the housing market impacts of shale gas development using data from pennsylvania and an array of empirical techniques to control for confounding factors we recover hedonic estimates of property value impacts from nearby shale gas development that vary with water source well productivity and visibility results indicate large negative impacts on nearby groundwater dependent homes while piped water dependent homes exhibit smaller positive impacts suggesting benefits from lease payments results have implications for the debate over regulation of shale gas development jel l71 q35 q53 r31 technological improvements in the extraction of oil and natural gas from unconventional sources have transformed communities and landscapes and brought debate and controversy in the policy arena shale gas plays underlying the populated northeastern united states were thought to be uneconomical less than ten years ago but now contribute a major share of us gas supply 1 natural gas has been hailed as a bridge to energy independence and a clean future because of its domestic sourcing and compared with coal and petroleum derivatives its smaller carbon footprint and reduced emissions of other pollutants e g particulates sulfur dioxide car

the empirical content of the roy model this paper clarifies and extends the classical roy model of self selection and earnings inequality the original roy model based on the assumption that log skills are normally distributed is shown to imply that pursuit of comparative advantage in a free market reduces earnings inequality compared to the earnings distribution that would result if workers were randomly assigned to sectors aggregate log earnings are right skewed even if one sectoral distribution is left skewed most major implications of the log normal roy model survive if differences in skills are log concave however few implications of the model survive if skills are generated from more general distributions we consider the identifiability of the roy model from data on earnings distributions the normal theory version is identifiable without regressors or exclusion restrictions sectoral distributions can be identified knowing only the aggregate earnings distribution for general skill distributions the model is not identified and has no empirical content with sufficient price variation the model can be identified from multimarket data cross sectional variation in regressors can substitute for price variation in restoring empirical content to the roy model

market heterogeneity and the determinants of paris apartment prices a quantile regression approach in this paper the heterogeneity of the paris apartment market is addressed for this purpose quantile regression is applied with market segmentation based on price deciles and the hedonic pri

is there a glass ceiling in sweden using 1998 data we show that the gender log wage gap in sweden increases throughout the wage distribution and accelerates in the upper tail we interpret this as a strong glass ceiling effect we use quantile regression decompositions to examine whether this pattern can be ascribed primarily to gender differences in labor market characteristics or in the rewards to those characteristics even after extensive controls for gender differences in age education both level and field sector industry and occupation we find that the glass ceiling effect we see in the raw data persists to a considerable extent

the part time premium enigma an assessment of the chilean case proquest denotes formulae omitted working part time has been seen by some researchers public policy advisers and politicians as a way for women to find a balance between home and paid work gregory and connolly 2008 bardasi and gornick 2008 however there is no agreement on the optimal balance indeed there are contrasting views on the subject those in favor suggest that in the absence of part time jobs female labor force participation would be substantially lower sundstrom 1991 dekker 2008 according to this belief women confronted with the choice between working full time and not working at all would opt for the latter on the other hand detractors in european countries assert that part time jobs imply a waste of resources and of investments in human capital since the many part time working women who are highly educated generally make a downward occupational move when they switch from full time to part time work gregory and connolly 2008 manning and petrongolo 2008 furthermore part time jobs have adverse repercussions for the economic well being of part time working women given that public social welfare benefits wage increases and professional development might be scarce for these women leiva 2000 warren 2008 fernandez kranz and others 2011 fernandez kranz and rodriguez planas 2011 in addition in mem ber countries of the organization for economic cooperation and develop ment oecd hourly earnings are lower manning and petrongolo 2008 and employer provided training less common gregory and connolly 2008 connolly and gregory 2009 in part time jobs than in full time jobs further more in those countries though the hourly earnings gap between women and men in full time work has been narrowing the same is not the case for female part time workers and males in full time jobs manning and petrongolo 2008 part time work among women after the birth of their first child is currently responsible for some of the pay gap between men and women kanji 2011 chile s rate of female labor force participation is one of the lowest in latin american countries cepal un eclac 2011 despite female educational attainment that is similar to or higher than that of other latin american countries carrillo gandelman and robano 2013 to increase female labor force partici pation the chilean government is promoting part time and home based work for women although part time work is not as extensive as in other countries the proportion of chilean women working part time has tripled in the past ten years and part time workers now represent more than 20 percent of the female work force national socio economic characterization survey casen 2009 contreras puentes and bravo 2005 show that in chile the female labor force participation rate is positively correlated with education it is not appar ent why female labor force participation is so low discrimination in the labor market or more generally the existent gender wage gap favorable to males nopo 2012 carrillo gandelman and robano 2013 might partially explain the low female participation rate as might cultural factors contreras and plaza 2010 find that women who have internalized machista values are less likely to participate in the labor market despite concerns of endogeneity owing to data limitations contreras and plaza 2010 find a negative rela tionship between female labor force participation and conservative values puentes and ruiz tagle 2011 using the voz de mujer survey analyze the same phenomenon while controlling for possible endogenous relationships 1 they find that cultural factors are not endogenously determined by a woman s labor participation decision on the contrary it seems that whether women work has little effect on cultural factors in the short term according to their study values develop in early childhood rather than during a woman s work ing life interestingly the same 2002 survey that contreras and plaza 2010 used was reapplied by the centro de estudios publicos and released in april 2012

a test for subadditivity of the cost function with an application to the bell system stable url http links jstor org sici sici 0002 8282 28198409 2974 3a4 3c615 3aatfsot 3e2 0 co 3b2 rthe american economic review is currently published by american economic association your use of the jstor archive indicates your acceptance of jstor s terms and conditions of use available athttp www jstor org about terms html jstor s terms and conditions of use provides in part that unless you have obtainedprior permission you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles and you may use content inthe jstor archive only for your personal non commercial use please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work publisher contact information may be obtained athttp www jstor org journals aea html each copy of any part of a jstor transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission the jstor archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long term preservation and access to leading academicjournals and scholarly literature from around the world the archive is supported by libraries scholarly societies publishers and foundations it is an initiative of jstor a not for profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community takeadvantage of advances in technology for more information regarding jstor please contact support jstor org http www jstor orgmon jul 2 16 52 19 2007

