations are not although they do not comment on this in discussing the appropriateness of the family investment model specifically they find similar rates of wage assimilation for husbands and wives this finding suggests roughly equal propensities to invest in one s own human capital for both groups this is contrary to the family investment hypothesis and does not match their story of dead end jobs for wives and large human capital investments of their husbands an alternative possible explanation for the patterns observed by baker and benjamin involves a simple price model in which the observed labor supply patterns reflect laborsupply responses to each spouse s wages for example the initially high but eventually falling level of wives labor supply relative to comparable natives could be a response to their husbands initially low but rising wages while this reasoning like the family investment model is broadly consistent with the data the authors conclude that the simple price model cannot be the entire explanation since in order to explain the full labor supply patterns of immigrants it would require unrealistically high labor supply elasticities and further that the assimilation patterns noted above remain even when wages of husband and wife are controlled blau school of industrial and labor relations cornell university 265 ives hall ithaca ny 14853 and nber and cesifo kahn school of industrial and labor relations cornell university 264 ives hall ithaca ny 14853 and cesifo moriarty school of industrial and labor relations cornell university ilr graduate student mailboxes ives hall ithaca ny 14853 souza faculdade de economia administracao e contabilidade university of sao paulo avenida professor luciano gualberto 908 cidade universitaria predio fea 1 sao paulo sp 05508 brazil the authors thank three anonymous referees for helpful comments and suggestions portions of this paper were written while blau and kahn were visiting scholars at the russell sage foundation to which they are grateful for research support

new evidence on labor supply employment versus hours elasticities by sex and marital status using the tri annual micro panel data of the survey of income and program participation we estimate fixed effects labor supply models separating the extensive and intensive margins the employment elasticity is 0 6 for single men versus 1 1 for married men the employment elasticity is 2 4 for single women versus 1 8 for married women the compensated hours worked elasticity is 0 4 for employed single and married men and 0 7 for employed single and married women the implied aggregate employment elasticity of 1 5 and hours per employee elasticity of 0 5 indicate employment fluctuations account for three fourths of wage induced variation in labor hours

a cohort analysis of the association between work hours and wages among men the results of some recent ingenious labor supply research may appear incompatible with the notion that uncompensated wage elasticities for men are small perhaps negative this paper argues there is no incompatibility the methodology in this recent research results in computing wage responses that come closer to measuring intertemporal wage elasticities than to uncompensated wage elasticities to demonstrate this i use pseudopanel data constructed from the march current population surveys from 1967 to 1998 to measure both intertemporal wage elasticities and uncompensated wage elasticities the latter appear sensitive to the particular specification of the hours equation

cultural industries in international business research progress and prospect cultural industries systems of organizations that produce and distribute cultural goods with substantive symbolic aesthetic or artistic value represent an important exciting and complex context that receives growing scholarly attention as the first review of management research on cultural industries this paper aims to provide a systematic synthesis of current research summarizing distinctive characteristics of cultural industries and highlighting research gaps we also illustrate how the unique nature dynamics and evolution of cultural industries provide opportunities to broaden international business theories in four research themes i e internationalization strategy cross border innovation social inclusion in the global economy and emerging market research

