labor market returns to two and four year college the paper examines labor market returns to a two and four year college education analysis of the 1972 national longitudinal survey of youth observation that the average person who attended a two year college earned about 10 percent more than those without any college education comparison with the wages of those who attended a four year college education

college scholarship rules and private saving this paper examines the effect of existing college scholarship rules on the incentive to save the analysis shows that families that are eligible for college scholarships face education tax rates on capital income of between 22 percent and 47 percent in addition to regular federal and state income taxes the empirical analysis developed here based on the 1986 survey of consumer finances implies that these high tax rates have a powerful adverse effect on the accumulation of financial assets copyright 1995 by american economic association

retirement in dual career families a structural model a structural econometric model of retirement of dual career couples is specified and estimated with panel data from the national longitudinal survey of mature women a coincidence of spouses retiring together despite the younger ages of wives suggests explicit efforts at coordination the estimates suggest that one reason is a correlation of tastes for leisure more important each spouse and perhaps husbands in particular values retirement more once their spouse has retired the opportunity set accounts for peaks in the retirement hazards of each spouse individually but not for peaks in the simultaneous retirement of both spouses

valuing lost home production of dual earner couples using a life cycle model in which women divide their time between home and market work we establish a link between retirement wealth and the value of forgone home production we use data from the health and retirement study to estimate the model s parameters and adjust the growth rate of gdp to reflect reductions in non market output we find that the value of forgone home production is modest about 25 percent of women s measured earnings

honoring sovereign debt or bailing out domestic residents the limits to bailouts abstract why does a borrowing country not avoid the internal cost of default an important driver of sovereign debt repayment by implementing domestic sector bailouts this paper investigates sovereign debt sustainability in a model where domestic and foreign investors optimally select their portfolios and the sovereign decides over its default and bailout policies it shows that internal bailouts do not preclude sovereign borrowing when domestic private exposures to sovereign debt direct or indirect cannot be observed or inferred by the sovereign in equilibrium when these exposures are correlated with future liquidity needs bailouts are less efficient to compensate domestic losses making repayment more desirable opacity on financial exposures is then a commitment device for sovereigns to honor their debts and thus may be welfare improving

retirement effect on health status and health behaviors in urban china abstract this paper analyzes the causal impact of retirement in china on body mass index bmi and weight which are a good gauge of the risk for some diseases many middle income developing countries are aging very rapidly and may have to adjust the retirement age to have financially feasible government budgets it is important to know and understand any plausible health consequences of raising the retirement age in developing countries and which sub populations within these countries may be most affected by using 2011 2013 and 2015 waves of the china health and retirement longitudinal study charls our identification strategy uses variation in china s mandatory retirement age with a fuzzy discontinuity design to examine an exogenous shock to retirement behavior our study finds that retirement will increase weight and bmi among men this effect is much larger for men with low education the channel may be that men with low education drink more and take less vigorous exercises after they get retired retirement does not affect weight and bmi for women these effects are robust with different definitions of retirement narrow retirement bandwidth for samples as well as dropping samples with rural hukou

the costs of financial crises resource misallocation productivity and welfare in the 2001 argentine crisis the costs of financial crises financial crises in emerging market countries appear to be very costly both output and a host of partial welfare indicators decline dramatically the magnitude of these costs is puzzling both from an accounting perspective factor usage does not decline as much as output resulting in large falls in measured productivity and from a theoretical perspective towards a resolution of this puzzle we present a framework that allows us to i account for changes in a country s measured productivity during a financial crises as the result of changes in the underlying technology of the economy the efficiency with which resources are allocated across sectors and the efficiency of the resource allocation within sectors driven both by reallocation amongst existing plants and by entry and exit and ii measure the change in the country s welfare resulting from changes in productivity government spending the terms of trade and a country s international investment position we apply this framework to the argentine crisis of 2001 using a unique establishment level data set and find that more than half of the roughly 10 decline in measured total factor productivity can be accounted for by deterioration in the allocation of resources both across and within sectors we measure the decline in welfare to be on the order of one quarter of one years gdp