can multinational enterprises light up developing countries evidences from the access to electricity in sub saharan africa summary this paper examines the role that multinational enterprises mnes and foreign direct investments fdi can have in enhancing the access to electricity for local communities in developing countries based on the quality of home and host institutions access to electricity is a marker for development but it is far from being universal in developing countries the shortage of electricity is mainly the consequence of inability of governments in planning financing and developing necessary electricity infrastructure in this context investments from other actors can be essential particularly we focus on the role of fdi and mnes we claim that when mnes invest in developing countries they are incentivized to solve the lack of electricity infrastructure mainly for two reasons to guarantee their business activities and to gain legitimacy with their local stakeholders in addition we argue that mnes and fdi from institutionally underdeveloped countries will be more prone to develop infrastructure for the provision of electricity to local population as generally they suffer from a negative stereotype for this study we rely on 1 547 observations composed of pairs of 83 home countries and 15 host countries in sub saharan africa observed from 2005 to 2011 due to the nature of the database we adopt panel data techniques i e system gmm and corrected least square dummy variable estimators we find that fdi promotes access to electricity in developing countries with weak institutions and this is more likely true when fdi come from institutionally underdeveloped countries these results are far from obvious as they controvert common idea among institutional scholars that a regulatory authority is essential in the provision of infrastructure in conclusion with this paper we partially rehabilitate the image of mnes investing in developing countries by demonstrating that under certain conditions they could contribute to energy poverty alleviation of local population

is corporate aid targeted to poor and deserving countries a case study of nestle s aid allocation summary empirical evidence on the targeting of private aid is largely lacking even though corporate donors are an increasingly important source of aid we contribute to closing this gap by performing a case study of nestle the allocation of nestle s aid is compared to that of swiss oda and ngo aid testing for both altruistic and selfish aid motivations we conclude that nestle s aid clearly lacks focus in terms of targeting poor countries which appears to be the downside of the strong link between commercial presence and aid moreover according to our tobit estimations nestle grants more aid to recipient countries with stronger democratic but also more corrupt institutions

corporate led sustainable development and energy poverty alleviation at the bottom of the pyramid the case of the cleancook in nigeria summary corporations are increasingly viewed as key actors in poverty alleviation bottom of the pyramid bop advocates suggest that multinational corporations mncs can simultaneously alleviate poverty and make profits by selling scaled down products to the poor our paper investigates this claim using the case of the cleancook stove and fuel technology introduced in nigeria by an mnc working through a nonprofit organization and local business actors supply and demand side analyses show that the cleancook is least likely to reach the energy poor bop households originally targeted the evidence suggests that serving the bop requires greater differentiation than can be achieved with profit driven business models

counterfactual decomposition of changes in wage distributions using quantile regression we propose a method to decompose the changes in the wage distribution over a period of time in several factors contributing to those changes the method is based on the estimation of marginal wage distributions consistent with a conditional distribution estimated by quantile regression as well as with any hypothesized distribution for the covariates comparing the marginal distributions implied by different distributions for the covariates one is then able to perform counterfactual exercises the proposed methodology enables the identification of the sources of the increased wage inequality observed in most countries specifically it decomposes the changes in the wage distribution over a period of time into several factors contributing to those changes namely by discriminating between changes in the characteristics of the working population and changes in the returns to these characteristics we apply this methodology to portuguese data for the period 1986 1995 and find that the observed increase in educational levels contributed decisively towards greater wage inequality copyright 2005 john wiley sons ltd

exploring spatial dynamics with land price indexes the purpose of this study is to explore the within region spatial dynamics of appreciation and depreciation rates using three different representations of geographical space mean value indexing methods are used to construct global land price indexes sub market land price indexes and local land price indexes using transaction price data for vacant residential land within the city of hamilton ontario between 1995 and 2003 the results are validated against statistics canada s series of new housing price indexes followed by a comparison of the relative performance of the three geographical representations of land price indexes the results indicate that the mean value indexing methods are robust although subject to outliers and sample selection bias and clearly illustrate the spatial dynamics of annual appreciation and depreciation rates across the study area the results also underscore the need for regular surveillance of the spatial dynamics of urban land markets

quantile selection models with an application to understanding changes in wage inequality we propose a method to correct for sample selection in quantile regression models selection is modeled via the cumulative distribution function or copula of the percentile error in the outcome equation and the error in the participation decision copula parameters are estimated by minimizing a method of moments criterion given these parameter estimates the percentile levels of the outcome are readjusted to correct for selection and quantile parameters are estimated by minimizing a rotated check function we apply the method to correct wage percentiles for selection into employment using data for the uk for the period 1978 2000 we also extend the method to account for the presence of equilibrium effects when performing counterfactual exercises

divergence in alternative hicksian welfare measures the case of revealed preference for public amenities this paper investigates the divergence between the two hicksian welfare measures of non traded amenity improvement associated with housing first the hicksian surplus measures for amenity changes are analytically developed based on explicit specification of utility structures a hedonic two stage approach is then applied to empirically show that for quantity changes in contrast to hypothetical markets divergence in real market is small the paper also analytically develops expressions for the income and substitution effects and empirically shows that for a given income effect the greater the substitution effect the smaller the divergence between the two measures copyright 2002 john wiley sons ltd