testing mixed strategy equilibria when players are heterogeneous the case of penalty kicks in soccer the concept of mixed strategy is a fundamental component of game theory and its normative importance is undisputed however its empirical relevance has sometimes been viewed with skepticism the main concern over the practical usefulness of mixed strategies relates to the indifference property of a mixedstrategy equilibrium in order to be willing to play a mixed strategy an agent must be indifferent between each of the pure strategies that are played with positive probability in the mixed strategy as well as any combination of those strategies given that the agent is indifferent across these many strategies there is no bene t to selecting precisely the strategy that induces the opponent to be indifferent as required for equilibrium why an agent would in the absence of communication between players choose exactly one particular randomization is not clear of course whether agents in real life actually play nash equilibrium mixed strategies is ultimately an empirical question the evidence to date on this issue is based almost exclusively on laboratory experiments e g barry o neill 1987 amnon rapoport and richard b boebel 1992 dilip mookherjee and barry sopher 1994 jack ochs 1995 kevin a mccabe et al 2000 the results of these experiments are mixed o neill 1987 concludes that his experimental evidence is consistent with nash mixed strategies but that conclusion was contested by james n brown and robert w rosenthal 1990 with the exception of mccabe et al 2000 which looks at a three person game the other papers generally reject the nash mixedstrategy equilibrium while much has been learned in the laboratory there are inherent limitations to such studies it is sometimes argued that behavior in the simpli ed arti cial setting of games played in such experiments need not mimic real life behavior in addition even if individuals behave in ways that are inconsistent with optimizing behavior in the lab market forces may discipline such behavior in the real world finally interpretation of experiments rely on the assumption that the subjects are maximizing the monetary outcome of the game whereas there may be other preferences at work among subjects e g attempting to avoid looking foolish that distort the results tests of mixed strategies in nonexperimental data are quite scarce in real life the games played are typically quite complex with large strategy spaces that are not fully speci ed ex ante in addition preferences of the actors may not be perfectly known we are aware of only one paper in a similar spirit to our own research using data from classic tennis matches mark walker and john wooders 2001 test whether the probability the player who serves the ball wins the point is equal for serves to the right and chiappori department of economics university of chicago 1126 east 59th street chicago il 60637 levitt department of economics university of chicago groseclose graduate school of business stanford university 518 memorial way stanford ca 94305 the paper was presented at games 2000 in bilbao and at seminars in paris and chicago we thank d braun j m conterno r guesnerie d heller d mengual p reny b salanie and especially j l ettori for comments and suggestions and m mazzocco and f bos for excellent research assistance any errors are ours 1 the theoretical arguments given in defense of the concept of mixed strategy equilibria relate either to puri cation john c harsanyi 1973 or to the minimax property of the equilibrium strategy in zero sum games for recent elaborations on these ideas see authur j robson 1994 and phil reny and robson 2001 2 the ultimatum game is one instance in which experimental play of subjects diverges substantially from the predicted nash equilibrium robert slonim and alvin e roth 1998 demonstrate that raising the monetary payoffs to experiment participants induces behavior closer to that predicted by theory although some disparity persists

the effect of job displacement on couples fertility decisions this paper analyzes the effects of job displacement on fertility using finnish longitudinal register data we focus on couples where one spouse has lost a job due to a plant closure and follow them for several years before and following the job loss the results show that female job loss decreases fertility for every 100 displaced females there are three fewer children born male job loss has no impact on fertility despite resulting in a stronger decrease in family income than female job loss this indicates that the income effect is not the mechanism through which job displacement influences fertility

do tournaments have incentive effects much attention has been devoted to studying models of tournaments or situations in which an individual s payment depends only on his or her output or rank relative to that of other competitors academic interest derives from the fact that under certain sets of assumptions tournaments have desirable normative properties because of the incentive structures they provide our paper uses nonexperimental data to test whether tournaments actually elicit effort responses we focus on professional golf tournaments because information on the incentive structure prize distribution and measures of individual output players scores are both available we find strong support for the proposition that the level and structure of prizes in pga tournaments influence players performance

empirical regularities in black markets for currency abstract this paper develops a model of the black or parallel market foreign exchange rate this rate is seen to depend upon the level of the official rate the unobserved equilibrium rate the premium offered for exchange sold through the black market and government reserve level policies the model is then empirically estimated for 10 countries over a period from 1957 through 1983 the results generally support the model specified by theory additionally the paper provides weak form tests concerning the efficiency of the black market the results cannot reject the hypothesis that the current black market rate incorporates all relevant historical price information

gender and ethnicity married immigrants in britain in this paper we investigate the economic activity of married or cohabiting female immigrants in britain we distinguish between two immigrant groups foreign born females who belong to an ethnic minority group and their husbands and foreign born white females and their husbands we compare these to native born white women and their husbands our analysis deviates from the usual mean analysis and investigates employment hours worked and earnings for males and females as well as their combined family earnings along the distribution of husbands economic potential we analyse the extent to which economic disadvantage may be reinforced at the household level and investigate the extent to which it can be explained by differences in observable characteristics we find that white female immigrants and their husbands have an overall advantage in earnings over white native born both individually and at the household level minority immigrants do less well in particular at the lower end of the husbands economic potential distribution this is mainly due to the low employment of both genders which leads to a disadvantage in earnings intensified at the household level only part of this differential can be explained by observable characteristics

bose einstein dynamics and adaptive contracting in the motion picture industry audiences discover what films they like and spread the word information feedback produces bose einstein dynamics in the motion picture box office revenue distribution information cascades generate box office hits and flops the revenue distribution evolves recursively over the run as a mixture of the opening and a stochastic competition among films the motion picture run is decentralized adaptive and self organizing semistationary admission prices local information and contingency rich contracts match the film rental price and the supply of theatrical engagements to demand copyright 1996 by royal economic society

earnings inequality and the changing association between spouses earnings increases in the association between spouses earnings have the potential to increase inequality as marriages increasingly consist of two high earning or two low earning partners this article uses log linear models and data from the march current population survey to describe trends in the association between spouses earnings and estimate their contribution to growing earnings inequality among married couples from 1967 to 2005 the results indicate that increases in earnings inequality would have been about 25 30 lower than observed in the absence of changes in the association depending on the inequality measure used three components of these changes and how they vary across the earnings distribution are explored

