scale diversity and determinants of labour migration in europe while global migration is increasing internal eu migration flows have only increased slowly this paper contributes to a better understanding of the determinants and scale of european migration it surveys previous historical experiences and empirical findings including the recent eastern enlargements the determinants of migration before and after the 2004 enlargement and in the eu15 and eu10 countries are analysed using individual data on migration intentions in addition perceptions about the size of migration after the enlargement are studied the potential emigrant from both old and new eu member states tends to be young better educated and to live in larger cities people from the eu10 with children are less likely to move after enlargement in comparison to those without family there exists a correlation between individual perceptions about the scale of migration and actual flows better educated and left oriented individuals in the eu15 are less likely to perceive these flows as important

the local response to tax limitation measures do local governments manipulate voters to increase revenues abstract this paper provides evidence that some cities subject to a statewide tax limit manipulate their mix of productive and administrative services in an attempt to get voters to override the statewide limit when a statewide limit reduces a city s budget one manipulative response is to cut service inputs for example teachers or uniformed police officers by a relatively large amount while cutting administrative inputs by a relatively small amount this approach reveals a relatively large trade off between public and private goods and the severe consequences from a tax limit may encourage local voters to override the statewide limit we provide evidence that cities with local override options tend to adopt this approach manipulation is most prevalent among cities run by city managers as opposed to strong mayors

data watch research data in the economics of education economists have developed a wide variety of policy relevant empirical research projects that address the role of education in promoting individual and social welfare recent examples include studies on the impact of school spending on educational outputs the differences between public and private schools the effects of competition among schools the determinants of teacher quality the impact of unions on schools and the consequences of education finance reform one reason for the proliferation of such empirical studies has been the emergence of high quality micro level data on education in this paper we discuss three broad types of data sets data on educational institutions data on educational outcomes at the individual level and data sets from school reforms and experiments in each section we summarize some of the leading surveys discuss the general availability of the data and identify some but certainly not all of the research that has utilized these data this review is by no means exhaustive we have restricted our attention to analyses of data sets describing primary and secondary education moreover we emphasize data sets that are excellent sources of information but are less wellknown and utilized by economists in particular two obvious omissions from this review are the national longitudinal survey of youth nlsy and the panel study of income dynamics psid both are broad based studies that track people over periods of time gathering information both on educational attainment and on many other issues as well

collective bargaining in the public sector the effect of legal structure on dispute costs and wages this paper examines the impact of collective bargaining legislation on dispute costs and wages using a panel of canadian public sector contracts the authors results suggest that policymakers designing collective bargaining legislation face a trade off between reducing dispute costs and increasing wages dispute costs are lower under compulsory arbitration than under the right to strike or when no collective bargaining legislation exists hence a switch to compulsory arbitration could potentially make both the union and the employer better off by reducing dispute costs however the authors find that wages are higher under compulsory arbitration than under other legal structures copyright 1991 by american economic association

sources of intra industry wage dispersion how much do employers matter observed human capital explains less than half of wage variation in bls industry wage surveys establishment based wage differentials controlling for occupation account for 20 70 percent of intra industry wage variation this corresponds to a standard deviation in wages of 14 percent of the mean almost as large as interindustry wage variation investigation suggests that establishment wage differentials are not random variations or returns to usual measures of human capital

heterogeneous market beliefs fundamentals and the sovereign debt crisis in the eurozone type main xml id ecca12155 abs 0001 the unprecedented sovereign debt crisis across the eurozone has prompted a new generation of models with self fulfilling attacks on public debt the model presented in this paper shows that multiple equilibria arise as investors have no direct information and form heterogeneous rational beliefs about the government s sustainable limit of the solvency primary balance if beliefs of insolvency are sufficiently large then the government is bound to default although initial solvency conditions are satisfied several issues are discussed concerning the role of initial conditions fiscal shocks and the policy options to escape from the default domain

do limits matter evidence on the effects of tax limitations on student performance abstract the goal of this research is to determine if limits on the revenue raising ability of school districts translate into constraints on the ability of these districts to affect student performance we use the recent imposition of property tax limitations on school districts in the chicago metropolitan area to determine if these limits have translated into slower growth in student performance we find only limited evidence that student performance in districts subject to the tax limitations has fallen relative to student performance in districts not subject to the limitations

do potential migrants internalize migrant rights in oecd host societies this paper analyzes how countries provision of migrant rights affects potential migrants destination choice combining data on bilateral migration desires from over 140 origin countries and data on migrant rights in 38 mainly oecd destination countries over the period 2007 2014 we find that potential migrants tend to favour destinations that are more open to the inclusion of immigrants into their society in particular better access to and conditions on the labour market as well as access to nationality and to permanent residency significantly increase the perceived attractiveness of a destination country these results are robust across different specifications and hold for subsamples of origin countries as well as of destinations moreover some results vary across types of respondents educational opportunities for migrants for instance affect the migration desires of individuals aged 15 to 24 years but less so of individuals in other age groups

