an empirical analysis of life cycle fertility and female labor supply this paper examines us household fertility and female labor supply over the life cycle using data from the panel study of income dynamics the authors investigate how maternal time inputs and market expenditures on offspring as well as the benefits they yield their parents vary with ages of offspring and influence female labor supply and contraceptive behavior the econometric framework combines a female labor supply model and a contraceptive choice index function it also accounts for the fact that conceptions are not perfectly controllable events using longitudinal data on married couples the authors estimate these equations and test alternative specifications of the technologies governing child care the findings suggest that while parents cannot perfectly control conceptions variations in child care costs do affect life cycle spacing of births furthermore the results demonstrate the gains of modeling the linkages between female labor supply and fertility behavior at the household level authors modified

time aggregation and state dependence in welfare receipt dynamic discrete choice models are an important tool in studies of state dependence in benefit receipt a common assumption of such models is that benefit receipt sequences follow a conditional markov process this property has implications for how estimated period to period benefit transition probabilities should relate when receipt processes are aggregated over time this paper assesses whether the conditional markov property holds in welfare benefit receipt dynamics in norway using high quality monthly data from administrative records we find that the standard conditional markov model is seriously misspecified estimated state dependence is affected substantially by the chosen time unit of analysis with the average treatment effect of past benefit receipt increasing with the level of aggregation the model can be improved considerably by permitting richer types of benefit dynamics we find strong evidence for both duration and occurrence dependence in benefit receipt allowing for heterogeneity in the entry and persistence processes we find important disparities in the effects of observed and persistent unobserved characteristics based on our preferred model the month to month persistence probability in benefit receipt for a first time entrant is 37 percentage points higher than the entry rate of an individual without previous benefit receipt over a 12 month period this corresponds to an average treatment effect of 5 percentage points

the career costs of children this paper analyzes the life cycle career costs associated with child rearing and decomposes their eects into unearned wages as women drop out of the labor market loss of human capital and selection into more child friendly occupations we estimate a dynamic life cycle model of fertility occupational choice and labor supply using detailed survey and administrative data for germany for numerous birth cohorts across dierent regions we use this model to analyze both the male female wage gap as it evolves from labor market entry onward and the eect of pro fertility policies we show that a substantial portion of the gender wage gap is explainable by realized and expected fertility and that the long run eect of policies encouraging fertility are considerably lower than the short run eects typically estimated in the literature

an empirical model of labor supply in a life cycle setting this paper formulates and estimates a structural intertemporal model of labor supply using theoretical characterizations derived from an economic model of lifetime behavior a two step empirical analysis yields estimates of intertemporal and uncompensated substitution effects which provide the information needed to predict the response of hours of work to life cycle wage growth and shifts in the lifetime wage path

measuring the effect of subsidized training programs on movements in and out of employment despite over two decades of u s experience in operating large scale subsidized training programs for low income and unemployed workers the effects of these programs are still highly controversial the controversy arises from the difficulty of specifying the model of participant outcomes in the absence of training that is necessary in any nonexperimental program evaluation in this paper we suggest that some of these difficulties may be overcome by focusing on a very simple measure of outcomes namely the probability of employment we present a variety of estimates of the effect of training on the probability of employment for the 1976 cohort of adult male participants in the comprehensive employment and training act ceta program our methods range from a simple comparison of pre and post training employment probabilities between trainees and nonparticipants to a fully specified first order markov model of employment probabilities with individual heterogeneity there is consistent evidence across methods that ceta participation increased the probability of employment in the three years after training by from 2 to 5 percentage points classroom training programs appear to have had significantly larger effects than on the job programs although the estimated effects of both kinds of programs are positive we also find that movements in and out of employment for trainees and nonparticipants are reasonably well described by a first order process conditional on individual heterogeneity in the context of this model ceta participation appears to have increased both the probability of moving into employment and the probability of continuing employment