household saving micro theories and micro facts in this survey we review the recent theoretical and empirical literature on household saving and consumption the discussion is structured around a list of motives for saving and how well the standard theory captures these motives we show that almost all of the motives for saving that have been suggested in the informal saving literature can be captured in the standard optimizing model particular attention is given to recent work on the precautionary motive and its implications for saving and consumption behavior we also discuss the behavioral or psychological approach that eschews the use of standard optimization techniques and focuses instead on direct consideration on saving we provide a section on facts who save and how much we then discuss informally the recent decline in the u s saving rate and whether the theory is of much use in understanding this and other changes in aggregate saving rates over time we do not find any convincing explanation for the change in saving rates we also discuss some analyses of saving behavior over the life cycle addressing such questions as whether households save enough for retirement and whether the consumption patterns of older households can be rationalized within a simple life cycle model we also review a great number of studies of the consumption euler equations based on our analysis of the studies cited we conclude that there is still mixed evidence that consumption is excessively sensitive to income we also examine in depth the recent empirical literature on the precautionary motive we conclude that although some households do seem to have a significant precautionary motive at some points in their life cycle this motive is not so strong empirically as some investigators suggest

public pension programmes and the retirement of married couples in denmark in this paper we study the economic determinants of the joint retirement process of married couples we propose a tractable dynamic discrete choice model for retirement decisions which allows for non trivial saving behaviour we estimate the model on a 1 sample of danish couples of potential retirement age drawn from a population based administrative register the introduction and subsequent reforms of a publicly financed early retirement programme provide us with variation in the data to insure identification of the parameters of interest the elasticities of participation retirement with respect to income flows our estimates imply a significant asymmetry in the sensitivity of retirement behaviour of men and women with respect to variation in their own or their spouse s income flows

the effects of sons and daughters on men s labor supply and wages in this paper we estimate the effects of children and the differential effects of sons and daughters on men s labor supply and hourly wage rates the responses to fatherhood of two cohorts of men from the psid sample are examined separately and we use fixed effects estimation to control for unobserved heterogeneity we find that fatherhood significantly increases the hourly wage rates and annual hours of work for men from both cohorts most notably men s labor supply and wage rates increase more in response to the births of sons than to the births of daughters

bargaining and distribution in marriage the standard economic model of the family is a common preference model that assumes that a family maximizes a single utility function and implies that family behavior is independent of which individuals receive income or control resources in recent years this model has been challenged by game theoretic models of marriage that do not impose pooling and are therefore consistent with empirical evidence that income controlled by husbands and wives does have different effects on family behavior in this paper the authors review a number of simple bargaining models and relevant empirical evidence and discuss their implications for distribution within marriage

cash on hand and competing models of intertemporal behavior new evidence from the labor market this paper presents new tests of the permanent income hypothesis and other widely used models of household behavior using data from the labor market we estimate the excess sensitivity of job search behavior to cash on hand using sharp discontinuities in eligibility for severance pay and extended unemployment insurance ui benefits in austria analyzing data for over one half million job losers we obtain three empirical results 1 a lump sum severance payment equal to two months of earnings reduces the job finding rate by 8 12 on average 2 an extension of the potential duration of ui benefits from 20 weeks to 30 weeks similarly lowers job finding rates in the first 20 weeks of search by 5 9 and 3 increases in the duration of search induced by the two programs have little or no effect on subsequent job match quality using a search theoretic model we show that estimates of the relative effect of severance pay and extended benefits can be used to calibrate and test a wide set of intertemporal models our estimates of this ratio are inconsistent with the predictions of a simple permanent income model as well as naive rule of thumb behavior the representative job searcher in our data is 70 of the way between the permanent income benchmark and credit constrained behavior in terms of sensitivity to cash on hand

the impact of asset tested college financial aid on household savings abstract federal college financial aid imposes an implicit tax on asset accumulation which reduces the incentive for families to save prior literature has found evidence of large reductions in asset accumulation as a result this paper finds that these conclusions are over estimated and are sensitive to the assumptions used in estimating the implicit tax rate additionally the 1992 exemption of home equity and other changes in federal policy have substantially eliminated the savings disincentive for many families thus the results of studies that examined families prior to the 1992 changes cannot be applied to the current program

health insurance and retirement of married couples summary most health insurance in the usa is provided by employers until eligibility for public health insurance medicare begins at age 65 retiring before 65 exposes workers who lack retiree health insurance coverage to the risk of catastrophic medical expenditure we solve and estimate a dynamic model of the employment behavior of older married couples that includes risky medical expenditure and health insurance parameter estimates imply that the risk reducing feature of health insurance can account for about half of the observed association between retiree health insurance and employment for married men but can account for only one tenth of the much larger observed association for married women policy simulations imply very small effects on employment of changing the age of eligibility for medicare from 65 to 67 copyright 2006 john wiley sons ltd

