how do nonprofits respond to negative wealth shocks the impact of the 2008 stock market collapse on hospitals the theory of cost shifting posits that nonprofit firms share the pain of negative financial shocks with their stakeholders for example by raising prices we examine how nonprofit hospitals responded to the sharp reductions in their assets caused by the 2008 stock market collapse the average hospital did not raise prices but hospitals with substantial market power did cost shift in this way we find no evidence that hospitals reduced treatment costs hospitals eliminated but left unchanged their offerings of profitable services taken together our results provide mixed evidence on whether nonprofits behave differently from for profits

narrow networks on the health insurance exchanges what do they look like and how do they affect pricing a case study of texas abstract the affordable care act has engendered significant changes in the design of health insurance products we examine the narrowness of hospital networks affiliated with plans offered in the first year of the marketplaces using data from texas we find limited evidence of a tight link between pricing and a simple measure of network breadth or a more complex measure of network value derived from a logit model of hospital choice the state s largest insurer priced its narrow networks at a fairly constant discount relative to its broad networks notwithstanding significant variation in its broad narrow gap across geographic markets in texas

wage changes and intrafirm job mobility over the business cycle two case studies despite the many reasons to expect sluggish wage adjustment recent evidence suggests that real wages are quite procyclical growing more rapidly during economic expansions than during recessions and that this wage procyclicality pertains even to workers who stay with the same employer one possible explanation for these findings is the old hypothesis that a portion of firms cyclical adjustment of labor costs is achieved not by changing the wages paid in particular jobs but by changing the quality of labor assigned to those jobs the authors analysis of interwar personnel data from the ford motor company and the a m byers company supports that hypothesis the authors recognize that case studies of only two firms cannot be definitive but they conclude that cyclicality in workers job assignments deserves further attention

long run effects of mergers the case of u s western railroads abstractwe provide a retrospective assessment of the effects of the two recent major railroad mergers in the western united states burlington northern atchison topeka santa fe and union pacific southern pacific on the price of rail transport of export grain estimation accounts for selectivity bias that arises because rail prices are observed only for routes with traffic despite concerns that both mergers could harm consumers by reducing carrier competition we find that in the long run the mergers have had negligible effects on grain transportation prices and consumer welfare

two sided uncertainty and up or out contracts a bilateral moral hazard problem provides a rationale for up or out employment contracts the employer sets a wage higher than opportunity cost to induce the worker to invest in firm specific capital if the individual does not make the grade it is in the firm s interest ex post to fire him had the initial arrangement not included provisions for firing individuals the firm would underreport the value of the employee wrecking the incentive scheme the basic model permits both firm and worker to be risk neutral therefore it admits a straightforward multiperiod extension which we also investigate

policy simulations with a continuous time macrodynamic model of the italian economy a preliminary analysis abstract one of the main policy problems being discussed at present is how to curb inflation what gives the italian case its distinctive flavour is the generalized presence of automatic escalator clauses yielding a high indexation of wages therefore in addition to standard suggestions a number of ad hoc policy recipes have also been proposed which need careful investigation the authors by means of simulations with their continuous time macrodynamic model of the italian economy give a preliminary analysis of the effects of these policy recipes

hospital systems and bargaining power evidence from out of market acquisitions competition analyses generally restrict their attention to how mergers alter concentration in the relevant consumer market studying hospital competition by focusing on the local patient market may be misleading however as multi market hospital systems often play an important role in the price negotiations of their members with managed care organizations we focus on out of market hospital mergers to investigate the cross market effects of system membership on member hospital reimbursement rates based on acquisitions occurring across the united states during 2000 2008 we find that hospitals exhibit significant increases of around 14 in their net reimbursement rates after becoming affiliated with an out of market system compared to independent stand alone hospitals we find no evidence that the price effect results from changes in patient case mix the cost of providing care generally or hospital quality the findings reveal that systems can impact the market power of hospitals in ways that have not been considered in recent antitrust analysis