misclassification errors and the underestimation of the us unemployment rate using recent results in the measurement error literature we show that the official u s unemployment rates substantially underestimate the true levels of unemployment due to misclassification errors in labor force status in current population surveys our closed form identification of the misclassification probabilities relies on the key assumptions that the misreporting behaviors only depend on the true values and that the true labor force status dynamics satisfy a markov type property during the period of 1996 to 2009 the corrected monthly unemployment rates are 1 to 4 6 percentage points 25 to 45 higher than the official rates and are more sensitive to changes in business cycles labor force participation rates however are not affected by this correction we also provide results for various subgroups of the u s population defined by gender race and age

measuring state dependence in individual poverty histories when there is feedback to employment status and household composition this paper argues that the assumption of strict exogeneity which is usually invoked in estimating models of state dependence with unobserved heterogeneity is violated in the poverty context as important variables determining contemporaneous poverty status in particular employment status and household composition are likely to be influenced by past poverty outcomes therefore a model of state dependence is developed that explicitly allows for possible feedback effects from past poverty to future employment and household composition outcomes empirical results based on data from the german socio economic panel gsoep suggest that there are indeed such feedback effects and that failure to take them into account may lead to biased estimates of the state dependence effect copyright 2009 john wiley sons ltd

the dynamics of health in the british household panel survey this paper considers the dynamics of a categorical indicator of self assessed health using eight waves 1991 1998 of the british household panel survey bhps our analysis has three focal points the relative contributions of state dependence and heterogeneity in explaining the dynamics of health the existence and consequences of health related sample attrition and the investigation of the effects of measures of socioeconomic status with a particular focus on educational attainment and income to investigate these issues we use dynamic panel ordered probit models there is clear evidence of health related attrition in the data but this does not distort the estimates of state dependence and of the socioeconomic gradient in health the models show strong positive state dependence and heterogeneity accounts for around 30 of the unexplained variation in health copyright 2004 john wiley sons ltd

fertility and female employment dynamics in europe the effect of using alternative econometric modeling assumptions we investigate the direct and long run effects of fertility on employment in europe estimating dynamic models of labor supply under different assumptions regarding the exogeneity of fertility and modeling assumptions related to initial conditions unobserved heterogeneity and serial correlation in the error terms we find overall large direct and long run effects of giving birth on employment probabilities and these effects differ considerably across countries we find that within countries the results are sensitive to the statistical assumption made on initial conditions the inclusion of serial correlation and the assumption of strict exogeneity of children however the pattern across countries is robust to these assumptions we show that such patterns are largely consistent with prevailing institutional differences related to the flexibility of the labor markets and family policies copyright 2009 john wiley sons ltd

caregiving to elderly parents and employment status of european mature women abstract we study the prevalence of informal caregiving to elderly parents by their mature daughters in europe and the links between parental health intense daily caregiving and the employment status of daughters we group data from share into three country pools north central and south which differ in the availability of public formal care services and female labor market attachment there is a strong north south gradient in the positive effect of parental ill health on the probability of daily caregiving the loss of employment ascribable to daily informal caregiving seems negligible except in southern countries we use a time allocation model to provide a link to an empirical iv treatment effects framework and to interpret our findings

what has been learned about labor supply in the past twenty years the main advance in the study of labor supply in the past 20 years has come in recognizing and interpreting the variety of different labor supply functions that coexist in the empirical literature a crucial theoretical distinction with important empirical payoff is that between labor supply choices at the extensive margin i e labor force participation and employment choices and choices at the intensive margin i e choices about hours of work or weeks of work for workers another important distinction is the one between a descriptive labor supply function and a structural supply function that can be the basis for out of sample policy investigations concerning responses to tax and welfare programs and evaluations of welfare losses a full understanding of the participation hours dichotomy leads to an appreciation of the importance of the problem of selection bias what is the wage to impute to a nonworking person these distinctions are a legacy of the research conducted on labor supply over the past 20 years many important empirical questions have been addressed i how strong are the effects of taxes welfare and transfer programs on labor supply ii how important is intertemporal substitution can life cycle labor supply models explain business cycle labor supply behavior iii has the consensus view of the 1960 s of high labor supply elasticities for married women and low labor supply elasticities for married men held up all of the empirical evidence assembled on labor supply must be called into question in the light of important research on the basic quality of the data conducted by analysts at the university of michigan i discuss this evidence in a concluding section except for my discussion of measurement issues i focus only on the major discoveries about which a general consensus has emerged

