disability job mismatch earnings and job satisfaction in australia we examine the relationship between disability job mismatch earnings and job satisfaction using panel estimation on data from the household income and labour dynamics in australia hilda survey 2001 08 while we do not find any relationship between work limiting disability and overskilling it appears that there is a positive relationship between work limiting disability and overeducation which is consistent with disability onset leading to downward occupational movement at least in relative terms we find a negative correlation between work limiting disability and both earnings and job satisfaction however there is only evidence of a causal relationship in terms of the latter where the impact of disability is found to be multifaceted

valuing environmental commodities some recent experiments a general model of consumer behavior is proposed to assess six recent experiments that have attempted to reveal preferences for environmental goals each experiment used a mix of both the techniques and the theory of demand for non market commodities and each was designed to estimate a non market attitude associated with the environment and to analyze potential biases in the techniques the six cases show some consistency in results the linkage within the contingent market between the environmental attribute institutional setting and the bidding instrument must be realistic and accepted by the respondent to avoid biased results possibly the most important result is the replication of results using a traditional property value study and a contingent bidding approach all evidence obtained to date suggests that hedonic studies of property values or wages travel costs and survey techniques all yield values well one order of magnitude in accuracy 41 references 2 tables

the perception of man and the conception of society two approaches to understanding society the social sciences offer two distinct approaches to understanding society one originated with the scottish moral philosophers and shaped the discipline of economics the other emerged from the french enlightenment and influenced the study of sociology the two approaches are based on radically different perceptions of man and man s relation to society this paper explores these alternative hypotheses and examines some major implications it concludes that the hypothesis reaching back to the scottish philosophers provides the basis for a unified approach in the social sciences

changes in wage discrimination against people with disabilities 1984 93 a group of health impaired workers who self report in the survey of income and program participation that their productivity is not affected by their impairment is used to separately measure the effects of discrimination from the effects of poor health on earnings in 1984 and 1993 the results indicate that in 1984 only 3 7 percentage points of the earnings gap is due to discrimination and the amount of discrimination did not decrease by 1993 although discrimination did not change over the 1984 to 1993 period the negative effects of poor health on the earnings of people with disabilities fell substantially

measuring over education previous work on over education has assumed homogeneity of workers and jobs relaxing these assumptions we find that over educated workers have lower education credentials than matched graduates among the over educated graduates we distinguish between the apparently over educated workers who have similar unobserved skills as matched graduates and the genuinely over educated workers who have a much lower skill endowment over education is associated with a pay penalty of 5 11 for apparently over educated workers compared with matched graduates and of 22 26 for the genuinely over educated over education originates from the lack of skills of graduates this should be taken into consideration in the current debate on the future of higher education in the uk

equal pay as a moving target international perspectives on forty years of addressing the gender pay gap this paper provides an overview of the key factors impacting upon the gender pay gap in the uk europe and australia forty years after the implementation of the first equal pay legislation the pay gap remains a key aspect of the inequalities women face in the labour market while the overall pay gap has tended to fall in many countries over the past forty years it has not closed in some countries it has been stubbornly resistant or has even widened in reviewing the collection of papers that make up this special issue we identify four broad themes with which to group the contributions and draw out the explanations for diverse trends theoretical and conceptual debates legal developments and their impacts wage setting institutions and changing employer demands and newly emerging pay inequalities between and within educational and ethnic groups across the four themes we underline how the trends in the gender pay gap capture the dynamism of inequalities as the market power of different groups and stakeholders changes over times three key dimensions emerge from the papers to provide a framework for future research and policy discourse the relationship between litigation and bargaining strategies the interaction between wage setting institutions and new organisational practices and the increasing and range of diversity or equality strands competing for equal treatment we conclude that progress towards closing the gender pay gap will not be easy will require a collective effort of various actors and will not be quick