macroeconomic conditions at entry and injury risk in the workplace financial support from mineco feder eco2015 70540 p and the compagnia di san paolo to call3 20120119 the popart network is gratefully acknowledged

monopolistic competition with experience goods this paper constructs a model of monopolistic competition where consumers cannot directly verify product quality prior to an initial purchase instead consumers base initial purchases on observed prices which perfectly signal firms qualities both in and out of equilibrium equilibrium quality is less than efficient but generally bounded away from the minimum quality with free entry observable product variety exceeds what would prevail with perfect information as repeat purchases become large relative to initial purchases or as firms become small relative to the size of the market equilibrium product quality rises and the market converges to the full information equilibrium

monetary and fiscal policy in a second order continuous time macroeconometric model of the united kingdom abstract this paper is concerned with the application to monetary and fiscal policy analysis of a recently developed second order continuous time macroeconometric model of the united kingdom it deals with the effect on stability of both simple ad hoc policy feedbacks and more sophisticated feedbacks derived by using optimal control theory the latter are designed to minimize an infinite horizon quadratic cost function involving deviations of output the exchange rate and the monetary and fiscal policy instruments from their steady state paths and also the rates of change of the policy instruments

demographic differences in cyclical employment variation demographic differences in patterns of employment variation over the business cycle are examined in this paper three primary conclusions emerge first both participation and unemployment must be considered in any analysis of cyclical changes in the labor market second young people bear a disproportionate share of cyclical employment variation third failure to consider participation has led to undue pessimism about the effect of aggregate demand policy on high unemployment groups if participation did not surge reduction in overall unemployment to its 1969 level would reduce the unemployment of almost all demographic groups to very low levels

bifurcation analysis of zellner s marshallian macroeconomic model the marshallian macroeconomic model in zellner and israilevich 2005 provides a novel way to examine sectoral dynamics through the introduction of a dynamic entry exit equation in addition to the usual demand and supply functions found in models of this class in this paper we examine the possibility of cyclical behavior in the marshallian macroeconomic model and investigate the existence of a hopf bifurcation with respect to the parameter in the entry exit equation

the perfect storm graduating during a recession in a segmented labor market using spanish social security data merged with labor force survey data this article analyzes the effects of entry labor market conditions on workers careers two to three decades after graduating

how acquisitions affect firm behavior and performance evidence from the dialysis industry many industries have become increasingly concentrated through mergers and acquisitions which in health care may have important consequences for spending and outcomes using a rich panel of medicare claims data for nearly one million dialysis patients we advance the literature on the effects of mergers and acquisitions by studying the precise ways providers change their behavior following an acquisition we base our empirical analysis on more than 1 200 acquisitions of independent dialysis facilities by large chains over a 12 year period and find that chains transfer several prominent strategies to the facilities they acquire most notably acquired facilities converge to the behavior of their new parent companies by increasing patients doses of highly reimbursed drugs replacing high skill nurses with less skilled technicians and waitlisting fewer patients for kidney transplants we then show that patients fare worse as a result of these changes outcomes such as hospitalizations and mortality deteriorate with our long panel allowing us to identify these effects from within facility or within patient variation around the acquisitions because overall medicare spending increases at acquired facilities mostly as a result of higher drug reimbursements this decline in quality corresponds to a decline in value for payers we conclude the article by considering the channels through which acquisitions produce such large changes in provider behavior and outcomes finding that increased market power cannot explain the decline in quality rather the adoption of the acquiring firm s strategies and practices drives our main results with greater economies of scale for drug purchasing responsible for more than half of the change in profits following an acquisition

spatial differentiation and vertical mergers in retail markets for gasoline this paper studies an empirical model of spatial competition applied to gasoline markets the main feature is to specify commuting paths as the locations of consumers in a hotelling style model as a result spatial differentiation depends in an intuitive way on the structure of the road network and the direction of traffic flows the model is estimated using panel data on the quebec city gasoline market and used to evaluate the consequences of a recent vertical merger difference in difference and counterfactual simulation methods are compared and the results to a large extent validate the assumptions of the demand model jel g34 l13 l42 l81 q41 r41

