truthfulness with value maximizing bidders on the limits of approximation in combinatorial markets abstract in some markets bidders want to maximize value subject to a budget constraint rather than payoff this is different to the quasilinear utility functions typically assumed in auction theory and leads to different strategies and outcomes we refer to bidders who maximize value as value bidders while simple single object auction formats are truthful standard multi object auction formats allow for manipulation it is straightforward to show that there cannot be a truthful and revenue maximizing deterministic auction mechanism with value bidders and general valuations approximation has been used as remedy to achieve truthfulness on other mechanism design problems and we study which approximation ratios we can get from truthful mechanisms we show that the approximation ratio that can be achieved with a deterministic and truthful approximation mechanism with n bidders cannot be higher than 1 n for general valuations for randomized approximation mechanisms there is a framework with a ratio that is tight

social security pensions and retirement behavior within the family this paper estimates a structural model of family retirement using us data from the health and retirement study hrs it provides further insight into household retirement decision making and the reasons for interdependence in the retirement decisions of each spouse improvements in hrs data and matched employer provided pension histories allow more precise identification of key parameters governing interdependent behaviour within the household in an earlier study we found that interdependence was due to preferences rather than coordination of retirement incentives in the budget and in particular that it is not a correlation in preferences but the appearance of the spouse s retirement status in the husband s and wife s utility function that is largely responsible for coordination of retirement between spouses we now find that a measure of how much each spouse values being able to spend time in retirement with the other accounts for a good portion of that apparent interdependence for the wife the husband s retirement status influences her retirement decision only if she values spending time in retirement with her husband for husbands the effect of having the wife already retired on his retirement decision is roughly doubled if he enjoys spending time in retirement with his wife but there is some effect even if he does not this is consistent with our earlier findings that the husband is more influenced by having a retired spouse than the wife is the increase in the extent of the dependence of the wife s labour supply on the husband s retirement from our past work probably is traceable to better measurement of the opportunity set facing the husband in hrs data once estimated we use the model to investigate the labour supply effects of alternative social security policies examining the effect of dividing credit for earnings evenly between spouses or of basing social security benefits on the amounts accumulated in private accounts both policies change the relative importance of spouse and survivor social security benefits within the household and both raise the relative reward to work later in the life cycle the incentives created are modest and retirement responds accordingly nevertheless at some ages such as 65 there may be as much as a 6 increase in the old age work force under privatized accounts copyright 2004 john wiley sons ltd

did the elimination of mandatory retirement affect faculty retirement a special exemption from the 1986 age discrimination act allowed colleges and universities to enforce mandatory retirement of faculty at age 70 until 1994 we construct a survey that permits us to compare faculty turnover rates before and after the law changed at a large sample of institutions with defined contribution pension plans after the elimination of compulsory retirement the retirement rates of 70 and 71 year olds fell by two thirds and were comparable to rates of 69 year olds these findings indicate that u s colleges and universities will experience a rise in the number of older faculty over the coming years jel j26 i21

gender differences in overeducation a test of the theory of differential overqualification there is little question that substantial labormarket differences exist between men and women among the most researched difference is the male female wage gap many different theories are used to explain why men earn more than women one possible reason is based on the limited geographic mobility of married women robert frank 1978 family mobility is a joint decision in which the needs of the husband and wife are balanced to maximize family welfare job motivated relocations are generally made to benefit the primary earner in the family this leads to a constrained job search for the secondary earner as he or she must search for a job in a limited geographic area since the husband is still the primary wage earner in many families the job search of the wife may suffer individuals who are tied to a certain area are labeled tied stayers while secondary earners who move for the benefit of the family are labeled tied movers jacob mincer 1978 the wages of a tied stayer or tied mover may not be substantially lower if the family lives in or moves to a large city if a large labor market has more vacancies the wife may locate a wage offer near the maximum she would find with a nationwide job search however being a tied stayer or tied mover can lower the wife s wage if the family lives in or moves to a small community a small labor market will reduce the likelihood of her finding a job that utilizes her skills as a result she may accept a job for which she is overqualified and thus earn a lower wage this hypothesized relationship between the likelihood of being overqualified and smsa size is termed differential overqualification frank 1978 and haim ofek and yesook merrill 1994 provide support for the theory of differential overqualification by finding that the malefemale wage gap is greater in smaller smsa s while the results are consistent with the existence of differential overqualification they may also result from other situations as well firms in small labor markets may use their monopsony power to keep wages down 2 local demand shocks are found to be a major source of wage variation both across and within local labor markets robert topel 1986 since large labor markets are generally more diversified a demand shock can have a substantial impact on immobile workers in small labor markets another reason for examining differential overqualification involves the assumption that there are more vacancies in large labor markets while there is little doubt that more vacancies exist in large labor markets there are also likely to be more people searching for jobs in large labor markets if the greater number of vacancies is offset by the larger number of searchers it is unclear whether women will be more likely to be overqualified in small labor markets instead of relying on wages to determine if differential overqualification exists we consider an explicit form of overqualification based on education

