schooling inequality and language barriers abstract this article estimates the impact of language barriers on school achievement and the potential ameliorating role of bilingual education using large household data sets from poor rural communities in mexico we find that parental language failure to speak spanish represents an important barrier to the schooling of indigenous children we provide an empirical test suggesting that this largely reflects parental human capital related to culture language rather than unobserved wealth effects using double difference estimators with community fixed effects to address endogenous program placement we demonstrate that schools with bilingual education narrow the gap in the educational performance of children with monolingual mothers versus bilingual and nonindigenous mothers

spurious volatility in historical unemployment data this paper shows that the stabilization of the unemployment rate between the pre 1930 and post 1948 eras is an artifact of improvements in data collection procedures prewar methods are used to construct postwar unemployment data that are consistent with the historical data the constructed postwar series is nearly as volatile as the pre 1930 unemployment data the constructed postwar data are systematically more volatile than the actual postwar data because the cyclical behavior of the labor force and productivity are misspecified in the construction procedures the relationship between the actual and constructed postwar unemployment series is used to construct new historical data

what explains wage gaps between farm and city exploring the todaro model with american evidence 1890 1941 nominal wage gaps between farm and city employment are one of the most pervasive aspects of modern economic growth so much so that they have become a key stylized fact of development economics indeed a good portion of the literature on the third world has focused on this problem at length both in terms of labor market behavior and in terms of policy formation in the face of factor market distortions yet wage gaps are not simply an institutional peculiarity of newly industrializing third world countries since they seem to have been even greater among nineteenthand twentieth century western nations while unskilled full time nominal city wages are about 41 higher than farm wages in the contemporary third world they were about 51 higher among late nineteenth century industrializers they were even higher in england in the 1830s about 73 2 furthermore the evidence suggests that these wage gaps vary substantially over time they rose from 29 to 41 in the american north between the antebellum and postbellum periods and were about 50 by the mid 1890s in the united states as a whole a figure that reached an all time u s high of about 65 by the late 1930s 3 there are three questions that these wage gaps raise not just one first would these nominal full time wage gaps disappear if they were properly measured proper measurement would include the fact that cities are more costly places to live that cities may have greater disamenities that farmers also make in kind payments to their workers and that farm laborers suffer seasonal underemployment elsewhere

world war i and the postwar depression a reinterpretation based on alternative estimates of gnp abstract this paper examines the official commerce department estimates of gross national product for 1909 1928 and suggests that they are far inferior to the less commonly used kendrick gnp estimates the paper then derives a revised version of the kendrick series that alters significantly the representation of annual movements in gnp before 1919 this endorsement of a revised kendrick gnp series in place of the official commerce department estimates before 1929 suggests that aggregate demand movements had much less effect on real output during world war i and the depression of 1921 than is commonly believed

short run impacts of a severance tax change evidence from alaska energy states face a fundamental tradeoff when increasing severance tax rates potential gains in tax revenues versus potential losses in exploration development and production activity despite the significant implications of this tradeoff there is very little empirical evidence on the short run responsiveness of extraction related activities to changes in severance taxes we conduct a comparative case study to evaluate the short term impact of a severance tax increase on oil related activities and development in alaska in 2007 the introduction of alaska s clear and equitable share aces more than tripled the tax liability for much of the oil already under production in alaska we construct a synthetic alaska from a set of u s energy states with the purpose of estimating the counterfactual evolution of oil production exploration and development wells gross state product and employment in the absence of aces overall our results indicate that there is no discernible difference in the outcome variables of interest between alaska and its synthetic control after the implementation of aces suggesting that aces had a minimal effect on alaskan oil related activity and development in the short run

women s schooling home teaching and economic growth the hypothesis that increases in the schooling of women enhance the human capital of the next generation and thus make a unique contribution to economic growth is assessed on the basis of data describing green revolution india estimates are obtained that indicate that a component of the significant and positive relationship between maternal literacy and child schooling in the indian setting reflects the productivity effect of home teaching and that the existence of this effect combined with the increase in returns to schooling for men importantly underlies the expansion of female literary following the onset of the green revolution

