a decomposition analysis of the trend in uk income inequality post war britain has experienced a number of dramatic demographic and social changes that have undoubtedly influenced the distribution of income there has been a rise in the number of pensioners whose incomes are relatively low a considerable increase in the number of young and old households living on their own and a remarkable expansion in the proportion of working wives the potential importance of these structural changes suggests that their impact on the income distribution needs to be examined systematically before any attempt can be made to interpret the observed trend in overall income inequality adequately the method usually adopted for this purpose attempts to create a comparable time series of distributions based on the structural characteristics pertaining in one particular year for example if we wished to investigate the effect of shifts in the age structure of the population this approach would disaggregate the distribution in one year tl and estimate what the distribution would have been like if the age structure had been the same as that observed in some other year to on the assumption that other distributional characteristics such as ageincome differentials and inequality within age groups remain invariant to this demographic change the comparison between the actual distribution at t1 and the constructed distribution at t1 with to s age structure is taken to indicate the impact of changes in the age structure over the period concerned this comparison can be presented in terms of quantile shares summary measures of inequality or the entire lorenz curves this approach known as shift share analysis or standardising the inequality series see semple i975 love and wolfson i976 dinwiddy and reed i977 royal commission i977 rowley and henderson i978 macleod and horner i980 is perfectly adequate for simple and straightforward structural changes when several changes are occurring simultaneously however it becomes difficult to identify the contribution of the individual factors and to assess their relative importance to the overall trend in inequality furthermore the combined impact of several structural influences will not in general sum up to the inequality change requiring explanation the purpose of this paper is to propose an alternative method of analysing

externally validating contingent valuation an open space survey and referendum in corvallis oregon abstract we ask whether respondents report the same decisions in non binding surveys as they do in real elections we study a corvallis or referendum to raise open space funds and find survey and election compatibility pivots on the characterization of undecided responses the survey and referendum percentage of yes votes match closely only if undecided responses are treated as no we compare survey based mean willingness to pay wtp estimates with election based estimates household wtp averages us 48 89 using election results while survey based wtp averages us 75 43 excluding undecided responses us 49 67 treating undecided responses as no and between us 49 96 and 80 05

using labels to investigate scope effects in stated preference methods insufficient sensitivity to scope variations in the scale of the environmental good on offer remains a major criticism of stated preference methods and many studies fail a scope test of some sort across a range of existing explanations for insensitivity to scope commodity mis specification embedding warm glows there seems to exist no clear conclusion on how to deal with the problem this paper provides an alternative explanation for insufficient sensitivity to scope based on re definition of the determinants of value for environmental goods within an attributes based choice model in the proposed framework respondents willingness to pay need depend not only on physical characteristics of a good but may also depend on the label under which the environmental good is sold in the hypothetical market to investigate this problem a choice experiment study of biodiversity was conducted we find that controlling for the effects of a label in this case national park designation leads to significant increase in the scope sensitivity of welfare measures

why have urban poverty and income inequality increased so much argentina 1991 2001 abstract this article analyzes the trends in income inequality and poverty among argentine households during the nineties we assess the effect of changes in labor force participation unemployment educational levels and returns to individual characteristics on income inequality and poverty by using a microsimulation approach we found that unemployment accounts for a large part of the increase in income inequality and poverty experienced in the past decade changes in labor force participation had an equalizing effect over the whole period while changes in the returns to workers sociodemographic characteristics could be associated with a small increase in income inequality with respect to poverty unemployment affected negatively the proportion of households below the poverty line amplified the poverty gap and increased the severity of poverty in contrast changes in labor force participation are associated with a reduction in the poverty rate

bayesian analysis of interval data contingent valuation models and pricing policies the general aim of a contingent valuation survey is to elicit the willingness to pay wtp of respondents for some public commodity without a clear market price this could be a program to protect some environmental resource or as in our application the access to a recreational area of particular interest in this context we want to accommodate the possibility of zero wtp and we need to deal with the fact that observations arise as intervals for wtp rather than point observations we propose a flexible bayesian statistical analysis of wtp as a function of characteristics of the respondents that formally incorporates this structure through a mixture model we consider model uncertainty and pay particular attention to the predictive distribution of revenue if a certain entry price were asked the latter is an important tool for deriving pricing policies

