can the human capital approach explain life cycle wage differentials between races and sexes i introduction the trends in gender and racial wage gaps have continued to receive the attention of researchers and policy makers due to their mounting social significance substantial literature concludes that after world war ii the black white pay gap shrank rapidly until the mid 1970s this trend was reversed in the 1980s card and dinardo 2002 couch and daly 2002 darity and myers 1998 o neill 1990 smith and welch 1989 1 in contrast the gender pay gap persisted for four decades after world war ii only in the 1980s did it start to narrow yet it showed only a little progress in the 1990s blau ferber and winkler 2002 goldin 1990 o neill 2003 although a large number of studies have been purported to investigate the sources of male female and black white pay gaps most have not addressed the issue of whether or not the individuals being observed have changed their economic status over their lifetimes the major problem is that longitudinal data are not available over a long enough period to determine the age earnings profiles 2 by using the national longitudinal survey of youth data 1979 cohort nlsy79 this paper examines gender and racial wage gaps among individuals of the same age in an effort to eliminate major life cycle differences while at the same time tracking the changes in the wage gaps over their life spans in particular we would like to provide answers to the following questions what factors can account for the narrowing widening gender wage gaps among blacks whites as they age can the observed life cycle wage gaps be attributed to different paths of postschool human capital accumulation since today s individuals regardless of race or sex have on average completed similar years of schooling among the youth cohort the observed disparity in wages between races and sexes may simply reflect the differences in the quality of schooling family background and postschool investment 3 given that school quality and family background are essentially fixed for an individual as he or she ages in order to address the questions above this paper attempts to further examine the differences in postschool human capital investment behavior among individuals past estimates of the structural parameters for the model of postschool human capital accumulation have however not been fruitful benporath 1970 brown 1976 haley 1976 heckman 1976a 1976b rosen 1976 the major reasons as heckman 1976b points out are that dynamic models are difficult to solve explicitly and that the proportion of time spent investing in on the job training cannot be measured directly moreover to fulfill the dynamic concepts of human capital accumulation longer period longitudinal data must be used to explore the life cycle view of individual wages 4 the lack of empirical investigation in relation to the continuous time dynamic model using panel data therefore leads us to develop an alternative empirical version for estimating the structural parameters of the wage function over a lifetime in other words the purpose of our study is to estimate a dynamic structural model based on the theory of optimal human capital accumulation in accordance with this theory of human capital the wage and its life path can be viewed as the outcome of an optimal path of human capital investment over an individual s life cycle instead of comparing the differences in the outcome of this optimization process i e wages we estimate the key parameters in determining the life cycle wage path as well as further empirically identifying the sources of the wage gap our empirical results first suggest that the male female wage gap mainly arises from gender difference in the marginal costs of human capital production as men in general spend more time in the labor market and gain more work experience than women they tend to have lower marginal costs in the process of human capital production

employment discrimination an empirical test of forward versus reverse regression using data on faculty salaries at a large university we follow a methodology suggested by goldberger to conduct an empirical test of the conway roberts proposition that reverse and not forward regression is the proper way to detect salary discrimination we obtained 11 different estimates of the amount of salary discrimination not only are these estimates statistically inconsistent but they are also at variance with the estimate derived from the composite reverse regression therefore we conclude that in light of the econometric modeling used reverse regression does not yield an unbiased estimate of salary discrimination

occupational self selection a human capital approach to sex differences in occupational structure a rich and diverse literature exists concerning the distribution of labor incomes one approach namely that of human capital concentrates on lifetime accumulation paths of earnings capacity units human capital individual variations in human capital imply differences in earnings power thereby yielding strong implications concerning earnings distribution within a population despite its explanatory power the human capital model has been widely criticized one criticism centers on its inability to obtain inferences concerning occupational distribution the purpose of this paper is to alleviate at least some such criticism by applying the hedonic price approach so as to embed occupational choice into the human capital framework the significance is that neoclassical economic theory can be used to obtain implications concerning the determinants of occupational structure excerpt

the earnings and human capital of american jews this paper analyzes the earnings and returns from human capital investments of second generation american jews compared with non jews jewish men have 16 percent higher earnings other things the same a 20 percent higher rate of return from schooling and a steeper experience earnings profile these patterns persist even after controlling for occupation self employment status and geographic concentration in the new york area there are no systematic differences among jews by parents country of birth the findings suggest that american jews are more productive in creating and using human capital and that this has encouraged greater investments in human capital

the effect of gender and race differentials on public private wage comparisons a study of postal workers this study argues that the aggregative specifications often used to examine wage diferentials fail to control for important demographic variations in wage patterns in testing how postal wages comp

micro data heterogeneity and the evaluation of public policy nobel lecture this paper summarizes the contributions of microeconometrics to economic knowledge four main themes are developed 1 microeconometricians developed new tools to respond to econometric problems raised by the analysis of the new sources of micro data produced after the second world war 2 microeconometrics improved on aggregate time series methods by building models that linked economic models for individuals to data on individual behavior 3 an important empirical regularity detected by the field is the diversity and heterogeneity of behavior this heterogeneity has profound consequences for economic theory and for econometric practice 4 microeconometrics has contributed substantially to the scientific evaluation of public policy