is increased nominal flexibility stabilizing some international evidence this paper studies the impact of the increased rigidity on macroeconomic fluctuations the author uses this evidence to test the validity of two major keynesian explanations the first is the conventional sticky wage sticky price explanation that suggests that the increased nominal rigidity ceteris paribus is destabilizing the second is a recently developed explanation that suggests that the increased flexibility is destabilizing the author s results are consistent with the conventional implications copyright 1991 by the london school of economics and political science

investability the key to competitive regions and cities this article proposes and develops a concept investability that can be used for analysing the competitive position of cities or regions and formulating policy responses it can be defined as conditions that are conducive to a higher level of investment and refers principally to the business environment in which economic agents operate the paper discusses various influences on investment decisions and how they will impinge on different classes of potential investors policy implications are developed and the ways in which the concept might be used in policy making are examined

changes in the cyclical sensitivity of wages in the united states 1891 1987 the conventional wisdom that nominal wages became less sensitive to the business cycle and more autocorrelated after world war ii is reexamined here by considering whether these properties are artifacts of the methods used to construct prewar wage series a replication based on these methods is more cyclically sensitive and exhibits less autocorrelation than the postwar data aggregation using variable instead of fixed employment weights also greatly exaggerates the cyclicality of prewar wages these biases imply that wages are just as sensitive to the cycle today as one hundred years ago perhaps even more so copyright 1992 by american economic association

competition in interregional taxation the case of western coal markets for many products are dominated by small group of states or countries with a natural advantage in the marketplace because of some initial endowment of resources favorable climate or location the purpose of this paper is to explore how such markets involving a few political jurisdictions interact noncooperatively we examine how such a market might be structured and operate and the extent of monopoly rent that can be extracted in the absence of collusion we answer these questions for an empirically estimated model of western u s coal in which two states montana and wyoming dominate production we demonstrate that in this market the amount of rent that can be extracted is greatly reduced through competition relative to a cartel nevertheless even with two producing states competing against each other significant rents can be captured significant enough to refute the contention that little rent can accrue without a cartel

on the aggregate welfare cost of great depression unemployment abstract the potential benefit of policies that eliminate a small likelihood of economic crises is calculated an economic crisis is defined as an increase in unemployment of the magnitude observed during the great depression for the u s the maximum likelihood estimate of entering a depression is found to be about once every 83 years the welfare gain from setting this small probability to zero can range between 1 and 7 of annual consumption in perpetuity for most estimates more than half of these large gains results from a reduction in individual consumption volatility

taxation depletion and welfare a simulation study of the u s petroleum resource abstract exhaustible resources in the united states are subject to taxes on property value production and corporate income as applied in practice each tax can cause high grading the elimination of incentives to explore develop and produce marginal resources and each can tilt the time path of production toward the present or the future the potential for such tax induced distortions has been shown in the theoretical literature due to the dynamic nature of resource exploitation and the resulting complexity of models developed to study it however purely theoretical exercises have been unable to provide detailed results of a sort that could help guide tax policy the present paper develops a simulation model of the u s petroleum resource and uses it to study the effects of taxation on exploration and production the model is partial equilibrium in scope and views the industry as a present value maximizing representative firm given expectations on the future time path of price and a function that relates reserve additions to exploratory effort the industry chooses time paths for exploration and production parameters of relevant functions are estimated with data for u s petroleum operations in the onshore region of the lower 48 states the simulated outcomes indicate that property and production severance taxes cause substantial deadweight losses a tax on corporate income from extraction imposes a very small deadweight loss and the property tax significantly biases utilization of the resource away from the future and toward the present

voter turnout in us presidential elections does carville s law explain the time series we estimate a time series model of voter turnout for 34 us presidential elections 1880 2012 employing a variety of econometric techniques our major results are as follows 1 a negative and significant structural shift in voter turnout occurs in 1972 and is too large to be explained by the lowering of the voting age 2 the 1972 shift is the only statistically significant structural shift to occur since the first decade of the twentieth century 3 short term macroeconomic conditions significantly impact turnout with unemployment having a positive effect 4 turnout in recent presidential elections has not deviated significantly from the post 1972 norm 5 turnout is positively related to the expected closeness of the election outcome but contrary to some theoretical predictions closeness exhibits no trend over time