who votes for public environmental goods in california evidence from a spatial analysis of voting for environmental ballot measures abstract voting referenda provide direct evidence of the demand for public goods a number of previous studies have used referenda to analyze the support for public environmental goods these studies have used aggregate data from large jurisdictional units usually counties and summary income measures such as the mean or median and have usually found that higher income areas offer greater support for environmental propositions we examine environmental referenda voting in california using census block group data spatial dependence controls and detailed income distribution data we find that household income has a negative marginal effect on environmental referenda voting for most of the income range when using census block data in addition controls for spatial dependence significantly reduce the magnitude of most coefficients this suggests that ols estimates of referenda determinants are biased we also show that county level data may be subject to severe aggregation bias and might not be appropriate for referenda studies

meeting the millennium development goals in brazil can microeconomic simulations help the authors investigate whether micro simulation techniques can shed light on the types of policies that should be adopted by countries wishing to meet their millennium development goals they compare two families of micro simulations the first family of micro simulations decomposes required poverty changes into a change in the mean and a reduction in inequality although it highlights the importance of inequality reduction it appears to be too general to be of much use for policymaking the second family of micro simulations is based on a richer model of behavior in the labor markets it points to the importance of combining different policy options such as educational expansion and targeted conditional redistribution schemes to ensure that the poorest people in society are successfully reached but the absence of market equilibria in these statistical models as well as the strong stability assumptions which are implicit in their use argue for extreme caution in their interpretation

returns to education a further international update and implications this paper updates evidence on the returns to investment in education by adding estimates for new countries and refining existing estimates to bring the total number of country cases to over 60 the new cross country evidence confirms and reinforces earlier patterns namely that returns are highest for primary education the general curricula the education of women and countries with the lowest per capita income the findings have important implications for directing future investment in education which for efficiency and equity purposes should concentrate on these priority areas

demand for environmental goods evidence from voting patterns on california initiatives this article studies voting behavior on 16 environmental ballot propositions in california in order to characterize the demand for environmental goods the environment is found to be a normal good for people with mean incomes but some environmental goods are inferior for those with high incomes at least when supplied collectively an important price of environmental goods is reduced income in the construction farming forestry and manufacturing industries income and price can explain most of the variation in voting there is little need to introduce preference variables such as political ideology

distribucion salarial y educacion en lima metropolitana 1970 1984 this paper evaluates tbe effects of educational expansion on the wage distribution in metropolitan lima from 1970 to 19i34 the analysis is based on the dynamic decomposition of the second inequality measured proposed by theil the theil l and makes use of peruvian household surveys the main results suggest that such effects depend on the kind of educational expansion that takes place and that they not necessarily contribute to improve the distribution

technology capital and the us current account the u s bureau of economic analysis bea estimates the return on investments of foreign subsidiaries of u s multinational companies over the period 1982 2006 averaged 9 4 percent annually after taxes u s subsidiaries of foreign multinationals averaged only 3 2 percent two factors distort bea returns technology capital and plant specific intangible capital technology capital is accumulated know how from intangible investments in r d brands and organizations that can be used in foreign and domestic locations used abroad it generates profits for foreign subsidiaries with no foreign direct investment fdi plantspecific intangible capital in foreign subsidiaries is expensed abroad lowering current profits on fdi and increasing future profits we develop a multicountry general equilibrium model with an essential role for fdi and apply the bea s methodology to construct economic statistics for the model economy we estimate that mismeasurement of intangible investments accounts for over 60 percent of the difference in bea returns

using referendum data to characterize public support for purchasing development rights to farmland an econometric model that de scribes public support for farmland preservation programs as a function of local land use pat terns and socioeconomic data is developed two versions of the model are estimated using data from referenda conducted in pennsylvania and rhode island during 1982 through 1990 results suggest that support for referenda that purchase development rights is stronger in counties and towns with both rapidly increasing population and where land and house values have increased at higher rates environmental factors such as the prevalence of resource sensitive lands are also significant in describing the public s moti vation to preserve farmland jel q15

educational expansion and the kuznets effect the objective in this note is to show the change in wage dispersion in response to increases in the relative supply of educated workers in two low income countries we also measure the relative contributions to that change of its two components the effect of the educational expansion on the educational composition of the labor force holding the educational structure of wages constant and the resultant compression of that structure holding composition constant the paper s analysis is based on three precisely comparable surveys of wage employees conducted in tanzania in 1971 and 1980 and in kenya in 1980

