learning your earning are labor income shocks really very persistent in this paper we examine the risk situation facing individuals in the labor market the current consensus in the literature is that the labor income process has a large random walk component we argue two points first the estimates of persistence from income data appear to be upward biased due to the omission of heterogeneity in income pro les across the population that would be implied for example by a human capital model with heterogeneity when we allow for dierences in pro les the estimated persistence falls from 0 99 to about 0 8 moreover the main evidence against pro le heterogeneity in the existing literature that the autocorrelations of income changes are small and typically negative is also replicated by the pro le heterogeneity model we estimate casting doubt on the previous interpretation of this evidence second we embed this process in a life cycle model to examine how it alters individuals consumption saving decision we assume that as seems plausible individuals do not know their pro les exactly at the beginning of life but learn in a bayesian way with successive income observations we nd that learning is very slow and aects consumption decision throughout the life cycle the model generates substantial rise in consumption inequality over the life cycle which matches empirical observations deaton and paxson 1994 moreover the shape of the age inequality pro le is non concave as in the data but unlike in a model with very persistent shocks finally the consumption pro les of college graduates are steeper than those of high school graduates in the model consistent with the data because they face a wider dispersion of and hence uncertainty about income growth rates overall this evidence indicates that income shocks may be signi cantly less persistent than what is currently assumed

taxing capital not a bad idea after all we quantitatively characterize the optimal capital and labor income tax in an overlapping generations model with idiosyncratic uninsurable income shocks and permanent productivity difierences of households the optimal capital income tax rate is signiflcantly positive at 36 percent the optimal progressive labor income tax is roughly a at tax of 23 percent with a deduction of 7 200 relative to average household income of 42 000 the high optimal capital income tax is mainly driven by the life cycle structure of the model whereas the optimal progressivity of the labor income tax is attributable to the insurance and redistribution role of the tax system jel e62 h21 h24

wealth distribution in life cycle economies abstract this paper compares the age wealth distribution produced in life cycle economies to the corresponding distribution in the us economy the idea is to calibrate the model economies to match features of the us earnings distribution and then examine the wealth distribution implications of the model economies the findings are that the calibrated model economies with earnings and lifetime uncertainty can replicate measures of both aggregate wealth and transfer wealth in the us furthermore the model economies produce the us wealth gini and a significant fraction of the wealth inequality within age groups however the model economies produce less than half the fraction of wealth held by the top 1 percent of us households

equilibrium heterogeneous agent models as measurement tools some monte carlo evidence abstract this paper discusses a series of monte carlo experiments designed to evaluate the empirical properties of heterogeneous agent macroeconomic models in the presence of sampling variability the calibration procedure leads to the welfare analysis being conducted with the wrong parameters the ability of the calibrated model to correctly predict the long run welfare changes induced by a set of policy experiments is assessed the results show that for the policy reforms with sizable welfare effects i e more than 0 2 the model always predicts the right sign of the welfare effects however the welfare effects can be evaluated with the wrong sign when they are small and when the sample size is fairly limited quantitatively the maximum errors made in evaluating a policy change are very small for some reforms in the order of 0 02 percentage points but bigger for others in the order of 0 6 percentage points finally having access to better data in terms of larger samples does lead to substantial increases in the precision of the welfare effects estimates though the rate of convergence can be slow

economic globalization and women s employment the case of manufacturing in mexico sociological research has been generally critical of the effects of economic globalization on developing countries however greater worldwide economic integration may have created new employment o

foreign capital dependence and development a new direction scholars have long debated the impact of foreign investment on the economies of less developed countries many argue that foreign investment is beneficial for the host economy others argue just as forcefully that dependence on foreign capital is detrimental this study offers a new conceptualization of foreign capital dependence that may resolve this debate foreign investment concentration which is the proportion of a host country s foreign direct investment stocks owned by the single largest investing country the theory is that high investment concentration limits the autonomy of state and business elites to act in the long term interests of domestic growth in a series of cross national panel regression models of 39 less developed countries estimated at five year intervals from 1970 to 1995 the often cited negative effects of foreign capital penetration on growth in gnp per capita are dramatically reduced or entirely replaced when investment concentration and the related concepts of export commodity and trade partner concentrations are included in the analyses foreign investment concentration has a significant long term negative effect on growth that is strongest over the initial five year period and decreases over the next 15 years a similar effect is also found for the 1990 1997 period this structural aspect of capital dependence has a greater impact on development than does the overall level of foreign capital penetration