us state and local oil and gas revenue sources and uses us state and local governments generate revenues from oil and gas production through a variety of mechanisms in this paper we quantify four leading sources 1 state taxes levied on the value or volume of oil and gas produced 2 local property taxes levied on the value of oil and gas property 3 oil and gas lease revenues from state lands and 4 oil and gas lease revenues from federal lands we measure these revenues against the total value of oil and gas produced in the top 16 oil and gas producing states using fiscal year 2013 as a benchmark on average state and local governments collect roughly 10 of oil and gas revenue ranging from a low of roughly 1 to a high of nearly 40 not including income taxes we also assess the use of these revenues finding that there is substantial variation among states the largest shares of revenue flow to state governments current expenditures and education followed by local governments some states also allocate a portion of oil and gas revenues to trust funds endowing future government operations and or education expenditures

some evidence on demand fluctuations and the increased stability of the post war american economy this paper investigates the implications of a sticky wage contracting model that can explain both the decline in wage and price flexibility and the increased stability of the post war american economy the reduction in the size of demand shocks in the post war period has increased agents incentives to write longer contracts though longer contracts have rendered real activity more responsive to demand shocks in the post war period the reduction in the size of these shocks has dominated the increase in the size of response to a particular shock overall real activity has become more stable in the post war period as predicted by theory

bilingualism and network externalities the authors develop a model in which the benefit of language acquisition is increasing in the number of individuals who speak the language this gives rise to a network externality and if language acquisition is costly the language acquisition decisions by individuals may be inefficient if the available policy instruments affect all members of a language group homogeneously then policies that effectively subsidize language acquisition are warranted only for the majority language

inflation unemployment regimes and the instability of the phillips curve using the statistical technique of fuzzy clustering regimes of inflation and unemployment are explored for the united states the united kingdom and germany between 1871 and 2009 we identify for each country three distinct regimes in inflation unemployment space similarities exist across countries in both the regimes and the timings of the transitions between regimes however the typical rates of inflation and unemployment experienced in the regimes are substantially different further even within a given regime the results from the cluster analysis reveal persistent fluctuations in the degree of attachment to that regime of inflation unemployment observations over time the economic implications of this are that first the inflation unemployment relationship or phillips curve experiences from time to time major shifts second that it is also inherently unstable even in the short run it is likely that the factors which govern the inflation unemployment trade off are so multi dimensional that it i

the endogeneity between language and earnings international analyses this study is concerned with the determinants of dominant language fluency its effects on earnings and its endogeneity with earnings among immigrants dominant language fluency is hypothesized to

a quantitative description of state level taxation of oil and gas production in the continental u s abstract we provide a quantitative description of state level taxation of oil and gas production in the continental u s for 2004 2013 aggregate revenues from production taxes nearly doubled in real terms over the period reaching 10 3 billion and accounting for 20 of tax receipts in the top ten revenue states the average state had a tax rate of 3 6 nationally the average dollar of production was taxed at 4 2 the oil specific rate estimated for the study period is 2 4 per barrel or 5 5 per ton of carbon lastly state level tax rates are two thirds higher in states excluding oil and gas wells from local property taxes suggesting that the policies are substitutes for one another

a measure of the u s output gap abstract an autoregressive distributed lag regression of the unemployment rate on output growth is structurally stable over the 1890 1986 period inverting this equation yields a measure of the output gap which is not subject to the spurious detrending problem

severance taxes and market structure in an exhaustible resource industry abstract this paper compares the effects of a severance tax on profit maximizing competitive and monopolistic firms which explore and produce an exhaustible resource the producers response to the tax are studied and the deadweight losses from the tax are calculated time paths of exploratory effort extraction and price are computed severance taxes lead both producers to reduce production and exploration and cause a shift in the time path for prices the deadweight losses from the tax are low especially in competition the losses in the monopoly case are relatively higher with the tax burden falling mainly on the monopolistic producer