how do hospitals respond to price changes this paper examines hospital responses to changes in diagnosis specific prices by exploiting a 1988 policy reform that generated large price changes for 43 percent of medicare admissions i find hospitals responded primarily by upcoding patients to diagnosis codes with the largest price increases this response was particularly strong among for profit hospitals i find little evidence hospitals increased the volume of admissions differentially for diagnoses subject to the largest price increases despite the financial incentive to do so neither did they increase intensity or quality of care in these diagnoses suggesting hospitals do not compete for patients at the diagnosis level

promotions and wage growth this article presents evidence that internal mobility defined as a promotion or other position change is an important source of wage growth it accounts for approximately 15 of wage growth over the life cycle for white and black men but less for women the incidence of promotions and other position changes appears tied to the wage level better paid workers are more likely to be promoted the life cycle incidence of internal mobility looks similar to that for conventionally defined job mobility most moves are made early in the career mobility declines both with time in position and with experience

a theory of wage and promotion dynamics inside firms we show that a framework that integrates job assignment human capital acquisition and learning captures several empirical findings concerning wage and promotion dynamics inside firms including the following first real wage decreases are not rare but demotions are second wage increases are serially correlated third promotions are associated with large wage increases fourth wage increases at promotion are small relative to the difference between average wages across levels of the job ladder fifth workers who receive large wage increases early in their stay at one level of the job ladder are promoted quickly to the next

mergers coordinated effects and efficiency in the portuguese non life insurance industry we evaluate the impact on market power and efficiency of a series of mergers on three portuguese non life insurance markets we specify and estimate with a panel of firm level data a structural model which includes preferences technology and a market equilibrium condition firms demand curves are not very elastic firms technologies exhibit scale and scope economies and high cost efficiency scores we find that for the period following the mergers there is no evidence of i an increase in market power through coordinated behavior or ii changes in cost efficiency levels in addition social welfare increased

ability matters effects of youth labor market opportunities on long term labor market outcomes utilizing registry data on cognitive ability tests for all norwegian males born between 1962 and 1973 i study whether labor market conditions at the age of graduation have differential effects on earnings and employment for different ability groups i find that low ability males are more vulnerable to local business cycles at the expected time of labor market entry in particular i demonstrate that low ability males suffer larger long term earnings losses than the rest of the population this article is protected by copyright all rights reserved

labor market entry and earnings dynamics bayesian inference using mixtures of experts markov chain clustering summary this paper analyzes patterns in the earnings development of young labor market entrants over their life cycle we identify four distinctly different types of transition patterns between discrete earnings states in a large administrative dataset further we investigate the effects of labor market conditions at the time of entry on the probability of belonging to each transition type to estimate our statistical model we use a model based clustering approach the statistical challenge in our application comes from the difficulty in extending distance based clustering approaches to the problem of identifying groups of similar time series in a panel of discrete valued time series we use markov chain clustering which is an approach for clustering discrete valued time series obtained by observing a categorical variable with several states this method is based on finite mixtures of first order time homogeneous markov chain models in order to analyze group membership we present an extension to this approach by formulating a probabilistic model for the latent group indicators within the bayesian classification rule using a multinomial logit model copyright 2011 john wiley sons ltd

the industrial organization of health care markets the u s health care sector is large and growing health care spending in 2011 amounted to 2 7 trillion and 18 percent of gdp approximately half of health care output is allocated via markets in this paper we analyze the industrial organization literature on health care markets focusing on the impact of competition on price quality and treatment decisions for health care providers and health insurers we conclude with a discussion of research opportunities for industrial organization economists including opportunities created by the u s patient protection and affordable care act