dynamics of female labour force participation in france abstractthis article formulates and estimates a structural intertemporal model of labour force participation relying on theoretical characterizations derived from an economic model of lifetime behaviour we estimate a dynamic probit model with correlated random effects using longitudinal data to allow for a dynamic structure the model is applied to a panel of married women drawn from the 1997 2002 french labour force surveys in order to represent their participation behaviour it is estimated by maximum simulated likelihood our results show that women s decisions to go out to work are characterized by significant state dependence unobserved heterogeneity and negative serial correlation in the transitory error component in addition we find that the presence of young children in a woman s household reduces her labour participation but unequally according to their age and number as expected educational level has a positive impact on women s participation last a rise in the husband s wage is found

state dependence serial correlation and heterogeneity in intertemporal labor force participation of married women a dynamic search framework is developed to analyze the intertemporal labor force participation behavior of married women using longitudinal data to allow for a rich dynamic structure the sensitivity to alternative distributional assumptions is evaluated using linear probability and probit models the dynamic probit models are estimated using maximum simulated likelihood msl estimation to overcome the computational difficulties inherent in maximum likelihood estimation of models with nontrivial error structures the results find that participation decisions are characterized by significant state dependence unobserved heterogeneity and negative serial correlation in the error component the hypothesis that fertility decisions are exogenous to women s participation decisions is rejected when dynamics are ignored however there is no evidence against this hypothesis in dynamic model specifications women s participation response is stronger to permanent than current nonlabor income reflecting unobserved taste factors

the application of generational theory to tourism consumer behavior an american perspective abstract the purpose of this study was to examine the attitudes and behaviors of american international travelers using a generational analysis based on woodside and dubelaar 2002 s theory of tourism consumption systems tcs five hypotheses were proposed regarding tourists information source preferences destination visitation history future destination preferences destination evaluation criteria and travel activity preferences the study utilized chi square and anova tests to detect statistically significant differences among generations additionally two perceptual mapping techniques correspondence analysis and multidimensional scaling analysis were employed to graphically discern the relationships between generations and the variables of interest the results support all five hypotheses revealing not only a number of significant differences among generations but also some important similarities the study provides important empirical support for the theory of tcs whilst showing the value of generational analysis as a commonsense segmentation criterion in travel market research

state dependence individual heterogeneity and the choice of employment status evidence from korea abstractfocusing on the individual heterogeneity this article examines the causes of an individual s employment status choice and the extent of state dependence in the korean labour market we estimate a dynamic multinomial logit model using the panel data drawn from the first to fifteenth wave of the korean labour and income panel study the results suggest the presence of state dependence individual characteristics and growth background have a significant effect on the choice of employment status gender is still an important employment factor males are more likely to be employed and this gender effect is highest for regular employment re one s educational attainment and age operate in opposite directions that is educational attainment age has a positive negative impact on the choice of a regular job and a negative positive impact on the choice of a non regular job contrary to our expectations a wealthy family background reduces the probability of individuals being wage workers and rais

determinants and costs of current account reversals under heterogeneity and serial correlation using large panel data sets for analysis of determinants and costs of reversals asks for controls of latent heterogeneity among countries this article performs a bayesian analysis which allows for a parsimonious yet flexible handling of country specific heterogeneity via random coefficients and serially correlated errors consideration of persistence within the employed macroeconomic data is important to gauge the impact of explaining variables suggested by theory correctly bayesian specification tests provide evidence in favour of models incorporating heterogeneity and serial correlation the results suggest that costs of reversals are overestimated when country specific heterogeneity is neglected and stress the importance of external variables in explaining current account reversals results are checked for robustness against the underlying reversal definition

the scarring effects of unemployment low pay and skills under utilization in australia compared there is a substantial literature on the scarring effects of unemployment on future employment prospects and a smaller one on the scarring effects of low pay but the possibility that skills mismatch in the form of skills under utilization may have similar detrimental effects has not been considered before we use the household income and labour dynamics in australia panel to investigate the dynamics of unemployment low pay and skills under utilization including differences by gender and education we show that in addition to earlier evidence on wage penalties and reduced job satisfaction skills under utilization scars future employment prospects in a way similar to that of low pay