cumulative advantage and inequality in science the hypothesis of cumulative advantage is widely accepted in the sociology of science but empirical tests have been few and equivocal one approach originated by allison and stewart 1974 is to see whether inequality of productivity and recognition increases as a cohort of scientists ages this paper extends their work by examining true cohorts of biochemists and chemists rather than synthetic cohorts increasing inequality is observed for counts of publications but not for counts of citations to all previous publications it is also shown that a mathematical model of cumulative advantage does not imply increasing inequality when the model is modified to allow for heterogeneity in the rate of cumulative advantage however increasing inequality is implied

black and official exchange rates in the pacific basin countries an analysis of their long run dynamics this paper examines the long run dynamic relationship between black and official markets for seven pacific basin countries over the period 1974 to 1989 the evidence shows a long run unit proportionality between the two rates i e a constant long run black market premium when the premium deviates from its long run value the black market rate adjusts to eliminates the division the speed of adjustment varies and seems to depend on the financial development of the country finally there is evidence of weak form informational inefficiency in the black markets

from mill town to board room the rise of women s paid labor the widespread participation of women in paid labor outside of the home and in the highest echelons of society would have been unheard of a century ago this paper documents this dramatic change in women s social and economic status and argues that it was determined both by contemporaneous demand factors and by the characteristics expectations and social norms regarding work and family of different cohorts of women history suggests that change in women s labor force experiences may be slow because it must await the entry of new cohorts of women and also of men into the labor market

changes in labor force participation in the united states the labor force participation rate in the united states increased almost continuously for two and a half decades after the mid 1960s pausing only briefly during economic downturns the pace of growth slowed considerably during the 1990s however and after reaching a record high of 67 3 percent in the first quarter of 2000 participation had declined by 1 5 percentage points by 2005 this paper reviews the social and demographic trends that contributed to the movements in the labor force participation rate in the second half of the twentieth century it also examines the manner in which developments in the 2000s reflect a break from past trends and considers implications for the future

changes in the labor supply behavior of married women 1980 2000 using march current population survey data we investigate married women s labor supply from 1980 to 2000 we find a large rightward shift in their labor supply function for annual hours in the 1980s with little shift in the 1990s these shifts account for most of the slowdown in the growth of labor supply during this period a major development was the dramatic decrease in the responsiveness of married women s labor supply to their own and husbands wages their own wage elasticity fell by 50 56 while their cross wage elasticity fell by 38 47 in absolute value

the influence of expert reviews on consumer demand for experience goods a case study of movie critics an inherent problem in measuring the influence of expert reviews on the demand for experience goods is that a correlation between good reviews and high demand may be spurious induced by an underlying correlation with unobservable quality signals using the timing of the reviews by two popular movie critics siskel and ebert relative to opening weekend box office revenue we apply a difference in differences approach to circumvent the problem of spurious correlation after purging the spurious correlation the measured influence effect is smaller though still detectable positive reviews have a particularly large influence on the demand for dramas and narrowly released movies

refraining from imitation professional resistance and limited diffusion in a financial market why do some practices not spread although this is an important question for both diffusion theorists and those interested in institutional change we know surprisingly little about the limitations on diffusion because most diffusion studies sample on successful diffusion i address the question of why some practices fail to spread by introducing the concept of a deviance discount a deviance discount is a systematic downgrading of the observed adoption performance of controversial practices which limits the contagion of such practices i test and find qualitative and quantitative support for my thesis in the product introduction behavior of swedish mutual fund firms my findings hold implications for diffusion theory and theories of endogenous institutional change

the family gap for young women in the united states and britain can maternity leave make a difference in the united states and britain there is a family gap between the wages of mothers and other women differential returns to marital and parental status explain 40 50 of the gender gap another 30 40 is explained by women s lower levels of work experience and lower returns to experience taking advantage of quasi experiments in job protected maternity leave in the united states and britain this article finds that women who had leave coverage and returned to work after childbirth received a wage premium that offset the negative wage effects of children

the market work behavior and wages of women 1975 94 changes in the labor market participation and wages of women in the united states are analyzed over the period 1975 1994 using data from the current population survey women are organized into nine birth cohorts five schooling groups and each year of age from 25 to 60 years and their weekly and annual work hours their annual work weeks their employment population ratio and their real average hourly earnings tabulated schooling differences in work behavior have become wider in recent cohorts as have their wages the relationship between work and wages is estimated for women of different ages cohorts and marital status the gap between the work of unmarried and married women has narrowed and the role of wages both the wages of women and those of husbands is examined to determine the extent to which changes in wages account for these movements excerpt