poverty alleviation as business strategy evaluating commitments of frontrunner multinational corporations summary in the debate on how to combat poverty the positive role of mncs is frequently mentioned nowadays although doubts and criticism remain facing this societal debate mncs feel the pressure to formulate a position this paper analyzes mncs policies on their poverty alleviating potential frontrunner mncs turn out not to be very outspoken especially not on those issues that have the largest potential to help alleviate poverty placed in the context of other mncs behavior a sector coordinated morality seems important which means that a meso approach to poverty alleviation needs to complement the current global macro and individual company micro focus

filtering city change and the supply of low priced housing in canada this paper examines the filtering process and shows the extent of the forces that are gentrifying canadian cities the 1996 census micro data are used to develop rent and price age profiles of dwe

the estimation of demand parameters in hedonic price models this paper shows that the econometric problem of estimating hedonic demand parameters is not a standard identification problem caused by demand supply interaction as has been often assumed estimation procedures based on this assumption lead to biased results the hedonic estimation problem is instead caused by the endogeneity of both prices and quantities when households face a nonlinear budget constraint an instrumental variables solution to this problem is suggested using instruments that exogenously shift the budget constraint

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

multinationality and corporate ethics codes of conduct in the sporting goods industry the international operations of firms have substantial impact on the formulation and implementation of business ethical principles such as codes of conduct the international sporting goods industry has been a pioneer in setting up codes and thus provides much relevant experience different sourcing strategies degrees of multinationality and national backgrounds affect the contents of codes moreover international non governmental organizations prove equally effective in triggering sophisticated codes

applying quantile regression and shapley decomposition to analyzing the determinants of household embedded carbon emissions evidence from urban china abstract as co2 emissions differ in households with different characteristics mitigation policies still address the contributions of these characteristics and their effects on specific households using a representative resident survey in urban china this paper compares how household characteristics differ in their associations with household embedded carbon emissions heces at different levels by quantile regression then this paper analyzes the contributions of these characteristics by shapley decomposition the findings include the following i household income is the most important contributor to the difference of heces and its positive effect increases as heces rise ii the use of wealth has different effects on heces because household housing ownership and deposits contribute little to heces but the positive effects of household car ownership contribute 25 8 iii young people and children will emit more heces than adults the employed emit more than persons who are unemployed or retired iv education increases heces overall but mainly at the low quantiles the negative effect of the marriage increases as heces rise v income car ownership marital status size and constitution of households with high heces should be addressed to reduce the inequality of heces indeed education on the low carbon concept is another way forward

oil extraction and poverty reduction in the niger delta a critical examination of partnership initiatives the combination of corporate community conflicts and oil transnational corporations tncs rhetoric about being socially responsible has meant that the issue of community development and poverty reduction have recently moved from the periphery to the heart of strategic business thinking within the nigerian oil industry as a result oil tncs have increasingly responded to this challenge by adopting partnership strategies as a means to contribute to poverty reductions in their host communities as well as secure their social licence to operate this paper critically examines the strengths and weaknesses of the different community development partnership cdps initiatives employed by shell exxon mobil and total to contribute to poverty reduction within their host communities in the niger delta nigeria drawing on empirical data and critical analysis the paper argues that while the cdp initiatives by spdc mpn and epnl have the potential to contribute to community development the failure to integrate negative injunction duties into existing partnerships means that the partnerships make no difference to how oil tncs conduct their core business operation consequently cdps have had limited positive impact on poverty reduction in the niger delta the paper concludes by examining the implications of the emerging issues for partnership and poverty reduction

housing submarkets and the lattice of substitution this paper aims to stimulate interest in the early micro economic conceptualisation of housing submarkets proposed by rapkin and grigsby which defined market areas in terms of dwelling substitutability three key questions need to be addressed if a return to the rapkin grigsby approach is to be achievable and worthwhile first what are the practical benefits the paper highlights a range of potential research applications that would benefit from the substitutability approach secondly in what way are existing approaches likely to be inadequate for demarcating substitutability based submarkets four criteria are proposed for assessing submarket estimation methods which existing approaches fail to satisfy thirdly what are the prospects for developing a substitutability metric that will make the rapkin grigsby definition empirically feasible a new measure is proposed based on the cross price elasticity of price cpep which is illustrated using data for glasgow scotland

foreign direct investment and income inequality further evidence abstract this paper examines the relationship between foreign direct investment fdi and income inequality special attention has been paid to data comparability and model specification by comparing models with and without geographical dummies this study shows that the statistically significant correlation between fdi and income inequality widely obtained in earlier studies might capture more of the geographical difference in inequality than the deleterious influence of fdi and to the extent that fdi does give rise to more unequal income distribution in the host less developed countries ldcs only east southeast asia ldcs appear to have been harmed by the inflow of fdi during the 1970s it should be noted however that the second result refers only to the marginal impact not the total impact apart from fdi our empirical evidence suggests that the level of economic development the direct role of government and to a smaller degree the significance of the agriculture sector in an ldc are crucial determinants of income inequality

identifying hedonic models economic models for hedonic markets characterize the pricing of bundles of attributes and the demand and supply of these attributes under different assumptions about market structure preferences and technology see jan tinbergen 1956 sherwin rosen 1974 and dennis epple 1987 for contributions to this literature while the theory is well formulated and delivers some elegant analytical results the empirical content of the model is under debate it is widely believed that hedonic models fit in a single market are fundamentally underidentified and that any empirical content obtained from them is a consequence of arbitrary functional form assumptions the problem of identification in hedonic models is a prototype for the identification problem in a variety of economic models in which agents sort on unobservable to the economist characteristics models of monopoly pricing michael mussa and sherwin rosen 1978 robert wilson 1993 and models for taxes and labor supply james heckman 1974 sorting is an essential feature of econometric models of social interactions see william brock and steven durlauf 2001 in this paper we address the sorting problem in hedonic models nesheim 2001 extends this analysis to a model with peer effects in this paper we note that commonly used linearization strategies made to simplify estimation and justify the application of instrumental variables methods produce identification problems the hedonic model is generically nonlinear it is the linearization of a fundamentally nonlinear model that produces the form of the identification problem that dominates discussion in the applied literature linearity is an arbitrary and misleading functional form when applied to empirical hedonic models our research establishes that even though sorting equilibrium in a single market implies no exclusion restrictions the hedonic model is generically nonparametrically identified instrumental variables and transformation model methods identify economically relevant parameters even 1 without exclusion restrictions multimarket data widely viewed as the most powerful source of identification achieves this result only under implausible assumptions about why hedonic functions vary across markets

