women as policy makers evidence from a randomized policy experiment in india this paper uses political reservations for women in india to study the impact of women s leadership on policy decisions since the mid 1990 s one third of village council head positions in india have been randomly reserved for a woman in these councils only women could be elected to the position of head village councils are responsible for the provision of many local public goods in rural areas using a dataset we collected on 265 village councils in west bengal and rajasthan we compare the type of public goods provided in reserved and unreserved village councils we show that the reservation of a council seat affects the types of public goods provided specifically leaders invest more in infrastructure that is directly relevant to the needs of their own genders

a further look at flexibilities and elasticities relationships between price elasticities and price flexibilities are examined with emphasis on comparing sizes of difference between a directly estimated demand matrix and an inverted demand matrix results show that by using inverted elasticities to represent flexibilities or vice versa sizable measurement errors may be committed in agricultural policy and program analysis a directly estimated demand matrix should be used

price and quantity endogeneity in demand analysis evidence from directed acyclic graphs we propose to use the emerging method of directed graphs to study price quantity endogeneity issues in empirical demand analysis the approach is illustrated through the examination of u s meat consumption we find that for two major meat products beef and poultry retail prices contemporaneously caused quantities consumed thus were predetermined in contrast the quantity consumed of pork appeared to be predetermined relative to its price

increasing earnings inequality and the gender pay gap in canada prospects for convergence this paper retraces the evolution of canadian women s labour force participation and of the gender earnings ratio across the generations to understand better the prospects for gender convergence in pay using data from the public use labour force surveys lfs and administrative annual earnings data from the longitudinal worker files lwf the paper assesses the role of increasing top earnings inequality in the persistence of the gender pay gap having identified a growing role for the under representation of women among top earners the paper then performs an evaluation and critical analysis of existing gender equality policies centred on horizontal occupational gender segregation and discusses alternative policies for the future

a short history of the gender wage gap in britain after closing dramatically during world war two the gender wage gap gwg was roughly constant in the decades prior to the equal pay act it closed substantially in the mid 1970s due to the act but the subsequent rate of narrowing has been very slow despite improvements in equal opportunities legislation and convergence in men s and women s educational attainment and work experience within cohort the gwg increases until employees reach their 40s after which it falls the gwg has closed across birth cohorts at all points in the adult life cycle but it remains substantial among those born in 1958 the raw gwg was 16 percentage points among workers aged 23 rising to 35 percentage points at 42 among those born 12 years later the gaps were 9 and 31 percentage points at age 26 and age 42 respectively regression adjustment for human capital investments reduces the size of the gap especially when accounting for full time work experience where differences open up between men and women in mid life following divergence of gender roles in the home results are insensitive to adjustments for sample attrition the gwg is a little larger early in the life cycle in both birth cohorts when accounting for non random selection into employment but selection plays no role later in life policy options for closing the remaining gap are considered

do women shy away from competition do men compete too much we examine whether men and women of the same ability differ in their selection into a competitive environment participants in a laboratory experiment solve a real task first under a noncompetitive piece rate and then a competitive tournament incentive scheme although there are no gender differences in performance men select the tournament twice as much as women when choosing their compensation scheme for the next performance while 73 percent of the men select the tournament only 35 percent of the women make this choice this gender gap in tournament entry is not explained by performance and factors such as risk and feedback aversion only playa negligible role instead the tournament entry gap is driven by men being more overconfident and by gender differences in preferences for performing in a competition the result is that women shy away from competition and men embrace it

an inverse demand system for u s composite foods this article provides a theoretically consistent framework for estimating a complete price dependent demand system where the concept of distance function and its related substitution and scale effects are used the approach is applied to a u s demand system consisting of thirteen food and one nonfood categories

gender economics an assessment concerns about gender equality have jumped to the forefront of public debate in recent years and gender economics is slowly affirming its place as a major field of study this assessment examines where we are in terms of gender equality it reviews the theoretical foundations that can explain existing inequalities and documents the empirical findings supported by the theories identifying avenues for future research and providing a fruitful framework to think about the effectiveness of policies and interventions targeting gender inequality in doing so i provide the foundations against which the contributions in this issue can be placed

women s career choices social norms and child care policies our model explains the observed gender specific patterns of career and child care choices through endogenous social norms we study how these norms interact with the gender wage gap we show that via the social norm a couple s child care and career choices impose an externality on other couples so that the laissez faire is inefficient we use our model to study the design and effectiveness of three commonly used policies we find that child care subsidies and women quotas can be effective tools to mitigate or eliminate the externality parental leave however may even intensify the externality and decrease welfare