anticipated money unanticipated money and output 1873 1930 anticipated money unanticipated money and output 1873 1930 i introduction this paper examines the roles of anticipated and unanticipated money in the period between the civil war and the depression 1 such an examination is warranted for at least two reasons first estimation of the impact of anticipated and unanticipated money on output for historical periods can enhance our understanding of the responses of economic activity to these key variables 2 second recent work has shown that traditional historical estimates of output may be faulty see romer 1986a 1986b 1986c 1988 not only do most studies investigating the economic roles played by anticipated and unanticipated money concentrate on the post world war ii era those that discuss the period before world war ii such as rush 1985 1986 use traditional data indeed despite the interesting analyses by rush if the validity of the conventional data on output and unemployment for the era under consideration is rejected then virtually no results on the importance of monetary and real factors for economic activity are available for this important period thus further discussion of this topic is needed to answer two important questions what do the revised data show us about the historical economy do these revisions change the inferences drawn about monetary influences on economic activity the analysis presented here is comprehensive in that a wide range of output measures are employed both in terms of the types of output and in terms of the manner in which the output measures are constructed given this variety in the output measures consistent results on the effects of anticipated and unanticipated money across output measures indicate that conclusions drawn from the analysis are robust in particular the empirical results presented below support the following hypotheses i that anticipated m2 and monetary base growth have no effect on output regardless of the output measure used ii that unanticipated m2 and monetary base growth do effect output regardless of the output measure used and iii that changes in financial intermediation may be important for the evolution of output over time support for hypotheses i and ii is consistent with the monetary explanation of business cycles support for hypotheses iii may be consistent with real explanations of business cycles if exogenous shocks to the monetary production technology subsequently affect output 3 taken together the joint support for hypotheses i iii suggests that at a minimum neither the real nor the monetary explanations for historical u s business cycles can be discounted without additional work the remainder of the paper is organized as follows section ii presents a brief overview of the historical period under consideration along with a discussion of prior work on the effects of anticipated and unanticipated money on output determination during this time period section iii discusses the data and the methodology the empirical results are presented in section iv and the conclusions in section v ii overview the historical period the period under investigation 1873 1930 is one of substantial economic change banking panics the return to the gold standard the founding of the federal reserve system and world war i are some of the more important events occuring during this period we consider the role played by expected and unexpected money in output determination for several major subperiods while data availability largely determined the selection of these subperiods they generally correspond to major economic events despite the structural and institutional changes over the period we also examine the roles of anticipated and unticipated money growth in the determination of output over the entire time period to be valid tests of the impact of money growth on output require a reasonable degree of homogeneity in the economic environment

changes in business cycles evidence and explanations this paper shows that the volatility of annual real macroeconomic indicators for the united states and the average severity of recessions have declined only slightly between the pre world war i and post world war ii eras recessions have however become somewhat less frequent and more uniform it argues that the advent of macroeconomic policy after world war ii can account for both the observed continuity and change countercyclical monetary policy and automatic stabilizers have prolonged postwar expansions and prevented severe depressions at the same time policy induced booms and recessions have led to continued volatility of the postwar economy

valuation of expectations a hedonic study of shale gas development and new york s moratorium abstract this paper examines the local impacts of shale gas development sgd we use a hedonic framework and exploit a discrete change in expectations about sgd caused by the new york state moratorium on hydraulic fracturing our research design combines difference in differences and border discontinuity as well as underlying shale geology on properties in pennsylvania and new york results suggest that new york properties that were most likely to experience both the financial benefits and environmental consequences of sgd dropped in value 23 as a result of the moratorium which under certain assumptions indicates a large and positive net valuation of sgd