optimal unemployment insurance in ge a robust calibration approach abstract a simple monte carlo calibration approach is implemented in a ge model with uninsurable employment risk to quantitatively study the optimal replacement rate of a public unemployment insurance ui scheme the optimal ui sampling distribution is found to be bimodal

the optimum quantity of debt abstract we find that the welfare gains to being at the optimum quantity of debt rather than the current us level are small and therefore concerns regarding the high level of debt in the us economy may be misplaced this finding is based on a model of a large number of infinitely lived households whose saving behavior is influenced by precautionary saving motives and borrowing constraints this model incorporates a different role for government debt than is found in standard models and it captures different cost benefit trade offs on the benefit side government debt enhances the liquidity of households by providing an additional means of smoothing consumption and by effectively loosening borrowing constraints on the cost side the implied taxes have adverse wealth distribution and incentive effects in addition government debt crowds out capital via higher interest rates and lowers per capita consumption

requiem for the representative consumer aggregate implications of microeconomic consumption behavior macroeconomists pursuing microfoundations for aggregate consumption have generally adopted one of two approaches either to model microeconomic consumption behavior carefully and then to aggregate or to thoroughly understand the behavior of a representative consumer in general equilibrium then to introduce microeconomic risk and heterogeneity the broad conclusion from the bottom up approach has been that precautionary saving and microeconomic heterogeneity can profoundly change behavior stephen p zeldes 1989 angus s deaton 1991 christopher d carroll 1992 the broad conclusion from the top down approach has been that precautionary saving is of little importance in determining the aggregate capital stock s rao aiyagari 1994 per krusell and anthony a smith 1998 leading some economists to conclude that heterogeneity is unimportant for macroeconomic purposes this paper shows that while general equilibrium effects do imply that the aggregate magnitude of precautionary saving is modest nevertheless when a model with uninsurable idiosyncratic risk is modified so that it can match the key micro facts it produces behavior very different in important respects from that produced by the representative agent economy this leads to the conclusion that for many purposes the representative consumer model should be abandoned in favor of a model which matches key microeconomic facts this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

measurement of monopoly behavior an application to the cigarette industry a simple scheme is proposed to measure monopoly pricing behavior the coefficient of the tax rate term in a price equation identifies the ratio of price to marginal cost no direct measurement of costs is required so a major problem for other empirical studies of monopoly is avoided empirical results for cross section time series data support rejection of atomistic competition but also provide evidence against the operation of an effective cartel in the cigarette industry the model represents an alternative interpretation of related results in a recent paper by barzel application of the methodology to other markets is feasible

dependency disarticulation and denominator effects another look at foreign capital penetration less developed countries desparately need capital to develop but countries dependent on foreign capital face slower economic growth higher income inequality and possibly impaired domestic capital formation these conclusions emerge from a reassessment of glenn firebaugh s broad critique of capital dependency research which exposed an important error in earlier studies the solution charts new theoreticall ground by factoring dependency effects into the differential productivity of foreign and domestic investment and the negative externalities from foreign capital penetration the revised formulation is applied to cross national analyses of economic growth decapitalization and income inequality the findings consistently support capital dependency theory

a quantitative analysis of capital income taxation this paper studies the quantitative impact of eliminating capital income taxation on capital accumulation and steady state welfare in a general equilibrium model with overlapping generations of sixty five period lived individuals who face idiosyncratic earnings risk borrowing constraints and life span uncertainty under a wide range of parameter configurations the capital income tax rate that maximizes steady state welfare is positive even though eliminating it completely would raise the steady state capital stock toward the golden rule this is because the tax burden is shifted toward the younger and liquidity constrained years reducing the individuals ability to self insure copyright 1998 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

the cyclical and secular behaviour of the labour input comparing efficiency units and hours worked summary a monthly labour input series designed to correct for the fact that all hours worked are not of the same quality is constructed and its properties compared with unadjusted hours worked this efficiency units series is constructed from bls data on hours worked and earnings by age and sex the cyclical fluctuations displayed by the efficiency units series are smaller on average than those displayed by hours worked although the difference is not large however the secular behaviour of the series is quite different hours worked per capita displays a significant positive trend while efficiency units per capita does not