the life cycle labor supply of married women and its implications for household income inequality i introduction there has been an abundance of papers on female labor supply over the years but most do not rigorously test the life cycle model of labor supply and none focus on the potentially important role of nonlabor income in shaping labor supply 1 their primary focus is on the wage elasticity and most recently on the intertemporal wage elasticity the intertemporal wage elasticity or the change in labor supply as wages change over the woman s life cycle is economically cleaner to interpret because it contains only a substitution effect the income effect is constant over the life cycle but this advantage comes at a cost we learn nothing about why labor supply varies across women such variability is extremely important for policy purposes because for example it has implications for income inequality the popular press often creates the impression that income inequality is worsening as upper income men marry upper income women the implication is that the rising labor force participation rate of women is increasing family income inequality on the other hand it is possible that the income of wealthy husbands exerts a negative income effect on their wives labor supply so income inequality is little changed or declines as participation rates of wives rise the objectives of this paper are twofold to estimate a life cycle labor supply model with panel data that emphasizes the husband s income effect on the wife s hours of work and to draw implications for family income inequality i provide new estimates of the income elasticity that nest the life cycle hypothesis of labor supply with the current income hypothesis the life cycle model suggests that it is the permanent income of the husband that matters not his current income yet nearly all models of female labor supply include only current income the exception is jakubson 1988 i include both and add a varying parameters specification for changes in tastes the implications for income inequality arise as an application of the life cycle labor supply model a summary of the empirical results is contained in the conclusion this paper is unusual in that it covers two relatively disparate topics though their linkage is important and demands their integration in one paper ii specification of the labor supply model following the standard life cycle labor supply model assume that an individual maximizes lifetime utility v where utility is separable over time and separable between consumption and leisure 2 mathematical expression omitted where c and l are consumption and hours of leisure for individual i rho is the rate of time preference gamma sub it reflects consumers tastes for home production leisure etc and omega is less than 1 is fixed across individuals the lifetime budget constraint is mathematical expression omitted for interest rate r wage rate w sub it hours of work h sub it and the present value of nonlabor income a sub i for an interior solution the leisure equation is 2 ln l sub it 1 omega 1 ln lambda sub i ln gamma sub it ln omega ln 1 r sup t 1 rho sup t ln w sub it where lambda sub i is the marginal utility of lifetime wealth the marginal utility of wealth lambda sub i is a fixed effect that captures all the permanent income effects that influence labor supply including expected lifetime potential wages and lifetime nonlabor income for the labor supply of a married woman the largest wealth effect is likely to be her husband s income as it enters through lambda an increase in the husband s lifetime earnings will decrease the marginal utility of lifetime wealth and decrease the wife s labor supply 3 incorporating this relationship in the parameterization of lambda mathematical expression omitted where mathematical expression omitted is the husband s lifetime income education e

global banking global crises the role of the bank balance sheet channel for the transmission of financial crises abstract we examine whether shocks to leveraged creditors with cross border holdings have an incidence on debtor countries risk of suffering financial turmoil we construct a new proxy of shocks to international banks balance sheets using credit ratings and the structure of their international assets this allows us investigating the effect of foreign bank balance sheet shocks on domestic financial turmoil in a large sample of 146 developed and emerging economies from 1984 to 2011 our proxies of shocks towards bank balance sheets are strong predictors of systemic banking crises in their debtor countries confirming these results bilateral bank flows significantly decrease when creditor banks assets are hit by negative shocks as measured by credit rating downgrades from third party countries short term liabilities towards global banks appear to increase roll over and funding risks thereby amplifying the impact of shocks to foreign lenders balance sheets domestic banking sectors vulnerabilities such as illiquid assets and a low deposit asset ratio are found to increase crisis contagion risk in contrast a high level of global liquidity attenuates the transmission of shocks to international banks assets to debtor countries