how vouchers could change the market for education small probability that vouchers will in the foreseeable future be adopted on a large scale in any school district or state at the moment only three states have adopted publicly funded voucher programs and all of these programs are limited in scale nonetheless in recent years over 40 state legislatures have considered proposals to provide some type of voucher program or tuition tax credit for at least some families in a given state or school district and the children s scholarship fund see http www scholarshipfund org has helped create or expand privately funded voucher programs in numerous cities as vouchers become a more significant part of education policy debates the time is right to consider what we know and do not know about the likely effects of adopting various voucher schemes in the balance of this paper i describe both empirical and theoretical work on education that speaks to this topic i argue that we cannot confidently predict the outcomes that would result from various voucher schemes and i also stress that debates over vouchers per se are not informative details concerning funding targeting and discretion in the use of vouchers should greatly affect the outcomes associated with any particular voucher program still empirical evidence on the performance of public versus private schools as well as numerical results from existing simulation models suggest that policymakers should be able to design voucher programs that would be helpful to minority students in large cities public schools in large cities often perform poorly in minority neighborhoods and this is especially true in economically disadvantaged areas

school board politics school district size and the bargaining power of teachers unions this paper presents a public choice theory of the bargaining power of teachers unions the theory predicts that the power of the unions rises with the size of a district the theory is tested by examining the relationship between district size and various bargaining outcomes for a sample of 771 california school districts in 1999 2000 as hypothesized teachers salaries rise and the ratio of teachers per pupil falls with increasing district size the paper also considers several alternative explanations for these results

state responses to fiscal crises the effects of budgetary institutions and politics this paper explores the dynamics of state taxes and spending during the late 1980s when regional economic downturns and increased expenditure demands led to substantial state budget deficits more restrictive state fiscal institutions such as no deficit carryover rules and tax and expenditure limitations are correlated with more rapid fiscal adjustment to unexpected deficits political factors are also important when a single party controls the state house and the governorship deficit adjustment is much faster than when party control is divided in gubernatorial election years tax increases and spending cuts are both significantly smaller than at other times

the quality and distribution of teachers under the no child left behind act the heart of accountability under the no child left behind nclb act is an attempt to change the existing incentives in schools with the ultimate objective that all students meet a proficiency standard existing research indicates that nothing is more important to high achieve ment as having effective teachers implying that the impact of new incentives on teachers will be central to any consideration of the accountability statutes tracing the impacts of nclb on the stock and distribution of teachers is none theless a difficult and uncertain task the belief that the quality of teachers matters a great deal to the quality of education received by students has actually proven hard to substantiate and the reasons for this difficulty are key to assessing the impacts of no child left behind a substantial body of research going back to the coleman et al 1966 report has attempted to link commonly used measures of teacher quality such as experience degree level and state teacher certification to student outcomes surprisingly except for perhaps the first few years of classroom experience no robust connection has appeared for example hanushek and rivkin 2006 review various studies attempting to identify characteristics of effective teachers one

do economics departments with lower tenure probabilities pay higher faculty salaries the simplest competitive labor market model asserts that if tenure is a desirable job characteristic for professors they should be willing to pay for it by accepting lower salaries conversely if an institution unilaterally reduces the probability that its assistant professors receive tenure it will have to pay higher salaries to attract new faculty our paper tests this theory using data on salary offers accepted by new assistant professors at economics departments in the united states during the 1974 75 to 1980 81 period along with data on the proportion of new ph d s hired by each department between 1970 and 1980 that received tenure in the department or at a comparable or higher quality department within the first eight years of receipt of their ph d s we find evidence that supports the hypothesis that a tradeoff existed equally importantly departments that offered low tenure probabilities to assistant professors also paid higher salaries to their tenured faculty we attribute this to low tenur

bargaining unit composition and the returns to education and tenure using data on collectively bargained outcomes in pennsylvania schools in 1983 89 the authors find a strong relationship between the returns to education and tenure and the distribution of those attributes in the bargaining unit for instance the higher the median level of teacher tenure in a district the greater was the pay gap between teachers with low and high tenure this relationship was very strong in districts with vigorous community support for union activities and weak or nonexistent in districts with low union support the authors argue that consistent with the median voter model the unions in this study pushed hardest to advance the interests of their typical members and that they were most effective in doing so where the community was generally supportive of unions

the forgotten history of domestic debt there is a rich scholarly literature on sovereign default on external debt comparatively little is known about sovereign default on domestic debt even today cross country data on domestic public debt remains curiously exotic particularly prior to the 1980s we have filled this gap in the literature by compiling a database on central government public debt external and domestic the data span 1914 to 2010 for most countries reaching back into the nineteenth century and earlier for many our findings here on debt sustainability sovereign defaults the temptation to inflate and the hierarchy of creditors only scratch the surface of what the domestic public debt data can reveal first domestic debt is big for the 64 countries for which we have long time series domestic debt accounts for almost two thirds of total public debt for most of the sample this debt carries a market determined interest rate except for the financial repression era between wwii and financial liberalization second the data go a long way toward explaining the puzzle of why countries so often default on their external debts at seemingly low debt thresholds third domestic debt has largely been ignored in the vast empirical work on inflation in fact domestic debt a significant portion of which is long term and nonindexed is often much larger than the monetary base in the run up to high inflation episodes last the widely held view that domestic residents are strictly junior to external creditors does not find broad support