empirical generalizations about the impact of advertising on price sensitivity and price consumers sensitivities to price changes are an important input to strategic and tactical decisions it has been argued that price sensitivities depend on factors such as advertising prior studies on the effect of advertising on consumer price sensitivity have found seemingly conflicting results we analyze the characteristics of previous studies in marketing and generate a set of three empirical generalizations these are 1 an increase in price advertising leads to higher price sensitivity among consumers 2 the use of price advertising leads to lower prices and 3 an increase in nonprice advertising leads to lower price sensitivity among consumers these generalizations have important implications for managers and researchers managers need to coordinate their advertising and pricing decisions to attain maximum profits for researchers our summary and discussion of empirical results provide directions for future

accounting for the u s earnings and wealth inequality we show that a theory of earnings and wealth inequality based on the optimal choices of ex ante identical households that face uninsured idiosyncratic shocks to their endowments of efficiency labor units accounts for the u s earnings and wealth inequality almost exactly

what is product differentiation really empirical research on industrial organization has failed to identify the empirical bases of product differentiation that is each seller facing an individual downward sloping demand curve two sets of conditions are theoretically sufficient one resting on complex attribute structures coupled with fixed costs the other on costs of information to guide buyers choices among brands factor analysis of observable decision variables and market patterns appears to reveal and confirm these underlying causes the estimated factors perform successfully to test hypotheses about the effects of product differentiation on the mutual sensitivity of prices of australian domestic manufactures and competing imports product differentiation is a well defined theoretical concept resting on

the role of unemployment insurance in an economy with liquidity constraints and moral hazard the potential welfare benefits of unemployment insurance along with the optimal replacement ratio are studied using a quantitative dynamic general equilibrium model to provide a role for unemployment insurance agents in our economy face exogenous idiosyncratic employment shocks and are unable to borrow or insure themselves through private markets in the absence of moral hazard replacement ratios as high as 65 are optimal and the welfare benefits of unemployment insurance are quite large however if there is moral hazard and the replacement ratio is not set optimally but is instead set to an empirically plausible value the economy can be much worse off than it would be without unemployment insurance

spatial aspects of deregulation in the market for legal services love j h stephen f h gillanders d d and paterson a a 1992 spatial aspects of deregulation in the market for legal services reg studies 26 137 147 since the early 1980s there has been a consistent policy of deregulating the legal profession in the uk however there has been little recognition that there are spatially distinct markets for legal services which may vary in their responses to policy initiatives this paper explores the implications of solicitor advertising and of licensed conveyancers in twenty seven geographical markets in england and wales evidence is presented which suggests that certain types of advertising have the effect of reducing the level of quoted conveyancing fees and that the removal of the solicitors conveyancing monopoly has also had some effect on quoted fees possible policy implications are discussed love j h stephen f h gillanders d d et paterson a a 1992 des aspects geographiques de la liberalisation du marche des services juridiques reg s

the comparative performance of foreign and domestic firms in brazil abstract this paper analyzes data for 282 pairs of foreign owned and private brazilian firms which are matched by sales and by four digit manufacturing industry differences between the two types of firms are surprisingly large and highly significant compared to their local counterparts foreign firms operate fewer plants have higher ratios of value added to output higher levels of advertising and royalty payments greater exports higher labor productivity higher wages and greater capital intensity

north south trade and female labour in manufacturing an asymmetry a simple method of measuring the impact of north south trade on the female intensity of manufacturing is applied to data for developed and developing countries the results confirm that growth of exports has increased the relative demand for female labour in the south however there does not appear to have been a general counterpart reduction in the relative demand for female labour in northern manufacturing even among blue collar workers there are several possible reasons for the apparent conflict between these findings and other evidence that in northern manufacturing females have been disproportionately displaced by trade with the south

the long term effects of foreign investment dependence on economic growth 1940 1990 does dependence of a national economy on foreign investment promote economic growth or underdevelopment the recent exchanges between glenn firebaugh and william j dixon and terry boswell suggest the contentious nature of this debate this study analyzes models similar to those tested in previous research but with data from earlier time points to examine the long term effects of foreign capital penetration accumulated stocks of foreign capital gdp in 1938 have a short term five year positive effect on economic growth followed by a 20 year lagged negative effect on economic growth beginning in 1960 and lasting at least 30 years similar effects are found using a second indicator of foreign investment dependence debits on investment income for the 1950 90 period the international migration of capital has facilitated development of the world s natural resources and has been instrumental in transmitting the direct effects of the industrial revolution from area to area thereby it has helped to increase