the sensitivity of an empirical model of married women s hours of work to economic and statistical assumptions this study undertakes a systematic analysis of several theoretic and statistical assumption s used in many empirical models of female labor supply using a singl e data set psid 1975 labor supply data the author is able to replic ate most of the range of estimated income and substitution effects fo und in previous studies in this field he undertakes extensive specif ication tests and finds that most of this range should be rejected du e to statistical and model misspecifications the two most important assumptions appear to be the tobit assumption used to control for sel f selection into the labor force and exogeneity assumptions on the wi fe s wage rate and her labor market experience copyright 1987 by the econometric society

dynamic female labor supply the increase in female employment and participation rates is one of the most dramatic changes to have taken place in the economy during the last century however while the employment rate of married women more than doubled during the last 50 years that of unmarried women remained almost constant to empirically analyze these trends we estimate a female dynamic labor supply model using an extended version of eckstein and wolpin 1989 to compare the various explanations in the literature for the observed trends this dynamic model provides a much better fit to the life cycle employment pattern than a static version of the model and a standard static reduced form model heckman 1979 the main finding using the dynamic model is that the rise in education levels accounts for about 33 percent of the increase in female employment and the rise in wages and narrowing of the gender wage gap account for another 20 percent while about 40 percent remains unexplained by observed household characteristics we show that this unexplained portion can be empirically attributed to cohort specific changes in preferences or the costs of child rearing and household maintenance finally the decline in fertility and the increase in divorce rates account for only a small share of the increase in female employment rates

intertemporal preferences and labor supply in this paper the authors examine whether nonseparable preference structures ar e important in characterizing life cycle labor supply using longitud inal data on prime age males from the panel study of income dynamics they estimate a model of life cycle leisure and consumption under un certainty in which intertemporal preferences are allowed to be nonsep arable in leisure the model tests several alternative specifications considered in the literature they investigate the robustness of the ir findings to certain forms of population heterogeneity and types of model misspecification across alternative specifications the autho rs find that the standard assumption of intertemporally separable pre ferences for leisure is not consistent with the data copyright 1988 by the econometric society

semiparametric bayesian inference for dynamic tobit panel data models with unobserved heterogeneity summary this paper develops semiparametric bayesian methods for inference of dynamic tobit panel data models our approach requires that the conditional mean dependence of the unobserved heterogeneity on the initial conditions and the strictly exogenous variables be specified important quantities of economic interest such as the average partial effect and average transition probabilities can be readily obtained as a by product of the markov chain monte carlo run we apply our method to study female labor supply using a panel data set from the national longitudinal survey of youth 1979 copyright 2008 john wiley sons ltd

the impact of agricultural extension and roads on poverty and consumption growth in fifteen ethiopian villages this article investigates whether public investments that led to improvements in road quality and increased access to agricultural extension services led to faster consumption growth and lower rates of poverty in rural ethiopia estimating an instrumental variables model using generalized methods of moments and controlling for household fixed effects we find evidence of positive impacts with meaningful magnitudes receiving at least one extension visit reduces headcount poverty by 9 8 percentage points and increases consumption growth by 7 1 percentage points access to all weather roads reduces poverty by 6 9 percentage points and increases consumption growth by 16 3 percentage points these results are robust to changes in model specification and estimation methods

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

intertemporal substitution in labor supply evidence from micro data the sensitivity of the supply of labor to intertemporal variation in the wage is an important issue in macroeconomics the analysis of social security and pensions and the study of life cycle patterns of work this paper explores two approaches to the measurement of intertemporal substitution that have appeared in the literature the first approach is to use consumption to control for wealth and unobserved expectations about future wages in the labor supply equation the second approach is to estimate a first difference equation for hours in which labor supply from the previous period serves as a control for wealth and wage expectations the results indicate that intertemporal substitution elasticity for married men is positive but small