organized crime or individual crime endogenous size of a criminal organization and the optimal law enforcement i introduction organized criminal activities have been regarded as major economic and social issues since the early 1900s although there has been as pointed out by fiorentini and peltzman 1995 enormous research interest in the economics of criminal activities economists have done relatively little work on issues specifically related to the economics of organized crime we only see that much of the work has been done by following becker s 1968 framework where the target is the individual agent s allocative choice between legal and illegal activities in the face of different deterrence arrangements among the few exceptions a criminal organization is often thought of as a monopolistic firm and the theory of monopoly is predominantly used to analyze organized crimes schelling 1967 buchanan 1973 backhaus 1979 gambetta and reuter 1995 and more recently garoupa 2000 investigate the optimal public policy toward organized crimes through a welfare comparison between a monopoly organized criminals and competitive supplies individual criminals given that criminal activities are seen as social bads the monopolistic market is considered to be better than a perfectly competitive one because its output of crime is smaller 1 the monopolistic model implies that potential offenders have no other criminal choices but are forced to join the criminal organization if they decide to commit a crime clearly it is less than exhaustive in terms of describing agents choices in relation to criminal behavior in fact the criminal organization may not be monopolistic after all as argued by dick 1995 and others 2 criminologists johnson 1962 rubin 1973 and reiss 1986 observe that most criminal organizations are endemic in some particular areas and or restrictive in some particular illegal businesses these criminal activities such as bootlegging drug dealing pimping and prostitution are often less organized and would be difficult to successfully monopolize dick 1995 also points out that prostitution smuggling fencing and narcotics importation often involve substantial competition among downstream suppliers and can hardly be regarded as monopolistic businesses in other similar studies klein and crawford 1967 morash 1983 and sarnecki 1986 conclude that most youths who engage in delinquency are at most street gangsters and cannot be seen as members of a highly structured organization in reality the determination of the market structure for crime should be endogenous which has notable implications for the optimal crime enforcement policies and crime itself to recover the conventionally neglected facts and provide a more complete picture regarding organized crime this article develops a simple but more general model in this framework individual and organized crimes are coexisting alternatives to a potential offender and joining a criminal organization is seen as only one of the agent s rational choices in deciding whether to join a criminal organization the methods used to allocate the criminal organization s payoffs and the extra benefits provided by the criminal organization are given serious consideration they both play crucial roles in determining the sizes of the criminal organizations as well as in influencing the interactive relationship between the market structure for crime and the government s optimal law enforcement this study contributes to the existing literature and provides new insights in three respects first of all by allowing the agent to choose rationally between engaging in individual or organized crime we not only endogenize the size of the criminal organization but also explore the factors that determine the type high or low criminal ability of offenders that enter the criminal organization a new theoretical attempt is made in terms of providing an explanation to the observation of anderson 1995 there are considerable variations in personal qualities and values across different criminal organizations

breaking the glass ceiling the effect of board quotas on female labor market outcomes in norway in late 2003 norway passed a law mandating 40 representation of each gender on the board of public limited liability companies the primary objective of this reform was to increase the representation of women in top positions in the corporate sector and decrease the gender disparity in earnings within that sector we document that the women appointed to these boards post reform were observably more qualified than their female predecessors along many dimensions and that the gender gap in earnings within boards fell substantially however we see no robust evidence that the reform benefited the larger set of women employed in the companies subject to the quota moreover the reform had no clear impact on highly qualified women whose qualifications mirror those of board members but who were not appointed to boards finally we find mixed support for the view that the reform affected the decisions of young women while the reform was not accompanied by any change in female enrollment in business education programmes we do see some improvements in labour market outcomes for young women with graduate business degrees in their early career stages however we observe similar improvements for young women with graduate science degrees suggesting this may not be due to the reform overall seven years after the board quota policy fully came into effect we conclude that it had very little discernible impact on women in business beyond its direct effect on the women who made it into boardrooms

the econometrics of markets with quantity controls this paper presents econometric methods for single markets with quantity controls or quotas a theory of quotas based on disequilibrium bargaining nations is outlined maximum likelihood methods are described for these theories the methods are applied to the australian tobacco leaf market it is argued that cigarette manufacturers gain slightly more from bargaining proces than tobacco growers

can gender parity break the glass ceiling evidence from a repeated randomized experiment this paper studies whether the gender composition of recruiting committees matters we make use of the unique evidence provided by spanish public examinations where the allocation of candidates to evaluating committees is random we analyse how the chances of success of 150 000 female and male candidates for positions in the four main corps of the spanish judiciary from 1987 to 2007 were affected by the gender composition of their evaluation committee we find that a female male candidate is significantly less likely to be hired whenever she he is randomly assigned to a committee where the share of female male evaluators is relatively greater evidence from multiple choice tests suggests that this is due to the fact that female majority committees overestimate the quality of male candidates

the structure of food demand interrelatedness and duality this paper presents a new empirical demand system which mitigates the effects of multicollinearity while facilitating the measurement of interrelatedness duality theory is used to derive the inverse demand functions using data on fourteen food items a complete set of demand equations is estimated in both quantity and price dependent forms the model is used to test for the theoretical restrictions of homogeneity additivity and negativity as well as the habit formation hypothesis a comparison is made between these results and those of brandow and george and king

forms of scale curves and differential inverse demand systems this article provides a new interpretation of the scale effects in differential inverse demand systems a scale curve is defined as a curve that shows how the expenditure share of a good or service changes as the consumption level changes it is shown that brown lee and seale s synthetic model has the same scale effects as do the box cox scale curves in this light their model is not a mere composite but a model in its own right an empirical illustration given for japanese fresh food demand suggests that the underlying scale curves differ from both linear and loglinear forms