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

validation of empirical measures of welfare change a comparison of nonmarket techniques since the passing of the flood control act of 1936 the attention of many resource economists has been directed towards measuring the benefits and costs of alternative uses of natural resources increasingly it has been recognized that the value of some of these uses is not explicitly determined through market transactions this has led to the focus of much attention upon the development of nonmarket methods to estimate the value of these uses in the 1940s the groundwork for the travel cost method was established by hotelling prewitt 1949 following this in the 1960s davis initiated the basic foundation for bidding methods davis 1963 which were later to be subsumed under the heading of contingent valuation methods brookshire randall and stoll 1980 schulze d arge and brookshire 1981 thayer 1981 both of these methods will be further discussed below in addition to these two methods a third approach the unit day value method has been recognized as acceptable but not preferred for the valuation of recreational uses of water and related land resources dwyer kelley and bowes 1977 u s water resources council 1979 given the existence of alternative methods of estimating the value of resource uses several obvious questions arise one of the first of these is under what circumstances is each method most appropriate existing literature has focussed sufficiently on this question and pointed out limitations of each especially the travel cost method and unit day value methods brookshire ives and schulze 1976 dwyer kelly and bowes 1977 freeman 1979 mcconnell 1975 randall ives and eastman 1977 schulze d arge and brook

economic man as a moral individual first there is the broadly ethical question how should one live to emphasize this connection is not the same as asserting that people will always act in ways they will themselves morally defend but only to recognize that ethical deliberations cannot be totally inconsequential to actual human behavior sen 1988 3 4 i introduction it is a plausible proposition that some people s behavior is affected significantly by moral considerations a growing literature in economics and related disciplines reviewed and analyzed in earlier work by two of the authors goldfarb and griffith 1991a griffith and goldfarb 1991b explores the possibility and desirability of incorporating these moral considerations into the economic analysis of individual behavior 1 a variety of approaches to introducing moral considerations into economic analysis have been put forward by contributors within economics including sen 1974 1977 1988 hirschman 1985 phelps 1975 vanberg 1988 brunner 1987 frank 1987 1988 hirshleifer 1985 mueller 1986 and schotter 1981 among others among related disciplines the philosophers gauthier 1986 and ulman margalit 1977 the sociologists coleman 1987 and etzioni 1986 1988 and the political scientist axelrod 1984 all present relevant analyses as our earlier review indicated these authors pursue three competing approaches introducing moral values as part of preference functions introducing moral norms or rules as constraints and introducing such norms as decision rules for coping with strategic interaction gaming situations we propose here a concrete method for including moral values in the economist s model of preferences our method maintains the standard economic framework of an agent maximizing his or her utility subject to constraints but modifies the utility function so that the enjoyment or utility from consuming a given set of goods varies in a lumpy or discontinuous way depending on the concurrent moral content of the individual s behavior moreover it offers an analytical representation of the linkage between preferring to act morally and the individual s being faced with possibly significant differences in constraints because of such moral considerations 2 the paper proceeds as follows section ii indicates where our approach fits in the existing literature incorporating moral values into preference functions section iii sets forth our approach to specifying these utility functions section iv suggests some extensions section v presents further discussion and conclusions ii relation to the literature while not directly inspired by the occupational choice literature our approach can be usefully viewed as an application of the economic model of occupational choice to modelling moral preferences 3 this approach helps fill an analytical gap between hochman and rodgers 1969 small modification of the standard microeconomic framework and the more extensive departures suggested by etzioni 1986 and sen 1974 1977 our model helps fill this gap by providing what we think is an intuitively appealing treatment of the discontinuous or lumpy content of important classes of moral decisions hochman and rodgers 1969 present an analysis of the possible relationship between moral and other values in the context of charitable transfers their analysis is now a standard ingredient in intermediate microeconomics textbooks 4 their interdependent utility approach puts impoverished individual y s income or utility into individual x s utility function one then analyzes the conditions under which individual x will either himself transfer resources to individual y or vote for a government program to make such a transfer this approach allows transfers that vary continuously from zero to very large amounts of money with decisions involving trade offs at the margin for our purposes this marginal trade off feature so useful for analyzing charitable transfers presents a very significant limitation when attempting to apply the model to a wider range of moral behavior

further investigations into the factors affecting compliance with uk fishing quotas this paper reports the results of a more recent study of quota compliance in the u k fishery that was investigated in an earlier article in this journal hatcher et al 2000 the study collected more detailed data on fishermen s perceptions and experience of enforcement and sought to measure the financial incentive to cheat in addition whereas the earlier study used a binary approach to modelling the data we employed an orderedresponse model and included a number of scale regressors without transformation although we still find some evidence of normative influences on violation levels the results suggest that conventional economic incentives predominate in the fishery

