the gender gap fertility and growth changes in fertility have long been recognized as important correlates of economic growth with the relationship between the level of fertility and the level of income per capita being one of the strongest observable correlations in cross country data this paper examines the linkages between fertility and growth theory the structure of the model is presented in sections on production couples decision making system dynamics and steady state equilibria the first component of the model is that increases in capital per worker raise womens relative wages since capital is more complementary to womens labor input than to mens the second component is that increasing womens relative wages reduces fertility by raising the cost of children more than household income finally lower fertility raises the level of capital per worker a positive feedback loop generates demographic transition a rapid decline in fertility accompanied by accelerated output growth

are corruption and taxation really harmful to growth firm level evidence exploiting a unique data set containing information about the estimated bribe payments of ugandan firms the authors study the relationship between bribe payments taxes and firm growth in uganda for the period 1995 97 using industry location averages to circumvent the potential problem of endogeneity and to deal with issues of measurement error they find that both the rate of taxation and the rate of bribery are negatively correlated with firm growth for the full data set a one percentage point increase in the bribery rate is associated with three percentage point reduction in firm growth an effect about three times that of taxation moreover after excluding outliers the authors find that bribery has a much greater negative impact on growth and taxation a considerably smaller one this provides some validation of firm level theories of corruption which posit that corruption retards development even more than taxation does

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

a joint dynamic model of fertility and work of married women this article estimates a dynamic model of fertility and labor supply of married women drawn from the national longitudinal survey of young women 1968 91 it distinguishes part time and full time employment sectors which differ by pecuniary and nonpecuniary returns and transferability of human capital the model with unobserved heterogeneity in earning ability and preferences for children fits the data and produces reasonable forecasts of labor force participation in decisions the estimates unpack important features of the persistence in labor market decisions intertemporal substitution of leisure over the life cycle and the effect of work interruptions due to childbirth on lifetime utility

a longitudinal analysis of white women s wages according to human capital theory women s work participation decisions will strongly affect their wages and wage growth we test human capital predictions about how labor force withdrawals both past and prospective part time work experience and working in male rather than in female jobs affect wages and wage growth for white women we do this by estimating a wage change model for the years 1967 1979 for a national sample of white women we find that wages drop immediately following withdrawals but that this is followed by a rapid wage growth so that the net loss in wages from dropping out of the labor force is small we further find that wage growth is not significantly lower in female than in male jobs but that part time work experience does not lead to significant wage growth in either male or female jobs

taxation and household labor supply we evaluate reforms to the u s tax system in a life cycle setup with heterogeneous married and single households and with an operative extensive margin in labor supply we restrict our model with observations on gender and skill premia labor force participation of married females across skill groups children and the structure of marital sorting we concentrate on two revenue neutral tax reforms a proportional income tax and a reform in which married individuals flle taxes separately separate flling our flndings indicate that tax reforms are accompanied by large increases in labor supply that difier across demographic groups with the bulk of the increase coming from married females under a proportional income tax reform married females account for more than 50 of the changes in hours across steady states while under separate flling reform married females account for all the change in hours

child care and the labor supply of married women reduced form evidence this paper empirically analyzes family demands for market and nonmarket child care services and the impact of these demands on the work effort of married women the paperfirst develops a general model of child care and labor force participation the model predicts that higher wages increase the likelihood of labor force participation and that higher costs decrease the likelihood of child care utilization the paper then develops a threeequation reduced form econometric specification of the general model the equations in the specification are estimated simultaneously using 1985 data from the survey of income program participation the estimates reveal that the cost of market child care has a strong negative effect on the labor supply of married women

capital market imperfections and the consumption function a model is presented in which there is asymmetric information between borrowers and lenders two questions are asked i would liquidity constraints in such a model take the form of credit rationing or of a wedge between borrowing and lending rates and ii how do these constraints affect the aggregate consumption function some empirical