modelling cost structure the bell system revisited this paper analyses a recent public policy decision and the crucial role played by the choice of the functional form the break up of the bell system is indeed a classic case of anti trust settlement and constitutes one of the most prominent and controversial applications of microeconomics to public policy it is argued that demanding multi output cost properties such as economies of scope for this is the considerable robustness problem displayed by the tranlog cost functional form the reason for this is the considerable able to robustness problem displayed by the translog cost function which is the source underlying many of the expert disagreements it is suggested that the non robustness is due to what ils termed the flip flop property and it is shown that the available empirical evidence from the pre divestiture bell system supports this argument to obtain robust results we propose that the analysis is constrained to the proper region of the cost function we propose that the analysis is con

semiparametric estimation of selection models some empirical results among the central theoretical developments in the econometric analysis of nonexperimental microeconomic data has been the analysis of selectivity bias following the work of james heckman 1974 statistical techniques were developed in the 1970s to consistently estimate the parameters of these models one potential drawback to the application of these techniques is their sensitivity to the assumed parametric distribution of the unobservable error terms in the model in recent years a number of estimation methods for selection models have been developed which do not impose parametric forms on error distributions these methods are termed semiparametric since only part of the model of interest the regression function is parametrically specified while the statistical theory of these semiparametric estimators has received much attention practical applications of the methods are lacking an exception being the paper by joel horowitz and george neumann 1987 in this paper we use semiparametric methods to reanalyze data on the labor supply of married women first studied by thomas mroz 1987 using parametric methods the object of this reanalysis is to determine whether mroz s results are sensitive to his parametric assumptions

unequal pay or unequal employment a cross country analysis of gender gaps we analyze gender wage gaps correcting for sample selection induced by nonemployment we recover wages for the nonemployed using alternative imputation techniques simply requiring assumptions on the position of imputed wages with respect to the median we obtain higher median wage gaps on imputed rather than actual wage distributions for several oecd countries however this difference is small in the united states the united kingdom and most central and northern eu countries and becomes sizable in southern eu countries where gender employment gaps are high selection correction explains nearly half of the observed negative correlation between wage and employment gaps

estimating british workers demand for safety this paper estimates workers demand function for job safety using the british general household survey data the estimation employs rosen s two stage procedure the main difference between our study and those done in the past is that we estimate hedonic price equations with data sets from two labour markets our approach overcomes the usual identification problems associated with the application of rosen s method the estimation shows that there is a significant wage compensation for job risk in the uk the willingness to pay for a 1 100 000 decrease of annual job fatal accident rate from our estimated workers demand function is about 6 in 1973 prices the estimation of a demand function for safety also enables the derivation of workers willingness to pay for non marginal change of job risk and this can be used for cost benefit analysis on projects involving such non marginal changes

the informal sector wage gap new evidence using quantile estimations on panel data abstractwe estimate the informal formal sector pay gap throughout the conditional wage distribution using panel data from brazil mexico and south africa we control for time invariant unobservables and identification stems from intersector movers we control for observables in a nonlinear way using propensity score reweighting and carefully check for potential measurement errors using similar definitions of informality we obtain consistent results for all three countries informally employed workers earn much less than formal workers primarily because of lower observable and unobservable skills estimates of the conditional wage gap show that they are also underpaid compared to their formal sector counterparts in all three countries the informal wage penalty is larger in the lower part of the conditional distribution and tends to disappear at the top i e the informal sector increases wage dispersion the magnitudes of these effects vary across countries with the largest penalties in lower cond

schools and housing markets an examination of school segregation and performance in connecticut this paper estimates a dynamic model of price level school performance and school racial and ethnic composition in the state of connecticut the paper finds that increasing minority representation in a labor market area reinforces the existing pattern of school segregation changes in segregation appear to be influenced by demographic trends in urban areas and by the labour market factors that determine those trends there is no evidence however to suggest that this process affects housing prices rather the housing market appears to adjust relatively quickly

which hedonic models can we trust to recover the marginal willingness to pay for environmental amenities abstract the hedonic property value model is among our foremost tools for evaluating the economic consequences of policies that target the supply of local public goods environmental services and urban amenities we design a theoretically consistent and empirically realistic monte carlo study of whether omitted variables seriously undermine the method s ability to accurately identify economic values our results suggest that large gains in accuracy can be realized by moving from the standard linear specifications for the price function to a more flexible framework that uses a combination of spatial fixed effects quasi experimental identification and temporal controls for housing market adjustment

human capital discrimination and the gender wage gap in bangladesh summary this paper investigates changes in the gender wage gap in bangladesh over the period 1999 2009 the gap in average wages between men and women decreased by 31 over this period this paper shows that a key driver of this change was an improvement in female educational qualifications it also demonstrates that the gender wage gap across the wage distribution narrowed much more at the lower end of the wage distribution than at the upper end it attributes this mainly to a decline in discrimination against women implications for policies aimed at more equal access to education and enforcement of equal pay legislation in bangladesh are also identified

the welfare economics of land use planning abstract this paper presents an empirical methodology for the evaluation of the benefits and costs of land use planning the technique is applied in the context of the town and country planning system of the uk and examines the gross and net benefits of land use regulation and their distribution across income groups the results show that the welfare and distributional impacts can be large