the macroeconomic implications of rising wage inequality in the united states in recent decades american workers have faced a rising college premium a narrowing gender gap and increasing wage volatility this paper explores the quantitative and welfare implications of these changes the framework is an incomplete markets life cycle model in which individuals choose education intrafamily time allocation and savings given the observed history of the u s wage structure the model replicates key trends in cross sectional inequality in hours worked earnings and consumption recent cohorts enjoy welfare gains on average as higher relative wages for college graduates and for women translate into higher educational attainment and a more even division of labor within the household

flat tax reform a quantitative exploration abstract this paper explores quantitatively the general equilibrium implications of a revenue neutral tax reform in which the current income and capital income tax structure in the u s is replaced by a flat tax as proposed by hall and rabushka 1995 the flat tax 2nd ed hoover the central aspects of such reform the impact of tax reform on capital accumulation and labor supply as well as its distributional consequences are analyzed in a dynamic general equilibrium model main results are that i the elimination of the actual taxation of capital income has an important and positive effect on capital accumulation ii mean labor hours are relatively constant across tax systems but aggregate labor in efficiency units increases iii in all circumstances analyzed the distributions of earnings income and especially wealth become more concentrated

advertising and competition in routine legal service markets an empirical investigation this study s findings together with the results of earlier studies of the relationship between advertis ing and market prices provide considerable empirical support for the pro competitive view of seller advertising data on attorney fees an d advertising practices in seventeen metropolitan areas across the u s were used to estimate the effect of market advertising intensity o n firm demand elasticities holding other possible influencing factor s constant the results obtained for all three routine legal services examined are consistent with the hypothesis that advertising increas es competition among sellers in a market copyright 1987 by blackwell publishing ltd

optimal unemployment insurance this paper considers the design of an optimal unemployment insurance system the problem is modeled as a repeated principalagent problem involving a risk averse agent the unemployed worker and a risk neutral principal which cannot monitor the agent s search effort the optimal long term contract subject to the associated incentive constraints is characterized this contract involves a replacement ratio that decreases throughout the unemployment spell and a wage tax after reemployment that under some mild regularity conditions increases with the lenght of the unemployment spell some numerical results are presented that suggest that the gains from switching to this optimal unemployment insurance scheme could be quite large the performance of this optimal contract is also compared to alternative liquidity provision mechanisms

the effects of health wealth and wages on labour supply and retirement behaviour this paper estimates a life cycle model of labour supply retirement and savings behaviour in which future health status and wages are uncertain individuals face a fixed cost of work and cannot borrow against future labour pension or social security income the method of simulated moments is used to match the life cycle profiles of labour force participation hours worked and assets that are estimated from the data to those that are generated by the model the model establishes that the tax structure of the social security system and pensions are key determinants of the high observed job exit rates at ages 62 and 65 removing the tax wedge embedded in the social security earnings test for individuals aged 65 and older would delay job exit by almost one year by contrast social security benefit levels health and borrowing constraints are less important determinants of job exit at older ages for example reducing social security benefits by 20 would cause workers to delay exit from the labour force by only three months

advertising consumer search costs and prices in a professional service market since stigler s 1961 seminal article on the economics of information it has been argued that producer advertising is a substitute for consumer search this view of advertising has been implicit in recent liberalization of restrictions on advertising by professionals e g lawyers doctors accountants etc using th e model of the price discriminating professional developed by masson and wu 1974 the impact of solicitor advertising on the level of conveyancing fees charged by a sample of scottish solicitors is estimated the analysis distinguishes between different forms of advertising the advertising of information theory cannot be rejected for some forms of advertising in one property value submarket but it can be in the other higher property value submarket the evidence here rejects i the view that all advertising is a substitude for consumer search and ii the view that actions to reduce search costs such as advertising necessarily reduce price discrimination