initial labor market conditions and long term outcomes for economists each year graduate students entering the academic job market worry that they will suffer due to uncontrollable macroeconomic risk given the importance of general human capital and the relative ease of publicly observing productivity in academia one might expect that long term labor market outcomes for students graduating in unfavorable climates will resemble long term outcomes for those graduating in favorable climates in this paper i analyze the relationship between macroeconomic conditions at graduation initial job placement and long term outcomes for ph d economists from seven programs using macroeconomic conditions as an instrument for initial placement i show that a quality and type of initial job have a causal effect on long term job characteristics i also show that better initial placement increases research productivity which helps to limit the set of economic models that can explain the effect of initial placement on long term jobs

the price ain t right hospital prices and health spending on the privately insured we use insurance claims data for 27 6 percent of individuals with private employer sponsored insurance in the us between 2007 and 2011 to examine the variation in health spending and in hospitals transaction prices we document the variation in hospital prices within and across geographic areas examine how hospital prices influence the variation in health spending on the privately insured and analyze the factors associated with hospital price variation four key findings emerge first health care spending per privately insured beneficiary varies by a factor of three across the 306 hospital referral regions hrrs in the us moreover the correlation between total spending per privately insured beneficiary and total spending per medicare beneficiary across hrrs is only 0 14 second variation in providers transaction prices across hrrs is the primary driver of spending variation for the privately insured whereas variation in the quantity of care provided across hrrs is the primary driver of medicare spending variation consequently extrapolating lessons on health spending from medicare to the privately insured must be done with caution third we document large dispersion in overall inpatient hospital prices and in prices for seven relatively homogenous procedures for example hospital prices for lower limb mris vary by a factor of twelve across the nation and on average two fold within hrrs finally hospital prices are positively associated with indicators of hospital market power even after conditioning on many demand and cost factors hospital prices in monopoly markets are 15 3 percent higher than those in markets with four or more hospitals

cohort effects in promotions and wages evidence from sweden and the united states abstract this paper studies the long term effects of the business cycle on workers future promotions and wages using the swedish employer employee matched data we find that a cohort of workers entering the labor market during a boom gets promoted faster and reaches higher ranks this procyclical promotion cohort effect persists even after controlling for workers initial jobs and explains at least half of the wage cohort effects that previous studies have focused on we repeat the same analyses using personnel records from a single u s company and obtain the same qualitative results

the changing effects of competition on non profit and for profit hospital pricing behavior abstract has the nature of hospital competition changed from a medical arms race in which hospitals compete for patients by offering their doctors high quality services to a price war for the patients of payors this paper uses time series cross sectional methods on california hospital discharge data from 1986 1994 to show the association of hospital prices with measures of market concentration changed steadily over this period with prices now higher in less competitive areas even for non profit hospitals regression results are used to simulate the price impact of hypothetical hospital mergers

job assignments signalling and efficiency this article analyzes a model in which information about a worker s ability is only directly revealed to the firm employing the worker other firms however use the worker s job assignment as a signal of ability three results recur throughout the analysis first wage rates tend to be more closely associated with jobs than with ability levels second there is frequently an inefficient assignment of workers to jobs i e even when a firm has complete information about a worker s output third the severity of this inefficiency tends to be negatively correlated with the level of firm specific human capital in the economy

the effect of implicit contracts on the movement of wages over the business cycle evidence from micro data in this paper we address the question of whether wages are affected by labor market conditions in a manner more consistent with a contract approach than with a standard spot market model from a simple implicit contract model we derive implications about the links between wages and past labor market conditions using individual data from the current population survey and the panel study of income dynamics we find that an implicit contract model with costless mobility describes these links better than either a simple spot market model or an implicit contract model with costly mobility

do business cycle conditions at the time of labor market entry affect future employment prospects abstract labor market conditions at the time and place of potential entry into the labor market are shown to have a substantial and persistent effect on adult employment prospects individuals who face particularly depressed local labor markets when they graduate from secondary education are other things equal subject to relatively high rates of nonemployment during their whole prime age work career building on a unique combination of micro and macro data from norway we show that these effects are robust with respect to model specification and conditioning variables and that they are not limited to individuals with a particularly disadvantaged background