did the tax revolt reduce school performance abstract this paper uses detailed school level data from 49 states to analyze the effects of tax revolt era property tax limitations on school services i find that limitations are associated with larger student teacher ratios and lower cost of living adjusted starting teacher salaries all else equal these results are robust to modelling the results as endogenous and using a variety of measures for whether the limitation binds at particular schools however i find no such evidence that schools subject to limitations have reduced their administrative costs furthermore i find that limitations are associated with lower student performance on mathematics science social studies and reading examinations all else equal

alternative interpretations of a stateless currency crisis a number of economists warned that a political union was a prerequisite for a viable currency union this paper disputes the feasibility of such a political union a fully fledged federal union which would likely please peripheral europe is impracticable since it implies a degree of fiscal solidarity that does not exist a hayekian minimal federal state which would appeal to core europe would be refused by peripheral members since residual fiscal sovereignty would be surrendered without any clear positive economic and social return even an intermediate solution based on coordinated keynesian policies would be unfeasible since it would be at odds with german monetary mercantilism the euro area is thus trapped between equally unfeasible political perspectives in this bleak context austerity policies are mainly explained by the necessity to readdress the euro area balance of payments crisis this crisis presents striking similarities to traditional financial crises in emerging economies associated with fixed exchange regimes therefore the delayed response of the european central bank ecb to the sovereign debt crisis cannot be seen as the culprit of the euro area crisis the ecb s monetary refinancing mechanisms target 2 and the ecb s belated outright monetary transactions intervention impeded a blow up of the currency union but could not solve its deep causes the current combination of austerity policies and moderate ecb intervention aims to rebalance intra eurozone foreign accounts and to force competitive deflation strategy

foreign debt versus domestic debt in the euro area the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis has led to a sharp rise in public debt throughout the developed world the problem is particularly acute within the euro area where several governments needed financial assistance from the international monetary fund and the european stability mechanism this paper argues that public debt poses much greater problems when it is owed to foreigners i e when it constitutes foreign debt this view implies that the key to overcoming the euro crisis is in the external adjustment not the fiscal adjustment another implication is that in a crisis a strong fiscal adjustment is desirable not because it can immediately reduce the public debt gdp ratio but because it reduces domestic absorption and thus reinforces the external adjustment copyright 2013 oxford university press

multilateral resistance to migration the rate of migration observed between two countries does not depend solely on their relative attractiveness but also on the one of alternative destinations following the trade literature we term the influence exerted by other destinations on bilateral flows as multilateral resistance to migration and we show how it can be accounted for when estimating the determinants of migration rates in the context of a general individual random utility maximization model we propose the use of the common correlated effects estimator pesaran 2006 and apply it to high frequency data on the spanish immigration boom between 1997 and 2009 compared to more restrictive estimation strategies developed in the literature the bias goes in the expected direction we find a smaller effect of gdp per capita and a larger effect of migration policies on bilateral rates

a predictive index for the flypaper effect abstract it is well established that lump sum public grants boost local government spending more than an equivalent increase in private income the flypaper effect one shortcoming of the related literature is that it presumes all communities have an identical propensity to consume from an intergovernmental grant this paper is one attempt to allow for a heterogeneous response the working conjecture is that government expenditure on administrative overhead is a gauge of voter control over fiscal decisions high overhead spending implies a lower provision of public services and a stronger role for revenue maximizing forces in the budget setting process as such the flypaper effect should be more marked in high overhead communities an overhead index is applied to a sample of pennsylvania communities in the philadelphia metropolitan area it is difficult to understand these governments spending propensities from various windfall revenues without the help of the overhead index supportive evidence for this approach because overhead data is widely available the technique here can be used to address important policy questions such as predicting variations in state government responses to the recently created lump sum welfare grants

competition between private and public schools testing stratification and pricing predictions abstract when there are peer effects in education private schools have an incentive to vary tuition to attract relatively able students epple and romano american economic review 88 1 1998 33 develop a general equilibrium model characterizing equilibrium pricing and student selection into schools when peer effects are present the model predicts that competition will lead private schools to give tuition discounts to more able students and that this will give rise to an equilibrium exhibiting stratification by income and ability between the public and private sectors and to a hierarchy of schools within the private sector the model also yields a variety of comparative static predictions the predictions of the model are tested in this paper using a unique data set assembled by figlio and stone research in labor economics 1999 115 tests of equilibrium predictions of the model reveal that the propensity to attend private school increases with both income and ability and among private schools the propensity to attend the highest tuition schools rises with both income and ability within private schools tuition declines with student ability with a substantial number of even high income households paying little or no tuition the correlation between income and ability is greater in public than private schools tests of comparative static predictions of the model reveal that both income and ability become stronger predictors of private school attendance as public school expenditure falls income becomes increasingly important in determining placement in the private school hierarchy as public school expenditure falls discounts to ability in the lowest quality private school decline as public school expenditure rises while discounts to ability in the highest quality private school are little affected by changes in public school expenditure expenditure in private schools rises as expenditure in public schools increases these empirical results are consistent with the predictions of the theoretical model