when market information constitutes fields sensemaking of markets in the commercial music industry in this paper we outline a key mechanism through which organizational fields are constituted we suggest that in competitive fields the market serves as a magnet around which groups of actors consolidate and that cognition of markets occurs through the creation distribution and interpretation of a web of information about the market to illustrate our theory we present a case study of thebillboard music chart from the commercial music industry to show that changes in either scope methodology or political tone with which market information is presented can provide a major jolt to the participants understanding of their field

employment motherhood and school continuation decisions of young white black and hispanic women we examine the empirical relationship between early employment activity and school continuation decisions for young american women using a dynamic sequential discrete choice framework that estimates schooling labor supply and birth decisions jointly controlling for unobserved heterogeneity and the endogeneity of these life cycle decisions that the rate of school withdrawal increases as work intensity rises helps explain the higher departure rates of hispanic girls from secondary school and the premature departure of young black women from college the disturbing implication is that youth employment induces long run wage stagnation for early school leavers and potentially increases race and ethnic inequities

assortative mating and female labor supply this paper investigates married women s hours worked disaggregated by the husband s wage decile in the united states this pattern has changed from downward sloping to hump shaped we show that this development can be explained within a standard household model of labor supply when taking into account trends in assortative mating a quantitative analysis of our model shows that female wage growth and decreasing fertility are primarily responsible for the overall increase in wives hours since the 1970s the fact that the most pronounced increases are observed for wives married to high wage men is a result of trends in assortative mating

volatility spillovers in east european black market exchange rates abstract this paper tests the efficiency of dollar exchange rate black markets for the currencies of six formerly socialist countries of eastern europe under conditions of imperfect information high transaction costs and pronounced turbulence due to political and economic crisis and reform we find evidence of volatility spillovers in conditional mean affecting only the markets for the bulgarian lev and rumanian lei and limited evidence of volatility spillovers in conditional variance which imply the possibility of some policy coordination emanating from the soviet union nevertheless on balance our results lend broad support to the efficiency of exchange rate black markets and to previous results concerning floating exchange rate systems in general

the critical trade off identity assignment and box office success in the feature film industry researchers have begun to study markets that are structured in terms of an opposition between market identities in a manner akin to the role pairs analyzed in structural role theory in this paper we analyze the feature film market which came to have such a role structure by the mid 1990s by exploiting the contingency that pertains to the identity of newly released films and the intermediary function played by critics we assess the tendency for offerings to be assigned one or the other of the available market identitiesc independent or major an analysis of the box office success of 396 feature films released in 1997 shows that a film attracted a larger audience when critics who specialized in major releases reviewed the film and implicitly certified it as fit for the mass market such classification was particularly crucial for breaking out of the initial constraints set by theatrical exhibitors however while attaining a major identity was necessary for success in the mass market it was a handicap in penetrating the art house this trade off illustrates how market structures restrict identity in a manner akin that by which role structures place constraints on the identities available to individuals copyright 2003 oxford university press

work environment and opt out rates at motherhood across high education career paths observing a sample of harvard alumnae in their late thirties the authors study the relationship between workplace flexibility and the labor force participation of mothers they first document a large variation in labor force participation rates across higher education fields mindful of the possibility of systematic patterns in the types of women who complete various graduate degrees they use the rich information available for the sample supplemented by the longitudinal nature of a subset of these data to assess the extent to which these labor supply patterns may reflect variation in the difficulty of combining work with family although ruling out systematic sorting entirely is not possible their evidence suggests that inflexible work environments push women out of the labor force at motherhood

the economics of organization the transaction cost approach the transaction cost approach to the study of economic organization regards the transaction as the basic unit of analysis and holds that an understanding of transaction cost economizing is central to the study of organizations applications of this approach require that transactions be dimensionalized and that alternative governance structures be described economizing is accomplished by assigning transactions to governance structures in a discriminating way the approach applies both to the determination of efficient boundaries as between firms and markets and to the organization of internal transactions including the design of employment relations the approach is compared and contrasted with selected parts of the organization theory literature

the sensitivity of an empirical model of married women s hours of work to economic and statistical assumptions this study undertakes a systematic analysis of several theoretic and statistical assumption s used in many empirical models of female labor supply using a singl e data set psid 1975 labor supply data the author is able to replic ate most of the range of estimated income and substitution effects fo und in previous studies in this field he undertakes extensive specif ication tests and finds that most of this range should be rejected du e to statistical and model misspecifications the two most important assumptions appear to be the tobit assumption used to control for sel f selection into the labor force and exogeneity assumptions on the wi fe s wage rate and her labor market experience copyright 1987 by the econometric society