estimating the returns to education in argentina using quantile regression analysis 1992 2002 espanoluna gran cantidad de estudios ha intentando estimar el retorno promedio a educarse examinando el efecto que tiene un ano adicional de educacion sobre la esperanza condicional de salarios trabajos internacionales recientes sugieren que en varios paises incrementos en los anos de educacion pueden resultar en cualquier efecto sobre la distribucion condicional de salarios y no solo el de incrementar la media es por esto que este trabajo examina dicho fenomeno para el caso de argentina a lo largo de un periodo de diez anos se estiman los retornos a educarse en diferentes partes de la distribucion condicional de salarios utilizando el metodo de regresion por cuantiles se analiza la posible existencia de retornos heterogeneos individuales y se encuentra que a lo largo del tiempo mientras los hombres tienen retornos educativos mayores cuanto mas arriba se encuentren en la distribucion las mujeres que experimentan los mayores retornos estan ubicadas en los cuantiles mas bajos obteniendo mayores beneficios por educarse estos resultados tienen implicancias potenciales para la expansion de las oportunidades educativas en argentina englishthere are countless estimates of the average returns to education which looks at the effect of an additional year of schooling on the conditional mean distribution of salaries recent international works suggest that there are variations from the average return to education across the population that is why in this paper we examine this possibility for the case of argentina over a ten year period we estimate returns to schooling at different quantiles of the conditional distribution of wages using quantile regression method we test whether there is individual heterogeneity in returns to education and find that over time while males have higher returns to schooling at the higher quantile women s returns are highest at the lowest quantile the evidence is suggesting that while lower ability women may benefit more from schooling the reverse is true for men our findings have potential implications for the expansion of educational opportunities in argentina

gender wage inequality during sri lanka s post reform growth a distributional analysis abstract this paper investigates gender wage inequality in sri lanka during 1992 2014 a period of robust economic growth following pro market reforms the gap in mean wages between men and women decreased steadily over this period unconditional quantile regression reveals the decline in gender wage inequality was driven by the upper half of the distribution and was due to improvements in women s observable human capital yet the pay structure became more unequal indicating widening gender gaps in the returns to labor market characteristics and in unobservable determinants of wages the gender gap in pay structure widened disproportionately in the lower half of the distribution coinciding with falling absolute and relative returns to women in manufacturing industries and production occupations facing greater international competition the study also demonstrates selection bias underestimates the gender wage gap and overestimates the gains in equality over time factors that hinder gender equality in the labor market are discussed along with policy implications

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

a hedonic approach to residential succession a model of neighborhood turnover drawn from bond and coulson 1989 is proposed the type of turnover process that is obtained is shown to depend mainly on the hedonic bid functions for housing and neighborhood quality a demand system of four hedonic attributes is estimated the main results are that the traditional model of filtering by age of unit does not occur and that filtering by housing size does tipping due to changes in median neighborhood income is also quite possible tipping through changes in racial composition appears less likely copyright 1990 by mit press

the dynamics of intraurban quantile house price indexes estimating price indexes for different quantiles shows how prices vary for homes that are in different stages of the filtering process the paper describes a filtering model and its implication for the dynamic interaction of housing prices at these various stages a time series analysis of quantile price indexes for three municipalities near chicago supports the predictions of the filtering model

new estimates of climate demand evidence from location choice abstract we develop and apply to census data a new method for estimating climate demand the method is useful for ranking quality of life based upon a willingness to pay criterion our two major findings are that the willingness to pay quality of life index is correlated with the hedonic approach s ranking but that the migration approach generates much larger estimates of willingness to pay for a more moderate climate this finding is relevant for evaluating the economic impact of global warming

the value of school in urban china a spatial quantile regression with housing transactions in beijing this study adopts microdata of individual housing transactions in beijing to explore the value that households place on high quality schools it is among the first to match exactly the housing unit

earnings distribution of cuban immigrants in the usa evidence from quantile regression with sample selection abstractthis article analyses the conditional earnings distribution for cuban immigrants in the usa considering buchinsky sample selection in a quantile regression model the test proposed by huber and melly to test the independence between error terms and regressors conditional on the selection probability is also considered this is the first attempt in the migration literature to use quantile regression with sample selection the data used come from the us american community survey the results show that the hypothesis of conditional independence is not rejected and increments in earnings associated with the usual socioeconomic characteristics in labour studies vary between the cohorts considered the main conclusions are that a decline in returns from education may be a sign that a high level of education no longer provides a competitive advantage and that being a black person is associated with substantially lower earnings regardless of the individuals position in the earnings distribution this

parametric and semiparametric estimation of sample selection models an empirical application to the female labour force in portugal this paper applies both parametric and semiparametric methods to the estimation of wage and participation equations for married women in portugal the semiparametric estimators considered are the two stage estimators proposed by newey 1991 and andrews and schafgans 1998 the selection equation results are compared using the specification tests proposed by horowitz 1993 horowitz and hardle 1994 and the wage equation results are compared using a hausman test significant differences between the two approaches indicate the inappropriateness of the standard parametric methods to the estimation of the model and for the purpose of policy simulations the greater departure seems to occur in the range of the low values of the index corresponding to a specific group of women copyright 2001 john wiley sons ltd

estimating the demand for the characteristics of housing a hstract estimates of the demand for the characteristics contained in a differentiated product such as housing can be based on hedonic regressions however previous studies have not dealt with several potential problems in such estimation a more appropriate framework for the estimation is provided in this paper also data from a number of cities are used to eliminate the identification problem and the endogeneity of the marginal prices derived from non linear hedonic equations is considered in the estimation the results on own and cross price elasticities expenditure elasticities and the effects of socio economic vafiables accord well with expectations