duration of disability job mismatch and employment outcomes abstractworkers with disabilities have functional limitations that affect their productivity in some but not necessarily all jobs workers who find a job that is a good match for their functional limitations i e a job where their limitations have little or no impact on important job functions should expect better employment outcomes e g higher wages longer job tenure than workers with similar disabilities who are mismatched in their jobs merging data from the survey of income and program participation with o net data on job demands we construct two continuous measures of job mismatch for workers with physical disabilities we then extend the literature on disability and employment by exploring relationships between duration of disability job mismatch wages and hours worked the results indicate that workers with long durations of disability are employed in jobs that are a better match to their physical limitations than are similar workers with shorter durations of disability and workers who

risk preference and the work leisure trade off the paper investigates the interrelationships between the wage rate period of employment work leisure choice and the attitude toward risk the model makes risk preference endogenous given external forces acting on individual choice beginning with assumptions normally considered consistent with risk aversion namely concave utility with respect to leisure and wealth along with perfect markets rational behavior consistent with the insurance buying gambler is shown to be a reasonable possibility the theory also provides an explanation for the repeating gambler paradox

the social and political consequences of overeducation this study employs national survey data to estimate the extent of overeducation in the u s labor force and its impact on a variety of worker attitudes estimates are made of the extent of overeducation and its distribution among different categories of workers according to sex race age and class background the effects of overeducation are examined in four areas of worker attitudes job satisfaction political leftism political alienation and stratification ideology evidence is found of significant effects of overeducation on job satisfaction and several aspects of stratification ideology the magnitude of these effects is small however and they are concentrated almost exclusively among very highly overeducated workers no evidence is found of generalized political effects of overeducation either in the form of increased political leftism or in the form of increased political alienation these findings fail to support the common prediction of major political repercussions of overeducation and suggest the likelihood of alternative forms of adaptation among overeducated workers

normative and social influences affecting compliance with fisheries regulations economic models of regulatory compliance in fisheries usually assume an instrumental determination of individual behavior in which the decision to comply or to violate depends primarily on the expected monetary costs and benefits policy implications tend as a result to focus only on deterrence that is increasing the expected monetary costs of violation more complete models of compliance behavior take into account factors such a social influence moral values and the perceived legitimacy of regulations and the regulatory authority the paper describes an investigation into the non monetary factors affecting compliance with output quota restrictions among fishermen in the united kingdom

valuing public goods a comparison of survey and hedonic approaches although the theory of public goods has progressed rapidly since paul samuelson s seminal article the empirical measurement of the value of demand for public goods only recently has received increased attention perhaps the best known and most widely accepted empirical approach has been the use of hedonic prices wherein for example it is assumed that either wages or housing values reflect spatial variation in public good characteristics of different communities this indirect approach based on theoretical work of charles tiebout kelvin lancaster sherwin rosen and others has proven quite successful among public goods or bads which have been valued using the hedonic approach are climate i hoch air pollution robert anderson and thomas crocker d harrison and d rubinfeld social infrastructure r cummings et al and other community characteristics such as noise level j nelson and ethnic composition ann schnare an alternative approach is to directly ask households or individuals to state their willingness to pay for public goods using survey techniques despite arguments that strategic bias will invalidate survey results there exists the need for an alternative to the hedonic approach as an example consider the case of a remote and unique scenic vista valuable to recreators which is threatened by air pollution from a proposed coal fired plant a typical situation in the western united states although it is possible in principle to impute the value of clean air and visibility from the relative decline in local visitation which might follow construction of a power plant information on the value of visibility at the site is needed prior to construction for socially optimal decision making on plant location and pollution control equipment the hedonic approach is unavailable both because the scarcity of local population as opposed to recreators makes use of wage or property value data impossible and because scenic vistas may themselves be unique for these reasons a randall et al first applied survey methods for valuing visibility and other environmental effects of large coal fired power plants in the four corners region of new mexico since this initial application the survey approach has been widely used to value environmental commodities where market data for hedonic analysis is difficult to acquire see for example brookshire ives and schulze rowe et al brookshire et al other early attempts to value public goods using the survey approach include r davis peter bohm and j hammack and g brown although results of using the survey approach for estimating the value of public goods appear to be internally consistent replicable and consistent with demand theory see schulze et al little work on external validation has been reported thus the purpose of this paper is to report on an experiment designed to validate the survey approach by direct comparison to a hedonic property value study the los angeles metropolitan area was chosen for the experiment because of the well defined air pollution problem and be assistant professor university of wyoming assistant professor university of missouri rolla associate professor university of wyoming and professor university of wyoming respectively the research reported here was funded under a grant methods development for assessing air pollution control benefits from the u s environmental protection agency we would like to give special thanks to alan carlin and shelby gerking for their helpful suggestions and contributions additional helpful comments were received from a myrick freeman iii john tschirhart and james murdoch all conclusions are of course our sole responsibility