affirmative action and opportunity a study of female quit rates t he effectiveness of affirmative action efforts has been a topic of some controversy and the literature is unclear about whether women and or minorities benefit one source of confusion is that in some models the economywide effect can be in a different direction than the effect upon regulated or covered individuals and firms in a sense this is much like the minimum wage in that while some individuals benefit there is considerable controversy about the gains for target groups as a whole what is more surprising however is that the affirmative action literature is unclear about whether the programs achieve their goals for firms which are covered again in part this confusion is theoretical for wage and hiring directives may provide conflicting incentives beller 1978 another difficulty is methodological in that measures of affirmative action activity tend to be indirect 1 this last point as we shall see is especially true for studies of the federal contract compliance program this paper assesses the effectiveness of the federal contract compliance program which is administered by the office of federal contract compliance ofcc in improving opportunities for women rather than focusing on wage growth or the sex composition of occupations or firms as have all the previous studies we examine quit rates quits are a useful measure of people s perceptions about their opportunities and effective affirmative action programs may improve intra firm opportunities for advancement as a result subject to some caveats discussed below we expect that program effectiveness is captured by a reduction in quit rates from previous levels in addition this paper employs a more defensible measure of ofcc activities than is typical in most studies part i of the paper develops the model part ii introduces the data and the specifications the basic results are presented in part iii two major conometric difficulties whether the ofcc variables are actually proxies for other industry effects and the possible endogeneity of ofcc activity are addressed in part iv and the results are summarized in the final section

racial discrimination in the labor market theory and empirics we review theories of race discrimination in the labor market taste based models can generate wage and unemployment duration differentials when combined with either random or directed search even when strong prejudice is not widespread but no existing model explains the unemployment rate differential models of statistical discrimination based on differential observability of productivity across races can explain the pattern and magnitudes of wage differentials but do not address employment and unemployment at their current state of development models of statistical discrimination based on rational stereotypes have little empirical content it is plausible that models combining elements of the search models with statistical discrimination could fit the data we suggest possible avenues to be pursued and comment briefly on the implication of existing theory for public policy jel j15 j31 j64 j71

bounded growth of the bullwhip effect under a class of nonlinear ordering policies abstract this paper analyzes the bullwhip effect in multi echelon supply chains under a general class of nonlinear ordering policies a describing function approach from control theory is used to derive closed form formulas to predict amplification of order fluctuations along the supply chain it is proven that with consideration of nonlinearity in the ordering policy the magnitude of the bullwhip effect will eventually become bounded after growing through the first few stages of the supply chain it is also proven that the average customer demand as well as the demand fluctuation frequency would directly affect the bounded magnitude while the suppliers demand forecasting method has no effect at all for illustration analytical results for a class of order up to policies are derived and verified by numerical simulations the proposed modeling framework holds the promise to not only explain empirical observations but also serve as the basis for developing counteracting strategies against the bullwhip effect

are those paid more really more productive the case of experience this study uses computerized personnel microdata on the white male managerial and professional employees at a major u s corporation to address the following question can the additional earnings which are associated with more labor market experience at a point in time really be explained by higher productivity at the same point in time our answer to this question based on both cross sectional and longitudinal information is that performance plays a substantially smaller role in explaining cross sectional experience earnings differentials and earnings growth than is claimed by those who have adopted the human capital explanation of the experience earnings profile this response depends critically on our assumption that the performance ratings which supervisors give to their white male managerial and professional subordinates adequately reflect the subordinates relative productivity in the year of assessment we present a great deal of evidence which strongly supports this assumption

on decomposing the wage gap a critical comment on blinder s method many studies have found that the impact of schooling on earnings is greater for females than for males despite the fact that females tend to earn less both absolutely and controlling for personal characteristics this study investigates possible

race and human capital while human capital has been used with some success to analyze recent changes in racial income differences scholars have repeatedly pointed to a major empirical problem that appears to severely limit the historical relevanlce and scope of skill based theories as applied to racial questions the challenge they raise is legitimate put simply if measured skill disparities between the races narrowed throughout the twentieth century why did income ratios first begin to converge in the 1960 s in this paper i address this question relying on some unexploited census data by race on education literacy occupations and income using these data that begin with the 1890 census i present new estimates of agespecific relative income positions of black men for all postslavery birth cohorts in addition to reconciling the apparently inconsistent skill and income series these income ratios offer a very different historical record than many economists believe to have been the case to cite a prominent example gunnar myrdal s classic work 1944 saw the economic position of his contemporary black america not only as dismal but made even more so by its sense of hopelessness given the absence of any hint of progress or change while myrdal s pessimism is understandable it appears that even in his day seeds had long been sown that were already permanently altering and improving the relative economic status of black men

living with risk living with risk can lead to anticipatory feelings such as anxiety or hopefulness such feelings can affect the choice between lotteries that will be played out in the future choice may be motivated not only by the static risks involved but also by the desire to reduce anxiety or to promote savouring this paper provides a model of preference in a three period setting that is axiomatic and includes a role for anticipatory feelings it is shown that the model of preference can accommodate intuitive patterns of demand for information such as information seeking when a favourable outcome is very likely and information aversion when it is more likely that the outcome will be unfavourable behavioural meaning is given to statements such as individual 1 is anxious and 2 is more anxious than 1 finally the model is differentiated sharply from the classic model due to kreps and porteus copyright 2008 wiley blackwell

estimating wage discrimination in the labor market if labor supply curves are not perfectly inelastic wage discrimination induces some minority workers to leave the labor force studies of discrimination that focus only on wage differentials overlook these disincentive effects on minority employment

analysis of compound bullwhip effect causes abstract this research investigates compound causes of the bullwhip effect bwe by considering an inventory system with multiple price sensitive demand streams joint price and demand dynamics are captured by a vector time series process that incorporates the stochastic co movements in price and demand we study two bwe measures one for each demand stream individually and one for the aggregated demand we show that demand parameters including demand autocorrelation cross correlation and price sensitivity serve as root causes of the bwe we prove that the impact of these parameters on the bwe can be additively decomposed conditions are established under which a pair of simultaneous compound causes may attenuate or dampen the bwe when demand streams are aggregated we derive a pooling factor that quantifies the impact of demand aggregation on order stability when positive the pooling factor corresponds to a synergy effect that captures the gain in the stability of the pooled orders conditions for the existence of the synergy effect are obtained for several special cases involving a zero leadtime we also discuss how our analytical findings can be managerially applied to bullwhip mitigation strategies