the determinants of international migration unbundling the role of economic political and social institutions international migrants may relocate because of economic political and social factors in their origin or destination countries using global bilateral migration flows from 103 countries over the period 1990 2000 we explore whether emigrants self select based on economic political and social institutions our study adds social dimension as a potential determinant of migration and separates the pull and push effects of political economic and social institutions our results indicate that economic political and social institutions are significant pull factors of migration economic freedom has the most substantial pull effect followed by the political institutions social institutions have the weakest pull effect on migration moreover economic and social institutions are significant push factors of migration while political institutions do not show any push effect furthermore educated migrants are more sensitive to the destination economic political and social institutions than less educated migrants and less educated migrants are more sensitive to the social institutions at the origin

wage tenure and wage growth variation within and across establishments we estimate employer specific wage tenure and wage growth differentials using a unique bureau of labor statistics establishment survey of full time white collar workers employer wage and tenure differentials conditional on worker characteristics are substantial in these data education potential experience and tenure are highly correlated within an establishment high wage establishments generally employ higher quality workers and the most skilled men and professionals typically work with the most skilled women and nonprofessionals there is significant variation in wage growth rates across employers and high wage growth establishments tend to have longer tenure all else equal

the intra unit wage structure and unions a median voter model this study adopts the median voter model to analyze the influence of unions on wage structures within collective bargaining units the model predicts that the intra unit wage structure will be changed to increase the share of the total wage bill received by the median members of the bargaining unit this prediction is examined through a case study of a collective bargaining unit the faculty of the state university system in minnesota the changes in the wage structure of the unit proposed by the union and those ultimately implemented are both consistent with the median voter model

does competition among public schools benefit students and taxpayers tiebout choice among districts is the most powerful market force in american public education naive estimates of its effects are biased by endogenous district formation i derive instruments from the natural boundaries in a metropolitan area my results suggest that metropolitan areas with greater tiebout choice have more productive public schools and less private schooling little of the effect of tiebout choice works through its effect on household sorting this finding may be explained by another finding students are equally segregated by school in metropolitan areas with greater and lesser degrees of tiebout choice among districts

selection and network effects migration flows into oecd countries 1990 2000 abstract this paper presents empirical evidence on immigration flows into the oecd countries during the period 1990 2000 our results indicate that network effects are strong but vary between different groups of welfare states and between countries according to the type of immigration policy being applied network effects seem to be less important in the nordic countries which also seem to attract immigrants from the lowest income level source countries we do not find clear evidence that selection effects measured by migration flows being sensitive to differences in public social expenditures have had a major influence on the observed migration patterns until now this may partly be explained by restrictive migration policies which may have dampened the potential selection effects

the distributional effects of new jersey s tax and expenditure limitation when state governments issue general rules that dictate the spending or tax policies of varied local municipalities they distort local government outcomes one example of this is state limitations on local government authority to levy taxes and make expenditures although state imposed tax and expenditure limits tels have been used throughout much of the united states s history they have recently stimulated attention in both the mass media and the academic press in practice tels can be divided into limitations on the authority of local governments to 1 make expenditures and 2 collect property taxes according to a 1981 tabulation of the advisory commission on intergovernmental relations acir reprinted in gold 1983 p 112 46 states had some kind of limitation on local county municipal or school governments ability to collect property taxes and 6 states imposed general expenditure limitations on local governments many of these controls are quite recent in origin in fact all but 18 of the 46 states with property tax limits enacted them after 1970 though some may have had earlier laws restricting the use of the property tax and all of the general expenditure limits were enacted after 1970 a particularly rapid wave of tels followed california s approval of proposition 13 which reduced property taxes there to one percent of assessed value in june 1978 in november 1978 just five months after proposition 13 was approved voters in alabama michigan nevada and texas approved legislation or constitutional amendments that reduced the authority of local governments to raise taxes 2 while many tels set maximum property tax rates and expenditure limits that do not appea to have much effect on the behavior of l cal governments others such as those in california massachusetts and new jersey do a pear to be binding on many localities several r cent studies have attempted to empirically measure the effects of tels 3 the most well known of these studies is a 1977 acir study that used a dummy variable indicating the pres nce or absence of property tax rate and or levy limits along with other independent variables to explain total per capita local own source government expenditures in each of the 50 states primarily because the estimated parameters of these dummy variables were negative and significantly different from zero the acir concluded that tels have reduced government spending further analyses showed the average tel reduced spending 6 to 8 percent inman s 1979b paper which used fiscal year 1966 67 data also employed dummy variables to indicate the presence or absence of various kinds of tax rate limits but used data disaggregated at the city level inman found a positive and insignificant coefficient on all dummy variables and concluded that efforts to regulate local taxation in 1967 through

tax incentives and the decision to purchase health insurance evidence from the self employed the tax reform act of 1986 introduced a new tax subsidy for health insurance purchases by the self employed we analyze the changing patterns of insurance demand before and after tax reform to generate new estimates of how the after tax price of insurance affects the discrete choice of whether to buy insurance we employ both traditional regression models and difference in difference methods that compare changes in insurance coverage across groups around tra86 the results from our most carefully controlled comparison suggest that a 1 percent increase in the cost of insurance coverage reduces the probability that a self employed single person will be insured by 1 8 percentage points