do favorable land price policy affect renewable energy industry evidence from photovoltaics abstract renewable energy is necessary for sustainable social and economic development this is particularly so with global energy shortages the continuous deterioration of ecosystems and the environment as well as the world population explosion this article qualitatively and quantitatively analyzes the effects and problems of chinese favorable land price policy on photovoltaics in examining the favorable land price policy in china this study develops a multiple linear regression model to study the effects of favorable land price policy on photovoltaic power and photovoltaic industry data used in this research was mainly collected from 20 provinces in china it is found that the development of pv in china has been greatly affected by the favorable land price policy in the end it is highly recommended that favorable land price policy should be continued for renewable energy systemic deficiencies can be overcome through continual reform and innovation of mechanisms

responses to social security by men and women myopic and far sighted behavior the labor supply response to critical aspects of the social security program depends on whether behavior is myopic conditioned by current benefits only or far sighted conditioned by the entire future benefit stream this behavior reflects attitudes toward risk and ability to borrow as well as underlying time preferences the individual s effective time horizon is treated as an empirical question in this paper responses to the social security earnings test and the delayed retirement credit are examined as well as the question of whether older men and women are able to work while keeping their earnings below the exempt earnings limit in other words whether the earnings test affects participation as well as hours of work hazard functions for labor market reentry after retirement are estimated using the longitudinal retirement history study we find striking gender differences in that women respond to social security wealth and are not deterred from working by the earnings test while men respond to current benefits and their labor force participation is impeded by the test increases in the delayed retirement credit as provided by the 1983 amendments to the social security act should therefore increase the labor supply of older women but not of men though its intention was to increase the supply of both however increasing or abolishing the earnings limit as proposed in congress would increase older men s participation but not that of older women

pension design with a large informal labor market evidence from chile this article investigates the fiscal and welfare trade offs involved in designing a pension system when workers can avoid contributing by working informally using a life cycle model of labor supply and saving decisions i structurally estimate preferences and earnings opportunities in the formal and informal sectors using data on chilean households i find limited support for formal jobs rationing instead mandatory pension contributions significantly encourage informality policy experiments show that chile could lower minimum pension spending by 23 while guaranteeing the same income to retirees if the minimum pension s implicit tax rate was increased to 60

the effect of private wealth on the retirement rate an empirical analysis theoretical models predict a positive effect of the level of private wealth on retirement in many countries there is a trend towards the introduction of more individual freedom of choice in pension schemes the level of private wealth will become an increasingly important factor in the retirement decision empirical analysis of retirement behaviour of elderly workers so far has concentrated on properties of the pension system for a sample of elderly male workers in the netherlands we empirically analyse the effect of wealth on the retirement rate we find evidence for a positive effect of wealth on early retirement the author economica 2010 the london school of economics and political science

delaying retirement to pay for college does sending children to college affect the contemporaneous labor supply of older workers drawing on biennial waves of the health and retirement survey from 1992 2006 the author tracks the labor supply of parents before and after they send their children to college and shows that parents delay retirement while they are financing their children s college education controlling for the total number of children who ever attend college and the total number of those whose college expenses are paid for by older parents she finds that mothers and fathers are more likely to be working by 10 5 percentage points for fathers and by 6 9 percentage points for mothers less likely to be collecting social security benefits and less likely to report that they are retired if they are currently paying for a child s college education of those working there is little evidence that paying for a child s education has any impact on work intensity

the effect of a wife s retirement on her husband s mental health this article examines the effect of wives retirement on their husband s mental health in australia by exploiting the exogenous variations in women s retirement induced by the age pension qualifyi

is college financial aid equitable and efficient nk reed based financial aid is often defended both on grounds of equity and efficiency equity because it provides equality of opportunity and efficiency because it encourages the formation of productive human capital james 1988 however need is now determined in a way that is both inequitable and inefficient an informal survey of my colleagues who do not study financial aid revealed no one who named the financial aid system as a substantial tax on savings however once this interpretation was suggested they quickly revealed their unanimous and disturbing impression that savings are summarily confiscated from parents upon their first child s matriculation at university though exaggerated this impression is not without foundation two families with identical earnings paths pay dramatically different amounts for college if one saves more than the other thus while the financial aid system may contribute to vertical equity since the poor get more aid than the rich its horizontal inequities are substantial moreover the federal rules for financial aid raise significant efficiency concerns 1 they might conceivably distort many household decisions including family size and the spacing of children however this paper will focus upon the most important incentive distorted by present policies the incentive to save because saving leads to receiving less financial aid a family s return to saving is substantially below the social return this may lead to families making inefficient intertemporal choices and correspondingly to an inefficient loss of capital formation