does the labour supply of wives respond to husbands wages canadian evidence from micro data and grouped data using micro data and grouped data we assess the extent to which canadian wives adjusted their labour supply in response to changes in husbands wages during the period 1980 2000 grouped data parameters based on weighted least squares and the unbiased error in variables estimator developed by devereux 2004 2007a b yield cross wage elasticities that are substantially higher in absolute value than those derived from ols regressions run on micro data both grouping estimators indicate that the labour supply of canadian wives responded strongly to changes in husbands wages during the 1980s for the 1990s our estimates of wives cross wage elasticity display greater dispersion a l aide de micro donnees et de donnees groupees on etablit jusqu a quel point les epouses canadiennes ont ajuste leur offre de travail en reponse aux changements dans les salaires de leurs epoux au cours de la periode 1980 2000 les parametres pour les donnees groupees derives par la methode des moindres carres ponderes et de l estimateur developpe par devereux 2004 2007a b engendrent des elasticites croisees qui sont substantiellement plus grandes en termes absolus que ceux derives par la methode des moindres carres ordinaires en utilisant des micro donnees les deux estimations montrent que l offre de travail des epouses canadiennes a repondu fortement aux changements dans les salaires des epoux au cours des annees 80 pour les annees 90 les evaluations des elasticites croisees des salaires montrent une plus grande dispersion

women s rising market opportunities and increased labor force participation i introduction this paper examines the secular increase in the labor market activity of married women in the united states from 1975 to 1991 overall the female employment rate increased from 49 in 1975 to 67 in 1991 not surprisingly the employment gains of married women the primary focus of this study largely accounted for this increase 1 in particular the employment rate of married women climbed from 44 in 1975 to 64 in 1991 analysis of the dramatic increase in female labor force participation is certainly not new for example smith and ward 1985 document the time series growth in female labor force participation from the beginning of this century to 1980 goldin s work 1977 1989 stresses that women s role in the labor market began changing well before world war ii most broad based studies of female labor force participation end their analyses around 1980 thus this research updates earlier work and provides a glimpse of what happened to women during the 1980s more importantly the present research places special emphasis on the degree of married women s attachment to the labor force conventional wisdom suggests that women particularly married women or women with children are not as productive or as attached to their jobs as their male or other female counterparts my findings combat this view and demonstrate a strengthening in married female labor force attachment over the period studied regardless of children s presence 2 this paper finds that the fraction of the married female population who worked a full year significantly increased from the 1977 1981 time period to the 1987 1991 time period this coincided with a decrease of equal magnitude in the fraction who did not work at all during the calendar year moreover although the absolute number of married women who work part time has increased in prevalence their representation among the population of working married women has declined in fact the fraction of married women who work part time has increased only among those who work part of the year a shrinking category of women even more interesting this study shows that the increase in married female employment from 1975 to 1991 stems primarily from a substantial decline in their exit rates from employment this holds for the sub population of married women with young children as well these results suggest that an increase in the duration of married women s employment spells was the most significant contributor to the increase in their employment rates over this time period not only did married women s employment increase but so did their wages during the period studied however the wages of higher and lesser skilled women diverged a story that has already become familiar for men in the case of women the higher skilled have made significant wage gains while the wages of the least skilled have stagnated with this in mind this research links women s employment increases to their changing market opportunities the findings suggest that women work more primarily because of their willingness to work more at the same wage supply shift and not because of their rising potential wage demand shift 3 in fact less than 15 of the increase in employment can be explained by rising wages regardless of skill category i interpret these results to reinforce the hypothesis of increased labor market attachment among married women the remainder of this paper is organized as follows section ii describes the current population survey cps data set used for the empirical work section iii documents the secular increase in married women s labor market participation from 1975 to 1991 in particular the employment increase for married women is disaggregated by race presence of children education group and own skill group section iv disentangles the effects of women who work more because of their rising potential wage from the effects of women who work more at the same wage because of either a possible decline in their non market opportunities or changes in behavior arising from possible changes in preferences

worker displacement and the added worker effect this article examines the added worker effect which is the labor supply response of wives to their husbands job losses unlike past studies which focused on the husbands current unemployment status this article analyzes wives responses before and after job losses to examine the life cycle labor supply adjustments using panel study of income dynamics data reveals small predisplacement effects and large persistent postdisplacement effects the timing of the responses differs with type of displacement possibly because of differences in the information acquired before job loss long run labor supply increases compensate for over 25 of the husbands lost income

inequality and poverty in united states the effects of rising dispersion of men s earnings and changing family behaviour using semiparametric density estimation techniques we analyse the effect of rising dispersion of men s earnings and related changes in family behaviour on increasing inequality in the distribution of family income in the united states for the period 1969 1989 the growing dispersion of men s earnings and changing family structure can account for most of the rise in family income inequality by contrast the increase in labour force participation by women offset this trend inequality grew at a slower rate in the 1990s than in earlier decades largely because of stabilization in the relative earnings of men from low income families