district house price movements in england and wales 1997 2007 an exploratory spatial data analysis approach using exploratory spatial data analysis and house price data from local authority districts in england and wales this article considers whether a regional ripple effect can be tracked at the district level although spatial house price variation has been explored at a sub regional level this is possibly the first paper to attempt to track house price spillover between districts on a national basis high and low growth clusters of areas are traced it is concluded that spatial spillover of house price growth is unlikely to be based on interlocked markets bonded by commuting or migration alone information flows and expectations are likely to reinforce interdistrict transmission specifically house price spillover north of the east midlands appears much more rapid than would be consistent with a ripple suggesting that there is some support for undertaking british housing market analysis on a spatially segmented basis even at a regional level

on the choice of functional form for hedonic price functions the empirical results presented in this paper demonstrate the usefulness of quadriatic models in the estimation of hedonic price functions we propose a quadriatic semi log model a restricted case of the quadriatic box cox model whose standardized marginal attribute prices are linear functions of the attribute vector this specification outperforms the linear box cox specification in terms of explanatory power and captures much of the increase in explanatory power provided by the quadriatic box cox model without the corresponding loss in the ability to interpret the coefficient estimates for policy applications the quadriatic semi log model provides a useful alternative to linear specification

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

unnatural monopolies in local telephone we attempt to overcome the serious data problems of past telecommunications cost studies by focusing on local exchange carriers lecs with enough degrees offreedom to yield precise estimates our global subadditivity tests show that the cost function is definitely not subadditive the results suggest that the benefits to breaking up the monopoly outputs of existing lecs substantially outweigh the potential losses in efficiency they also support permitting entry and increasing competition in local exchange markets furthermore given the competitive nature of long distance service it is doubtful that the predivestiture bell system was a natural monopoly

does school quality matter returns to education and the characteristics of public schools in the united states this paper estimates the effects of school quality measured by the pupil teacher ratio average term length and relative teacher pay on the rate of return to education for men born between 1920 and 1949 using earnings data from the 1980 census we find that men who were educated in states with higher quality schools have a higher return to additional years of schooling rates of return are also higher for individuals from states with better educated teachers and with a higher fraction of female teachers holding constant school quality measures however we find no evidence that parental income or education affects average state level rates of return

choice among wage hours packages an empirical investigation of male labor supply this article specifies and estimates an empirical model of male labor supply based on an implicit market model of wage hours determination we discuss how moving from a standard labor supply model to an implicit market model affects model specification and choice of estimation technique we find that average hourly earnings are not independent of hours worked and that ols estimates of the wage hours relationship are biased we also show that a labor supply model that assumes wages to be independent of hours worked produces a positively biased estimate of the effect of the wage on labor supply

pensions and wage premia i introduction despite the widespread acceptance of the theory of compensating differences empirical efforts to estimate the magnitude of these differences have met with only mixed success 1 with the exception of fatal risks economists have not been able to consistently find a significant relationship between wages and other job characteristics the failure to find consistent evidence on compensating differentials has been attributed to either poor measures of non wage characteristics or inadequate controls for worker productivity 2 studies by gunderson hyatt and pesando 1992 montgomery shaw and benedict 1992 and moore 1987 which have been able to explicitly address these issues have had greater success in finding significant compensating differentials in this paper we focus on an alternative explanation for the variation in estimated compensating differentials that the magnitude of the compensating differential varies systematically across different sectors in the labor market the theory of compensating differentials predicts that the implicit price or cost of providing a job attribute such as pensions will be a function of firm or industry technological differences and that the value attached to that attribute will also vary across workers depending on their tastes if workers and firms are not randomly assigned to sectors this will lead to systematic variations in the size of the estimated compensating differential across sectors or markets the result of this variation is that studies using different subsamples of the labor force will yield very different estimates of the size of the compensating differential the few studies that have addressed sources of heterogeneity in compensating differentials have concentrated on testing for individual differences in tastes for risk 3 in contrast our emphasis is on firm side differences in technologies or market power we estimate the compensating differential between annual pension accruals and wage rates and let this tradeoff vary by firm size and union status with corrections for selectivity bias the implicit cost of pensions and hence the size of the compensating differential may vary by finn size or union status for a number of reasons greater ability to spread fixed administrative costs across a large work force more difficulty monitoring worker effort or the presence of market power thus the cost of fringe benefits to the firm may be lower in large or unionized firms than in small nonunion firms we find empirical evidence supporting this view the estimated wage pension compensating differentials are smaller in unionized and large firms than in small nonunion firms the results from this paper are significant for several reasons 1 they provide evidence that compensating differentials vary across markets this evidence could account for some of the differences in estimates of tradeoffs across studies that have used different nonrandom samples 4 more importantly these sectoral differences serve as a reminder that the labor market is in fact a multitude of markets and that technological differences that vary across markets should be considered when addressing issues ranging from estimating the returns to human capital investment to the impact of the minimum wage 5 2 these results also deepen our knowledge of the relationship between pensions and wages a relationship that has important implications for the shape of workers wage earnings profiles or for the mechanisms for motivating workers and for the returns to human capital and for the distribution of income regarding the latter pensions are a large component of compensation and work by even and macpherson 1990 mccarthy and turner 1983 and moore 1987 suggests that coverage rates and returns are smaller for women and blacks our analysis suggests that an element of the differences could be sectoral choices

an empirical analysis of the demand for housing attributes in a third world city this paper presents estimates of the demand for a set of housing attributes using data drawn from the renter and owner occupier housing submarkets for ibadan nigeria the empirical analysis based on an adaptation of rosen s two step model reveals that the most important determinants of the demand for housing attributes are income price of the attribute in question household size and the occupational status of the head of household the paper further indicates that the demand for housing attributes is inelastic since all estimated coefficients are below unity

double penalty in returns to education informality and educational mismatch in the colombian labour market abstractthis article examines the returns to education taking into consideration the existence of educational mismatches in the formal and informal employment of a developing country results show that the returns of surplus required and deficit years of schooling are different in the two sectors moreover they suggest that these returns vary along the wage distribution and that the pattern of variation differs for formal and informal workers in particular informal workers face not only lower returns to their education but suffer a second penalty associated with educational mismatches that puts them at a greater disadvantage compare to their formal counterparts