eisenberg gale markets algorithms and game theoretic properties abstract we define a new class of markets the eisenberg gale markets this class contains fisher s linear market markets from the resource allocation framework of kelly kelly f p 1997 charging and rate control for elastic traffic europ transactions telecommunications 8 33 37 as well as numerous interesting new markets we obtain combinatorial strongly polynomial algorithms for several markets in this class our algorithms have a simple description as ascending price auctions our algorithms lead to insights into game theoretic properties of these markets such as efficiency fairness and competition monotonicity they also help determine if these markets always have rational equilibria a classification of eisenberg gale markets w r t these properties reveals a surprisingly rich set of possibilities

identifying higher order rationality strategic choice data from a carefully chosen set of ring network games are used to obtain individual level estimates of higher order rationality the experimental design exploits a natural exclusion restriction that is considerably weaker than the assumptions underlying alternative designs in the literature in our data set 93 percent of subjects are rational 71 percent are rational and believe others are rational 44 percent are rational and hold second order beliefs that others are rational and 22 percent are rational and hold at least third order beliefs that others are rational

the incidence of and returns to overeducation in the uk the 1991 wave of the british household panel survey is used to examine the extent of and the returns to overeducation in the uk about 11 of the workers are overeducated while another 9 are undereducated for their job the results show that the allocation of female workers is more efficient than the allocation of males the probability of being overeducated decreases with work experience but increases with tenure overeducated workers earn less while undereducated workers earn more than correctly allocated workers both the hypothesis that productivity is fully embodied and the hypothesis that productivity is completely job determined are rejected by the data it is found that there are substantial wage gains obtainable from a more efficient allocation of skills over jobs

bundling equilibrium in combinatorial auctions this paper analyzes ex post equilibria in the vcg combinatorial auctions if is a family of bundles of goods the organizer may restrict the bundles on which the participants submit bids and the bundles allocated to them to be in t he vcg combinatorial auctions obtained in this way are known to be truth telling mechanisms in contrast this paper deals with non restricted vcg auctions in which the buyers choose strategies that involve bidding only on bundles in and these strategies form an equilibrium we fully characterize those that induce an equilibrium in every vcg auction and we refer to the associated equilibrium as a bundling equilibrium the main motivation for studying all these equilibria and not just the domination equilibrium is that they afford a reduction of the communication complexity we analyze the tradeoff between communication complexity and economic efficiency of bundling equilibrium

a mismatch made in heaven a hedonic analysis of overeducation and undereducation in this paper a hedonic pairing process is modeled in which some workers may be overeducated or undereducated as an equilibrium outcome of a dynamic labor market undereducated workers are those whose abilities and training permit them to move into a job with higher qualifications whereas overeducated workers are highly qualified workers who select into lower skill entry level jobs that provide the training or signal necessary for promotion the empirical model shows that these pairing types cannot be directly identified in a cross section since all workers are exactly educated during a portion of their career however pairing types may be imputed by comparing predicted and observed qualifications of the worker and predicted and observed requirements of the firm using a rich cross section and a panel of british working age males to identify the pairing types we confirm the predicted career development patterns with regard to on the job training promotion and wages

bridge jobs and partial retirement the job stopping process of older workers often includes some combination of postcareer bridge employment partial retirement and reverse retirement fewer than two fifths of household heads retire directly from career jobs over half partially retire at some point in their working lives and a quarter reenter the labor force after initially retiring in addition postcareer employment is frequently located outside the industry and occupation of the career job and there are important differences in postcareer labor force experiences by gender permanent income and career job pension status