something to talk about social spillovers in movie consumption we exploit the randomness of weather and the relationship between weather and moviegoing to quantify social spillovers in movie consumption instrumenting for early viewership with plausibly exogenous weather shocks captured in lasso chosen instruments we find that shocks to opening weekend viewership are doubled over the following five weekends our estimated momentum arises almost exclusively at the local level and we find no evidence that it varies with either ex post movie quality or the precision of ex ante information about movie quality suggesting that the observed momentum is driven in part by a preference for shared experience and not only by social learning

marital sorting inequality and the role of female labor supply evidence from east and west germany this paper examines to what extent marital sorting affects cross sectional earnings inequality in germany over the past three decades while explicitly taking into account labor supply choices using rich micro data the observed distribution of couples earnings is compared to a counterfactual of randomly matched spouses hypothetical earnings are predicted based on a structural model of household labor supply for west germany a positive effect of marital sorting on inequality is found after adjusting for labor supply behavior while the effect is limited when earnings are taken as given this means that there is positive sorting in earnings potential which is veiled by relatively low female labor force participation in east germany the impact of marital sorting on inequality is highly disequalizing irrespective of adjusting for labor supply choices this is mainly due to the fact that east german women are much more attached to the labor market

distribution properties of latin american black market exchange rates abstract this paper conducts a statistical analysis of the distribution properties of black market exchange rate changes for 12 latin american currencies the infinite variance stable law hypothesis is tested using a regression type technique to estimate the parameters of the stable paretian distribution strong evidence is found supporting this hypothesis a separate analysis of extreme observations using a robust statistical procedure further supports these findings

a note on the efficiency of black markets in foreign currencies there exists considerable literature on the efficiency of foreign exchange markets with most of the empirical work supporting the hypothesis that the foreign exchange markets are weak form efficient 1 in some countries however trading in foreign currencies takes place in black markets which are the result of restrictions placed on the foreign sector 2 the importance of these markets in sustaining the illegal import and export of goods and assets as well as illegal capital flows has been growing in the past few years 3 in this paper market efficiency tests are performed on the black market exchange rates in india taiwan and south korea it is quite conceivable that black markets may not be efficient because the information about prices and market participants is generally imperfect the markets tend to be thin and often segmented and the transaction costs as measured by the buy sell differential tend to be high all these factors could hinder efficient adjustment of exchange rates to new information 4 a test of market efficiency is a test simultaneously of efficiency and of the assumptions of market equilibrium the theory underlying financial efficiency tests has been omitted here since it is well known and accepted weak form tests of market efficiency are based on the autocorrelation functions of rates of return on currency positions on nonparametric tests like the runs analysis and on mechanical trading rules applied to historical currency prices in the black market finally the cross correlations between the changes in the black market rate and changes in the official exchange rate are examined to see if the black market exchange rate predicts the movements in the official rate

wage inequality and family labor supply using the march current population surveys and the 1960 census this article describes earnings and employment changes for married couples in different types of households stratified by the husband s hourly wage while declines in male employment and earnings have been greatest for low wage men employment and earnings gains have been largest for wives of middle and high wage men these findings cast doubt on the notion that married women have increased their labor supply in the recent decades to compensate for the disappointing earnings growth of their husbands

towards an economics of awards awards are a widespread phenomenon they cater to the fundamental desire for social recognition and serve as a valuable incentive to influence behaviour the study of awards such as medals prizes and titles has in recent years gained momentum in economics complementing the longstanding focus on material incentives to evaluate the effectiveness of awards as a motivator is difficult as the effect of awards must be separated from the fact that awards are meant to be given to the best we show how research on awards has advanced over the last couple of years thus providing points of departure for future work

marriage and wages a test of the specialization hypothesis we investigate the relationship between marriage and wages among men in britain using panel data our econometric specifications allow for observed and unobserved heterogeneity and explicitly test the role of intra household specialization in explaining the observed relationship our estimates provide evidence for the existence of large selection effects into marriage based on observable and unobservable characteristics that are positively correlated with wages after accounting for individual specific time invariant effects and a wide range of individual household job and employer related characteristics we find a statistically significant premium that can be attributed to productivity differences largely resulting from intra household specialization

what s an oscar worth this article examines the impact of an academy award nomination and award for best picture best actor actress and best supporting actor actress on a film s i market share of theaters ii average revenue per screen and iii its probability of survival the model is estimated using weekly box office data for a matched sample of nominated and non nominated films the results indicate substantial financial benefits for a nomination and award for best picture and best actor actress the structure of rewards is consistent with that found in two stage single elimination tournaments