the economics of schooling production and efficiency in public schools n recent years public and professional interest in schools has been heightened by a spate of reports many of them critical of current school policy these policy documents have added to persistent and long standing concerns about the cost effectiveness and fairness of the current school structure and have made schooling once again a serious public issue as in the past however any renewed interest in education is likely to be short lived doomed to dissipate as frustration over the inability of policy to improve school practice sets in this frustration about school policy relates directly to knowledge about the educational production process and in turn to underlying research on schools although the educational process has been extensively researched clear policy prescriptions flowing from this research have been difficult to derive 2 there exists however a consistency to the research findings that does have an immediate application to school policy schools differ dramatically in quality

migration and institutions evidence from internal eu mobility despite the formal achievement of the free movement of labour within the eu the institutional characteristics of the labour markets of the member states may influence european mobility the paper seeks empirical evidence of the relationship between labour market institutions and intra eu migrations estimating a gravity model for bilateral migration for the period 2001 11 the results indicate that trade union density negatively correlates with the size of bilateral migrations destinations with relatively high union density are associated with lower migration inflows since these countries tend to have a relatively flat earnings distribution it is also investigated whether their earnings structure reduces their attractiveness as destinations hindering the access to their labour market even if a dependence between the earnings dispersion and migrations is found trade union density remains the main driver of migration patterns clear effects of employment protection on eu mobility are not found

examining the link between teacher wages and student outcomes the importance of alternative labor market opportunities and non pecuniary variation researchers using cross sectional data have failed to produce systematic evidence that teacher salaries affect student outcomes these studies generally do not account for non pecuniary job attribu

job duration seniority and earnings an important stylized fact about labor markets is that workers with longer seniority with their current employer have higher earnings than other workers with the same total labor market experience this study shows that workers in longer jobs earn more throughout than workers in a series of shorter jobs and that the measured positive cross sectional return seniority is largely a statistical artifact due to the correlation of seniority with an omitted variable representing the quality of the worker the job or the worker employer match the implication is tha t earnings do not in fact rise very much with seniority copyright 1987 by american economic association

a practitioners guide to gravity models of international migration the use of bilateral data for the analysis of international migration is at the same time a blessing and a curse it is a blessing because the dyadic dimension of the data allows researchers to address a number of previously unanswered questions but it is also a curse for the various analytical challenges it gives rise to this paper presents the theoretical foundations of the estimation of gravity models of international migration and the main difficulties that have to be tackled in the econometric analysis such as the nature of migration data how to account for multilateral resistance to migration or endogeneity we also review some empirical evidence that has considered these issues

the bargaining power of teachers unions and the allocation of school resources abstract this paper examines how district size affects the bargaining power of teachers unions and the allocation of school resources our identification strategy exploits the fact that 33 states mandate collective bargaining while 5 states prohibited it in states that mandate collective bargaining we find that beginning salaries and the premium paid to experienced teachers increase with district size while the teacher pupil ratio declines with district size in contrast in states that prohibit collective bargaining we find a negative relationship between district size and the premium paid to experienced teachers district size also has a stronger positive effect on beginning salaries and a weaker negative effect on teacher pupil ratios in states that prohibit collective bargaining collectively our results suggest that more powerful unions bargain for more generous returns to teacher seniority at the expense of staffing ratios and base salaries

union effects in low wage services evidence from canadian childcare empirical evidence presented in this paper based on survey data for canadian childcare workers in 1991 contradicts most stereotypes of the childcare labor market although childcare labor was low wage the authors find that the union impact on wages 15 and fringe benefits was in line with union effects found in other better compensated work and they find substantial returns to education occupational level and firm specific experience the returns to the skill related attributes were blunted somewhat in the union sector except where such returns stood to benefit the median union voter the findings suggest that monetary incentives can be used to encourage improvements in the education experience and skill acquisition of childcare workers unions can improve wages and benefits for childcare workers just as they can for most other workers suggesting the viability of union organizing in this sector despite the traditional barriers to organizing low wage service sector workers in small firms u nion organizing in the growing lowwage female dominated service sector is often regarded as key to offsetting the decline in union membership that is occurring in the areas of traditional union strength the recent success of the service

immigrant selection in the oecd in this paper we examine the determinants of educational selectivity in immigration using immigrant stock data for 70 source countries and 21 oecd destination countries as observed in the year 2000 2001 we develop a variant of the roy model to estimate the determinants of educational selectivity two key findings emerge first the effect of the skill premium which is at the core of the roy model can be observed only after we take into account the poverty constraints operating in the source countries second cultural similarities colonial legacies and physical distance are often more important determinants of educational selectivity than wage incentives or selective immigration policy

labor union objectives and collective bargaining we consider a model oflabor union behavior in which workers make decisions about wages and employment by simple majority rule we show that under general conditions such a union has a well behaved objective function different from those previously postulated in the literature we then show that the union s majority preferences generally lack a von neumann morgenstern utility representation and thus cannot be inserted into traditional bargaining models we then develop and characterize the solutions to a new bargaining model that is consistent with the structure of union preferences several comparative statics results are presented