eco efficiency in the smes of venezuela current status and future perspectives abstract this paper presents a comparison analysis of eco efficiency in the small and medium sized enterprises smes of venezuela the research can be divided into three parts the first part reviews similar studies in the literature on the level of eco efficiency exhibited by the companies of venezuela and other countries in the second place the findings of a survey conducted on venezuelan smes allowed the definition of 54 eco efficiency profiles thirdly six national experts in cleaner production and eco efficiency were interviewed the interview was based on a questionnaire similar to that used in the survey of the venezuelan smes at a second meeting the experts were asked to discuss on the similarities and differences between their answers and those of the company s managers the findings of the survey allow us to conclude that venezuelan smes understand the legal environmental regulations that affect them but they do not perceive the influence of external driving forces like customers demand for green products or institutional incentives the adoption of eco efficiency practices is not perceived as an incentive to improve competitiveness so that the environmental strategies adopted generally aim at reducing costs or avoiding non compliance sanctions and negative effects on the company image materials recycling and reuse especially packaging materials are common practices however other environmental tools or practices have not been implemented yet e g environmental management systems ems process product and services design tools based on the product life cycle renewable energy resources or green marketing there are also differences among the eight industrial sectors analyzed food and chemical industries having the higher index of eco efficiency practices and plastic and wood industries the lower

the specification and estimation of dynamic stochastic discrete choice models a survey our main goal is to quantify the returns to a career in the united states congress we specify a dynamic model of career decisions of a member of congress and estimate this model using a newly collected dataset given estimates of the structural model we

the sensitivity of labor supply parameter estimates to unobserved individual effects fixed and random effects estimates in a nonlinear model using panel data life cycle models of labor supply predict the presence of an unobserved individual effect in the labor supply equation that is correlated with observed explanatory variables leading to an omitted variables bias in the cross section i examine the sensitivity of parameter estimates to the presence of these effects using fixed and random effect tobit models the estimated effects of children are too large in the cross section the estimated intertemporal substitution elasticity ranges from 1 1 to 1 7 the results are similar for fixed and random effects models and for models using different specifications of the dependent variable

urban effects on participation and wages are there gender differences abstract this paper estimates participation and wage equations using panel data from the united kingdom to explore gender differences in urban wage and participation premiums the results suggest a small but economically significant urban participation premium for women but none for men results from the wage estimations suggest that after controlling for sample selectivity observed and unobserved heterogeneity the urban premium is larger for women this wage premium is also larger for married or cohabiting women relative to others there is also evidence of higher urban returns to experience for men and lower urban wage depreciation for both men and women

two separated effects of employer provided health insurance on job mobility we estimate the effect of employer provided health insurance ephi on job mobility via a dynamic model of joint employment and health insurance decision in the presence of uncertainty about wage rate and health status transitions the model is based on a markov decision process in which a hedonic wage approach provides an economic rationale for the different choices and health insurance serves as an input to the health production process including health transitions in the model helps us to understand how the availability of ephi positive job characteristic and holding ephi the wage health insurance trade off enter into the individuals decisions the model is estimated using the 1999 2000 medical expenditure panel survey panel 4 and the results show that the pure effects of holding ephi are negligible the full effects of ephi are significant and the degrees of the inefficiency vary between 14 and 25 across different states

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

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

split panel jackknife estimation of fixed effect models we propose a jackknife for reducing the order of the bias of maximum likelihood estimates of nonlinear dynamic fixed effect panel models in its simplest form the half panel jackknife the estimator is just 2 hat theta bar theta 1 2 where hat theta is the mle from the full panel and bar theta 1 2 is the average of the two half panel mles each using t 2 time periods and all n cross sectional units this estimator eliminates the first order bias of hat theta the order of the bias is further reduced if two partitions of the panel are used for example two half panels and three 1 3 panels and the corresponding mles on further partitioning the panel any order of bias reduction can be achieved the split panel jackknife estimators are asymptotically normal centered at the true value with variance equal to that of the mle under asymptotics where t is allowed to grow slowly with n in analogous fashion the split panel jackknife reduces the bias of the profile likelihood and the bias of marginal effect estimates simulations in fixed effect dynamic discrete choice models with small t show that the split panel jackknife effectively reduces the bias and mean squared error of the mle and yields confidence intervals with much better coverage