truthful approximation mechanisms for restricted combinatorial auctions when attempting to design a truthful mechanism for a computationally hard problem such as combinatorial auctions one is faced with the problem that most efficiently computable heuristics can not be embedded in any truthful mechanism e g vcg like payment rules will not ensure truthfulness we develop a set of techniques that allow constructing efficiently computable truthful mechanisms for combinatorial auctions in the special case where each bidder desires a specific known subset of items and only the valuation is unknown by the mechanism the single parameter case for this case we extend the work of lehmann o callaghan and shoham who presented greedy heuristics we show how to use if then else constructs perform a partial search and use the lp relaxation we apply these techniques for several canonical types of combinatorial auctions obtaining truthful mechanisms with provable approximation ratios

immigration search and loss of skill this article develops and estimates an on the job search model of the entry of highly skilled immigrants from the former soviet union into the israeli labor market the estimated parameters of the model together with information on the wages of immigrants from earlier waves imply that on average immigrants can expect lifetime earnings to fall short of the lifetime earnings of comparable natives by 57 of this figure 14 percentage points reflect frictions associated with nonemployment and job distribution mismatch and 43 percentage points reflect the gradual adaptation of imported schooling and experience to the local labor market

convergence of incentive driven dynamics in fisher markets abstract we study out of equilibrium price dynamics in fisher markets we develop a general framework in which sellers have a a set of atomic price update rules apu which are simple responses to a price vector b a belief formation procedure that simulates actions of other sellers themselves using the apu to some finite horizon in the future sellers use an apu to respond to a price vector they generate with the belief formation procedure the framework allows sellers to have inconsistent and time varying beliefs about each other under mild and natural assumptions on the apu we show that despite the inconsistent and time varying nature of beliefs the market converges to a unique equilibrium at a linear rate distance to equilibrium decreases exponentially in time if the apu are driven by weak gross substitutes demands the equilibrium point is the same as predicted by those demands

the economics of pensions this paper sets out the economic analytics of pensions after introductory discussion successive sections consider the effects of different pension arrangements on labour markets on national savings and growth and on the distribution of burdens and benefits these areas are controversial and politically highly salient while open about expressing our own views the main purpose of the paper is to set out the analytical process by which we reach them to enable readers to form their own conclusions 1 the backdrop this paper has a two fold purpose it sets out the economic analytics of pensions without discussion of empirical magnitudes and outside the context of any particular country with the intention of giving readers a systematic way of thinking about the topic the paper is also intended as a contribution to a continuing debate hence part of the discussion rebuts arguments that we regard as false or equivocal or true in some circumstances but not necessarily always specifically we argue that much analysis is incomplete and oversimplified focussing on one objective while ignoring others assuming an idealised economy with well informed agents and no distortions such as taxes and missing markets comparing one steady state with another when the underlying issue is a move from one steady state to a different one or ignoring distributional effects the opening section sets out some background matters the objectives of pension systems types of pension arrangement and the economics of pensions sections 2 3 and 4 discuss in turn pensions and labour markets mainly microeconomic finance and funding mainly macroeconomic and distributional issues

optimal bidding in auctions from a game theory perspective abstract the game theoretic perspective in auction bidding has provided a powerful normative framework for the analysis of auctions and it has generated an impressive volume of research contributions tracing this research we review key recent advances which have greatly expanded our understanding of the operation of auctions and produced a more accurate analysis of mechanism design and optimal bidding we follow various experimental studies which have shown that the predictive power of auction theory remains in many cases limited for this reason we concentrate on research themes which enhance the applicability of auction theory leading to more realistic descriptions of bidding behaviors we identify important innovations which expand the environment of auction bidding and carry us beyond rational decision making we conclude providing directions of future research and discussing their implications

mismatch in the spanish labor market overeducation the objective of this article is to explain the job match which is assessed by comparing attained education and job required education as reported by workers we frame our empirical work according to the occupational mobility theory using a cross section of workers from a representative survey of the spanish labor force we consider overeducated workers to be those who report that the level of education their jobs require is below the level of education they have attained our results indicate that overeducated workers have less experience decreased on thejob training and higher turnover than other comparable workers we also observe an improvement in the job match over age and mobility