paralegals and substitution among labor inputs in the law firm despite the recent interest in economic analysis of the law firm and the market for legal services 1 little attention has been given by economists to a phenomenon of increasing importance in the markets for inputs to the production of legal services the rise of the paralegal to illustrate between 1972 and 1977 the number of practicing attorneys in the u s increased by 41 percent but the number of paraprofessionals in legal services increased by 135 percent if we look at all law firms in the u s we find the share of labor cost paid to paralegals almost doubled in those five years increasing from 3 7 percent to 6 7 percent on the other hand the cost share of salaried associate lawyers was stable over the same period this raises the questions of how easily substitutable the various labor inputs are for one another in this paper we examine this issue by using a short run labor substitution model estimating cost share equations derived from a translog labor price function data from the 1977 census of service industries are used to derive quantity and price measures for three types of labor inputs associate lawyers paraprofessionals and all others for law partnerships in 65 standard metropolitan statistical areas the primary result is that paralegals seem more closely substitutable with other workers secretarial clerical messengers than with associate lawyers suggesting that wages and employment of lawyers are unlikely to have been significantly affected by the influx of paralegals

consumption and risk sharing over the life cycle a striking feature of u s data on income and consumption is that inequality increases with age this paper asks if individual specific earnings risk can provide a coherent explanation we find that it can we construct an overlapping generations general equilibrium model in which households face uninsurable earnings shocks over the course of their lifetimes earnings inequality is exogenous and is calibrated to match data from the u s panel study on income dynamics consumption inequality is endogenous and matches well data from the u s consumer expenditure survey the total risk households face is decomposed into that realized before entering the labor market and that realized throughout the working years in welfare terms the latter is found to be more important than the former

cost of business cycles with indivisibilities and liquidity constraints it is almost universally agreed that individuals face incomplete insurance markets and cannot perfectly insure against the idiosyncratic risk in this paper simple general equilibrium models with incomplete insurance markets are examined in order to assess the impact of imperfect insurance on the magnitude of the welfare costs of business cycles two versions of incomplete insurance markets are considered and certain statistical properties of the equilibrium stochastic processes in these environments are compared with those of a perfect insurance economy

the risk free rate in heterogeneous agent incomplete insurance economies abstract why has the average real risk free interest rate been less than one percent the question is motivated by the failure of a class of calibrated representative agent economies to explain the average return to equity and risk free debt i construct an economy where agents experience uninsurable idiosyncratic endowment shocks and smooth consumption by holding a risk free asset i calibrate the economy and characterize equilibria computationally with a borrowing constraint of one year s income the resulting risk free rate is more than one percent below the rate in the comparable representative agent economy

the changing position of women in russian industry prospects of marginalization abstract women have played a prominent role in russian industry this paper draws on data from the first two rounds of the russian labor flexibility survey to assess whether the economic and employment changes that occured in 1990 1992 led to their displacement from jobs to a greater or lesser extent than for men it examines the extent of explicit discrimination against women in recruitment and in access to training the changing share of jobs expected changes in female employment and in a preliminary way the degree of gender based occupational segregation of jobs the paper also examines evidence on the neglected issue of gender based wage differentials and indicates changes that seem to have occured in the early part of the restructuring process

what is a good job a new measure of labor market success no currently available index allows investigators to estimate the overall desirabitlity of specific jobs with data collected in the 1980 survey of job charactersitics an index of job desirability ijd can be constructed to fill this gap the ijd incorporates 13 nonmonetary job characteristics along with measures of earnings and weights all job characteristics according to their effects on workers judgments about how good their current jobs are compared with an average job while earnings are the most important single determinant of a job s desirability the 13 nonmonetary job characteristics together are twice as important as earnings unlike occupational status and earnings the proposed index explains almost the entire effect of race sex educational attainment and experience on job ratings it also explains almost all the variation in job ratings provided by workers in different occupations furthermore taking account of nonmonetary job characteristics more than doubles the estimated level of

international capital flows identifying the gender dimension abstract this paper explores the main issues involved in examining the gender impact of international capital flows to developing countries it argues that at the macroeconomic level women lose more than men from slow and or unstable economic growth financial crises and meltdowns and even more so the longer and deeper the economic downturn because without a social security system the family and women have many additional burdens women should formulate an agenda of their own with respect to international monetary reform and some proposals are outlined in this respect including those involving capital controls