estimation and identification of merger effects an application to hospital mergers abstract existing empirical estimates of merger effects are compromised by the fact that merging and nonmerging entities differ in unobserved ways that independently affect outcomes of interest to obtain an unbiased estimate of the effect of consummated mergers i propose an approach that focuses on the response of rivals to mergers and accounts for the endogeneity of exposure to these mergers i apply this approach to evaluate the impact of independent hospital mergers in the united states between 1989 and 1996 using the physical colocation of rivals as an instrument for whether they merge i find a sizeable one time increase in price following a rival s merger with the greatest increase occurring among hospitals nearest the merging hospitals these results are more consistent with predictions from structural models of the hospital industry than with prior observational estimates of the effects of hospital mergers

the role of promotion in inducing specific human capital acquisition workers routinely carry out activities that increase their productivity with their current employer for which they are not directly compensated for example a worker may be asked to develop relationships with clients or shop floor staff or he may develop a better understanding of how his firm operates firmspecific human capital of this type is difficult to quantify so that it is likely to be difficult to directly compensate the worker for its acquisition this paper is concerned with designing compensation schemes for employees to induce them to collect nonverifiable firm specific human capital if firms develop reputations for fairly compensating workers for skill collection the vagueness of these skills may not provide a significant incentive problem i consider the case where firms do not have the opportunity to develop reputations as a result the acquisition of human capital is subject to a dual moral hazard problem first noted in kahn and huberman 1988 first a worker only collects skills if there is a promise of a higher wage if he does so second the employer has an incentive to claim that the worker has not collected these skills even when he in fact has in order to save on wage costs so on the one hand it is difficult to repay the worker after skills are collected as the firm has an incentive to renege however the worker cannot be repaid before collecting skills as he has no subsequent incentive to collect them following the institutional literature i assume that the firm can commit to a labor contract which attaches wages to different tasks the principal purpose of the paper is to show that the firm can use this ability to commit to a wage scale for different tasks to induce a worker to collect firm specific human capital in the presence of this dual moral hazard problem where the worker is rewarded for skill acquisition by promotion to another job assume that a worker can be assigned to one of two jobs d and

an aggregate private expenditure function for the bangladesh economy abstract this paper specifies and estimates an aggregate private expenditure function for bangladesh for the period 1974 1 1985 4 it is specified on the basis of a monetary approach where the level of private expenditure depends not only on the level of real permanent disposable income but also on a variable which measures the extent of disequilibrium in the real money market the regression results suggest that the long run income elasticity of private expenditure is around 0 765 which is lower than unity a fact which induces a decline in the ratio of private expenditure to income as income increases the adjustment coefficient to monetary disequilibrium indicates that in the long run around 32 of excess money supply is reflected in an increase in private expenditure while the rest is mainly used for accumulation of assets

does concentration matter measurement of petroleum merger price effects we have estimated the price effects of two changes in market structure resulting from two changes in the ownership of gasoline refineries in the san francisco bay area tosco s purchase of unocal s rodeo refinery in april 1997 and uds s purchase of tosco s avon refinery in august 2000 these events provide a relatively unique opportunity to test a price concentration relationship if market concentration is related to price then we should observe prices increase and then decrease by a similar amount following these transactions we do not find evidence of a consistent price concentration relationship

assessing competition in hospital care markets the importance of accounting for quality differentiation quality differentiation is especially important in the hospital industry where the choices of medicare patients are unaffected by prices unlike previous studies that use geographic market concentration to estimate hospital competitiveness this article emphasizes the importance of quality differentiation in this spatially differentiated market i estimate a random coefficients discrete choice model that predicts patient flow to different hospitals and find that demand responses to both distance and quality are substantial the estimates suggest that patients do not substitute toward alternative hospitals in proportion to current market shares implying that geographic market concentration is an inappropriate measure of hospital competitiveness

the internal economics of the firm evidence from personnel data we analyze twenty years of personnel data from one firm the hierarchical structure is quite simple and stable career movements suggest that the employee s rate of learning and the firm s learning about ability are important there are promotion fast tracks exit rates vary little with tenure or salary the firm has personnel policies like those described in the internal labor markets literature although several theoretical preconditions for ilms such as ports of entry and exit are lacking job levels are important to compensation but there is also substantial individual variation in pay within levels our companion paper in this issue explores the wage policy of this firm