gluttony and sloth calories labour market activity and the rise of obesity the rise in obesity has largely been attributed to an increase in calorie consumption we show that official government household survey data indicate that levels of calorie consumption have declined in england between 1980 and 2013 while there has been an increase in calories from food eaten out at restaurants fast food soft drinks and confectionery overall there has been a decrease in total calories purchased households have shifted towards more expensive calories both by substituting away from home production towards market production and substituting towards higher quality foods we show that the decline in calories can be partially but not entirely rationalized with weight gain by a decline in the strenuousness of work and daily life jel d12 i12 i18

retirement in the uk in common with other oecd countries the uk experienced more than two decades of declining labour market activity among older men from the 1970s to the early 1990s a trend that has only recently shown signs of being reversed retirement decisions are heavily shaped by institutional context and in the uk this has led to there being two distinct groups with very different retirement experiences at the top of the wealth distribution early retirement has typically been influenced by private occupational pensions at the bottom of the wealth distribution individuals are even more likely to be not working in their 50s but do not typically define themselves as retired and draw on income support or more usually disability benefits policy makers keen to increase effective retirement ages will need to consider the very different circumstances of these two groups

does education expansion increase intergenerational mobility education expansion may lead to over education where the social connections of parents may exert more significant influence on the return to education of children with the assumption of a positive correlation between return on human capital and parental income in the presence of over education we show that i the expansion of education may cause horizontal inequity in education opportunities and inefficiency in human capital accumulation ii the positive correlation between return on human capital and parental income causes a more persistent intergenerational immobility iii an expansion of education especially higher education leads to more persistent intergenerational immobility

retirement and the evolution of pension structure defined benefit pension plans have become considerably less common since the early 1980s while defined contribution plans have spread previous research showed that defined benefit plans with sharp incentives encouraging retirement after a certain point contributed to the striking decline in american retirement ages in this paper we find that the absence of agerelated incentives in defined contribution plans leads workers to retire almost two years later on average compared to workers with defined benefit plans thus the evolution of pension structure can help explain recent increases in the typical retirement age after decades of decline

determinants of the demand for education in spain the aim of this paper is to estimate an equation for household demand for both secondary and university education using an estimation of the opportunity cost associated with the decision to invest in education limited dependent variable models are applied to the data provided by the family budget survey 1991 for spain the results show that the social and economic status of the family has a comparatively greater impact on household expenditure on secondary education than on university education the opportunity cost is also shown to be a decisive variable in the decision to invest in secondary education although the results are less conclusive in the case of university education

overeducation undereducation and the theory of career mobility the theory of career mobility sicherman and galor journal of political economy 98 1 169 92 1990 claims that wage penalties for overeducated workers are compensated by better promotion prospects sicherman journal of labour economics 9 2 101 22 1991 was able to confirm this theory in an empirical study using panel data however the only retest using panel data so far robst eastern economic journal 21 539 50 1995 produced rather ambiguous results in the present paper random effects models to analyse relative wage growth are estimated using data from the german socio economic panel it is found that overeducated workers in germany have markedly lower relative wage growth rates than adequately educated workers the results cast serious doubt on whether the career mobility model is able to explain overeducation in germany the plausibility of the results is supported by the finding that overeducated workers have less access to formal and informal on the job training which is usually foun

overeducation job mobility and earnings mobility among holders of first degrees abstractovereducation has been researched extensively for nearly three decades but some major issues in regard to it are still topics of ongoing debate by using a panel data that combines a survey of two cohorts of israeli first degree holders and data from administrative sources on jobs and wages we examine the contribution of job turnover cognitive abilities and continuing graduate studies to the likelihood of overeducation and wage dynamics the study produces four main findings first rapid job switching makes a negative contribution to the increase in employee s wage and there is a negative correlation between two variables an employee s tenure and the number of past employers in the years after the completion of degree studies and the probability of being overeducated second the contribution of the individual s cognitive abilities and quantitative reasoning skills to the likelihood of becoming overeducated is negative third the wages of overeducated employees are some 11 lower and ris