the effects of progressive income taxation on job turnover abstract we examine whether the level of the income tax rate and the convexity of the income tax schedule affect job mobility as measured by moving to a better job while the predicted effect of the level of the tax rate is ambiguous we predict that an increase in the convexity of the tax schedule decreases job search activity by taxing away some of the benefits of a successful job search using data from the panel study of income dynamics we estimate that both higher tax rates and increased tax rate progressivity decrease the probability that a head of household will move to a better job during the coming year our estimates imply that a five percentage point reduction in the marginal tax rate increases the average probability of moving to a better job by 0 79 percentage points a 8 0 increase in the turnover propensity and that a one standard deviation decrease in our measure of tax progressivity would increase this probability by 0 86 percentage points a 8 7 increase in the turnover propensity this estimate is robust to sensitivity analysis examining the importance of different sources of identification and variation in estimated effects across subgroups in the population our estimated importance of tax policy for job turnover suggests a potential role in explaining the responsiveness of taxable income to marginal tax rates

accounting for the changing role of family income in determining college entry in this paper i analyze the determinants of college enrolment and the changes in these determinants over time i propose a quantitative life cycle model with college enrolment altruistic parents provide financial support to their children using counterfactual experiments i find that 24 percent of all households are financially constrained in their college decision constraints become more severe over time i show that my model is consistent with a narrow college enrolment gap between students from rich and poor families as previously reported in the empirical literature the estimation of enrolment gaps is a popular reduced form approach for measuring the fraction of constrained households my results suggest that these reduced form estimates are misleading and that a structural model of parental transfers is needed to correctly identify constrained households further i show that parental transfers are an important driver behind the changing role of family income as a determinant of college entry a fact that is well documented for the us economy

can social security explain trends in labor force participation of older men in the united states after a long decline the labor force participation rate lfpr of older men in the united states leveled off in the 1980s and began to increase in the late 1990s we examine how changes in social security rules affected these trends we attribute only a small portion of the decline from the 1960s 80s to the increasing generosity of social security over this period increases in the full retirement age and the delayed retirement credit explain one quarter to one half of the recent increase in the lfpr increasing educational attainment and increasing lfpr of married women also contributed to the recent rise

why have the labor force participation rates of older men increased since the mid 1990s this article seeks to explain the substantial increases in older men s labor force participation rates observed since the mid 1990s using data from the united states canada and the united kingdom i exploit the cohort effects driving recent increases in older women s participation rates to identify the effect of a wife s participation decision on her husband s participation decision i then decompose the changes in older married men s participation rates demonstrating that husbands responses to increases in wives participation in the labor force can explain one fourth one half and one third of the increase in the united states canada and the united kingdom respectively

the implicit taxes from college financial aid abstract families who earn more or who heed the experts advice and save for college typically receive less financial aid the financial aid system therefore implicitly taxes both income and assets we use npsas aid award data to estimate these implicit taxes and find that at average priced colleges the marginal income tax ranges from 2 to 16 and the marginal asset levy from 8 to 26 a typical family loses aid worth about 11 000 at average priced colleges and 15 000 at expensive colleges by accumulating an extra 50 000 in assets

collective labor supply and welfare the paper develops a general collective model of household labor supply in which agents are characterized by their own possibly altruistic preferences and household decisions are only assumed to be pareto efficient an alternative interpretation is that there are two stages in the internal decision process agents first share nonlabor income according to some given sharing rule then each one optimally chooses his or her own labor supply and consumption this setting is shown to generate testable restrictions on labor supplies moreover the observation of labor supply behavior is sufficient for recovering individual preferences and the sharing rule up to a constant finally the traditional tools of welfare analysis can be adapted to the new setting