determinants of college major choice identification using an information experiment this article studies the determinants of college major choice using an experimentally generated panel of beliefs obtained by providing students with information on the true population distribution of various major specific characteristics students logically revise their beliefs in response to the information and their subjective beliefs about future major choice are associated with beliefs about their own earnings and ability we estimate a rich model of college major choice using the panel of beliefs data while expected earnings and perceived ability are a significant determinant of major choice heterogeneous tastes are the dominant factor in the choice of major analyses that ignore the correlation in tastes with earnings expectations inflate the role of earnings in college major choices we conclude by computing the welfare gains from the information experiment and find positive average welfare gains

changes in the u s wage structure 1963 1987 application of quantile regression the 1980 s witnessed rapid changes in the structure of wages in the united states in this study recently developed techniques for quantile regression are applied to every march current population survey since 1964 and changes in the return to schooling and experience at different points of the wage distribution are examined the quantile regression technique parsimoniously describes the entire conditional wage distribution this conditional distribution is used to examine changes in within group wage inequality as measured by the difference between conditional quantiles two linear models are considered a simple one group model and a 16 group model the results suggest that the returns to schooling and experience differ across quantiles of the wage distribution but their patterns of change are similar significant differences in wage inequality are also found across the various skill groups the paper also presents a new imputation method for cps data

detecting and removing discrimination under equal opportunities policies abstract this paper surveys part of the recent voluminous literature on the economics of discrimination focusing on two key questions first how should discrimination be measured and can in fact unambiguous estimates be derived as the basis for detecting where discrimination is present and setting in train measures to eliminate it second to what extent has the implementation of equal opportunities legislation improved the relative standing of women and minority workers in the labour force this section includes a discussion of the likely effects of recent changes in the law such as the equal value amendment in the uk or the introduction of comparable worth in the usa the survey concludes that our ability to detect discrimination at all precisely is still rudimentary and consequently policy measures are likely to be inefficient for this reason

the labor market effects of sex and race discrimination laws westudytheeffectsofstatesexandracediscriminationlawsthatwerepassedprior to federal antidiscrimination legislation state sex discrimination laws targeted discrimination in pay only because an equal pay constraint raises the relative price of female labor we would expect the relative employment of females to decline we find robust evidence that state equal pay laws for women reduced relative employment of both black women and white women we also find some evidence of positive effects of race discrimination laws on earnings of blacks relative to whites although no evidence of employment effects jel j15 j16 j18 j23 i introduction public policies to narrow the gaps in labor market outcomes between men and women and between whites and minorities have a long and controversial history two pieces of federal legislation stand out as perhaps the most significant such policies the first was the equal pay act of 1963 which requires equal pay for equal work noting some exceptions but explicitly prohibiting a worker s sex as one of them the second was title vii of the civilrightsactof1964 makingitillegaltodiscriminate in hiring discharge compensation and so on on the basis of race color religion sex or national origin two other important landmarks in the evolution of these policies at the federal level were amendments to title vii embodied in the equal employment opportunity act eeoa of 1972 which expanded coverage and increased the enforcement powers of the equal employment opportunity commission eeoc and executive orders 10925 1961 11246 1965 and 11375 1967 which laid the groundwork for affirmative action although the phrase has its origins in title vii 1

the stabilizing effect of inventory in supply chains this paper presents a hierarchical model framework for the analysis of the stabilizing effect of inventories in multiechelon manufacturing distribution supply chains this framework is used to compare the variance of demand to the variance of replenishment orders at different echelons of the system e g retailer wholesaler empirical data and experience with management games suggest that in most industries inventory management policies can have a destabilizing effect by increasing the volatility of demand as it passes up through the chain the bullwhip effect our model helps to explain these observations and indicates mechanisms that can promote stabilization the analysis results also define sufficient conditions for the existence of stabilization and relate these conditions to the optimality of myopic control policies

do individuals have preferences used in macro finance models an experimental investigation recent financial studies often assume that agents have epstein zin preferences preferences that require agents to care about when uncertainty is resolved under this recursive preference framework the preference for uncertainty resolution is entirely determined by an agent s preferences for risk and intertemporal substitution to test the implications of this model this paper presents an experiment designed to elicit subject preferences on risk time intertemporal substitution and uncertainty resolution results reveal that most subjects prefer early resolution of uncertainty and have relative risk aversion greater than the reciprocal of the elasticity of intertemporal substitution consistent with the predictions by recursive preferences subjects are classified in a finite mixture model by their risk time and intertemporal substitution parameters regression results show that types predicted by the epstein zin model to prefer early resolution choose early resolution with 20 50 higher probabili

production smoothing in the linear quadratic inventory model contrary to popular belief the linear quadratic inventory model does not imply that in response to demand shocks output is always less variable than sales when demand shocks are not anticipated and without this assumption it is hard to see why firms should hold inventories in the first place it is shown that output can be more variable than sales even when the only shocks are demand shocks and the inventory target is not a rising function of sales the variance of output will typically exceed that of sales when the firm s marginal cost curve is fairly flat copyright 1994 by royal economic society

do financial constraints hold back innovation and growth evidence on the role of public policy abstract this paper provides evidence that capital market imperfections hold back innovation and growth and that public policy can complement capital markets we deliver the evidence by studying the effects of government funding on the behavior of smes in finland by adapting the methodology recently proposed by rajan and zingales rajan r g zingales l 1998 financial dependence and growth american economic review 88 pp 559 587 to firm level data we show that government funding disproportionately helps firms from industries that are dependent on external finance we demonstrate that the result is economically significant and robust to a variety of tests