wage dynamics and inequality in the brazilian formal labor market abstract this paper investigates the decrease in wage inequality among working age men in the brazilian formal labor market by decomposing it into its permanent and transitory components the permanent component refers to workers productivity characteristics such as education and abilities whereas the transitory component relates to noise caused by economic instability we use data from the annual reports of social information rais from 1994 to 2016 covering periods of both economic instability and stability our proposed model includes year and cohort specific effects in both components and we use minimum distance methods to estimate our parameters of interest overall we observe a downward trend in wage inequality levels for most cohorts during the entire period however different sources are associated with this decrease in different sub periods this decline can be attributed to reductions in the transitory component from 1994 to 2005 related to the economic stabilization process and in the permanent component from 2010 to 2016 moreover our results suggest that the permanent component has an important role in explaining the wage inequality level in brazil especially considering older cohorts even though its share in terms of total variance has decreased over the 2010s finally we show that age and education are accountable for a great share of permanent inequality with this percentage being even greater for younger cohorts although their relative importance also decreased over the years

voting on the environment price or ideology evidence from swiss referendums studies on preferences for environmental quality usually posit that price and income explain most of the observed choices however we argue that conceptions of social norms and the common good are equally important when analyzing environmental voting outcomes and are a significant component of the environmental demand we study aggregate results of three ballot proposals in switzerland put to vote in the year 2000 which foresaw different tax schemes on fossil energy all three bills were rejected by the electorate we are able to show that regions with producer interests car commuting habits and elderly population are less supportive of ecological tax reforms unlike higher education and leftist political affinity that work in favor of the bills though more importantly our results underline the importance of including variables pertaining to the notion of ideology both in terms of statistical fit and obtaining unbiased estimates for price and income determinants

preferences for public lands management under competing uses the case of yellowstone national park we examine snowmobile use conflict in yellowstone national park to assess the effect of different winter management policies on heterogeneous visitors welfare using a stated preference choice experiment we quantify welfare changes for snowmobile riders and non riders under different snowmobile restrictions a key determinant of welfare change is visitors willingness to trade off reduced snowmobile access for improved ambient conditions in the park our findings support the notion that welfare losses to snowmobile riders could be offset by welfare gains to non riders but net benefits will depend on the number of riders and non riders and the specifics of the policy

the impact of school quality on earnings and educational returns evidence from a low income country abstract the expansion of education has been widely adopted as a key element in the development strategies of low income countries while there is substantial evidence on the benefits of greater educational attainment for subsequent labor market earnings empirical evidence on the role played by school quality is scarce this paper combines household survey data with unique data on school quality from honduras to study the importance of school quality as a determinant of earnings our objective measures of school quality capture teacher training school infrastructure and school crowding the results display strong positive effects of school quality on earnings and on educational returns these effects persist across a variety of model specifications

declining inequality in schooling in brazil and its effects on inequality in earnings abstract household survey data demonstrate that brazilian males born between 1925 and 1963 experienced steady increases in mean schooling and significant declines in schooling inequality the variance in years of schooling increased for cohorts born up until 1950 with steady declines for more recent cohorts decomposition of a standard human capital earnings equation indicates that trends in schooling tended to reduce earnings inequality from 1976 to 1985 due to reductions in both the variance of schooling and in returns to schooling these improvements were more than offset however by increases in other sources of inequality although the net increase in earnings inequality from 1976 to 1985 is disturbing the reduction in schooling inequality represents a fundamental improvement in the determinants of earnings inequality in brazil that will have beneficial effects for decades

contingent valuation of ecotourism in annapurna conservation area nepal implications for sustainable park finance and local development abstract to determine willingness to pay wtp for candidate entry fees contingent valuation surveys were administered to 315 foreign visitors to the annapurna conservation area nepal during april and may of 2006 the results of logit regression showed that the bid amount family size visitors satisfaction the use of a guide and group size were the most significant predictors of wtp results suggest that most visitors would be willing to pay an entry fee considerably higher than the current fee of 27 u s dollars usd the mean and median wtp were 69 2 and 74 3 usd respectively the most common explanation for wtp by respondents was a desire to better protect the environment the most common explanation for unwillingness to pay was that the bid was simply too expensive two models were developed based upon different predictions of visitor numbers an optimistic case and pessimistic case to calculate the expected revenue production and likely gross local economic impact of candidate entry fees based on this analysis we recommend an increase in the entry fee to usd 50 in the optimistic scenario this higher entry fee leaves a budget surplus in the pessimistic scenario it would reduce current budget deficits