sudden stops and output drops in recent financial crises and in recent theoretical studies of them abrupt declines in capital inflows or sudden stops have been linked with large drops in output do sudden stops cause output drops no according to a standard equilibrium model in which sudden stops are generated by an abrupt tightening of a country s collateral constraint on foreign borrowing in this model in fact sudden stops lead to output increases not decreases an examination of the quantitative effects of a well known sudden stop in mexico in the mid 1990s confirms that a drop in output accompanying a sudden stop cannot be accounted for by the sudden stop alone to generate an output drop during a financial crisis as other studies have done the model must include other economic frictions which have negative effects on output large enough to overwhelm the positive effect of the sudden stop this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

economic determinants of workers retirement decisions economic determinants of workers retirement decisions the landscape for older workers has changed dramatically in recent decades governments have made cuts to public pension programs private pensions have shifted from defined benefit to defined contribution plans equity and housing markets have been unusually volatile and workers have experienced declining morbidity and mortality at the same time the labor force participation rate for older men and women has been rising over the past two decades implying later retirement are these phenomena related this paper reviews the large and growing body of literature exploring the economic determinants of workers retirement decisions including public and private pensions wealth and savings health and health insurance and labor demand

supply chain and logistics issues of bio energy production abstract within the concert of renewable energy technologies bio energy can play a decisive role during the next decades when smartly designed and applied under favorable conditions in this respect efficient and effective supply chain and logistics management represent one key parameter this paper presents a literature review of articles published in english speaking peer reviewed journals from 2000 to 2009 which cover the interface of bio energy production and issues of logistics and supply chain management first the articles are assessed according to descriptive criteria such as journal year of publication and research design applied then issues and challenges of designing and operating biomass chains that secure stable and competitively priced feedstock supply for bio energy plants have been classified 1 into the operations harvesting and collection storage transport and pre treatment techniques as well as 2 into overall supply system design although biomass supply chains for energy use are manifold in terms of size design and functioning most relevant issues regarding supply chain management and logistics of bio energy production are identified the findings are discussed against the backdrop of bio energy as sustainable renewable energy option

optimal financial aid policies for a selective university our paper provides a model of optimal financial aid policies for a selective university the model implies that the financial aid package to be offered to each category of admitted applicants depends on the elasticity of the fraction who accept offers of admission with respect to the financial aid package offered them the propensity of the category to enroll the elasticity of the category s average quality with respect to the number admitted and the relative weight the university assigns them in the utility function while the latter must be determined subjectively the former parameters are subject to empirical estimation we conclude with a study of one institution s data and illustrate how they may be estimated these estimates are then applied to illustrate what the optimal financial aid policy would be for the university

children and household economic behavior this paper looks at some of the methodological issues that arise in modeling the effects of children on household behavior and presents some estimates for selected areas for our purposes household behavior will be taken to refer to household decisions on labor supply the allocation of expenditure to different periods and the decision as to what to do with the difference between income and expenditure i shall be concerned mainly with the effects of dependent children and i restrict attention largely to western societies excerpt

bio energy policies in a global context abstract against the background of an increasing global demand for bio energy the need for sustainability standards and a certification system ensuring sustainable production and trade has grown rapidly nevertheless there is currently no specific forum for discussions on how to deal with biomass trade at the multilateral level distortions in agricultural and energy trade regimes the myriad of standards and the lack of a clear biomass classification in the multilateral trade regime suggest that bio energy products may not deliver sustainable development gains for all trading partners this paper analyses then the global impact of bio energy policies on biomass production and trade paying particular attention to sustainable development in the bio energy sector it examines how a possible reduction and elimination of trade barriers as well as a phasing out of trade distorting support measures would contribute to the development of a global sustainable bio energy market

what accounts for the variation in retirement wealth among u s households even among households with similar socioeconomic characteristics saving and wealth vary considerably life cycle models attribute this variation to differences in time preference rates risk tolerance exposure to uncertainty relative tastes for work and leisure at advanced ages and income replacement rates these factors have testable implications concerning the relation between accumulated wealth and the shape of the consumption profile using the panel study of income dynamics and the consumer expenditure survey we find little support for these implications the data are instead consistent with rule of thumb mental accounting or hyperbolic discounting theories of wealth accumulation jel di d91 e21

children and their parents labor supply evidence from exogenous variation in family size although theoretical models of labor supply and the family are well developed there are few credible estimates of key empirical relationships in the work family nexus this study uses a new instrumental variable the sex composition of the first two births in families with at least two children to estimate the effect of additional children on parents labor supply in the united states instrumental variables estimates using the sex mix are substantial but smaller than the corresponding ordinary least squares ols estimates moreover unlike the ols estimates the female labor supply effects estimated using sex mix instruments appear to be absent among more educated women and women with high wage husbands we also find that married women who have a third child reduce their labor supply by as much as women in the full sample while there is no relationship between wives child bearing and husbands labor supply excerpt