black white wage inequality employment rates and incarceration the observed gap in average wages between black men and white men inadequately reflects the relative economic standing of blacks who suffer from a high rate of joblessness the authors estimate the black white gap in hourly wages from 1980 to 1999 adjusting for the sample selection effect of labor inactivity among working age men in 1999 accounting for labor inactivity including prison and jail incarceration leads to an increase of 7 20 in the black white wage gap adjusting for sample selectivity among men ages 22 30 in 1999 increases the wage gap by as much as 58 increasing selection bias which can be attributed to incarceration and conventional joblessness explains about two thirds of the rise in black relative wages among young men between 1985 and 1998 apparent improvement in the economic position of young black men is thus largely an artifact of rising joblessness fueled by the growth in incarceration during the 1990s

estimation of a censored dynamic panel data model panel data models have a long history in econometrics and have become increasingly popular in empirical economics over the past two decades panel data expand our opportunities to study more complex economic relationships by for example allowing for individual heterogeneity and dynamic feedback these goals are often achieved by including in the model individual specific effects and lagged dependent variables these two features of the dynamic panel data model however often create difficulties in estimation although much progress has been made in the linear panel data model see among others hsiao 1986 baltagi 1995 and arellano and honore 2001 for review our knowledge of general nonlinear dynamic panel data models is very limited in most nonlinear models strict exogeneity of the explanatory variables is still the key assumption the main difficulty is that with nonlinearity it is not obvious how to difference away the individual specific effects and how to use instrumental variable type techniques 2 despite these difficulties some developments have been made on estimating certain nonlinear dynamic models using the fixed effects approach for example the censored regression models honore 1993 honore and hu 2001 the sample selection models kyriazidou 2001 the discrete choice models honor6 and kyriazidou 2000 and the models with multiplicative individual effects chamberlain 1992 wooldridge 1997

the effect of information sharing on supply chain stability and the bullwhip effect this paper analyzes the bullwhip effect in multi stage supply chains operated with linear and time invariant inventory management policies and shared supply chain information such information includes past order sequences and inventory records at all supplier stages the paper characterizes the stream of orders placed at any stage of the chain when the customer demand process is known and ergodic and gives an exact formula for the variance of the orders placed the paper also derives robust analytical conditions based only on inventory management policies to predict the presence of the bullwhip effect and bound its magnitude these results hold independently of the customer demand the general framework proposed in this paper allows for any inventory replenishment policies any ways of sharing and utilizing information and any customer demand processes it is also shown as a special case that sharing customer demand information across the chain significantly reduces but does not completely eliminate the bullwhip effect

marital status child rearing and earnings differentials in the graduate labour market differential the importance of family role specialisation for the measurement of the residual earnings differential is examined within a sample selection model of participation and earnings the earnings differential between men and women may be divided into that explained by different characteristics and attributes and that due to residual factors one element of this residual may be discrimination although other factors may be incorporated in the unexplained component the residual also incorporates the effects on earnings associated with the production of home goods see polachek ig75 a b these will occur

black white earnings ratios the role of cohort size effects abstract while black white earning ratios have been rising over time across cohorts there is some evidence that they have been dropping over time within cohorts of recent entrants to the labor market this has coincided with the entry of the large baby boom cohorts into the labor market this paper examines the role of race differences in cohort size effects on black white earnings ratios for male high school graduates using current population survey data in larger cohorts the black white earnings ratio is lower at entry and falls as the cohort progresses through the career consistent with recent evidence

value of information in capacitated supply chains we incorporate information flow between a supplier and a retailer in a two echelon model that captures the capacitated setting of a typical supply chain we consider three situations 1 a traditional model where there is no information to the supplier prior to a demand to him except for past data 2 the supplier knows the s s policy used by the retailer as well as the end item demand distribution and 3 the supplier has full information about the state of the retailer order up to policies continue to be optimal for models with information flow for the finite horizon the infinite horizon discounted and the infinite horizon average cost cases study of these three models enables us to understand the relationships between capacity inventory and information at the supplier level as well as how they are affected by the retailer s s s values and end item demand distribution we estimate the savings at the supplier due to information flow and study when information is most beneficial

performance pay and the white black wage gap we show that the reported tendency for performance pay to be associated with greater wage inequality at the top of the earnings distribution applies only to white workers this results in the white black wage differential among those in performance pay jobs growing over the earnings distribution even as the same differential shrinks over the distribution for those not in performance pay jobs we show that this remains true even when examining suitable counterfactuals that hold observables constant between whites and blacks we explore reasons behind our finding focusing on the interactions between discrimination unmeasured ability and selection

information distortion in a supply chain the bullwhip effect this article originally appeared in management science april 1997 volume 43 number 4 pp 546 558 published by the institute of management sciences consider a series of companies in a supply chain each of whom orders from its immediate upstream member in this setting inbound orders from a downstream member serve as a valuable informational input to upstream production and inventory decisions this paper claims that the information transferred in the form of orders tends to be distorted and can misguide upstream members in their inventory and production decisions in particular the variance of orders may be larger than that of sales and distortion tends to increase as one moves upstream a phenomenon termed bullwhip effect this paper analyzes four sources of the bullwhip effect demand signal processing rationing game order batching and price variations actions that can be taken to mitigate the detrimental impact of this distortion are also discussed

selectivity bias and earnings differences by gender and race abstract the effect of selectivity bias on earnings differences due to labor force participation decisions is investigated using current population survey and census data the magnitudes of observed earnings differences by both race and gender are clearly influenced by the presence of selectivity bias