the relationship between unions and job satisfaction this paper examines the assoication between canadian unions and their member attitudes data on job satisfaction indicate that unionized workers in canada are less happy with the quality of their jobs than non union workers the former however are more satisfied with their financial compensation and job security than non members

optimal mismatch and promotions i introduction a substantial proportion of workers are employed in jobs for which they appear to be either overqualified or underqualified for instance using data from the panel study of income dynamics sicherman 1991 finds that 40 percent of his sample are overeducated and another 16 percent are undereducated rumberger 1987 reports similar values using data from the quality of employment surveys other studies which find substantial education mismatch include duncan and hoffman 1981 verdugo and verdugo 1989 and hersch 1991 and evidence that a single firm hires both under and overqualified workers is presented here this paper provides an explanation for why firms hire both overqualified and underqualified workers firms hire overqualified workers because these workers require less training for their initial positions such workers also form a pool from which promotions are made which lowers hiring costs for higher level positions within the firm workers accept positions for which they are overqualified to enhance their probability of promotion and because of search and mobility costs but if they fail to be promoted to a position that better matches their qualifications they are more likely to quit firms hire underqualified workers despite their longer training requirement since such workers are less likely to quit and provide continuity of the labor force over time thus contrary to job matching arguments that would explain these hires as a result of imperfect information hiring of seemingly mismatched workers is optimal and these matches are made with perfect information the model developed in this paper yields three testable hypotheses 1 training time for entry level jobs is inversely related to overqualification at the time of hire 2 workers who are overqualified on their current job are those who have failed to be promoted to a job which better matches their qualifications and such workers are more likely to quit and 3 workers overqualified at time of hire are more likely to be promoted to test these hypotheses i use new data collected for this purpose previous empirical research such as that cited above was restricted by data availability to examining only the match between education and the worker s current job thus the quality of the match with the worker s initial job and the match between worker qualifications other than education has gone unexplored however various worker characteristics in addition to education are often substituted for each other in determining a worker s qualification for a job thus i examine additional qualifications including the match between the worker s experience level of previous job and use of skills information on the match between the worker s qualifications and those required for the initial job with the employer is particularly important since entry level qualifications determine training time for the initial job as well as the likelihood of promotion further individual specific training time for the initial job is necessary but typically not available since data sets providing information on training such as the panel study of income dynamics and quality of employment surveys request information on training time for the average worker and not for the individual worker the data set reveals several interesting statistics qualification mismatch at hire is fairly common for this firm 29 percent of the sample report themselves overqualified for their first job with the firm while 13 percent report themselves as underqualified lateral intra firm mobility is common and occurs far more frequently than promotions workers in the sample average 1 3 promotions but four different jobs with the employer this suggests that the job matching process occurs not only by turnover but through intrafirm mobility consistent with the assumptions and implications of the model the empirical results indicate that workers who are overqualified at hire receive less training and more promotions and that workers overqualified for their current job are more likely to quit

establishment size job satisfaction and the structure of work this paper empirically investigates a the relationship between establishment size and the degree of flexibility in the work environment and b the extent to which establishment size differences in workers satisfaction with their jobs can be accounted for by differences in their work environment the main findings are that large establishments do organize production in a less flexible fashion than do smaller establishments and that observed lower levels of job satisfaction in larger establishments net of wage and fringe benefit effects can largely be explained by the inflexibility in the work environment

the longitudinal structure of earnings losses among work limited disabled workers this paper asks what are the dynamic effects of disability on earnings unlike most of the previous literature it uses panel data and fixed effects methods are used to assess how the earnings of disabled workers depart from expected levels over many years before and after the date of onset of their disability the paper also examines how worker characteristics affect earnings losses from disability with particular attention paid to the age at which the person suffers onset disabled men are found to experience sharp drops in earnings that predate the measured date of onset earnings recover rapidly soon after onset with much of the immediate reduction made up in the first two post onset years a modest downward trendfollows resulting in significant long term losses in expected annual earnings of about 12 percent per year being older at onset nonwhite more chronically disabled and less educated cause the losses from disability to be larger and the recovery smaller a large portion of these differences across groups appear to derive from industry affiliation after onset the paper argues the facts are all consistent with a simple human capital explanation of the disability process