tax limits and the qualifications of new teachers abstract this paper examines the impact of local tax limits on new teacher quality using data from the national center for education statistics we find that tax limits systematically reduce the average quality of education majors as well as new public school teachers in states that have passed these limits the average relative test scores of education majors in tax limit states declined by ten percent as compared to the relative test scores of education majors in states that did not pass limits this relationship is strengthened if we control for school finance equalization reforms or examine tax limits passed in two different periods

probation length and teacher salaries does waiting pay off tenure policies for elementary and secondary school teachers is a controversial issue in many states but there is virtually no empirical evidence on how tenure affects teacher labor markets this paper begins to fill this research void by using cross state variation in tenure policies to identify the effects if any of the length of the probationary period on entry level teacher salaries using data from the schools and staffing survey the authors investigate whether districts in states with longer probationary periods offer higher wages to teachers as a way to compensate for the extended evaluative period results suggest that they do although effects are concentrated in districts that are most likely to be competing for teachers with districts in neighboring states with shorter probation periods the authors also find that the relationship between probation length and wages is stronger for experienced teachers and in districts that engage in collective bargaining

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

competition and teacher pay i introduction recent policy initiatives are increasing the degree of competition in primary and secondary education the number of charter schools is growing at an astounding rate vouchers are available to eligible children in florida utah and a number of cities including washington d c kafer 2005 school districts throughout the country are experimenting with subcontracting campuses to private firms the increasing popularity of policies that foster school competition dovetails with a burgeoning literature on the effects of educational competition researchers have examined the effects of educational competition on academic outcomes average public school spending and school district efficiency l this research has largely ignored the effects of increased competition on teacher pay yet reductions in the market power of school districts could have a significant impact on teacher earnings if school districts behave as typical monopsonists or oligopsonists when hiring then a lack of competition suppresses wages and policies that are designed to enhance competition among schools could lead to higher teacher salaries ceteris paribus 2 alternatively if a school district s position as a monopolistic provider of education services generates economic rents there are few parties to whom those rents might be dissipated besides school district personnel if teachers have been able to appropriate a share of the economic rents generated by the market power of school districts then increased competition could lower teacher salaries 3 this study uses individual data on more than 335 000 teachers from 670 texas school districts to explore the empirical relationship between competition and teacher pay the analysis suggests that a lack of competition in the public school system has led to significant market power for texas school districts resulting in lower wages for most texas teachers but higher wages for teachers in relatively concentrated markets ii theoretical models the elementary and secondary education industry in the united states is often highly concentrated more than 30 of u s educational markets are served by a single public school district and there are many more that are served by only a handful of educational providers 4 the concentrated nature of education markets suggests two alternative models of teacher wage determination the first is a classic oligopsony model and the second is a rent sharing model an oligopsony model of teacher wage determination boal and ransom 1997 lay out a classic cournot model of oligopsony that can be directly applied to the educational labor market 5 firms school districts choose an employment level l sub i to maximize the firm s revenue function r sub i given the employment level of all other firms in the market l sub i 1 r sub i l sub i w l sub i l sub i l sub i the market wage is determined by the total employment of all firms the first order condition for each firm implies that it chooses l sub i such that 2 mrp sub i w w l sub i l epsilon sup 1 in this model the gap between the marginal revenue product of firm i mrp sub i and the wage rate w depends on the firm s employment share l sub i l and the inverse wage elasticity of labor supply for the market epsilon sup 1 6 assuming that firms have different marginal revenue products the employment weighted average across all the firms in the market is 3 summation over i mrp sub i w l sub i wl epsilon sup 1 summation over i l sub i l sup 2 the last term on the right hand side is the familiar herfindahl index of market concentration thus wages are a function of market concentration h the employment weighted average marginal revenue profit per worker bar

climatic factors as determinants of international migration we examine environmental change as a potential determinant of international migration we distinguish between unexpected short run factors captured by natural disasters as well as long run climate change and climate variability captured by deviations and volatilities of temperatures and rainfall from and around their long run averages starting from a simple neo classical model we use a panel dataset of bilateral migration flows for the period 1960 2000 that allows us to control for numerous time varying and time invariant factors we find no direct impact of climatic change on international migration across our entire sample these results are robust when conditioning on characteristics of origin countries as well as when further considering migrants returning home and the potential endogeneity of our network variable in contrast there is evidence of indirect effects of environmental factors going through wages we further find strong evidence that natural disasters beget greater flows of migrants to urban environs

income maximization and the selection and sorting of international migrants abstract two prominent features of international labor movements are that the more educated are more likely to emigrate positive selection and more educated migrants are more likely to settle in destination countries with high rewards to skill positive sorting using data on emigrant stocks by schooling level and source country in oecd destinations we find that a simple model of income maximization can account for both phenomena results on selection show that migrants for a source destination pair are more educated relative to non migrants the larger is the absolute skill related difference in earnings between the destination country and the source results on sorting indicate that the relative stock of more educated migrants in a destination is increasing in the absolute earnings difference between high and low skilled workers we use our framework to compare alternative specifications of international migration estimate the magnitude of migration costs by source destination pair and assess the contribution of wage differences to how migrants sort themselves across destination countries