can mergers increase output evidence from the lodging industry we find that hotel mergers increase occupancy in some specifications price also rises because these effects occur only in markets with high capacity utilization and high uncertainty we reject simple models of price or quantity competition in favor of models of revenue management where firms price to fill available capacity in the face of uncertain demand

incentives wages and promotions theory and evidence i study an incentive problem that has been largely ignored in the agency literature incentives for repeated human capital investment the optimal contract is very simple but still provides rich implications for incentive and wage structures in large organizations the empirical evidence is presented using personnel records of health insurance claim processors in a large u s insurance company these processors are white collar nonmanagerial female service industry workers a rapidly growing but rarely studied labor group the empirical findings are consistent with the main features of the optimal contract

equal pay for equal work evidence from sweden and a comparison with norway and the u s using a new data set covering most privately employed workers in sweden we compare gender wage differences to those previously reported for norway and the u s the central finding is that the wage gap is small when comparing men and women working in the same type of occupation for the same employer segregation of men and women by occupation accounts for more of the gap in sweden than in the other two countries in all three countries we find that segregation by occupation explains more than segregation by establishment and that institutional changes over the past two decades aimed at improving the status of women had little effect on the gender wage gap jel classification j16 j71

on empirical exchange rate models what does a rejection of the symmetry restriction on short run interest rates mean abstract the purpose of this paper is to interpret the well documented rejection of reduced form symmetry restrictions on short run interest rates and to show that such a rejection implies a rejection of rational expectations re and or uncovered interest rate parity uip the paper also shows that if this rejection is due to failure of uip it cannot be explained by the presence of a standard risk premium in order to provide for well specified alternatives the paper explores the reduced form implications of imperfect capital mobility and a recent alternative to re called the theories consistent expectations framework

the lasting effects of leaving school in an economic downturn on alcohol use the author tests whether leaving school in an economic downturn persistently affects alcohol use she models alcohol use in middle age as a function of the state unemployment rate at school leaving in the national longitudinal survey of youth 1979 cohort the results suggest that men but not women who leave school in an economic downturn consume more drinks and are more likely to report heavy and binge drinking than otherwise similar men findings are robust to addressing the endogeneity of the time and location of school leaving and contribute to the literature on the lasting consequences of leaving school in an economic downturn

task assignment over the business cycle in this article i evaluate the hypothesis that firms respond to negative demand shocks by assigning workers to tasks that require less skill than the tasks they normally carry out using changes in employment in state industry cells as a measure of demand conditions facing individual firms i provide evidence in favor of the hypothesis furthermore the skill requirements of the tasks carried out by workers are procyclical the results are consistent with a specific capital model where employers move workers between tasks so that layoffs are concentrated on workers with low levels of firm specific human capital

hospital consolidation and costs another look at the evidence we investigate whether pairwise hospital consolidation leads to cost savings we use a unified empirical methodology to assess both systems and mergers our comparison group for each consolidation consists of 10 pseudo mergers chosen based on propensity scores cost function estimates reveal that consolidation into systems does not generate savings even after 4 years mergers in which hospitals consolidate financial reporting and licenses generate savings of approximately 14 2 3 and 4 years after merger the system consolidation and merger results are very robust to changes in the specification and the sample

insurer provider networks in the medical care market i use data on the hospital networks offered by managed care health insurers to estimate the expected division of profits between insurers and providers i include a simple profit maximization framework and an additional effect hospitals that can secure demand without contracting with all insurers e g those most attractive to consumers and those that are capacity constrained may demand high prices that some insurers refuse to pay hospital mergers may also affect price bargaining i estimate that all three types of hospitals capture higher markups than other providers these results provide information on the hospital investment incentives generated by bargaining