preferences for site and environmental functions when selecting forthcoming national parks abstract a political decision to establish the first ever national parks in denmark allowed us to examine if people hold preferences regarding which site to be designated as national park separate from the preferences for its environmental functions to this end we designed a choice experiment representing the national park alternatives by the possible site and the possible improvements in environmental functions results revealed that respondents have strong preferences for the establishment of a national park per se furthermore there are significant differences in taste parameters for the different sites which cannot be explained by respondents valuing the different functions differently across sites instead we explain the results with differences in regional and cultural preferences we also performed a balanced split sample test of anchoring effects and found clear evidence of this we included a zero bidder screening question prior to the choice set part of the survey instrument to improve wtp estimation

patterns and sources of changing wage inequality in chile and costa rica during structural adjustment abstract during their respective periods of structural adjustment inequality increased more rapidly in chile than in costa rica using a new technique which measures the effects of changes in the quantities and prices of individual dimension of human capital on overall wage inequality we identify changes in wage premiums associated with more education as an important cause of the different inequality outcomes we present evidence that the different education price effects were due to different rates of growth in the demand for more educated workers furthermore inequality increased in chile despite a large equalizing education quantity effect

what does it take to sell environmental policy an empirical analysis of referendum data we analyze the factors that influence the support for environmental policy proposals swiss referendum data show that proposals obtain more yes votes if they do not restrict consumption possibilities directly if they are endorsed by the largest business association if environmental preferences are strong and economic conditions are favorable at the time of the referendum also there are more pro environmental votes in cantons with higher population density on the other hand yes votes do not seem to depend on whether a proposal involves a tax or not

wage inequality and the distribution of education abstract this paper analyzes the relationship between education and wage inequality in metropolitan brazil the study is based on data from ten brazilian annual household surveys pnads which are available for the period 1976 1986 the universe of analysis is limited to occupied prime age males the inequality measure used was theil s second measure which is analytically convenient for a study of the determinants of inequality it is shown that there exist sharp differences in wage inequality across metropolitan areas to identify whether these large regional differences in inequality are directly associated with differences in educational levels or with differences in the steepness of the wage education profiles some simulations are conducted the results indicate that regional differences in the distribution of education are not able to explain much of the regional differences in wage inequality as a matter of fact the differences in wage inequality were shown to be intrinsically associated with differences in the steepness of the wage education profiles

monitoring choice task attribute attendance in nonmarket valuation of multiple park management services does it matter land management in alpine parks provides multifunctional services to separate groups of users choice experiments can be used to derive estimates of value for different management attri butes however little research has been conducted on how frequently respondents ignore attributes used to describe policy management scenarios we fill this gap using an approach that identifies and compares both serial and choice task attribute nonattendance addressing five different visitor types our results indicate that accounting for choice task nonatten dance significantly improves model fit and yield estimates of marginal willingness to pay with a more plausible pattern of signs and greater efficiency jel q24 q51 i introduction the effects of park management policies on outdoor recreation are increasingly coming under public scrutiny alpine park land is among the most valuable land in terms of outdoor recreation park manage ment decisions are often controversial be cause of differences between objectives pursued by conservationists and the tourist industry parkland management agencies find it increasingly difficult to fund all the services needed to facilitate the ever broad ening variety of outdoor recreation activi ties this is further exacerbated by the increasing expectations for high quality recreational experiences by a population of recreationists with a heightened sensitivity to environmental and conservation issues such a situation widens the scope for multiattribute nonmarket valuation meth ods especially for those methods capable of capturing and modeling the preferences of heterogeneous visitors who seek to pursue a variety of activities in the land under study our research reports the results of a study designed to address attribute nonattendance henceforth abbreviated as an a which despite being quite a common decision heuristic has only recently begun to be explored by analysts with this decision heuristic respondents ignore some of the described attributes in their evaluation of alternatives within a given choice task they hence act as if a zero weight were assigned to the ignored attributes in the utility of the respective alternatives we study this issue by using a well known statistical model of discrete choice the multinomial logit mnl model this random utility model is often used for the purpose of multi attribute nonmarket valuation but the effects of accounting for an a are still rela tively unexplored information on an a is commonly collected by questioning each respondent at the end of the sequence of choice tasks respondents are asked to list those attributes that they feel they have