evaluating the effects of optimally distributed public programs child health and family planning interventions this paper develops and tests an optimizing model determining the distribution of family planning and health subsidies across heterogeneous households and assesses the biases in cross area estimates of the health effects of such subsidies due to public resource optimization the model incorporates both health externalities and the endogenous response of the size of the recipient population to program subsidies longitudinal data describing child health and publicly provided family planning and health programs in 20 barrios in laguna province in the philippines are used to estimate the effects of such programs on child health and the relationships between the distribution of the programs and preprogram health levels the impact of a program on a particular childs health status is viewed as dependent upon the childs length of exposure to the program a basic feature of the model is the presence of health externalities which is shown to be sufficient along with plausible features of household behavior to make selective subsidization of fertility control either alone or in combination with health investment subsidies pareto efficient the model suggests that subsidization of fertility control is likely to be pareto efficient in the presence of health or human capital externalities when human capital and family size are gross substitutes and or when any per child human capital subsidies may substitute for direct subsidies to health investment and an equalizing distribution of the subsidies the highest family planning subsidies to the lowest health recipient households is efficient when both health and family planning subsidies are used fertility control subsidies minimize the subsidy burden for donors and are highest when total subsidy expenditures per child are greatest

oil production responses to price changes an empirical application of the competitive model to opec and non opec countries abstract falling oil prices over the last decade accompanied by over production by some opec members and the growth of non opec supply warrant further empirical investigation of the competitive model to ascertain production behavior a supply function based on a modification of griffin s model is estimated using data from 1973 1997 the sample period unlike griffin s however includes phases of price increase 1970s and price decrease 1980s 1990s thus providing a better framework for examining production behavior using the competitive model the opec results do not support the competitive hypothesis instead a negative and significant price elasticity of supply is obtained this result offers partial support for the target revenue theory for most of the non opec members the estimates support the competitive model opec s loss of market share and the drop in the share of oil based energy should signal adjustments in price and quantity based on a competitive world market for crude oil

jurisdictional tax competition and the division of nonrenewable resource rents this paper presents a model of nonrenewable resource extraction across multiple jurisdictions which engage in strategic tax competition the model incorporates rents due to both resource scarcity and capital scarcity as well as intra region ricardian rents regions set taxes on nonrenewable resource production strategically to balance tax revenues and local benefits from investment conditional on other regions tax rates a representative extraction firm then allocates production capital across regions and time to maximize the present value of profits generally we find that the division of resource rent between firms and regional governments ultimately depends on the relative scarcity of natural and production capital relative costs across space and the value regional governments place on economic activity this theoretical result provides policymakers with information on the determinants of optimal tax rates and motivates future empirical research on the factors influencing the division of resource rent in practice

a language theory of discrimination any advanced industrial society is composed of a number of speech communities with different verbal and nonverbal languages in particular in the united states blacks and whites and men and women have sharply differing methods of speaking and listening this paper develops a model in which people can only work together if they speak the same language and in which it is costly to learn a second language the competitive market will tend to minimize communication through segregation but if interaction is required the cost will be borne by the minority a number of nontrivial predictions are derived from the model

strategy and market structure in western coal taxation this paper analyzes the potential market power of western states in setting coal severance taxes and the emphasis placed by these states on the development of their coal resources vs obtaining tax revenues three market structures are analyzed one involves a western regional cartel setting taxes collectively the other cases are noncooperative tax equilibria with montana and wyoming competing against each other we conclude that the western states seem to be primarily concerned with revenue collection and are very efficient extractors of economic rent

keeping the keynesian faith this wide ranging discussion takes in the development of macroeconomics and the influence of ideas and events on that development the nature and causes of the great depression keynesianism lessons from the high inflation period of the 1970s the role of macroeconomic policy and the idea of the new economy

is deflation costly after all the perils of erroneous historical classifications i estimate average economic activity during periods of inflation and deflation while accounting for measurement errors in 19th century prices these measurement errors lead to underestimation overestimation of economic activity during periods of inflation deflation by exploiting multiple deflation indicators it is possible to recover the true relationship the shortfall of us industrial production growth during periods of deflation ranges from 4 5 pp to 7 6 pp instead of 2 pp i also find a negative relationship between deflation and real activity in the uk i then examine the cross country variation in the estimates for eleven countries the patterns are consistent with stronger biases for countries with more serious measurement errors in prices

quantitative assessment of tariff endogeneity abstract the paper provides a quantitative assessment of the tariff endogeneity hypothesis in the macro context for the interwar and postwar u s economy there is an almost unidirectional causality running from unemployment and trade deficit to the average tariff rate during the interwar period while more interactive relationships hold in the postwar period compared with the interwar era there is a decline in the dependence of tariff on unemployment and trade deficit but the individual effect of unemployment on tariff has increased and that of trade deficit has decreased furthermore unanticipated shocks exert smaller and less persistent effects of tariff