evaluating a simple method for estimating black white gaps in median wages racial differences in wage rates are important measures of economic inequality among races because for almost all individuals labor income constitutes the most important component of lifetime income as a consequence the prices at which individuals may sell their time provide vital infornation about the distribution of welfare and economic success however we only observe prices when market transactions occur and thus we only observe wage rates for individuals who are employed since the wages of employed workers are not randomly sampled from the distribution of potential wages it is difficult to draw inferences concerning racial gaps in potential wages from data on observed wage rates richard butler and james heckman 1977 raised this issue in the context of assessing the impact of government policies on racial income inequality charles brown 1984 james smith and finis welch 1989 and amitabh chandra 2000 also examine the extent of racial differences in participation rates and the impact of these differences on measures of racial wage and income gaps this topic remains salient in part because employment rates among working age black males remain significantly below corresponding rates for whites neal and johnson 1996 estimated racial gaps in median wages among men by imputing wages of zero for all men in a particular crosssection who report that they have not worked at all during the survey period under a specific assumption concerning the distribution of missing wages this procedure yields consistent estimates of the black white gap in median wages conditional on observed characteristics below we spell out this assumption and use panel data to investigate the extent to which it may be violated in cross section wage analyses our results suggest that imputing wages of zero for unemployed individuals may provide a reasonable way to estimate median wage regressions among men

divergent paths a new perspective on earnings differences between black and white men since 1940 we present new evidence on the evolution of black white earnings differences among all men including both workers and nonworkers we study two measures i the level earnings gap the racial earnings difference at a given quantile and ii the earnings rank gap the difference between a black man s percentile in the black earnings distribution and the position he would hold in the white earnings distribution after narrowing from 1940 to the mid 1970s the median black white level earnings gap has since grown as large as it was in 1950 at the same time the median black man s relative position in the earnings distribution has remained essentially constant since 1940 so that the improvement then worsening of median relative earnings have come mainly from the stretching and narrowing of the overall earnings distribution black men at higher percentiles have experienced significant advances in relative earnings since 1940 due mainly to strong positional gains among those with college educations large relative schooling gains by blacks at the median and below have been more than counteracted by rising return to skill in the labor market which has increasingly penalized remaining racial differences in schooling at the bottom of the distribution

the impact of federal civil rights policy on black economic progress evidence from the equal employment opportunity act of 1972 the equal employment opportunity act eeoa of 1972 extended civil rights coverage to employers with 15 24 employees while leaving unaffected the civil rights protection for employees of larger firms in conjunction with pre existing state fair employment practice fep laws the eeoa provides a natural experiment in which the treatment and control groups are defined by differences across industries in the fraction of workers employed in the newly covered establishments and across states in the scope of the fep laws applying the treatment and control group methodology to current population survey data the author finds that there were large shifts in the employment and pay practices of the industries most affected by the amendment the timing of the relative gains and their concentration by industry and region provide evidence that the eeoa had a positive impact on the labor market status of african americans

the bullwhip effect progress trends and directions the bullwhip effect refers to the phenomenon where order variability increases as the orders move upstream in the supply chain this paper provides a review of the bullwhip literature which adopts empirical experimental and analytical methodologies early econometric evidence of bullwhip is highlighted findings from empirical and experimental research are compared with analytical and simulation results assumptions and approximations for modelling the bullwhip effect in terms of demand forecast delay replenishment policy and coordination strategy are considered we identify recent research trends and future research directions concerned with supply chain structure product type price competition and sustainability

nonconvex costs and the behavior of inventories this paper explores one possible explanation for the apparent excess volatility of production relative to sales nonconvexities in the technology facing firms it is shown that if firms operate in a region of declining marginal costs then small shifts in demand can cause production to jump substantially estimates for six production to stock industries as well as the automobile industry suggest that all these industries behave as if they were operating in the region of nonconvex costs the results have important implications not only for inventory investment but also for the cyclical behavior of productivity and prices

the bullwhip effect in supply chain networks this paper analyzes the propagation and amplification of order fluctuations i e the bullwhip effect in supply chain networks operated with linear and time invariant inventory management policies the supply chain network is allowed to include multiple customers e g markets any network structure with or without sharing information the paper characterizes the stream of orders placed by any supplier for any stationary customer demand processes and gives exact formulas for the variance of the orders placed and the amplification of order fluctuations the paper also derives robust analytical conditions based only on inventory management policies to predict the presence of the bullwhip effect for any network structure any inventory replenishment policies and arbitrary customer demand processes numerical examples show that the analytical results accurately quantify the bullwhip effect managerial insights are drawn from the analysis the methodology presented in this paper generalizes those in previous studies for serial supply chains

semiparametric censored regression models aregression model is censored when the recorded data on the dependent variable cuts off outside a certain range with multiple observations at the endpoints of that range when the data are censored variation in the observed dependent variable will understate the effect of the regressors on the true dependent variable as a result standard ordinary least squares regression using censored data will typically result in coefficient estimates that are biased toward zero traditional statistical analysis uses maximum likelihood or related procedures to deal with the problem of censored data however the validity of such methods requires correct specification of the error distribution which can be problematic in practice in the past two decades a number of semiparametric alternatives for dealing with censored data have been proposed in a semiparametric approach part of the functional form of the model usually the regression function is parametrically specified by the researcher based upon plausible assumptions while the rest of the model is not parameterized 1 while the theoretical literature has produced several semiparametric estimators for the censored data model published applications of these estimators to empirical problems in economics have lagged far behind this paper reviews the intuition and computation of a handful of semiparametric estimators proposed for the censored regression model the various estimators are used to examine changes in black white earnings inequality during the