voting on open space what explains the appearance and support of municipal level open space conservation referenda in the united states abstract numerous communities in the united states have been willing to use public funds to protect open space the amount of money allocated for open space protection by local and state governments exceeds the budget of the largest federal land protection program in the u s the conservation reserve program this paper analyzes what types of municipalities hold open space referenda and the level of support for these referenda factors that increased the probability of a municipality holding an open space referendum from 2000 to 2004 were large population low population density rapid growth of the surrounding area and highly educated and environmentally concerned residents increases in median household income up to 100 000 increased the likelihood of a vote but further increases in income beyond 100 000 decreased the likelihood for municipalities holding an open space referendum factors that increased support for passage of the referendum were rapid growth low unemployment rates highly educated residents and no new taxes given high levels of support for open space referenda 76 of municipal level referenda held from 2000 through 2004 passed the spatial pattern of locally managed open space will be largely determined by the factors that affect referenda appearance on a municipal ballot this conclusion suggests that locally managed conservation hotspots will cluster around fast growing affluent communities with highly educated residents such hotspots may or may not align with overall conservation priorities non governmental and environmental organizations should focus efforts on helping communities in locally managed conservation coldspots secure open space

a quantitative framework for assessing public investment in tourism an application to haiti abstract this study develops a linked regional computable general equilibrium and micro simulation rcge ms model to assess the regional economy wide and poverty impacts of a us 36 million investment in tourism in the south of haiti the first social accounting matrix for haiti with a base year of 2012 2013 was constructed to calibrate the model this research addresses three key gaps identified in the tourism impact assessment literature first a destination specific tourism demand and value chain analysis was used to calibrate the shocks implemented in the model second the rcge ms approach moves beyond the representative household configuration to enable more robust analysis of tourism investment impacts on poverty and income inequality third results of this modeling were used to inform a social cost benefit analysis to provide greater transparency in the evaluation of trade offs between investment alternatives results of this analysis showed a positive impact on sectoral activity especially for the hotel and restaurant sector 182 1 in 2040 and a 2 0 increase in gross regional product by 2040 the south s exports fell 4 7 below baseline and imports were 6 1 higher due to the inflow of foreign exchange the appreciation of the regional real exchange rate increased demand for most goods and services and limited regional productive capacity the rate of unemployment fell from 26 to 23 the investment helped lift some of the region s poorest out of poverty reducing the poverty headcount by 1 6 percentage points driving this result was an increase in employment wages and non labor income the linked rcge ms approach proves to be a powerful tool for assessing how tourism investments affect regional economic activity and revealing the mechanisms through which tourism can contribute to increased employment opportunities and poverty reduction

payment vehicles for public goods evidence from california s proposition 21 proposition 21 on california s 2010 ballot concerned an annual surcharge on vehicles to support state parks proposition 21 failed leaving 25 of california state parks at risk of closure we analyze voting patterns which we show depend on the average gross price of the proposition political ideology environmental preferences the availability of substitutes and park salience we simulate counterfactual scenarios under which proposition 21 might have passed and use holdout samples to illustrate the predictive ability of our model heterogeneity across california makes our model potentially useful for predicting public sentiment for similar propositions even for jurisdictions without direct democracy

education and changes in brazilian wage inequality 1976 2001 in countries with high levels of inequality progress in education has often been placed high in the list of policy proposals designed to change the unequal state of affairs this study uses brazilian annual data to chart the trends in wage inequality and a decomposition procedure to ascertain how wage distribution was affected by advances in education that doubled the median schooling level of prime age men during the sample period the results show that while falling returns to education were an equalizing factor across the wage distribution changes in the educational composition of the work force exerted a disequalizing influence that was strongest at the top of the distribution the net result was a fall in wage dispersion that was not as dramatic as might have been hoped