promotion signaling discrimination and positive discrimination policies this article studies discrimination in a model in which promotions are used as signals of worker ability the model can account for statistical and taste based discrimination in the short run a positive discrimination policy is beneficial for workers in the middle of the ability distribution because these workers are promoted if and only if the policy is in place instead workers of either high or low ability suffer from the policy in the long run the policy benefits all targeted workers the model can explain empirical findings about the effects of a gender quota on the boards of norwegian companies

do quotas help women to climb the career ladder a laboratory experiment abstract women are less likely to enroll in selective or scientific courses applying for promotions and are particularly underrepresented in both middle and top positions in the stem field quota are often advocated as an instrument to reduce this gender gap but it remains unclear at what step of the career ladder they more effectively foster women s reaching the top many factors may affect quota s success or failure such as how they would in turn affect teamwork and trust between members within organizations or coordination in applying for promotions in this paper by means of a laboratory experiment implementing a two stage tournament we evaluate the impact of three different interventions in affecting individual decision to climb the career ladder abstracting away from other possible confounding factors we find that compared with no intervention a gender quota introduced in the initial stage of competition was ineffective in encouraging women to compete for the top quotas introduced in the final stage of competition or at both stages increased women s willingness to compete for the top without distorting the performance of the winners

does integration change gender attitudes the effect of randomly assigning women to traditionally male teams we examine whether exposure of men to women in a traditionally male dominated environment can change attitudes about mixed gender productivity gender roles and gender identity our context is the

do employer preferences contribute to sticky floors the authors investigate the importance of employer preferences in explaining sticky floors the pattern in which women are less likely as compared to men to start to climb the job ladder the authors perform a randomized field experiment in the belgian labor market and test whether hiring discrimination based on gender is heterogeneous by whether jobs imply a promotion compared to the applicants current position the findings show that women receive 33 fewer interview invitations when they apply for jobs that imply a first promotion at the functional level by contrast the results show that their hiring chances are not significantly affected by the authority level of the job

using survey data of inflation expectations in the estimation of learning and rational expectations models do survey data on inflation expectations contain useful information for estimating macroeconomic models i address this question by using survey data in the new keynesian model by smets and wouters 2007 to estimate and compare its performance when solved under the assumptions of rational expectations and learning this information serves as an additional moment restriction and helps to determine the forecasting model for inflation that agents use under learning my results reveal that the predictive power of this model is improved when using both survey data and an admissible learning rule for the formation of inflation expectations

the family of inverse demand systems abstract a set of inverse demand systems derived from some well known utility functions is presented in which the hotelling wold identity has been used for such a derivation the functional forms of the inverse demand systems obtained by this study are theoretically integrable and empirically operations

gender diversity in firms this paper explores the recent efforts by the corporate world and public policy to increase the number of women in leadership positions in the workplace we review and empirically evaluate the business case for gender equality showing some evidence in favour of it despite the evidence and growing support progress towards more diversity in leadership positions has been slow we study the importance of supply side constraints as well as the main diversity policies gender quotas mentoring and network programs diversity training to change firm culture and family friendly policies that have been implemented we focus on the effectiveness of these policies their shortcomings as well as potential future steps that could help guide policy

equality for whom organizational policies and the gender gap across the german earnings distribution work establishments are critical for the creation and maintenance of gender inequality organizational practices most notably those that formalize personnel systems or target gender inequality are often assumed to have uniform effects on inequality across the wage hierarchy this assumption has eluded careful empirical scrutiny the authors estimate unconditional quantile regressions with a unique german linked employer employee data set to assess whether formalized human resource practices female friendly diversity measures and the availability of workplace child care facilities affect wage inequality differently across the wage distribution while these policies reduce gender inequality in general they do so more strongly near the bottom of the earnings distribution policies that formalize personnel systems and explicitly promote female employees are particularly advantageous to women in low wage jobs these results suggest that gender policies have a more subtle effect on earnings inequality than

the changing of the boards the impact on firm valuation of mandated female board representation in 2003 a new law required that 40 of norwegian firms directors be women at the time only 9 of directors were women we use the prequota cross sectional variation in female board representation to instrument for exogenous changes to corporate boards following the quota we find that the constraint imposed by the quota caused a significant drop in the stock price at the announcement of the law and a large decline in tobin s q over the following years consistent with the idea that firms choose boards to maximize value the quota led to younger and less experienced boards increases in leverage and acquisitions and deterioration in operating performance copyright 2012 oxford university press

price and quantity controlled agricultural markets and disequilibrium econometrics a survey abstract this survey reviews the literature on estimating single markets in disequilibrium in the presence of regulated price and or quantity controls e g minimum price regimes and or marketing quotas most of the literature is found to describe pure econometric technique with only a few applications having emerged to date various reasons for the broad non acceptance of this literature are offered including a perceived lack of realism proposals to close this econometric theory application gap are put forward including the use of effective demand concepts in specifying demand and supply functions synthesizing some closely related literature on agricultural price quantity controls with disequilibrium econometrics i e endogenous government policy and the effects controls have on yield uncertainty and price risk and outlining more applicable econometric technique extensions