endogenous communication among lenders and entrepreneurial incentives if banks have an informational monopoly about their clients borrowers may curtail their effort level for fear of being exploited via high interest rates in the future banks can correct this incentive problem by committing to share private information with other lenders the fiercer competition triggered by information sharing lowers future interest rates and future profits of banks but provided banks retain an initial informational advantage their current profits are raised by the borrowers higher effort this trade off determines the banks willingness to share information their decision affects credit market competition interest rates volume of lending and social welfare article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

effects of tax reform on labor supply investment and saving the u s tax system received two major overhauls during the 1980s the tax cuts of 1981 and the tax reform act of 1986 supporters of both reforms argued that major changes in tax policy could boost saving investment labor supply and entrepreneurship eventually it was argued such changes could reverse the slowdown in economic growth that began in the early 1970s and spur improvements in american living standards the aim of this paper is to assess whether the goals of increased labor supply and capital formation were achieved

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

labour force participation timing and persistence this paper examines the relative importance of timing and persistence elements in explaining cyclical fluctuations in labour supply data from the natural experiment provided by world war ii and cross sectional data on american local labour markets as well as aggregate time series data are used in the empirical work we find little evidence that timing effects play an important role in labour market dynamics the evidence suggests that views emphasizing persistence are more accurate and that previous employment tends to raise the probability of subsequent employment much of the development of applied economic theory within the past 25 years has emphasized the importance of viewing economic decisions in a life cycle context consumption decisions are today frequently viewed as being determined by wealth or permanent income the human capital revolution has brought life cycle considerations to the forefront of modern labour economics while the life cycle dynamics of labour force participation decisions have important implications for macroeconomic theory and policy they have received relatively little empirical attention with the notable exceptions of lucas and rapping 1969 and hall 1980 none of the large body of work on cyclical fluctuations in employment has explicitly relied on a dynamic model of labour supply this paper uses several types of data to examine two elements of participation dynamics the first is the aspect of timing which is implicit in the work of lucas and rapping and in mincer s 1966 early discussion of hidden unemployment the timing argument which is presented most explicitly in ghez and becker 1975 holds that leisure is easily substitutable across periods hence relatively small transitory movements in the perceived real wage or real rate of return can have large effects on the path of labour supply as individuals time their participation to coincide with periods of high transitory wages on the other hand permanent changes because they do not affect the timing decision are expected to have a much smaller effect on participation it is this view of labour supply which underlies new classical macroeconomic models the dependence is made explicit in lucas 1975 who claims that what we do know indicates that leisure in one period is an excellent substitute for leisure in other nearby periods the ability of classical macroeconomic models to explain fluctuations in employment depends on the presence of strong intertemporal substitution effects unless

reaching out access to and use of banking services across countries the authors 1 present new indicators of banking sector penetration across 99 countries based on a survey of bank regulatory authorities 2 show that these indicators predict household and firm use of banking services 3 explore the association between the outreach indicators and measures of financial institutional and infrastructure development across countries and 4 relate these banking outreach indicators to measures of firms financing constraints in particular they find that greater outreach is correlated with standard measures of financial development as well as with economic activity controlling for these factors the authors find that better communication and transport infrastructure and better governance are also associated with greater outreach government ownership of financial institutions translates into lower access while more concentrated banking systems are associated with greater outreach finally firms in countries with higher branch and atm penetration and higher use of loan services report lower financing obstacles thus linking banking sector outreach to the alleviation of firms financing constraints

why the gender gap in wages narrowed in the 1980s since 1976 the gender gap in wages on average declined by about 1 per year this article focuses on identifying the factors underlying this trend three data sets are analyzed the current population survey the panel study of income dynamics and the national longitudinal survey we find that convergence in measurable work related characteristics schooling and work experience explains one third to one half the narrowing the remainder is attributable to a relative increase in women s returns to experience as well as to declining wages in blue collar work and other factors