price flexibility and aggregate stability new evidence and implications i introduction is increased price flexibility stabilizing the importance of this question can be easily established by observing the number of recently published papers in which this question or a slight modification of it has appeared in their titles 1 while most economists would answer this question affirmatively a strand of macroeconomic thought that questions the wisdom of too much price flexibility has recently regained some attention 2 in the most widely discussed of this recent literature delong and summers 1986b question the wisdom of too much price flexibility their work was motivated by some of the ideas expressed by keynes 1936 and formally articulated by james tobin 1975 low prices work to move the economy to full employment but falling prices to the extent that they lead to expectations of deflation raise the real interest rate through the mundell effect and move the economy away from full employment in a version of taylor s 1979 wage setting model delong and summers show that instability is likely to occur if expectations of inflation adjust rapidly to actual inflation and the real interest rate effect is large this view presents a direct challenge to mainstream keynesian models of business cycles 3 according to these models sluggish wages and prices are generally the culprits of unemployment and business fluctuations an exogenous institutional increase in the degree of price inflexibility increases the size of quantities adjustment in response to aggregate demand shocks in the current period and over time the assumption of exogeneity is consistent with the view that wage and price rigidity are the result of an institutional structure that is relatively unresponsive to changes in the underlying economic conditions in gray and kandil 1991 we find this view unappealing considering recent efforts to rationalize nominal rigidities as the outcome of explicit optimization exercises 4 it is for this reason that we examine the relationship between price flexibility and output variability in a framework in which both are endogenously determined in the model we develop price rigidity is attributed to the length of contractual wage agreements an increase in contract length will occur if the costs of negotiating contracts rise or the amount of uncertainty impinging on the economy declines in the first case declines in wage and price flexibility will be accompanied by decreased stability of output in the latter case the opposite will occur the reduction in the size of stochastic disturbances impinging on the economic system has a direct stabilizing impact on real output concurrently the reduction in the degree of uncertainty increases agents incentives to write longer contracts the increased rigidity is destabilizing this destabilizing impact is dominated however by the direct stabilizing impact the implications of the alternative views can be contrasted in many respects in kandil 1991b i test the relation between measures of wage and price flexibility and the size of macroeconomic fluctuations across a group of ten major industrial countries the analysis of this paper extends this research in several directions first the analysis provides a formal illustration of the channels through which price flexibility may differentiate the real effects of specific shocks underlying aggregate demand and in turn aggregate variability the framework approximates the key relationships for the theoretical debate under consideration these relationships are replicated empirically to establish the validity of the hypotheses that differentiate the alternative views second the analysis provides a more formal attempt towards quantifying the structural shocks underlying aggregate demand these shocks are the driving forces of economic instability and in turn they are crucial to the debate on the stabilizing effects of price flexibility

exploration information and regulation in an exhaustible mineral industry abstract the paper presents a model of exploration and production in an uncertain environment exploration provides a by product of information that helps predict future finds more accurately when this information is not equally valued at the margin by society and industry socially inefficient levels of exploration are chosen by industry in this event government intervention may be warranted a regulator could control future prices to encourage industry to select socially preferred levels of production and exploration alternatively by making public varying amounts of exploration information incentives to industry could be adjusted conditions where such regulation might yield sufficient gains to society to offset regulatory costs are considered