simulation estimation of two tiered dynamic panel tobit models with an application to the labor supply of married women in this paper a computationally practical simulation estimator is proposed for the two tiered dynamic panel tobit model originally developed by cragg 1971 the log likelihood function simulated through procedures based on a recursive algorithm formulated by the geweke hajivassiliou keane simulator is maximized the simulation estimators are then applied to study the labor supply of married women the rich dynamic structure of the labor force participation decision as well as hours worked decisions that are conditional on the participation of married women are identified by using the proposed simulation estimators the average partial effects of the participation and hours worked decisions for married women in response to fertility decisions and increases in the husband s income are also investigated it is found that the hypothesis that the fertility decision is exogenous and the hypothesis that the husband s income is exogenous to married women s labor supply function are both rejected in the dynamic and static two tiered models moreover children aged between 6 and 13 years old may have a negative impact on the hours worked decision for married women that is conditional on their participation however these children may provide some positive incentives for married women to participate in the labor force copyright 2009 john wiley sons ltd

measuring the effects of welfare time limits this paper develops a simple regression model that incorporates the behavioral dynamics of time limits and is estimable by panel data techniques by relating this model to reduced form analysis i clarify an implicit assumption that underlies a popular difference in differences did specification which understates the overall effects of time limits i also find that a considerable amount of dynamics is due to individuals reducing welfare use as their stock of remaining welfare eligibility depletes this generates more plausible predictions related to counterfactuals cumulative welfare use patterns and mechanical termination of benefits

labour supply as a buffer evidence from uk households this paper examines how individuals use their labour supply hours of work and participation decisions as a margin of adjustment or buffer in response to financial shocks the financial shock measure is constructed using individuals expected change to their financial situation in the year ahead relative to the perceived outcome one year later using bhps data we find that both men and women adjust their labour supply in response to financial shocks the propensity to participate in the labour market also appears to respond to the experience of a financial shock but is less robust

labor market institutions and long term effects of youth unemployment graduating from a school during a time of adverse economic conditions has a persistent harmful effect on workers subsequent employment opportunities an analysis of panel data from oecd countries during the 1960 2010 periods reveals that a worker who experiences a 1 percentage point higher unemployment rate while the worker is 16 24 years old has a 0 14 percentage point higher unemployment rate at ages 25 29 years and 0 03 percentage points higher at ages 30 34 years the persistence of this negative effect is stronger in countries with stricter employment protection legislation a composite index for labor market rigidity is constructed and the index is shown to have positive correlation with the persistence moderating macroeconomic fluctuations is more important in countries that have more persistent labor market entry effects on subsequent outcomes

aiding violence or peace the impact of foreign aid on the risk of civil conflict in sub saharan africa abstract this paper considers the impact of foreign aid flows on the risk of civil conflict we improve on earlier studies on this topic by addressing the problem of the endogenous aid allocation using gdp levels of donor countries as instruments a more structural addition to the literature is that we efficiently control for unobserved country specific effects in typical conflict onset and conflict continuation models by first differencing the literature often overlooks the dynamic nature of these types of models thereby forcing unlikely i i d structures on the error terms implicitly 1 as a consequence malfunctioning institutions deep rooted political grievances or any other obvious yet unobserved and time persistent determinants of war are simply assumed away we find a statistically significant and economically important negative effect of foreign aid flows on the probability of ongoing civil conflicts to continue the continuation probability such that increasing aid flows tends to decrease civil conflict duration we do not find a significant relationship between aid flows and the probability of civil conflicts to start the onset probability

corrigendum on a life cycle model of female labour supply in the empirical work in our article on the intertemporal substitution of leisure time for married women heckman and macurdy 1980 we inadvertently constrained the estimated intertemporal substitution elasticity to be too high since this parameter plays a prominent role in discussions of equilibrium models of the business cycle and since our empirical work has been cited in discussions on this topic e g hall 1980 we would like to present a corrected set of empirical results for our model the period t utility function adopted in this note is in the notation of our original paper equation 15

sri lanka can conditional cash transfer programs serve as safety nets in keeping children at school and from working when exposed to shocks this brief summarizes the results of a gender impact evaluation study can conditional cash transfer cct programs serve as safety nets in keeping children at school and from working when exposed to shocks conducted the program started in 1997 and still exists today in sri lanka the study observed that income shocks on poor households are known to induce parents to take their children out of school and send them to work when other risk coping instruments are insufficient cct programs where the condition is on school attendance have been shown to be effective in increasing educational achievements and reducing child work shocks are highly prevalent and children have irregular periods of school enrollment children who are taken out of school are less likely to re enroll