changes in wage structure in urban india 1983 2004 a quantile regression decomposition summary this paper utilizes individual level earnings data from urban india to examine the evolution of wages during 1983 2004 across the entire wage distribution quantile regression analysis reveals that the effects of many covariates are not constant across distribution returns to secondary and tertiary education not only increased in the 1990s but also became more heterogeneous suggesting wage inequality may increase further in near future as more workers get higher education moreover the quantile regression decomposition suggests that the increase in returns has been the driving force behind the increase in wages in both the 1980s and 1990s

simultaneity in the market for housing characteristics abstract the nature of simultaneity in the markets for housing characteristics is examined simultaneity is found to arise in the implicit markets for individual characteristics because of the presence of nonlinearity in the market hedonic price function for housing however this simultaneity is not the kind discussed by s rosen j political econ 82 34 55 1974 between firm supplies and household demands as a result the rosen suggestion of identifying demand with firm supply shifters is inappropriate among the alternative approaches to identification the most desirable involve use of data over two or more markets in which residence for a given household is exogenous to the choice of housing

the dynamics of changes in the female wage distribution in the usa a quantile regression approach this paper examines the female wage structure focusing on changes at different points in the wage distribution newly developed quantile regression methods are used in analysing data from the march current population survey the results show that while the most significant changes for the less skilled women took place at the bottom of the wage distribution for the more skilled groups changes occurred at both ends of the distribution consequently wage inequality decreased for the high school graduates and increased for the younger college graduates furthermore the more highly skilled women experienced the steepest gain in wages regardless of their position in the distribution 1998 john wiley sons ltd

public private sector wage gap by gender in egypt evidence from quantile regression on panel data 1998 2018 abstract this paper estimates the public formal private wage gap in egypt using egypt labor market panel survey for the 20 year period of 1998 2018 for men and women separately we estimate the public formal private sector wage gap with wage equations including a public sector indicator both at the mean and at different quantiles of the conditional wage distribution using the panel feature of the data we also address the endogenous employment and the sector of employment selection issue and find a persistent public wage penalty for the males and public wage premium for the females except at the top even after controlling for the observable and the time invariant unobservable characteristics we further examine the public wage gap over time and in different sub samples by potential experience skill levels and regions generally the results are consistent with a decrease in the public wage gap for both men and women over the period considered we further provide evidence on the quality of workers we find that the public sector fails to attract better quality men throughout the conditional wage distribution while it manages to attract better quality women in the lower parts of the conditional wage distribution but not at the top all on the basis of time invariant unobservable attributes these results indicate concern for the efficient provision of public services

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

estimating housing demand with an application to explaining racial segregation in cities we present a three stage nonparametric estimation procedure to recover willingness to pay for housing attributes in the first stage we estimate a nonparametric hedonic home price function in the second stage we recover each consumer s taste parameters for product characteristics using first order conditions for utility maximization finally in the third stage we estimate the distribution of household tastes as a function of household demographics as an application of our methods we compare alternative explanations for why blacks choose to live in center cities while whites suburbanize

foreign investment and ethics how to contribute to social responsibility by doing business in less developed countries do foreign direct investment fdi and international business ventures promote positive social and economic development in emerging nations this question will always prove contentious first the impacts differ according to context second the social consequences and spillover effects of knowledge diffusion and technology sharing may be limited and hard to measure third contributions to enhancing social responsibility and improving living standards in host countries are delayed in effect causally complex and also hard to measure outcomes often critically depend on collaboration of governments international institutions the business world and non governmental organizations ngos research in this area is challenging and requires interdisciplinary collaboration between economists financial experts sociologists ethicists and other specialists this paper explores 1 the evidence to support the proposition that fdi and international business improve social conditions in less developed countries and 2 how these improvements are linked to strategies of corporate social responsibility csr and ethical business practice the paper draws insights from development fdi poverty alleviation and bottom of the pyramid bop literature applications are demonstrated using examples from poverty stricken areas of sub saharan africa the paper attempts not only to argue theoretically but also to provide practical evidence the approach is simultaneously descriptive analytical and prescriptive in order to address a wide audience it also highlights issues and trends for further academic research and presents the viewpoint that some limitations lie in the nature of ethics frameworks widely referenced in business and that these often fail to consider the compatibility of ethical constructs with relevant incentives in this vein we explore the application of homann s framework for advantage and incentive based ethics

down from the mountain skill upgrading and wages in appalachia the appalachian region has experienced persistently higher poverty and lower earnings than the rest of the united states we examine whether skill differentials or differences in the returns to those skills lie at the root of the appalachian wage gap using census data we decompose the appalachian wage gap using both mean and full distribution methods our findings suggest that significant upgrading of skills within the region has prevented the gap from widening over the last 20 years additionally we find that urban areas within appalachia have not experienced the rise in returns to skills as in non appalachian urban areas

micro economic determinants of tourist expenditure a quantile regression approach abstract we assess the effect of the main determinants of tourist expenditure by applying both linear and quantile regression models to individual micro data collected by a survey addressed to non resident tourists who spent their holidays in sardinia during the period april october 2012 we find that in addition to income and foreign nationality tourist expenditure is crucially driven by trip related party size stay length accommodation sea and sun typology and transport modality and psychographic characteristics repeated visits and holiday motivations moreover our results indicate that the effects vary with respect to the expenditure component and the level of spending thus confirming the high complexity of the tourism product higher positive effects were found for heavy spenders in the case of foreign nationality previous visits and notoriety motivated holidays while party size and the number of visited sites contribute to reducing the level of expenditure for light spending tourists