age discrimination laws and labor market efficiency in lazear s model of long term incentive contracts age discrimina tion laws barring age based involuntary terminations preclude such contracts reducing efficiency alternatively such laws may serve as precommitment devices for these contracts without pre venting firms from offering strong financial incentives to induce retirement at specific ages in this case age discrimination laws may encourage lazear contracts hence increasing efficiency we assess evidence on these alternative interpretations using variation in state and federal age discrimination laws the evidence indicates that age discrimination laws steepen age earnings profiles for co horts entering the labor market suggesting that these laws encour age the use of lazear contracts

gender wage differentials and educational mismatch an application to the spanish case this article aims to analyse gender wage differentials in spain by taking into account the levels of educational attainment and by studying whether the educational mismatch affects the gender wage gap focusing on returns to education evidence is found on the existence of educational mismatch and on its contribution to determine wages with women suffering greater wage penalties that are associated with educational mismatch furthermore although the gender wage gap is lower for individuals with low educational levels we find that the part of this gap due to differences in returns is greater in this group on the contrary the gender gap is greater among highly educated workers but in this case most of the wage differentials are due to differences in productive characteristics in any case our results suggest that gender wage discrimination tends to be greater for those workers who show educational mismatch

a theory of career mobility this paper analyzes theoretically and empirically the role and significance of occupational mobility in the labor market focusing on individuals careers it provides additional dimensions to the analysis of investment in human capital wage differences across individuals and the relationships among promotions quits and interfirm occupational mobility it is shown that part of the returns to education is in the form of higher probabilities of occupational upgrading within or across firms given an origin occupation schooling increases the likelihood of occupational upgrading furthermore workers who are not promoted despite a high probability of promotion are more likely to quit

pensions overview of the issues many countries face increasing fiscal problems financing pensions in the face of population aging there is controversy about the underlying economic theory about the extent of the problem and about the best mix of policies to protect old age security this paper establishes the areas of debate gives thumbnail descriptions of pension arrangements in different countries discusses the main analytical and empirical issues relevant to thinking about pension design and assesses a range of policy directions the main conclusions are that what matters most is effective government and economic growth that the debate between pay as you go and funding is secondary that good pension schemes can take many forms and that there is a problem in financing pensions but not a crisis copyright 2006 oxford university press

multi unit auctions with budget limits abstract we study multi unit auctions for bidders that have a budget constraint a situation very common in practice that has received relatively little attention in the auction theory literature our main result is an impossibility there is no deterministic auction that 1 is individually rational and dominant strategy incentive compatible 2 makes no positive transfers and 3 always produces a pareto optimal outcome in contrast we show that ausubel s clinching auction satisfies all these properties when the budgets are public knowledge moreover we prove that the clinching auction is the unique auction that satisfies all these properties when there are two players this uniqueness result is the cornerstone of the impossibility result few additional related results are given including some results on the revenue of the clinching auction and on the case where the items are divisible

tatonnement beyond gross substitutes gradient descent to the rescue abstract we identify a class of economies for which tatonnement is equivalent to gradient descent this is the class of economies for which there is a convex potential function whose gradient is always equal to the negative of the excess demand among other consequences we show that a discrete version of tatonnement converges to the equilibrium for the following economies of complementary goods i fisher economies in which all buyers have complementary ces utilities with a linear rate of convergence in fisher economies all agents are either buyers or sellers of non numeraire goods but not both this shows that tatonnement converges for the entire range of fisher economies when buyers have complementary ces utilities in contrast to prior work which could analyze only the substitutes range together with a small portion of the complementary range ii fisher economies in which all buyers have leontief utilities with an o 1 t rate of convergence

graduate overeducation as a sheepskin effect evidence from northern ireland this article examines the nature of graduate overeducation amongst a group of applicants to a graduate conversion programme it was found that while a substantial proportion of earnings differentials were associated with a mismatch between individual skill levels and job requirements wage gaps were still likely to occur should such mismatches be eliminated the evidence suggests that graduate wage levels are heavily related to sheepskin effects associated with the attainment of jobs with graduate level entry requirements these sheepskin effects suggest that the process of job categorization is arbitrary in nature with stated job requirements somewhat independent of actual skill requirements the analysis suggests that graduate overeduction is better understood within the context of both skill and categorization mismatches as opposed to skill matches alone