historical perspectives and the interpretation of unemployment jn the last decade the levels of unemployment in industrialized countries have risen dramatically rates now are typically two and in some cases three and four times those prevailing in the 1950s and 1960s the fact that these new higher levels are widely tolerated suggests that our thinking about the meaning and significance of unemployment has changed enormously over the period such a change is certainly present in the thinking among professional economists in the 1960s the standard view was that the unemployed represented unutilized resources their existence in an economy where the vast majority of people had unsatisifed wants was seen as a major social paradox and the most important unsolved intellectual puzzle of the capitalist economic system this fed the rationale for keynesian countercyclical fiscal policy and government deficit spending the government could reasonably print money in order to hire the unemployed because the resources absorbed in the process were essentially free goods today a good number of professional economists certainly in the united states but to a lesser extent throughout the world have come to view measured unemployment in industrial economies as an artifact in at least three senses it is a statistical artifact of a measurement process that classifies as unemployed people who are not really available for work it is an institutional artifact of a system of social insurance and public welfare that encourages an extension of the process of job search and it is an artifact of the language that uses a term which in everyday parlance means forced idleness for activities that have important productive functions akin to the functions of inventories information processing and investment associated with the utilization of capital goods these interpretations to be sure hardly constitute a consensus about the meaning of unemployment but they are no more diverse than the range of views that underlay the older orthodoxy and for policy makers and economic researchers they carry a single message there are many more serious problems toward which to direct attention these new views about unemployment were developed out of a set of ideas originally associated with the chicago school of economics where the emphasis at once positive and normative was placed on the competitive market as the gover a review of alexander keyssar out of work the first century of unemployment in massachusetts cambridge cambridge university press 1986 and robert salais nicolas baverez and b6nedicte reynaud l invention du chomage histoire et transformations d une categorie en france des annees 1890 aux annees 1980 paris presses universitaires de france 1986

assessing the incidence and efficiency of a prominent place based policy abstract this paper empirically assesses the incidence and efficiency of round i of the federal urban empowerment zone ez program using confidential microdata from the decennial census and the longitudinal business database using rejected and future applicants to the ez program as controls we find that ez designation substantially increased employment in zone neighborhoods and generated wage increases for local workers without corresponding increases in population or the local cost of living the results suggest the efficiency costs of first round ezs were relatively modest jel h26 h77 j31 r23 r58

spatially variable taxation and resource extraction the impact of state oil taxes on drilling in the us abstract we estimate the responsiveness of nonrenewable resource firms to taxes on output using spatially explicit data from the oil sector in the united states using a model of resource firm capital allocation over space we show that responses to spatially varying taxes differ from responses to equivalent changes in the common output price a larger response to tax rates occurs because the tax change only affects the returns to drilling in a single state whereas a price change affects both the returns to drilling in a state and the opportunity cost of not drilling in other states econometrically we estimate the effect of severance taxes on oil drilling we find that the response to a one dollar increase in tax per unit of production has an effect at least eight times as large as the effect of an equivalent decrease in output price the tax response is inelastic implying that an increase in state tax rate would increase revenue we do not find evidence of spillovers between states in the local areas near state borders

leakage in regional environmental policy the case of the regional greenhouse gas initiative abstract subglobal and subnational greenhouse gas policies are often thought to be less effective than comprehensive policies as production and emissions of trade exposed industries may move from the regulated to the unregulated regions a process referred to as leakage leakage negates some emission reductions from the regulated regions we use detailed electricity generation and transmission data to show that this is the case for the regional greenhouse gas initiative rggi a co2 cap and trade program for the electricity sector in select northeastern u s states more specifically our results indicate that rggi induced a reduction in coal fired generation in rggi states and an increase in ngcc generation in rggi surrounding regions this finding suggests that the pollution haven hypothesis holds for state level variation in environmental policy even when compliance costs are low

government programs can improve local labor markets evidence from state enterprise zones federal empowerment zones and federal enterprise communities 1 abstract federal and state governments spend well over a billion dollars a year on programs that encourage employment development in disadvantaged labor markets through the use of subsidies and tax credits in this paper we use an estimation approach that is valid under relatively weak assumptions to measure the impact of state enterprise zones entzs federal empowerment zones empzs and federal enterprise community entc programs on local labor markets we find that all three programs have positive statistically significant impacts on local labor markets in terms of the unemployment rate the poverty rate the fraction with wage and salary income and employment further the effects of empz and entc designation are considerably larger than the impact of entz designation we find that our estimates are robust to allowing for a regression to the mean effect we also find that there are positive but statistically insignificant spillover effects to neighboring census tracts of each of these programs thus our positive estimates of these program impacts do not simply represent a transfer from the nearest non treated census tract to the treated census tract our results are noteworthy for several reasons first our study is the first to jointly look at these three programs thus allowing policy makers to compare the impacts of these programs second our paper along with a concurrent study by neumark and kolko 2008 is the first to carry out the estimation accounting for overlap between the programs third our estimation strategy is valid under weaker assumptions than those made in many previous studies we consider three comparison groups and let the data determine the appropriate group fourth in spite of our conservative estimation strategy by looking at national effects with disaggregated data we show that entz designation generally has a positive effect on the local labor market while most previous research on entzs much of which used more geographically aggregated data to look at state specific effects did not find any significant impacts fifth we note that there is little or no previous work on entcs overall our results strongly support the efficacy of these labor market interventions