a structural approach to market definition with an application to the hospital industry a structural approach to market definition market definition is essential to merger analysis because no standard approach to market definition exists opposing parties in antitrust cases often disagree about the extent of the market these differences have been particularly relevant in the hospital industry where the courts have denied seven of eight merger challenges since 1994 due largely to disagreements over geographic market definition we compare geographic markets produced using common ad hoc methodologies to a method that directly applies the ssnip test to hospitals in california using a structural model our results suggest that previously employed methods overstate hospital demand elasticities by a factor of 2 4 to 3 4 and define larger markets than would be implied by the merger guidelines s hypothetical monopolist test the use of these methods in differentiated product industries may lead to mistaken geographic market delineation and was likely a contributing factor to the permissive legal environment for hospital mergers

can governments do it better merger mania and hospital outcomes in the english nhs the literature on mergers between private hospitals suggests that such mergers often produce little benefit despite this the uk government has pursued an active policy of hospital mergers arguing that such consolidations will bring improvements for patients we examine whether this promise is met we exploit the fact that between 1997 and 2006 in england around half the short term general hospitals were involved in a merger but that politics means that selection for a merger may be random with respect to future performance we examine the impact of mergers on a large set of outcomes including financial performance productivity waiting times and clinical quality and find little evidence that mergers achieved gains other than a reduction in activity given that mergers reduce the scope for competition between hospitals the findings suggest that further merger activity may not be the appropriate way of dealing with poorly performing hospitals

the competitive effects of horizontal mergers in the hospital industry a closer look abstract woolley 1989 attempted to analyze the competitive impact of horizontal hospital mergers using the event study method woolley characterized his results as consistent with traditional oligopoly theories of market behavior we scrutinize in detail a large number of his events however and find that most either generated concentration increases too small to plausibly produce market power or could not have conferred monopoly returns on firms improperly characterized as rivals accordingly any observed abnormal returns are likely attributable to some other cause we suggest some alternative interpretations of his results our paper highlights the need for care in the selection of events and the identification of rivals when applying the event study method to the analysis of mergers

occupational specificity of human capital we find that returns to occupational tenure are substantial everything else being constant 5 years of occupational tenure are associated with an increase in wages of 12 20 moreover when occupational experience is taken into account tenure with an industry or employer has relatively little importance in accounting for the wage one receives this finding is consistent with human capital being occupation specific

the long term effects of youth unemployment using nlsy data we examine the long term effects of youth unemployment on later labor market outcomes involuntary unemployment may yield suboptimal investments in human capital in the short run a theoretical model of dynamic human capital investment predicts a rational catch up response using semiparametric techniques to control for the endogeneity of prior behavior our estimates provide strong evidence of this response we also find evidence of persistence in unemployment combining our semiparametric estimates with a dynamic approximation to the lifecycle we find that unemployment experienced as long ago as ten years continues to affect earnings adversely despite the catch up response

enriching a theory of wage and promotion dynamics inside firms in previous work we showed that a model that integrates job assignment human capital acquisition and learning can explain several empirical findings concerning wage and promotion dynamics inside firms in this article we extend that model in two ways first we incorporate schooling and derive further testable implications that we then compare with the available empirical evidence second and more important we show that introducing task specific human capital allows us to produce cohort effects we further argue that task specific human capital is a realistic concept and may have many important implications we also discuss limitations of our extended approach

an empirical analysis of the effect of monetary disequilibria in open economies abstract a dynamic disequilibrium simultaneous equation econometric model for france and west germany is set up estimated and simulated to consider the ways in which disequilibrium in the money markets is eliminated the results provide suggestive evidence to support the monetary approach to the balance of payments

a treatment effect method for merger analysis with an application to parking prices in paris we propose a method of building control groups for retrospective merger evaluation the procedure involves two parameters a distance or radius and an order of exposure reflecting the notion that a merger can affect an outlet in a more or less direct way we implement the method of estimating the price effect of a merger in the paris parking market and illustrate the consequences of including indirectly exposed outlets in the control group the methodology applies to any industry with spatial competition and allows one to check the sensitivity of the results to the choice of the control group