has job stability declined yet new evidence for the 1990 s we update the evidence on changes in job stability through the mid 1990s using recently released current population survey data for 1995 that parallel earlier job tenure supplements in the aggregate job stability declined modestly in the first half of the 1990s moreover the relatively small aggregate changes mask rather sharp declines in stability for workers with more than a few years of tenure nonetheless the data available to this point do not support the conclusion that the downward shift in job stability for more tenured workers and the more modest decline in aggregate job stability reflect long term trends

self selection and the earnings of immigrants this paper analyzes the way in which the earnings of the immigrant population may be expected to differ from the earnings of the native population because of the endogeneity of the decision to migrate the empirical study shows that differences in the u s earnings of immigrants with the same measured skills but from different home countries are attributable to variations in political and economic conditions in the countries of origin at the time of migration excerpt

the regulation of labor author s botero juan djankov simeon la porta rafael lopez de silanes florencio shleifer andrei abstract we investigate the regulation of labor markets through employment collective relations and social security laws in 85 countries we find that the political power of the left is associated with more stringent labor regulations and more generous social security systems and that socialist french and scandinavian legal origin countries have sharply higher levels of labor regulation than do common law countries however the effects of legal origins are larger and explain more of the variation in regulations than those of politics heavier regulation of labor is associated with lower labor force participation and higher unemployment especially of the young these results are most naturally consistent with legal theories according to which countries have pervasive regulaory styles inherited from the transplantation of legal systems

do wages rise with job seniority many previous studies have found a strong positive effect of job seniority tenure on wages this paper re examines the evidence using a simple instrumental variables scheme to deal with the fact that tenure is likely to be related to unobserved individual and job characteristics that affect the wage we use the variation of tenure over a given job match as the principal instrumental variable for tenure the variation in tenure over the job is uncorrelated by construction with the fixed individual and job match specific components of the error term of the wage equation our main finding is that the partial effect of tenure on wages is small and that general labour market experience and job shopping account for most wage growth over a career the strong cross section relationship between tenure and wages is due primarily to heterogeneity bias prior researchers see mincer and jovanovic 1981 bartel and borjas 1981 borjas 1981 cline 1979 and mellow 1981 and many others have established that job seniority has a strong positive relationship with wage rates in a cross section or a cross section time series of individuals in this paper we re evaluate the evidence concerning the partial effects on wages of job seniority tenure and total labour market experience the extent to which wages rise with tenure is important for several reasons first and foremost the wage tenure profile is a fundamental question about the structure of earnings over careers second the wage tenure profile is a key determinant of the extent to which the earnings power of individuals is tied to specific jobs and it is important for assessment of the losses suffered by displaced workers hamermesh 1984 third evidence that wages rise with job tenure has been used to explain the decline in quits with tenure since the wage growth on the current job lowers the probability that the worker will locate a superior alternative a growing theoretical literature surveyed in parsons 1984 has taken the evidence of a strong wage tenure profile at face value and sought to provide an explanation for the relationship the most prominent explanation is the theory of specific human capital oi 1962 becker 1962 mincer 1974 parsons 1972 kuratani 1973 and hashimoto 1980 in which the growth of wages with tenure holding experience constant is attributed to the worker s share of investments in firm specific skills more recently lazear 1981 has presented a supervision model of wage growth in which firms defer compensation as a means of inducing workers not to shirk freeman 1977 and harris and holmstrom 1982 provide an explanation for wage growth based on an insurance motive salop and salop 1976 nickell 1976 and guasch and weiss 1982 present adverse selection models of wage growth in which firms use a wage tenure profile as a

returns to seniority among public school teachers returns to seniority account for a substantial share of public k 12 expenditures over the first ten to 15 years of a career public school teachers enjoy average wage growth at least equivalent to that of other white collar workers explanations for this structure in terms of human capital or costly monitoring lack theoretical and empirical support a steeper wage tenure profile reduces turnover but it is doubtful that the costs of turnover are high enough to make this an optimal use of school resources we conclude that the structure of teacher pay in public education is more consistent with rent seeking than efficient contracting

migration and imperfect labor markets theory and cross country evidence from denmark germany and the uk we investigate the labor market effects of immigration in denmark germany and the uk three countries which are characterized by considerable differences in labor market institutions and welfare states institutions such as collective bargaining minimum wages employment protection and unemployment benefits affect the way in which wages respond to labor supply shocks and hence the labor market effects of immigration we employ a wage setting approach which assumes that wages decline with the unemployment rate albeit imperfectly we find that the wage and employment effects of immigration depend on wage flexibility and the composition of the labor supply shock in germany immigration involves only moderate wage but large unemployment effects since immigrants are concentrated in labor market segments with low wage flexibility the reverse is true for the uk and denmark