clumped or piecewise evidence on preferences for information in this paper we examine individuals attitudes toward the timing of information we test a theoretical prediction that people prefer to get information clumped together rather than piecewise we conduct a controlled lab experiment where subjects participate in a lottery and can choose between different resolutions of uncertainty clumped or piecewise and analyze which kind of resolution is preferred two additional treatments allow us to get a quantitative measure of subjects preferences over different information structures our data provide little support for a systematic aversion to piecewise information on the aggregate level in additional treatment conditions we demonstrate the robustness of our findings and explore potential explanations data as supplemental material are available at http dx doi org 10 1287 mnsc 2013 1884 this paper was accepted by john list behavioral economics

the effect of britain s anti discriminatory legislation on relative pay and employment pressive increase in the number of women in the labour force during the i970s between i970 and i980 female relative employment increased by i8 3 and female relative hours by i 7 6 in this paper we attempt an evaluation of the possible effects of anti discriminatory legislation by considering the labour market as a whole taking into account not only relative employment but also other factors that through their influence on demand and supply may have affected relative pay the prima facie evidence in favour of the effectiveness of this legislation is very strong and we want to see if this evidence is maintained after considering all these additional factors and their interaction within the context of the labour market in the first section we present the main facts under analysis the analytical framework to consider the joint effect of the legislation on pay and employment and the

why do minority men earn less a study of wage differentials among the highly educated en in several minority groups in the united states have wages that are substantially lower than those of the benchmark majority group non hispanic white men several generations of labor economists have sought to understand the forces that drive these disparities this research program is potentially important for the purpose of determining whether minority wage gaps are likely to be narrowed more effectively by increasing enforcement of antidiscrimination laws or by implementing policies that reduce inequity in educational opportunity existing work shows large racial and ethnic differences in premarket factors especially formal schooling and suggests that these differences play a key role in shaping wage differences one example is trejo 1997 who finds that third and higher generation mexican american men earn 21 less than non hispanic white men approximately three quarters of the earnings gap is found to be attributable to the mexican americans relative youth and to differences in english language proficiency and years of schooling a second example is neal and johnson 1996 who find that black men earn 24 less than do non hispanic white men differences in schooling account for only about one fifth of this gap when the authors condition on performance on a basic verbal and math skills test the armed forces qualification test afqt though the differential between wages of blacks and whites declines to approximately onethird of its unadjusted level 1 trejo s 1997 study is a nice example of the traditional approach to studying race ethnicity wage gaps traditional in the sense that the explanatory variables in the study are conventional objective measures of human capital such as years of schooling and language ability neal and john

the supply of information by a concerned expert how much information should a policy maker pass on to a currently ill informed citizen in this paper we address this classic question of crawford and sobel 1983 in a setting in which beliefs impact utility as in kreps and porteus 1978 we show that this simple amendment has far reaching implications in particular our question cannot be answered using a utility function with standard revealed preference foundations revealed preference cannot tell us whether in a particular state s a decision maker prefers to believe incorrectly that the state is t or to know the truth to solve the model we go beyond the classical model in two respects relying on the psychological expected utility model of caplin and leahy 2001 to capture preferences and the psychological game model of geanakoplos pearce and stacchetti 1989 to capture strategic interactions

labor force participation work experience and the pay gap between men and women previous research on the relationship between women s educational attainment and the timing of entry into parenthood has produced conflicting results although studies have consistently found that educational attainment has a delaying effect on entry

a theory of anticipated utility abstract a new theory of cardinal utility with an associated set of axioms is presented it is a generalization of the von neumann morgenstern expected utility theory which permits the analysis of phenomena associated with the distortion of subjective probability

the revealed preference theory of changing tastes we analyse preferences over finite decision problems in order to model decision makers with changing tastes we provide conditions on these preferences that identify the strotz model of consistent planning building on an example given by peleg and yaari 1973 we show that for problems with infinitely many choices strotz s representation of preferences may not be well defined for that case we propose a well defined approximation which is empirically indistinguishable from the strotz preference that is being approximated

executive compensation female executives and networking the phrase it s who you know not what you know that counts is often heard in conversations about people who get ahead in economic terms this phrase translates into it s your connections not your human capital investments that count this study attempts to determine the influence of networking in addition to human capital investments by examining a sample of top female executives in the united states we conclude that networking is as important as performance variables in helping women climb the corporate ladder

inventories and the volatility of production a stylized fact associated with inventory behavior is that the variance of production exceeds the variance of sales this paper presents a model of production decisions with demand uncertainty that incorporates no nnegativity constraints on inventories even with no productivity shocks optimal behavior by the firm is consistent with this stylized fact either if demand exhibits positive serial correlation or if the firm can backlog excess demand the reason is that a demand shock affects both the actual inventory level given unchanged production and the desired level production must replenish the stock and adjust to the new desired level copyright 1987 by american economic association

black white life cycle earnings differences and the vintage hypothesis a longitudinal analysis a common finding of virtually all previous studies of black white earnings differences is that the earnings of white males appear to rise at a more rapid rate with each additional year of work experience or with age than do the earnings of black workers this finding has been noted by economists since at least the mid 1950 s when morton zeman called

determining the impact of federal antidiscrimination policy on the economic status of blacks a study of south carolina this paper evaluates alternative explanations for the dramatic increase in black employment in south carolina manufacturing that occurred in the mid 1960s black progress in traditionally segregated sectors of manufacturing in operation at the time jim crow laws were passed cannot be attributed to tight labor markets the decline of agriculture or the growth of education of the black workforce the only plausible explanation is federal government civil rights and affirmative action policy for newer industries that entered the state on a large scale after world war ii the growth of skills among blacks accounts for black economic progress copyright 1989 by american economic association