consumption retirement and social security evaluating the efficiency of reform that encourages longer careers abstract this paper proposes and analyzes a social security reform in which individuals no longer face the oasi payroll tax after say age 54 or a career of 34 years and their subsequent earnings have no bearing on their benefits we first estimate parameters of a life cycle model our specification includes non separable preferences and possible disability it predicts a consumption expenditure change at retirement we use the magnitude of the expenditure change together with households retirement age decisions to identify key structural parameters the estimated magnitude of the change in consumption expenditure depends importantly on the treatment of consumption by adult children of the household simulations indicate that the reform could increase retirement ages one year or more equivalent variations could average more than 4000 per household and income tax revenues per household could increase by more than 14 000

trends in male labor force participation and retirement some evidence on the role of pensions and social security in the 1970 s and 1980 s this article estimates the effects of changes in pension plans and social security in the 1970s and 1980s on the steady state retirement of men work incentives associated with pension coverage and plan characteristics are calculated primarily from the 1969 79 retirement history study and the 1983 and 1989 surveys of consumer finances simulations with a structural retirement model suggest that the long run effects of changes in pension plans and social security account for about a quarter of the reduction in full time work by men in their early sixties but cannot explain the reduction by those age 65

sovereign risk and secondary markets conventional wisdom says that in the absence of default penalties sovereign risk destroys all foreign asset trade we show that this conventional wisdom rests on one implicit assumption that assets cannot be retraded in secondary markets without this assumption foreign asset trade is possible even in the absence of default penalties this result suggests a broader perspective regarding the origins of sovereign risk and its remedies sovereign risk affects foreign asset trade only if default penalties are insufficient and secondary markets work imperfectly to reduce its effects one can either increase default penalties or improve the working of secondary markets jel f34 g12 g15

european union leadership in biofuels regulation europe as a normative power the rapid emergence of the european union eu as a leader in global environmental politics has led many scholars to argue in favour of the eu being a normative power in international relations this paper critically examines the eu s biofuels policy and evaluates whether its attempts to lead by example and shape international practice in this field could support such arguments europe s biofuel policies are evaluated through a sustainable development lens so as to determine the extent to which it has embraced a holistic approach to sustainability while not dismissing that the identity of the eu is indeed an explanatory factor and that normative intentions may well be regarded as a motivating force this study argues that an interest based perspective on international environmental regulation offers a supplementary view of how an actor s preferences for an international regime are shaped by erecting barriers aimed at shielding its own inefficient domestic biofuels production the eu is in essence placing trade competitiveness and economic growth above environmental protection thus permitting sustainability concerns to be addressed only in part

integrated assessment of sustainability trade offs and pathways for global bioenergy production framing a novel hybrid approach abstract current controversies and debates on bioenergy production in the areas of greenhouse gases emission reduction food and energy security social exclusion and welfare erosion and ecosystem deterioration attest to the challenges which the bioenergy sector has to overcome to achieve its global production potentials because it is yet an evolving sector the sustainability of bioenergy production in different regions is very elusive experiences show that bioenergy policies in one region can have impacts not only on its own but also on other regions social economic and ecological sustainability it is thus important to assess development pathways for bioenergy to exploit the potential benefits and forestall any unnecessary costs this paper frames a novel hybrid approach for assessing bioenergy potentials for regions with diverging economic social and ecological systems the approach is based on a conceptual framework that takes into account trade offs decisions on sustainability goals and production options in the assessment of bioenergy pathways it combines different empirical techniques for the systematic investigation of trade offs and pathways including fuzzy logic conjoint logit and path analyses to show the relevance and utility of these techniques for the integrated assessment of trade offs and pathways in bioenergy development we illustrated their application using results and data from previous related studies

college tuition and household savings and consumption abstract despite the high cost of college there has been little study of the adequacy of household savings and other resources available to fund college to gauge their adequacy this paper examines households standard of living as they pay for college using the consumer expenditure survey the main finding is that households appear to do a relatively good job smoothing their consumption into the academic year despite large expenses this is consistent with the life cycle theory of saving and consumption there is some evidence of a delayed decline in consumption and of a decline for households with children first beginning college but the magnitudes of these declines are rather small