double penalty in returns to education informality and educational mismatch in the colombian labour market abstractthis article examines the returns to education taking into consideration the existence of educational mismatches in the formal and informal employment of a developing country results show that the returns of surplus required and deficit years of schooling are different in the two sectors moreover they suggest that these returns vary along the wage distribution and that the pattern of variation differs for formal and informal workers in particular informal workers face not only lower returns to their education but suffer a second penalty associated with educational mismatches that puts them at a greater disadvantage compare to their formal counterparts

the characterization of affine maximizers on restricted domains with two alternatives abstract in the framework of implementable social choice functions we present an axiomatic characterization of affine maximizers for an important missing case in the literature that of two alternatives with restricted domain we use two independent conditions positive association of differences and an independence condition

overqualification permanent or transitory this article analyses job mismatches in switzerland based on a subjective measure of overqualification according to job search and job matching theories overqualification is a transitory problem other theories show that overqualification can also be of a permanent nature we test the perpetuity of overeducation using panel data from the first eight waves of the swiss household panel shp covering the period 1999 to 2006 our empirical analysis reveals little evidence for lasting rigidities that would cause permanent job mismatches rather spells of overqualification are relatively short about half of all individuals who were overqualified in a given year had an adequate job match 1 year later while a short duration of overqualification would be consistent with job search and job matching theories our observation that the probability of a job mismatch does not significantly decrease with experience is at odds with these theories our article provides an alternative explanation for this phenomenon

overeducation undereducation and asymmetric information in occupational mobility due to short term asymmetric information overeducated and undereducated workers are shown to have different optimal strategies in seeking upward occupational mobility into their next positions undereducated workers typically have other human capital strengths but these strengths are not marketable to outsiders overeducated workers typically have other human capital weaknesses that are not apparent to outsiders while their excess schooling is marketable in labour markets with dynamic asymmetric information this article presents empirical evidence showing that job tenure increases the probability of upward occupational mobility more if individuals are undereducated moreover the probability of finding upward occupational mobility is increased by overeducated workers engaging in firm switching this article also validates prior empirical studies finding overeducated workers more likely to self report engaging in firm switching activities and more likely to experience upward occupational mobility than o

to defer or not defer uk state pension and work decisions in a lifecycle model the uk state pension which depends only on age includes an option to defer take up which yields either a subsequent lump sum or higher weekly pension we analyse the joint decisions on pension deferral and intertemporal labour supply participation in a lifecycle setting we show that deferral is purely a financial decision but the impact of deferral on work decisions depends on preferences wage rates non labour income and initial wealth to exactly characterize this we use a quasilinear utility function and provide calibrated simulations we also discuss the choice between a lump sum or increased weekly pension

the retirement consumption puzzle and involuntary early retirement evidence from the british household panel survey this article uses data from the british household panel survey bhps to shed further light on the fall in consumption at retirement the retirement consumption puzzle comparing food spending of men retiring involuntarily early through ill health or redundancy with spending of men who retire voluntarily it finds a significant fall in spending only for those who retire involuntarily this is consistent with the observed fall in spending being linked to a negative wealth shock for some retirees

overeducation in the labor market this article examines the reasons for the observed discrepancy between workers actual and required levels of schooling and the resulting differences in returns to schooling overeducated workers are found to be younger and to have lower amounts of on the job training than workers with the required level of schooling they also have higher rates of firm and occupational mobility characterized by movement of higher level occupations the findings suggest that overeducation can be explained by the trade off between schooling and other components of human capital and by the mobility patterns of overeducated workers

the impact of surplus schooling on earnings some additional findings this paper examines the impact of overeducation or surplus schooling on earnings overeducated workers are defined as those with educational attainments substantially above the mean for their specific occupations two models are estimated using data from the 1980 census though our models data and measure of overeducation are different from those used by rumberger 1987 our results are similar our results show that overeducated workers often earn less than their adequately educated and undereducated counterparts

overeducation in the labour market abstract this paper presents a review of the literature on overeducation the paper assesses the consistency of overeducation within the context of a number of theoretical frameworks including human capital theory hct and assignment theory the analysis goes on to discuss the various measurement controversies associated with the study of overeducation in order to provide an assessment of the extent to which the impacts of the phenomenon represent an economic reality as opposed to a statistical artefact after reviewing the literature it is concluded that the impacts of overeducation are likely to be non trivial and that the phenomenon may potentially be costly to individuals and firms as well as the economy more generally the existence of overeducation also raises some doubts with respect to the validity of some of the central assumptions and predictions of hct that are unlikely to be fully explained by gaps in the standard wage equation framework