differences in metropolitan and nonmetropolitan u s family income inequality a cross county comparison abstract u s family income inequality is examined using 1990 cenus of population data for the 3109 counties and independent cities in the 48 contiguous states use of counties as the unit of analysis extends previous research on u s income inequality that relied on national state or metropolitan level data in addition including both metropolitan and nonmetropolitan counties allows us to determine whether income inequality differs between them after controlling for a variety of labor market demographic and regional characteristics as another innovation we also consider whether counties that experienced recent structural changes in industry composition have higher income inequality

greater wage inequality reduces average hours of work i argue that rising inequality in offered wages lowers average working hours if labour supply is concave in wages a decrease in the working hours of low paid workers is greater than an increase in working hours of high paid workers furthermore due to low market opportunities some low paid workers may leave the labour force using cps morg data for prime age men i find evidence in support of this explanation i establish empirically the concavity of the labour supply and find evidence that after controlling for the average wage wage inequality has a negative effect on labour supply

reputation and the league standing effect the case of a split season in minor league baseball abstractsplit season league design resets standings at the midpoint of the season thus allowing for two periods in which a team can potentially achieve success in a single season this context allows us to test both the reputation of the first half winner and the league standing effect on demand examination of game level data from the 2010 southern league reveals fans are unaffected by measures of both team quality and league standing in the second half of the season on the other hand the first half winners saw an 11 increase in attendance as a percent of stadium capacity suggesting that in the second half of the season winners matter more than winning

the incredible shrinking elasticities married female labor supply 1978 2002 this paper demonstrates the extent to which married women s labor supply elasticities have changed over the past quarter century estimates from march current population survey data suggest that these elasticities have decreased substantially by 60 percent for the hours wage elasticity from 0 36 to 0 14 70 percent for the hours income elasticity from 0 053 to 0 015 95 percent for the participation wage elasticity from 0 66 to 0 03 and 60 percent for the participation income elasticity from 0 13 to 0 05 changing demographic characteristics explain little of the drop in these elasticities suggesting that preferences toward work have changed across birth cohorts

structural breaks in parallel markets the case of nigeria 1980 1993 abstract this paper demonstrates the importance of allowing for structural breaks in the time series when investigating the relationship between the official and the parallel markets in foreign exchange only when structural breaks are accounted for does a relationship emerge in nigeria we find that over the period 1980 1993 the official rate has granger caused the parallel rate

seasonality in the u s motion picture industry the observed seasonality of box office revenues reflects both seasonality in underlying demand for movies and seasonality in the number and quality of available movies i separately identify these aspects by estimating weekly demand for movies using movie fixed effects a long panel of movies weekly revenues and restrictions on their decay pattern i find that the estimated seasonality in underlying demand is much smaller and slightly different from the observed seasonality of sales the biggest movies are released at times when demand is highest amplifying the underlying seasonality price rigidities in the industry may facilitate this amplification effect

trends in the well being of american women 1970 1995 this paper examines the trends in the well being of american women over the last 25 years a time of significant changes in the relative economic status of women and in the labor market as a whole a broad range of indicators are considered to capture changes in women s well being in the family as well as in the labor market for virtually all age and education groups substantial evidence is obtained of rising gender equality in labor market outcomes notably labor force participation wages and occupational distributions broad evidence is also found of greater gender parity within married couple families as the housework time of husbands increased relative to wives and the relative wages of wives rose compared to their husbands however parallel to the recent evidence of the declining labor market position of lower skilled men there has been a similar deterioration in the economic status of less educated women especially high school dropouts their labor force participation rates and wages have risen at a much slower pace than those of more highly educated women while their incidence of single headship has increased much more rapidly these findings for less educated women serve to underscore the widening gap between more and less skilled americans of both sexes as well as to emphasize its broad dimensions

a life cycle perspective on changes in earnings inequality among married men and women abstract the connection between changes in earnings inequality of individuals and changes in family earnings involves several links the movements in the employment of different family members the association between changes in husbands and in wives earnings and patterns of assortative mating a decomposition of the logarithm of the coefficient of variation in family earnings identifies these links the data on the dispersion of family earnings are organized not simply over time but also by age the growth in wives relative employment and earnings has partly offset the effects on family earnings inequality of the increase in husbands earnings inequality

sorting and long run inequality many social commentators have raised concerns over the possibility that increased sorting in society may lead to greater inequality to investigate this we construct a dynamic model of intergenerational education acquisition fertility and marital sorting and parameterize the steady state to match several basic empirical endings we end that increased sorting will signiecantly increase income inequality four factors are important to our endings a negative correlation between fertility and education a decreasing marginal effect of parental education on children s years of education wages that are sensitive to the relative supply of skilled workers and borrowing constraints that affect educational attainment for some low income households