international bioenergy trade a review of past developments in the liquid biofuel market policies aimed to promote biofuels locally had tremendous effects on global market developments across the past decade this article develops insights into the interaction of these policies and market forces via a comprehensive collection and analysis of international production and trade data it shows that world biofuel production and trade has grown exponentially from below 30 pj in 2000 to 572 pj in 2009 for biodiesel from 340 pj in 2000 to over 1540 pj in 2009 for fuel ethanol the eu has dominated world biodiesel whereas the us and brazil have led fuel ethanol production world net biofuel trade reached 120 130 pj in 2009 and was directed towards the most lucrative markets for biodiesel this has been the eu whose imports rose to 92 pj in 2008 and remained at 70 pj in 2009 regarding fuel ethanol both the us and the eu have been prime destinations for competitively priced exports the vast majority of which originated in brazil international biofuel trade is both supply and demand driven the demand side was shaped by support policies which generally increased the domestic market value of biofuels trade developed wherever these policies prices were not accompanied by respective measures it is found that import duties largely influenced trade volumes whereas trade routes were mainly driven by tariff preferences trade regimes appear to have been designed and adapted unilaterally along national interests causing market disruptions trade inefficiencies and disputes to avoid these it is important to explicitly consider international trade implications of national trade policies a prerequisite is to improve the understanding of the underlying complex and interwoven links within the market the current lack of adequate homogeneous international reporting of biofuel production and trade statistics could be bridged via internationally standardized custom clarifications trade factor interrelations also need to be investigated further

separate spheres bargaining and the marriage market this paper introduces the separate spheres bargaining model a new model of distribution within marriage it differs from divorce threat bargaining models e g manser brown mcelroy horney in that the threat point is not divorce but a noncooperative equilibrium within marriage this noncooperative equilibrium reflects traditional gender roles the predictions of our model thus differ from those of divorce threat bargaining models in the separate spheres model cash transfer payments to the mother and payments to the father can but need not imply different equilibrium distributions in existing marriages in the long run the distributional effects of transfer policies may be substantially altered by changes in the marriage market equilibrium

how social security and medicare affect retirement behavior in a world of incomplete markets this paper provides an empirical analysis of how the u s social security and medicare insurance system affect the labor supply of older males in the presence of incomplete markets for loans annuities and health insurance we estimate a detailed dynamic programming dp model of the joint labor supply and social security acceptance decision focusing on a sample of males in the low to middle income brackets whose only pension is social security the dp model delivers a rich set of predictions about the dynamics of retirement behavior and comparisons of actual vs predicted behavior show that the dp model is able to account for wide variety of phenomena observed in the data including the pronounced peaks in the distribution of retirement ages at 62 and 65 the ages of early and normal eligibility for social security benefits respectively we identify a significant fraction of health insurance constrained individuals who have no form of retiree health insurance other than medicare and who can only obtain fairly priced private health insurance via their employer s group health plan the combination of significant individual risk aversion and a long tailed pareto distribution of health care expenditures implies that there is a significant security value for these individuals to remain employed until they are eligible for medicare coverage at age 65 overall our model suggests that a number of heretofore puzzling aspects of retirement behavior can be viewed as artifacts of particular details of the social security rules whose incentive effects are especially strong for lower income individuals and those who do not have access to fairly priced loans annuities and health insurance

the social security early entitlement age in a structural model of retirement and wealth abstract a structural life cycle model of retirement and wealth attributes retirement peaks at both ages 62 and 65 to social security rules and wide heterogeneity in time preferences those with high discount rates often retire at 62 they have few assets and heavily value lost benefits from working after 62 largely ignoring potential increases in later benefits declining actuarial adjustments beginning at 65 induce those with low discount rates to retire at 65 raising the social security early entitlement age to 64 induces 5 of the population to delay retiring shifting the retirement spike from 62 to 64

retirement and home production a regression discontinuity approach existing studies show that individuals who retire replace some private consumption with home production but do not consider joint behavior of couples here we analyze the causal effect of retirement of each partner on hours of home production for both partners in a couple our identification strategy exploits the earliest age retirement laws in france enabling a fuzzy regression discontinuity approach we find that own retirement significantly increases own hours of home production and the effect is larger for men than for women moreover retirement of the female partner significantly reduces male hours of home production but not vice versa