engines of liberation electricity was born at the dawn of the last century households were inundated with a flood of new consumer durables what was the impact of this consumer durable goods revolution it is argued here that the consumer goods revolution was conducive to liberating women from the home to analyse this hypothesis a beckerian model of household production is developed households must decide whether or not to adopt the new technologies and whether a married woman should work can such a model help to explain the rise in married female labour force participation that occurred in the last century yes the housewife of the future will be neither a slave to servants nor herself a drudge she will give less attention to the home because the home will need less she will be rather a domestic engineer than a domestic labourer with the greatest of all handmaidens electricity at her service this and other mechanical forces will so revolutionize the woman s world that a large portion of the aggregate of woman s energy will be conserved for use in broader more constructive fields thomas alva edison as interviewed in good housekeeping magazine lv no 4 october 1912 p 436

financial and legal constraints to growth does firm size matter using a unique firm level survey database covering 54 countries we investigate the effect of financial legal and corruption problems on firms growth rates whether these factors constrain growth depends on firm size it is consistently the smallest firms that are most constrained financial and institutional development weakens the constraining effects of financial legal and corruption obstacles and it is again the small firms that benefit the most there is only a weak relation between firms perception of the quality of the courts in their country and firm growth we also provide evidence that the corruption of bank officials constrains firm growth

the role of part time work in women s labor market choices over time at any point in time over the last decade approximately 37 percent of nonelderly adult women were not employed while 18 percent worked part time and 45 percent worked full time while much research has explored the static labor market participation and hours decisions of women 1 there has been almost no exploration of how the pattern of labor market involvement varies among individual women over time is there one group of women who always work full time and another that is always out of the labor market or do most individual women move between different levels of labor market involvement over time part time work may be particularly important in labor market dynamics it has been suggested that part time work provides a bridge or a stepping stone into fulltime employment for women who have been absent from the labor market yet knowing little about the dynamics of individual labor supply we do not know if most part timers are in that state transitionally or if they are permanently involved in part time work this paper focuses on labor market changes over a nine year period among a sample of adult women the questions it addresses are 1 what are the patterns of labor market involvement that we find among individual women over time 2 what role does part time work play in the dynamic patterns of women s labor market involvement and is there evidence that part time work is a more transitional category than full time work or nonwork 3 what factors induce women to move between part time work full time work and nonwork

investor protection and corporate governance recent research has documented large differences among countries in ownership concentration in publicly traded firms in the breadth and depth of capital markets in dividend policies and in the access of firms to external finance a common element to the explanations of these differences is how well investors both shareholders and creditors are protected by law from expropriation by the managers and controlling shareholders of firms we describe the differences in laws and the effectiveness of their enforcement across countries discuss the possible origins of these differences summarize their consequences and assess potential strategies of corporate governance reform we argue that the legal approach is a more fruitful way to understand corporate governance and its reform than the conventional distinction between bank centered and market centered financial systems

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

the macroeconomic implications of rising wage inequality in the united states in recent decades american workers have faced a rising college premium a narrowing gender gap and increasing wage volatility this paper explores the quantitative and welfare implications of these changes the framework is an incomplete markets life cycle model in which individuals choose education intrafamily time allocation and savings given the observed history of the u s wage structure the model replicates key trends in cross sectional inequality in hours worked earnings and consumption recent cohorts enjoy welfare gains on average as higher relative wages for college graduates and for women translate into higher educational attainment and a more even division of labor within the household

taxing women a macroeconomic analysis based on well known evidence on labor supply elasticities several authors have concluded that women should be taxed at lower rates than men we evaluate the quantitative implications and merits of this proposition relative to the current system of taxation setting a proportional tax rate on married females equal to 4 8 increases output and married female labor force participation by about 3 9 3 4 and 6 9 4 0 respectively gender based taxes improve welfare and are preferred by a majority of households nevertheless welfare gains are higher when the u s tax system is replaced by a proportional gender neutral income tax 2011 published by elsevier b v