successful movies a preliminary empirical analysis summary our findings lend further support to existing informal evidence that the characteristics of successful films have changed over the past forty years moreover they also suggest that it may well be possible to develop empirical models relating a film s attributes to the likelihood of consumer demand unfortunately such analysis cannot be undertaken without access to more detailed information on the performance and features of individual movies given the interesting characteristics of movies as ideal examples of differentiated products and of the institutional arrangements governing their production and distribution such increased data availability would make this an exceptionally attractive area for applied micro economic research

the market for motion pictures rank revenue and survival i introduction on any given day in every major city there may from 50 to 100 motion pictures playing on theater screens each is unique and its producer hopes it will catch that bit of magic that lights up the screen and the box office yet few achieve this feat and most lead brief unpredictable lives each film competes for screens and audiences during its brief life against a changing array of imperfect and equally unique substitutes how is one to understand this market is there any sense in which this market could be called competitive and how is it organized what institutions and contracts are adapted to this market environment and how do they shape the results we seek to answer some of these questions by examining the relationship between contractual practices and motion picture hazard and survival distributions our modeling is based on a large sample of motion picture revenues and theater bookings during their theatrical runs our detailed sample of motion picture lifetimes is a rare look at this fascinating industry whose unusual and complex features challenge economic theory in interesting ways as smith and smith 1986 506 observe given the interesting characteristics of movies as ideal examples of differentiated products and of the institutional arrangements governing their production and distribution such increased data availability would make this an exceptionally attractive area for applied micro economic research much of the empirical work on the motion picture industry has focused on the attributes of successful movies smith and smith 1986 examined the impact of oscar awards on the cumulative rentals of movies released from the 1950s through the 1970s in more recent work nelson et al undated have quantified the value of an oscar award on movie revenues using a large panel of data and an event study methodology in a somewhat broader empirical study prag and cassavant 1994 examined the determinants of movie revenues and marketing expenditures they found that marketing expenditures and quality are important determinants of a film s success and that production cost star actors and awards are positively related to marketing expenses in the present paper we attempt to account for the dynamic patterns in the data because each film is unique and plays in its own way its life as a commercial product in the theatrical market is hazardous indeed most motion pictures have short and unpredictable lives because audiences must discover what they like and films compete against an ever changing cast of competitors for these reasons it is productive to use evolutionary models of survival and death to model the data 1 we model competition among films in the theatrical market as an evolving rank tournament of survival 2 motion pictures live and die in the box office tournament as they are challenged during their run by a randomly evolving cast of new competitors the challengers come from films previously released and from newly released films the contending films are ranked by film goers and those with high rank survive and are carried over to the next week low ranked films fail and are replaced by new contenders these attributes of the motion picture market contribute to increasing returns and give the box office revenue distribution the distinctive convex shape of a tournament prize distribution 3 the leading products command a disproportionate share of the market and they have longer runs even then a film s rank in the tournament is ephemeral and its life unpredictable in fact of any 10 major theatrical films produced on the average 6 or 7 are unprofitable and 1 will break even vogel 1990 29 ii the motion picture exhibition market once a film is produced it is distributed to theaters who exhibit it for audiences the distributor chooses a release pattern the number and location of theaters in which the film is booked or licensed to play

short term projects and emergent careers evidence from hollywood the hollywood film industry is considered as a system of recurrent ties among the various major participants who usually work under short term contracts for single films this form of project based organization in seen as a response to uncertainty and risk in the film industry the paper examines the ways in which independent contractors producers directors cinematographers and actors organize and operate to reduce uncertainty and risk and to increase profits the analysis of data from 2 430 films made in the period 1965 80 establishes patterns of recurrent ties among participants who are at comparable levels of cumulative productivity with respect to earnings oscars oscar nominations and number of previous films the paper also considers the degree to which film earnings are influenced by the past productivity of the major participants

informational efficiency of the clandestine and official gold markets in paris for gold moving from clandestine to official trading does not significantly change informational efficiency both markets are inefficient suggesting that efficiency is linked more to the type of asset than to the legal status of the market

why have women become left wing the political gender gap and the decline in marriage the last three decades have witnessed the rise of a pohtical gender gap in the united states wherein more women than men favor the democratic party we trace this development to the decline in marriage which we posit has made men richer and women poorer data for the united states support this argument first there is a strong positive correlation between state divorce prevalence and the political gender gap higher divorce prevalence reduces support for the democrats among men but not women second longitudinal data show that following marriage divorce women are less more likely to support the democratic party