a new pension settlement for the twenty first century the uk pensions commission s analysis and proposals this article summarizes the analysis and recommendations of the uk pensions commission which reported in november 2005 the uk faces similar demographic challenges to other nations from increasing longevity and past fertility declines however in the face of them both state and private pension provision are in decline for younger cohorts the commission proposes reforms to the state pension system which would make it more generous less means tested and more universal than it would otherwise become this would require both higher public spending on pensions as a share of gdp than now and a gradual increase in state pension age after 2020 it also proposes establishment of a new national pension savings scheme into which workers would be automatically enrolled with the right to opt out if they were outside good employer provision together with measures to facilitate later and more flexible retirement copyright 2006 oxford university press

project evaluation and control in decentralized firms is capital rationing always optimal when capital investments are made in an agency setting we show that even without risk considerations capital rationing need not be the only rational outcome we analyze a principal agent model with risk neutrality and with two productive inputs the agent s efforts and capital investment the two inputs can be either economic complements or substitutes the agent has pre contract private information about his own type the output is measured with an additive noise we show that when the two inputs are substitutes the optimal solution entails a marginal capital rationing but when the two inputs are complements then either a marginal capital rationing or a marginal leniency could be the optimal response our results therefore provide an explanation for why firms may employ a capital rationing for a project that may increase manufacturing complexity and hence may reduce managerial labor productivity yet employ a less strict criterion for evaluating a productivity enhancing project this result contrasts with earlier results where only a capital rationing is shown to be optimal

i m too clever for this job a bivariate probit analysis on overeducation and job satisfaction in australia using data from the first wave of the household income and labour dynamics in australia data set this article establishes an empirical relationship between overeducation and workplace satisfaction for australian adult males in the labour force in a departure from much of the existing literature both univariate and bivariate probit models are used to account for potential unobserved heterogeneity we find that estimates in the univariate probit models are positively biased for three of the six measures of workplace satisfaction studied this suggests that consideration should be given to the use of bivariate models when studying the determinants of workplace satisfaction and overeducation results show although levels of satisfaction remain high that across all measures of workplace satisfaction overeducated workers are less satisfied compared to their nonovereducated counterparts this intimates that satisfaction levels should be viewed from a relative rather than an absolute perspective pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work aristotle 384bc 322bc

multi item auctions a collection of items is to be distributed among several bidders and each bidder is to receive at most one item assuming that the bidders place some monetary value on each of the items it has been shown that there is a unique vector of equilibrium prices that is optimal in a suitable sense for the bidders in this paper we describe two dynamic auction mechanisms one achieves this equilibrium and the other approximates it to any desired degree of accuracy

compact bidding languages and supplier selection for markets with economies of scale and scope preference elicitation is a fundamental problem in single unit combinatorial auctions but it becomes prohibitive even for small instances of multi unit combinatorial auctions the bidders cannot express their preferences exactly as this would take a huge number of bids typically leading to inefficient allocations hence markets with economies of scale and scope require more compact and yet expressive bidding languages in this thesis we propose an expressive bidding language allowing bidders to describe the characteristics of their cost functions bidders in these auctions can specify various discounts and markups and specify pricing rules as logical functions finding the optimal allocation given these pricing rules is a strongly np hard optimization problem and we propose a mixed integer program to solve it based on field data we introduce a multi item cost function and provide extensive computational experiments to explore the computational burden and the impact of different language features on the computational effort and total spend of the auctioneer in addition we explore characteristics of the knowledge representation of the bidding language

how not to run auctions the european 3g telecom auctions abstract there were enormous differences in the revenues from the european third generation 3g or umts mobile phone license auctions from 20 euros per capita in switzerland to 650 euros per capita in the uk though the values of the licenses sold were similar poor auction designs in some countries facilitated collusion between firms and failed to attract entrants the sequencing of the auctions was also crucial we discuss the auctions in the uk netherlands germany italy austria switzerland belgium greece and denmark