wage risk and employment risk over the life cycle we specify a structural life cycle model of consumption labour supply and job mobility in an economy with search frictions that allows us to distinguish between different sources of risk and to estimate their effects the sources of risk are shocks to productivity job destruction the process of job arrival when employed and unemployed and match level heterogeneity our model allows for four main social insurance programmes in contrast to simpler models that attribute all income fluctuations to shocks our framework allows us to disentangle the effects of the shocks from the responses to these shocks estimates of productivity risk once we control for employment risk and for individual labour supply choices are substantially lower than estimates that attribute all wage variation to productivity risk increases in productivity risk impose a considerable welfare loss on individuals and induce substantial precautionary saving increases in employment risk have large effects on output and primarily through this channel affect welfare the welfare value of government programs such as food stamps which partially insure productivity risk is greater than the value of unemployment insurance which provides partial insurance against employment risk and no insurance against persistent shocks

new evidence on whether unemployment and out of the labor force are distinct states this paper focuses on the question of whether people who are out of the labor force olf should be included in unemployment measures if people who are olf can obtain jobs as often as the people who are unemployed then there is no real distinction between the two states of nonemployment surprisingly there has been very little effort surrounding this issue in the past clark and summers 1982 conclude that for teenagers unemployment and olf are not distinct states while flinn and heckman 1982a find the opposite for white male high school graduates the methodology adopted in this paper enables one to use incomplete transition data on unemployment and olf and to obtain estimates of the full transition matrix between three labor force states that are not possible with standard methods new evidence for high school graduates is presented by gender and it is found that while for young women the two states are distinct for young men they are not

two birds with one stone female labor supply fertility and market childcare abstract the correlation between the female labor force participation rate fpr and the total fertility rate tfr has switched from negative to positive in some developed countries in this paper we show how increasing the substitutability between maternal time and market childcare can raise both fpr and tfr and provide an explanation for the change in the tfr fpr correlation simulations of a life cycle model of married women s work and fertility decisions indicate that the fpr increases whereas the tfr is u shaped with regard to substitutability the dynamic relationship depends on the relative strength of behavioral and composition effects greater substitutability allows working women to have more children but it also attracts less productive women to enter the labor force who trade childbirths for labor supply the findings imply that raising substitutability to a sufficiently high level can achieve the two seemingly conflicting goals increasing female labor force participation and fertility rates

the effects of health wealth and wages on labour supply and retirement behaviour this paper estimates a life cycle model of labour supply retirement and savings behaviour in which future health status and wages are uncertain individuals face a fixed cost of work and cannot borrow against future labour pension or social security income the method of simulated moments is used to match the life cycle profiles of labour force participation hours worked and assets that are estimated from the data to those that are generated by the model the model establishes that the tax structure of the social security system and pensions are key determinants of the high observed job exit rates at ages 62 and 65 removing the tax wedge embedded in the social security earnings test for individuals aged 65 and older would delay job exit by almost one year by contrast social security benefit levels health and borrowing constraints are less important determinants of job exit at older ages for example reducing social security benefits by 20 would cause workers to delay exit from the labour force by only three months

information sharing in credit markets we present a model with adverse selection where information sharing between lenders arises endogenously lenders incentives to share information about borrowers are positively related to the mobility and heterogeneity of borrowers to the size of the credit market and to advances in information technology such incentives are instead reduced by the fear of competition from potential entrants in addition information sharing increases the volume of lending when adverse selection is so severe that safe borrowers drop out of the market these predictions are supported by international and historical evidence in the context of the consumer credit market a large body of literature on credit markets has shown that asymmetric information may prevent the efficient allocation of lending leading to credit rationing e g jaffee and russell 1976 stiglitz and weiss 1981 or to a wedge between lending and borrowing rates e g king 1986 in this literature informational asymmetries are taken to be exogenous lenders fail to observe some relevant characteristic or action of potential borrowers and have no way of learning about it in some countries however lenders can improve their knowledge about new customers by exchanging information with other lenders through information brokers generally known as credit bureaus the latter collect file and distribute the information voluntarily supplied by their members and operate on the principle of reciprocity lenders who do not provide data are denied access to the bureau s files in other countries instead these institutions do not exist the literature offers no guide to identify the factors that lead to endogenous communication between lenders this paper is an attempt to fill the gap information sharing is important for a number of reasons it may increase the degree of competitiveness within credit markets vives 1990 improve