a model of the operation and development of a national oil company we present a model of the exploration and development activities of a national oil company noc which uses similar technology to a private firm to extract a depletable resource however unlike the private firm the noc may have a wider range of objectives than maximizing the present value of profits specifically we assume an objective function that balances firm profitability against a political desire to favor domestic consumer surplus and domestic employment we find that the non commercial objectives faced by a noc tend to reinforce each other in their effects on profitability the timing of cash flows and employment

tax avoidance and business location in a state border model abstract previous studies have struggled to demonstrate that higher taxes deter business activity we revisit this issue by estimating the effect of changes over time in cross border differences in state tax conditions on the tendency for new establishments to favor one side of a state border over the other identification is enhanced by taking account of previously overlooked reciprocal agreements that require workers to pay income tax to their state of residence as opposed to their state of employment when reciprocal agreements are in force higher personal income tax rates lure companies from across the border while corporate income tax and sales tax rates have the opposite effect where reciprocal agreements are not in place the results are largely reversed these patterns are amplified in heavily developed locations and differ in anticipated ways by industry and corporate non corporate status of the establishment overall results strengthen the view that state level tax policies do affect the location decisions of entrepreneurs and new business activity but not in a way that lends itself to a one size fits all summary

hotelling under pressure we show that oil production from existing wells in texas does not respond to oil prices while drilling activity and costs respond strongly to explain these facts we reformulate hotelling s class

targeted business incentives and local labor markets this paper uses a regression discontinuity design to examine the effects of geographically targeted business incentives on local labor markets unlike elsewhere in the united states enterprise zone ez designations in texas are determined in part by a cutoff rule based on census block group poverty rates exploiting this discontinuity as a source of quasi experimental variation in investment and hiring incentives across areas i find that ez designation has a positive effect on resident employment increasing opportunities mainly in lower paying industries while business sitings spurred by the program are more geographically diffuse ez designation is associated with increases in home values

the phillips curve the persistence of inflation and the lucas critique evidence from exchange rate regimes comment we present evidence from the united states and the united kingdom that the persistence of price inflation is significantly higher under managed exchange rate regimes than under gold based fixed exchange rate regimes these differences are also reflected in expectations augmented phillips curves we use a two country macro model with forward looking price setters to demonstrate that higher monetary accommodation of inflation and exchange rate accommodation of inflation differentials increase inflation persistence the evidence does not contradict this hypothesis it supports the hypothesis of forward looking price setters and highlights the empirical significance of the lucas critique jel e31 e42 f33

minimum wage shocks employment flows and labor market frictions we provide the first estimates of the effects of minimum wages on employment flows in the u s labor market identifying the impact using policy discontinuities at state borders we find that minimum wages have a sizable negative effect on employment flows but not stocks separations and accessions fall among affected workers we interpret our findings using a job ladder model in which minimum wage increases can reduce job to job transitions we find that a standard calibration of the model generates predicted relative magnitudes of the employment stock and flow elasticities that are very close to our reduced form estimates

effect of the number of banking relationships on credit availability evidence from panel data of spanish small firms this paper investigates how the choice between single or multiple banking relationships affects credit availability for a complete panel of small and medium sized spanish firms the results seem to indicate the existence of rationing since a substitution relation has been found between trade and bank credit we also analyse the relationship between the level of indebtedness and the interest rate for each group of firms the results show that those smes that work with fewer financial intermediaries obtain fewer funds for the same increase in the interest rate which indicates that these companies have more financial restraints