debt levels debt composition and sovereign spreads in emerging and advanced economies this paper studies the relationship between sovereign spreads and the interaction between debt composition and debt levels in advanced and emerging market countries it finds that in emerging market countries there is a significant correlation between spreads and debt levels this correlation however is not statistically significant in countries where most public debt is denominated in local currency in advanced economies the magnitude of the correlation between debt levels and spreads is about one fifth of the corresponding correlation for emerging market economies in eurozone countries however the correlation between spreads and debt ratios is similar to that of emerging market countries the paper also shows that the financial crisis amplified the relationship between spreads and debt levels within the eurozone but had no effect on the relationship between spreads and debt in stand alone countries finally the paper shows that the relationship between debt levels and spreads is amplified by the presence of large net foreign liabilities this amplifying effect of net foreign liabilities is larger in the eurozone than in stand alone advanced economies the paper concludes that debt composition matters and corroborates the original sin hypothesis that rather than being a mere reflection of institutional weakness the presence of foreign currency debt increases financial fragility and leads to suboptimal macroeconomic policies copyright 2013 oxford university press

a tale of two unions divergent platforms and their constituencies the median voter theorem has regularly been used in economics to represent the behaviour of teachers unions little empirical work however tests whether this framework is a good fit for teachers

enhanced debt management solving the eurozone crisis by linking debt management with fiscal and monetary policy abstract unconventional approaches to suit unusual circumstances have become acceptable in monetary policy a formerly highly conservative discipline in this paper it is argued that unconventional approaches should also be considered in sovereign debt management in order to contribute to resolving the eurozone sovereign debt crisis first the troika crisis lending to indebted sovereign borrowers in the eurozone is reviewed and compared with standard imf post crisis lending the main difference and shortcoming is the unsustainable character of the eurozone approach due to the omission of demand stimulation components to address this and other shortcomings the features of an ideal alternative funding tool are identified it would solve the funding problems of affected sovereigns help stabilise the banking system but most of all stimulate domestic demand and hence end the vicious downward spiral it is found that this funding method can be implemented as part of enhanced public debt management by each nation s debt management office

self selection in the market of teachers public school teachers are usually paid according to centralized earning schedules in which their income depends mainly on experience by contrast in private schools there is high wage dispersion and salaries correspond mainly to teachers performance that dichotomous labour regulation encourages teachers with better unobservable skills to self select into private schools because the likelihood of earning higher wages is higher than in public schools the other side of the coin is the self selection of bad teachers into public schools using a representative sample of chilean teachers we estimate a two sector roy model to test self selection we find evidence of negative self selection of teachers into public schools

on the contract curve a test of alternative models of collective bargaining the traditional model of collective bargaining confines unions to settlements constrained by the employer s labor demand curve but an alternative model places wage employment outcomes on a contract curve that extends beyond the labor demand curve this paper derives a multidimensional hedonic contract curve model in which employment security provisions are used to maintain efficient bargains outside the employer s demand curve and distinguishes empirically between the contract curve and demand constraint models using data for public school teachers in new york state estimates clearly support the contract curve model over the demand constraint model by linking the gap between compensation and the value of the marginal product to the strength of employment security provisions

school quality and black white relative earnings a direct assessment the wage differential between black and white men fell from 40 percent in 1960 to 25 percent in 1980 it has been argued that this convergence reflects improvements in the relative quality of black schools to test this hypothesis we assembled data on pupil teacher ratios annual teacher pay and term length for black and white schools in the eighteen segregated states from 1915 to 1966 these data are linked to estimated returns to education for southern born men from different cohorts and states in 1960 1970 and 1980 improvements in the relative quality of black schools explain 20 percent of the narrowing of the black white earnings gap between 1960 and 1980

bargaining and the determinants of teacher salaries this study examines the impact of collective bargaining on salary setting in public school districts using a 1969 82 sample of oregon school districts the author focuses particularly on the roles

expenditures and student achievement in illinois abstract this study examines educational outcomes in illinois for the 1989 1990 school year several measures of educational attainment are analyzed including act scores high school graduation rates and the percentage in a high school planning to attend college the most important results are that an increase in average teacher s salary increases act scores and the percentage college bound and an increase in the pupil teacher ratio reduces the graduation rate and the percentage college bound

sovereign debt the assessment this article serves as an introduction to two issues of the oxford review of economic policy one entitled sovereign debt understanding bond markets during the eurozone crisis and the second sovereign debt lessons from the past reforms for the future we begin by documenting recent trends in advanced country sovereign indebtedness and reviewing events that preceded the sovereign debt crisis in the eurozone the mechanisms through which rising sovereign debt may impact bond yields economic growth and inflation are discussed and the evidence for such effects is reviewed our discussion highlights that there is no unique threshold beyond which sovereign debt exerts adverse macroeconomic effects and that in order to understand the consequences of a given debt load one must analyse its structure in terms of internal and external creditors currency denomination the time to maturity of the bonds and the legal code governing debt issuance as well as various economic and political constraints measuring the fiscal space of the sovereign we then turn our attention to episodes in which sovereign debt proves excessive and default occurs we review explanations for the protracted and inefficient nature of defaults and describe some lessons from historical studies examining default outcomes in the final part of the paper we discuss proposals for averting future debt crises including jointly issued bonds such as eurobonds contingent convertible bonds and elements of a sovereign debt restructuring mechanism in the course of our discussion we draw on each of the 11 articles included in the two issues of this journal devoted to sovereign debt copyright 2013 oxford university press