the measurement of race and gender wage differentials evidence from the federal sector this paper presents an empirical analysis of wage differentials based on race and gender in the federal bureaucracy by focusing on the study of interagency variations in wage differentials the au

psychological expected utility theory and anticipatory feelings we extend expected utility theory to situations in which agents experience feelings of anticipation prior to the resolution of uncertainty we show how these anticipatory feelings may result in time inconsistency we provide an example from portfolio theory to illustrate the potential impact of anticipation on asset prices

the intergenerational transmission of generosity abstract this paper estimates the correlation between the generosity of parents and the generosity of their adult children using regression models of adult children s charitable giving new charitable giving data are collected in the panel study of income dynamics and used to estimate the regression models the regression models are estimated using a wide variety of techniques and specification tests and the strength of the intergenerational giving correlations is compared with intergenerational correlations in income wealth and consumption expenditure from the same sample using the same set of controls we find the religious giving of parents and children to be strongly correlated as strongly correlated as are their income and wealth the correlation in the secular giving e g giving to the united way educational institutions for poverty relief of parents and children is smaller similar in magnitude to the intergenerational correlation in consumption parents religious giving is positively associated with children s secular giving but in a more limited sense overall the results are consistent with generosity emerging at least in part from the influence of parental charitable behavior in contrast to intergenerational models in which parental generosity towards their children can undo government transfer policy ricardian equivalence these results suggest that parental generosity towards charitable organizations might reinforce government policies such as tax incentives aimed at encouraging voluntary transfers

the rich domain of uncertainty source functions and their experimental implementation we often deal with uncertain events for which no probabilities are known several normative models have been proposed descriptive studies have usually been qualitative or they estimated ambiguity aversion through one single number this paper introduces the source method a tractable method for quantitatively analyzing uncertainty empirically the theoretical key is the distinction between different sources of uncertainty within which subjective choice based probabilities can still be defined source functions convert those subjective probabilities into willingness to bet we apply our method in an experiment where we do not commit to particular ambiguity attitudes but let the data speak

on the stability of supply chains this paper examines the stability of decentralized multistage supply chains under arbitrary demand conditions it looks for intrinsic properties of the inventory replenishment policies that hold for all customer demand processes and for policies with desirable properties it is found that the overall conditions experienced by suppliers several stages removed from the final customer e g the variances of the orders they receive and the inventories they keep depend on the policy much more than on the demand process a policy specific but demand independent upper bound for the order variance amplification factor of any decentralized policy is shown to exist and its formula is presented the bound is always tight for the suppliers at the end of a long chain so that a policy exhibits the bullwhip effect if and only if its bound is greater than 1 a simple necessary condition for bullwhip avoidance is also identified in terms of a policy s gain gain is the marginal change in average inventory induced by a policy when there is a small but sustained change in the demand rate it is shown thatall policies with positive gain produce the bullwhip effect if they do not use future order commitments because manufacturers can reduce costs by operating with positive gain this explains the prevalence of the bullwhip effect a family of commitment based policies that can dynamically maintain any desired inventory level for any demand rate e g achieve positive gain without the bullwhip effect is also presented the family includes just in time strategies as a special case simulation results are used as an illustration

black white earnings ratios since the civil rights act of 1964 the importance of labor market dropouts published median earnings of wage and salary workers by race and sex are based on distributions that exclude those without earnings and those not employed as wage and salary workers at the time of the survey it has been argued that the changing importance of these exclusions rather than any improvement in the distribution of offered wages for blacks accounts for the apparent increase in black white relative median earnings this paper presents a new method for correcting the published medians for such censoring the apparent improvement in relative earnings is reduced but not eliminated by the correction

changes in the distribution of male and female wages accounting for employment composition using bounds this paper examines changes in the distribution of wages using bounds to allow for the impact of nonrandom selection into work we show that worst case bounds can be informative however because employment rates in the united kingdom are often low they are not informative about changes in educational or gender wage differentials thus we explore ways to tighten these bounds using restrictions motivated from economic theory with these assumptions we find convincing evidence of an increase in inequality within education groups changes in educational differentials and increases in the relative wages of women

risk aversion in the theory of expected utility with rank dependent probabilities expected utility with rank dependent probability theory is a model of decision making under risk where the preference relations on the set of probability distributions is represented by the mathematical expectation of a utility function with respect to a transformation of the probability distributions on the set of outcomes this paper defines based on g teaux differentiability measures of risk aversion for such preferences which characterize the relation more risk averse and applies these measures to the analysis of unconditional and conditional portfolio choice problems

estimation of semiparametric censored regression models an application to changes in black white earnings inequality during the 1960s building on the work of chay 1995 this study examines the impact of civil rights policies on black economic progress using individual level panel data many earnings records are censored and the degree of censoring changed during the period of interest consequently valid estimates of the program effects must account for this censoring maximum likelihood estimation can be used if the error terms of the model are identically normally distributed we investigate the value of using weaker assumptions on the error process to estimate the laws impact the analysis shows that there was significant black white earnings convergence in the south during the 1960s we also find that semiparametric estimation methods are informative in pinpointing which parts of the model are mis specified

developments in non expected utility theory the hunt for a descriptive theory of choice under risk this article reviews recent developments in the economic theory of individual decision making under risk since the 1950s it has been known that individual choices violate the standard model of expected utility in predictable ways considerable research effort has now been devoted to the project of developing a superior descriptive model following an overview of non expected utility theories which distinguishes between conventional and non conventional approaches the paper seeks to assess these alternative models in terms of empirical success using laboratory and field data and theoretical usefulness the closing sections reflect on some new directions emerging in this literature