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

on the role of social norms in a market economy given that the discussion in section 2 focuses on but two potential sources of norms and on only a pair of variables affecting the activities of these sources it may appear premature to attempt to generalize about the supply of netn norms in a market economy however based on the above discussion it is nevertheless quite reasonable to hypothesize that the norms market will not operate in such a way as to ensure the proper supply of netn norms the failures found by economic theory in the economic marketplace and by petp in the political market have their analogue in the norms market that this can be said with some assurance even though the investigation has been so limited is due to the importance of the variables and group activities investigated the specific structural characteristics the high degree of specialization in society and the specific cluster of values those related to individualism examined above and found to be inhibitory to the supply of netn norms are of considerable importance and their negative impact on the norms market cannot readily be altered in the first place these variables are significantly and synergistically related to one another but secondly and more importantly these variables are so closely associated with the market economy itself that short of replacing the market little can be done to diminish the negative effect that these variables have on the supply of netn norms

if homo economicus could choose his own utility function would he want one with a conscience reply in my model of the evolution of honesty 1 i assumed the existence of a signal a blush perhaps extreme values of which served to identify some individuals as being honest with certainty joseph harrington notes that without this assumption honest individuals have difficulty invading a population initially dominated by defectors for readers who do not wish to work through the algebra in his comment the argument is easily summarized in nontechnical terms suppose two honest mutants a and b arrive in an uncountably large population consisting entirely of dishonest persons and suppose that the probability that an honest person exhibits an intense blush is say 0 999 while the corresponding probability for everyone else is only 0 001 when a sees an intense blush on the face of b what will then be his estimate of the probability that b is honest assuming that a knows the laws of elementary probability and corrects for the base rate of honest persons in the population it will be zero when virtually everyone in the population is dishonest even a person with an intense blush will be pegged as dishonest provided that even the smallest fraction of dishonest persons also shows an intense blush with

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

okoboji experiment comparing non market valuation techniques in an unusually well defined market for water quality abstract three techniques to value the non market commodity of water quality are compared in a notably active and unusually well defined market the okoboji lakes region of northwest iowa the paper compares a a site valuation based on differing property values across lakes b a market valuation by soliciting realtors interpretations of observed price differentials and c a contingent valuation of willingness to pay for water quality changes the results obtained are similar in magnitude the value of water quality ranges from 13 to 23 of the total residence value per square foot of private residence

an intertemporal analysis of the interdependence between risk preference retirement and work rate decisions indivisibilities in consumption investment choice of employment and so forth have been used by others to justify the behavior of the insurance buying gambler unfortunately these theories ignore the market incentives to make the indivisible divisible through leasing or variation in quality as well as individual initiative through borrowing and lending in this paper the same behavior toward risk is explained without resort to indivisibilities or market imperfections using the effect of work rates and retirement decisions on lifetime earning profiles this is done using assumptions normally consistent with risk aversion diminishing marginal utility of consumption and time separable utility

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

is there a genuine under utilization of skills amongst the over qualified two theories of over qualification are considered namely mismatch whereby workers do not find the most appropriate jobs for their skills because of imperfect information or labour market rigidities and heterogeneous workers whereby individuals with the same qualifications have different actual skill levels so that they can be over qualified in terms of formal qualifications while their skills are actually appropriate for the jobs that they do the evidence suggests that both theories are relevant in certain situations

willingness to pay and compensation demanded experimental evidence of an unexpected disparity in measures of value aside from possible income effects measures of the maximum amounts people will pay to avoid a loss and the minimum compensation necessary for them to accept it are generally assumed to be equivalent unexpectedly wide variations between these sums however have been noted in survey responses to hypothetical options this paper reports the results of a series of experiments that confronted people with actual money payments and cash compensations the results indicate that the compensation measure of value seems to exceed significantly the willingness to pay measure which would appear to call into some question various rules of entitlement damage assessments and interpretations of indifference curves

the economics of tax amnesties abstract this paper examines some of the economic implications of tax amnesties we present a model where individuals are initially uncertain about the disutility from tax evasion when they file their tax returns if they later learn that they would like to be more honest than they have been an amnesty gives them an opportunity to report additional income we also show that as the probability of an amnesty rises people report less income as a consequence an optimal collection policy requires the government to balance the cost of lost tax revenue against the gains from an amnesty