overeducation undereducation and the british labour market this paper addresses the issue of overeducation and undereducation using for the first time a british dataset which contains explicit information on the level of required education to enter a job across the generality of occupations three key issues within the overeducation literature are addressed first what determines the existence of over and undereducation and to what extent are over and undereducation substitutes for experience tenure and training second to what extent are over and undereducation temporary or permanent phenomena third what are the returns to over and undereducation and do certain stylized facts discovered for the us and a number of european countries hold for britain

rationalizability learning and equilibrium in games with strategic complementarities we study a rich class of noncooperative games that includes models of oligopoly competition macroeconomic coordination failures arms races bank runs technology adoption and diffusion r d competition pretrial bargaining coordination in teams and many others for all these games the sets of pure strategy nash equilibria correlated equilibria and rationalizable strategies have identical bounds also for a class of models of dynamic adaptive choice behavior that encompasses both best response dynamics and bayesian learning the players choices lie eventually within the same bounds these bounds are shown to vary monotonically with certain exogenous parameters we study the class of noncooperative supermodular games introduced by topkis 1979 and further analyzed by vives 1985 1989 who also pointed out the importance of these games in industrial economics supermodular games are games in which each player s strategy set is partially ordered the marginal returns to increasing one s strategy rise with increases in the competitors strategies so that the game exhibits strategic complementarity 2 and if a player s strategies are multidimensional marginal returns to any one com ponent of the player s strategy rise with increases in the other components this class turns out to encompass many of the most important economic applications of noncooperative game theory in macroeconomics diamond s 1982 search model and bryant s 1983 1984 rational expectations models can be represented as supermodular games in each of these models more activity by some members of the economy raises the returns to increased levels of activity by others in oligopoly theory some models of bertrand oligopoly with differentiated products qualify as supermodu lar games in these games when a firm s competitors raise their prices the marginal profitability of the firm s own price increase rises a similar structure is present in games of new technology adoption such as those of dybvig and spatt 1983 farrell and saloner 1986 and katz and shapiro 1986 when more users hook into a communication system or more manufacturers adopt an interface standard the marginal return to others of doing the same often rises similarly in some specifications of the bank runs model introduced by diamond and dybvig 1983 when more depositors withdraw their funds from a bank it is more worthwhile for other depositors to do the same in the warrant exercise

a convergent price adjustment process abstract in this paper we describe a price adjustment mechanism which leads to an economic equilibrium starting from an arbitrarily chosen initial price vector the process is global and universal

lying for strategic advantage rational and boundedly rational misrepresentation of intentions starting from hendricks and mcafee s 2000 example of the allies decision to feint at calais and attack at normandy on d day this paper models misrepresentation of intentions to competitors or enemies allowing for the possibility of bounded strategic rationality and rational players responses to it yields a sensible account of lying via costless noiseless messages in many cases the model has generically unique pure strategy sequential equilibria in which rational players exploit boundedly rational players but are not themselves fooled in others the model has generically essentially unique mixed strategy sequential equilibria in which rational players strategies protect all players from exploitation

on the wage growth of immigrants israel 1990 2000 this paper develops a descriptive methodology for the analysis of wage growth of immigrants that is based on human capital theory the sources of the wage growth are 1 the rise of the return to imported human capital 2 the impact of accumulated experience in the host country and 3 the mobility up the occupational ladder in the host country the model implies a nonlinear wage function that includes interactions between imported skills and local wage growth using data on native israelis and immigrants from the former soviet union of israel we estimate wage equations jointly for the two groups we find that upon arrival immigrants receive non return for imported skills in the ten years following arrival wages of highly skilled immigrants grow at 8 percent a year rising prices of skills occupational transitions accumulated experience in israel and an economy wide rise in wages account for 3 4 1 1 1 5 and 1 5 percent each in the long run the return for schooling converges to 0 027 substantially below the 0 069 return for natives we do not reject the hypothesis that the return for experience converges to that of natives and that immigrants receive a higher return for their unmeasured skills we find that there is some downgrading in the occupational distribution of immigrants relative to that of natives moreover the average wages of immigrants approach but do not converge to the wages of comparable natives the main reason for this is the low return to their imported skills jel j24 j31 j60