decomposing technical change within the conventional neoclassical framework a distinction is sometimes made between productaugmenting and factor augmenting technical change a parallel distinction is commonly made between embodied and disembodied technical change with the former associated with factor and the latter with product augmentation disembodied change is commonly assumed to arise from increases in the stock of knowledge independently of the characteristics of the inputs used while embodied change relates to increases in the efficiency of inputs that is labor skills or the productivity of physical capital unfortunately this distinction is ambiguous changes in the efficiency of the inputs used are usually accompanied indeed made possible by increases in knowledge and conversely increases in the stock of knowledge often favor some inputs more than others including the capital goods of one vintage relative to those of another notwithstanding the ambiguity the concept of embodiment has intuitive appeal and this partly explains the focus on decomposing the sources of technical change that followed solow s 6 seminal paper but by the late 1960s a reader of the literature might have concluded that such decomposition was impossible for with merely time series data on inputs and output product augmenting and factor augmenting technical change are empirically indistinguishable in an important paper hall 3 showed that with data on used equipment prices and the interest rate embodied technical change and the deterioration function can in principle be calculated however the paucity of data on the price of used capital goods has allowed little progress in this direction the new longitudinal research database created by the u s bureau of the census now permits still another approach to the estimation of embodied technical change associated

labour and capital saving technical change in telecommunications the australian telecommunications sector is being improved and extended through substantial recent investment in intelligent technology such as digital switching fibre optics satellite and cellular transmission and the internet these technologies are being progressively integrated with technology from the broadcasting computer and electronics industries providing a unified information infrastructure for information transmission and processing technological progress embodied in new equipment has the effect of increasing the efficiency of the factors of production such efficiency increases can be biased towards a particular factor for instance the impact of labour augmenting technical change is a decline in the cost of labour per unit of production when such biases are apparent the relativity between the costs of labour and capital per unit of production is changed in the longer term technical change can impact on the rate of employment growth and also on the rate of capital accumulation in th

how immigrants fare across the earnings distribution in australia and the united states this paper investigates determinants of the earnings distribution for native born workers and immigrant workers in two countries the authors using data from the 2000 u s census and 2001 australian census employ a methodology quantile regression that facilitates measurement of the native born immigrant earnings differential and the partial effect of explanatory variables such as schooling and experience at each decile of the earnings distribution they find evidence that schooling and labor market experience had stronger earnings effects at higher deciles the native immigrant earnings gap varied by decile and in particular increased in the united states at higher deciles the results suggest that in the united states minimum wages compressed earnings at low deciles whereas in australia the minimum administered wage system compressed earnings across the entire distribution a pattern of higher earnings for immigrants than for the native born at the lowest earnings decile in australia may reflect favorable selectivity in migration

valuing risk in the workplace market price willingness to pay and the optimal provision of safety the theory of compensating wage differentials attributable to adam smith suggests that jobs with disagreeable characteristics will command high wages ceteris paribus most empirical tests of this theory with hedonic wage equations implicitly assume that workers willingness to pay for risk reduction safety in the workplace through diminished wages and market valuations of the price of these reductions are equivalent it is shown that this is not the case within the manufacturing sector where willingness to pay exceeds the price cost of risk reduction at current levels of risk exposure implications for implied value of life estimates are also examined copyright 1990 by mit press

changes in the distribution of house prices over time structural characteristics neighborhood or coefficients quantile hedonic house price function estimates imply that appreciation rates were higher between 1995 and 2005 for high priced homes in chicago decompositions of temporal changes in the house price distribution suggest that the types of homes sold and their location do not account for the change in the price distribution rather higher appreciation rates for high priced homes are explained by differences in the quantile regression coefficients over time

cost structure and technological change of local public transport the kaohsiung city bus case this study has developed a translog cost function for the kaohsiung city bus kcb to analyse its cost structure and economic characteristics based on monthly data over the time period from january 1996 to december 2000 the empirical results reveal that economies of density in the provision of bus services in kaohsiung do prevail the estimated marginal cost which is less than the average cost but greater than the current bus fare indicates that the subsidy is necessary due to the existence of returns to density rtd the kcb could obtain cost saving benefits by extending its output scale the kcb production technology is also not neutral the effects of technological change on the kcb costs suggest that over the period 1996 2000 technological progress did lead to cost saving the pure productivity growth rate increased from 0 45 in 1998 to 3 in 2000

do corporate codes of ethics reflect national character evidence from europe and the united states this paper analyses the usage and contents of corporate codes of ethics the results from a sample of 600 large european companies are contrasted with findings reported for similar u s firms the comparison reveals that significantly fewer european than u s firms adopted codes of ethics in europe the large majority of codes have been introduced only very recently and there are indications that codes made their way into europe via subsidiaries of u s firms however there are striking differences in content between u s and european codes of ethics pointing to the existence of a distinctly european approach to codifying ethics

hedonic prices and implicit markets estimating demand and supply functions for differentiated products in choosing the level of quality to purchase the buyer of a differentiated product also chooses a point on the marginal price schedule for that product hence in general the demand functions for product characteristics cannot be consistently estimated by ordinary least squares market equilibrium results in a matching of characteristics of demanders and suppliers this matching restricts the use of buyer and seller characteristics as instruments when estimating demand and supply functions for product characteristics the paper develops these issues a stochastic structure for hedonic equilibrium models is then proposed identification results are presented and estimation procedures are outlined

growth accounting when technical change is embodied in capital this paper revisits the hypothesis that technical change is embodied in capital it extends old results to make them more relevant to the contemporary debates about the adjustment of investment goods for quality change and about the role of embodied technical change as a source of economic growth it is shown that the failure to adjust capital for quality change has the effect of suppressing the quality effects into the conventional total factor productivity residual and it is found that approximately 20 percent of the residual growth of quality adjusted output could be attributed to embodied technical change copyright 1992 by american economic association