the value of private sector business credit information sharing the us case this paper investigates the value added by private information exchanges that share information on business payment performance we discuss how this information is collected and disseminated by the worlds largest private information broker dun bradstreet we provide the first empirical examination of the importance of this information at the lending decision level our findings indicate that exchange generated information provides significant explanatory power in failure prediction models controlling for other credit information that is easily available to lenders our study complements the work of jappelli and pagano information sharing lending and defaults cross country evidence centre for economic policy research discussion paper 2184 1999 who find in cross country macro level tests that information exchanges add value 2003 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

credit bureau policy and sustainable reputation effects in credit markets welfare increasing reputation effects arise in credit markets when adverse selection gives rise to borrower reputation formation incentives that mitigate moral hazard problems this paper shows that welfare stemming from reputation effects will diminish over time as the private information of borrowers is revealed to lenders in the form of lengthening credit histories aggregate borrower welfare may therefore decrease over time unless reputation effects can be sustained restricting a lender s access to a borrower s credit history via credit bureau policy is shown to be one method of sustaining reputation effects and preventing a decline in welfare copyright 1995 by the london school of economics and political science

regulations market structure institutions and the cost of financial intermediation this paper examines the impact of bank regulations market structure and national institutions on bank net interest margins and overhead costs using data on over 1400 banks across 72 countries while controlling for bankspecific characteristics the data indicate that tighter regulations on bank entry and bank activities boost the cost of financial intermediation inflation also exerts a robust positive impact on bank margins and overhead costs while concentration is positively associated with net interest margins this relationship breaksdownwhencontrolling for regulatory impediments to competition and inflation furthermore bank regulations become insignificant when controlling for national indicators of economic freedom or property rights protection while these institutional indicators robustly explain cross bank net interest margins and overhead expenditures thus bank regulations cannot be viewed in isolation they reflect broad national approaches to private property and competition

bank supervision and corruption in lending abstract which commercial bank supervisory policies ease or intensify the degree to which bank corruption is an obstacle to firms raising external finance based on new data from more than 2500 firms across 37 countries this paper provides the first empirical assessment of the impact of different bank supervisory policies on firms financing obstacles we find that the traditional approach to bank supervision which involves empowering official supervisory agencies to monitor discipline and influence banks directly does not improve the integrity of bank lending rather we find that a supervisory strategy that focuses on empowering private monitoring of banks by forcing banks to disclose accurate information to the private sector tends to lower the degree to which corruption of bank officials is an obstacle to firms raising external finance in extensions we find that regulations that empower private monitoring exert a particularly beneficial effect on the integrity of bank lending in countries with sound legal institutions

a structural explanation of recent changes in life cycle labor supply and fertility behavior of married women in the united states abstract this study documents and explains important changes in the life cycle labor supply and fertility behavior of married women in the united states from the 1950s to more recent cohorts the younger cohorts relative to the 1950s supply more labor at earlier stages of the life cycle delay motherhood to later stages without reducing the fertility rate and upon childbearing show a greater tendency to stay out of the labor force in a life cycle model for married couples in which a household makes decisions on fertility as well as labor supply consumption and savings all the behavioral changes are jointly and quantitatively explained by a combination of changes in various labor supply fertility determinants with the increased returns penalties to work non work experience being the dominant contributor the results survive a series of robustness tests including endogenizing education choice and assortative marriage

a structural model of child care and the labor supply of married women this article empirically examines married women s labor supply and child care expenditures the article uses winter 1984 85 data from the survey of income and program participation to estimate a fu