labor market dropouts and trends in the wages of black and white men there is continuing debate over whether and to what degree estimations of black white wage convergence are biased because they leave labor market dropouts out of the picture if a high proportion of blacks become discouraged and cease searching for jobs and if those dropouts have on average poor job prospects the average wage of black workers who remain in the labor market will be an upwardly biased estimate of the average wage across the population this paper introduces a simple method of imputing wages to non workers when non workers are accounted for in the calculations real wage growth for prime age black men over the 1969 98 period is reduced approximately 40 and black white wage convergence is reduced by approximately one third the author finds that a source of bias as important as falling employment rates is the growing gap between wages of workers and potential wages of non workers

how much would you pay to resolve long run risk abstract though risk aversion and the elasticity of intertemporal substitution have been the subjects of careful scrutiny the long run risks literature as well as the broader literature using recursive utility to address asset pricing puzzles has ignored the full implications of their parameter specifications recursive utility implies that the temporal resolution of risk matters and a quantitative assessment thereof should be part of the calibration process this paper gives a sense of the magnitudes of implied timing premia its objective is to inject temporal resolution of risk into the discussion of the quantitative properties of long run risks and related models jel d81 g11 g12

black men s relative earnings are the gains illusory this study investigates the hypothesis that the increase in the median earnings of black men relative to those of white men after 1964 in the united states largely reflects the labor force withdrawal of high proportions of low wage black men who availed themselves of government transfers analyzing current population survey and social security administration data through 1985 the author finds little empirical support for three direct implications of the sample censoring hypothesis of the total measured gain in relative earnings between 1964 and 1985 from 531 to 663 or 13 2 percentage points he finds that only 14 or 1 8 percentage points can be attributed to sample selection

understanding black white wage differentials 1960 1990 understanding black white wage differentials 1960 1990 author s james j heckman thomas m lyons petra e todd source the american economic review vol 90 no 2 papers and proceedings of the one hundred twelfth annual meeting of the american economic association may 2000 pp 344 349 published by american economic association stable url http www jstor org stable 117248 accessed 16 08 2008 00 56

errors in variables and reverse regression in the measurement of wage discrimination abstract several recent articles have proposed reverse regression as a solution to errors in variables problems in wage discrimination regressions this note demonstrates that the reverse regression approach is biased against finding evidence of discrimination

the effect of court ordered hiring quotas on the composition and quality of police arguably the most aggressive armative action program ever implemented in the united states was a series of court ordered racial hiring quotas imposed on municipal police departments my best estimate of the eect of court ordered armative action on workforce composition is a 14

intrinsic preference for information abstract suppose agents value information not only to make contingent plans but also intrinsically how are such attitudes toward information related to attitudes toward risk we generalize the kreps porteus recursive expected utility model dropping both recursivity and expected utility there is a geometric analogy between risk and information we characterize intrinsic information loving in general by a substitution property analogous to multivariate risk loving and for smooth preferences by the convexity of gateaux derivatives even with recursivity preference for information does not imply expected utility we provide an example we examine connections between information loving and risk aversion for early and late resolving risks journal of economic literatureclassification numbers d80 d81

the impact of employment quotas on the economic lives of disadvantaged minorities in india abstract india has the world s biggest and arguably most aggressive employment based affirmative action policy for minorities this paper exploits the institutional features of a federally mandated employment quota policy to examine its causal impact on the economic lives of the two distinct minority groups scheduled castes and scheduled tribes my main finding is that a 1 percentage point increase in the employment quota for scheduled castes increases the likelihood of obtaining a salaried job by 0 6 percentage points for male scheduled caste members residing in the rural sector the employment quota policy has no impact for scheduled tribes contrary to popular notion i do not find evidence of elite capture among the scheduled castes the impact is concentrated among members who have completed less than secondary education consistent with the employment results i find that the policy improved the well being of scheduled castes members in rural areas who have completed less than secondary education finally the impact of the employment quota policy varies by state characteristics

can the production smoothing model of inventory behavior be saved the production smoothing model of inventory behavior has a long and venerable history and theoretical foundations that seem very strong yet certain overwhelming facts seem not only to defy explanation within the production smoothing framework but actually to argue that the basic idea of production smoothing is all wrong most prominent among these is the fact that the variance of detrended production exceeds the variance of detrended sales this paper first documents the stylized facts then it derives the production smoothing model rigorously and explains how the model can be amended to make it consistent with the facts finally it reviews the theoretical and empirical evidence and tries to draw some tentative conclusions

a new look at the causes of the improved economic status of black workers the wage differential between black and white men fell from 40 percent in 1960 to 25 percent in 1980 it has been argued that this convergence reflects improvements in the relative quality of black schools to test this hypothesis we assembled data on

characterization of the bullwhip effect in linear time invariant supply chains some formulae and tests the authors analyze the bullwhip effect in multistage decentralized supply chains operated with linear and time invariant inventory management policies the focus is on robustness the supply chain is modeled as a single input single output control system driven by arbitrary customer demands the authors derive robust analytical conditions to predict the presence of the bullwhip effect and bound its magnitude based only on the way inventories are managed these results hold independently of the customer demand the authors also characterize the stream of orders placed at any stage of the chain when the customer demand process is known and ergodic and give an exact formula for the variance of the orders placed this formula generalizes existing results by broadening the class of inventory replenishment policies and customer demand processes to which it applies the authors also show that the bullwhip effect can be mitigated by introducing commitments for future orders into the ordering policies

comparable worth wage adjustments and female employment in the state and local sector our paper simulates the likely effects of a comparable worth wage adjustment policy in the state and local sector on female employment in the sector the simulation is based on estimates of within occupation male female substitution and across occupation occupational employment substitution that we obtain using data from the 1980 census of population