child care costs and family labor supply this paper presents a theoretical and empirical analysis of the effects of child care costs on family labor supply and the demand for market child care the model is a framework for cross section estimation of the effects of child care costs on labor supply and child care use it applies to households having young children requiring continuous care and in which both the mother and 1 other potential child care provider are present the 3 potential sources of child care are the mother the potential informal provider and the market using data from the 1980 baseline household survey of the employment opportunity pilot projects this empirical analysis uses a subsample of 6170 households in which there is a married woman under age 45 with her spouse present at the time of the survey at least 1 child under age 14 and nonmissing data on key variables results show that 1 higher market child care costs discourage women from working even when an informal source of care is available indicating that such informal care is an imperfect substitute for market care 2 a higher wage rate for the mother encourages her to work thus a higher wage rate increases the probability of using market child care 3 the number of children requiring care has a negative impact on the probability of the women working with the largest impact caused by younger children 4 nonwage income has a negative impact on the probability of the woman working and 5 black women are more likely to work than whites and are statistically more likely than whites to use market child care if they do work this family labor supply model predicts that the cost of market child care will affect household decisions on labor supply and child care use estimates of a qualitative choice model provide strong confirmation that child care costs affect such decisions the responsiveness of the labor supply of mothers to child care costs demonstrated in this study indicate that such subsidies do have their intended effect of encouraging labor supply the fact that a large proportion of current child care subsidies benefit primarily middle and upper income families via the income tax credit suggests that the labor supply effets of such subsidies may in practice be stronger for less needy families than for low income families employer subsidized child care may become an increasingly popular tool for attracting mothers into the labor force

simultaneous supplies of dirty energy and capacity constrained clean energy is there a green paradox the effects of two popular second best clean energy policies are analysed using an extended hotelling type resource extraction framework this model features first heterogenous energy sources and second a capacity constrained backstop technology this setup allows for capturing the following two empirical observations first different types of energy sources are used simultaneously despite different production cost second experiences from various european countries show that a further expansion of the use of climate friendly technologies faces substantial technological as well as political constraints we use this framework to analyse if under two policy scenarios a so called green paradox occurs a subsidy for the clean energy as well as an expansion of the capacity of the clean energy are considered the analysis shows that under plausible parameter values both policy measures lead to a weak green paradox however a strong green paradox is only found for the capacity expansion scenario in addition the subsidy is found to be welfare enhancing while the capacity increase is welfare enhancing only if the cost of adding the capacity is sufficiently small we also show the effects of the policies crucially depend on the initial capacity and that under certain scenarios even an extreme green paradox is found

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

swimming upstream trends in the gender wage differential in the 1980s using michigan panel study of income dynamics data for 1979 and 1988 we analyze how a falling gender wage gap occurred despite changes in wage structure unfavorable to low wage workers the decrease is traced to gender specific factors which more than counterbalanced changes in measured and unmeasured prices working against women supply shifts net of demand were unfavorable for women generally and hurt high skilled more than middle and low skilled women by analyzing wages we find support for the notion of a gender twist in supply and demand having its largest negative effect on high skilled women

corruption in bank lending to firms cross country micro evidence on the beneficial role of competition and information sharing abstract building on the important study by beck demirguc kunt and levine 2006 bank supervision and corruption in lending journal of monetary economics 53 2131 2163 we examine the effects of both borrower and lender competition as well as information sharing via credit bureaus registries on corruption in bank lending using the unique world bank data set wbes covering more than 4 000 firms across 56 countries with information on credit bureaus registries assembled by djankov mcliesh and shleifer 2007 private credit in 129 countries journal of financial economics 84 299 329 and bank regulation data collected by barth caprio and levine 2006 rethinking bank regulation till angels govern cambridge university press new york to measure bank competition and information sharing we find strong evidence that both banking competition and information sharing reduce lending corruption and that information sharing also helps enhance the positive effect of competition in curtailing lending corruption we also find that the ownership structure of firms and banks legal environment and firm competition all exert significant impacts on lending corruption

does competition kill corruption corrupt agents officials or gangsters exact money from firms corruption affects the number of firms in a free entry equilibrium the degree of deep competition in the economy increases with lower overhead costs relative to profits and with a tendency toward similar cost structures increases in competition may not lower corruption the model explains why a rational corrupt agent may extinguish the source of his bribe income by causing a firm to exit assessing the welfare effect of corruption is complicated by the fact that exit caused by corruption does not necessarily reduce social welfare