has discrimination lessened over time a test using baseball s all star vote i introduction the objective of this analysis is to examine changes in racial discrimination over time the labor market literature indicates that black white wage differentials have declined substantially in the last 45 years and most of that decline came before 1980 1 however the degree to which this was due to altered attitudes among whites increased productivity among blacks or corrective legislation is debated 2 most studies are not able to effectively test the hypothesis of changes in attitudes as attitudes are very difficult to observe some activities may be very indicative of attitudes though take voting for baseball s annual all star game each all star vote is cast anonymously the voter gets neither praise nor censure the cost of voting is low ballots are freely supplied at ballparks and filling them out takes but a minute or two to a large degree the reward is in the voting itself the voter is able to express his her opinion on an issue of interest there are no rules to be followed a fan can vote for a player because of his ability reputation performance team age appearance color or anything else the all star vote is as close to a pure expression of preference as is likely to be found if fans prefer white players to black all else equal black players should receive fewer votes than equivalent whites if those preferences change the vote differential should change in tandem this is the test that this article applies in an examination of all star voting from 1970 to 1996 baseball has long been a useful source of discrimination studies it has a clear and unambiguous history of discrimination in which owners players and fans have all been implicated 3 there are two particular advantages in looking to baseball for evidence of changes in discriminatory attitudes baseball has not been as directly influenced by the equal opportunity and affirmative action laws that are argued to have helped close the black white wage gap and baseball productivity can be controlled for in a relatively precise fashion while changes in the wage gap may have a variety of causes changes in an all star vote gap more plausibly reflect changes in attitudes therefore if we find the variance in all star votes unexplained by other factors and correlated with race has shrunk over time we will take it as support for the hypothesis that discriminatory attitudes have weakened the article will proceed as follows section ii discusses the all star vote and the underlying model section iii presents the analysis section iv concludes ii the all star game baseball s all star game has been played every year and twice per year for a short period since 1933 with the exception of the war year of 1945 it is held in the middle of the season and pits the best players from each of major league baseball s mlb two leagues the national and the american against each other various methods of selecting all star teams have gone in and out of vogue the game was first established through the efforts of arch ward sports editor of the chicago tribune as a special part of the 1933 chicago world s fair ballots were printed in the tribune and in several other major newspapers and fans voted for their favorite stars fan voting was dropped two years later in favor of selection by baseball s managers only to be re instituted in 1947 and abandoned a second time after ballot stuffing by cincinnati reds fans led to the election of seven reds to the starting line up in 1957 from 1958 to 1969 the starting all star line ups were chosen by a vote of the players themselves in 1970 baseball commissioner bowie kuhn re established the fan vote amid much ballyhoo the new system was a popular success and has remained in place ever since this study analyzes and compares fan votes over 26 years it begins with 1970 the year that the fan vote was re established ends with 1996 and fills in the middle with the votes of 1971 1973 1975 1977 1979 1980 1985 and 1990

targeting inflation by constant interest rate forecasts this paper reviews the concept of constant interest rate inflation forecast cir targeting it stresses the time inconsistent nature of cir targeting and provides a new method for constructing cir forecasts consistently in the context of models with forward looking variables a dynamic new keynesian model with forward looking price setting is used as an illustration suggesting that the main reason for choosing a relatively long forecast targeting horizon lies in the monetary authorities objective to smooth interest rate movements as greater nominal and real stabilization is achieved at a relatively short inflation forecast targeting horizon

bayesian new neoclassical synthesis nns models modern tools for central banks this paper discusses the advantages of bayesian new neoclassical synthesis models as tools for monetary policy analysis and forecasting the combination of a sound micro founded structure with a good probabilistic description of the observed data makes those models suitable for investigating the structural sources of business cycle fluctuations for analysing optimal monetary policy responses to those developments and for making economic projections conditional on various policy assumptions the paper gives two examples of such analysis jel e40 e50 c11 copyright c 2005 the european economic association

why do black basketball players work more for less money abstract we explore kahn and sherer s finding that national basketball association players salaries are lower for black than white players in general we do not find evidence that this salary differential is due to the racial preferences of fans specifically we observe that black players actually play more than comparable white players we offer a theory of price discrimination based on relative supplies and supply elasticities in lieu of the racial discrimination argument as an explanation for the black white wage differential

interfirm segregation and the black white wage gap this article studies interfirm racial segregation in two newly developed firm level databases we find that the interfirm distribution of black and white workers is close to what would be implied by random assignment we also find that black workers are clustered in employers where managers owners and customers are also black these findings may be reconciled by the facts that a there are not enough black employers to generate much segregation and that b other forces may systematically integrate black and white workers finally we find that the black white wage gap is primarily a within firm phenomenon

what went wrong the erosion of relative earnings and employment among young black men in the 1980s this paper shows a widening in black white earnings and employment gaps among young men from the mid 1970s through the 1980s earnings gaps increased most among college graduates and in the midwest while gaps in employment population rates grew most among dropouts we attribute the differential widening to shifts in demand for subgroups due to shifting industry and regional employment the falling real minimum wage and deunionization the growing supply of black to white workers that was marked among college graduates and to increased crime among dropouts the different factors affecting subgroups highlight the economic diversity of black americans

organized labor and racial wage inequality in the united states why have african american private sector unionization rates surpassed those of white workers for decades and how has private sector union decline exacerbated black white wage inequality using data from the current population survey 1973 2007 the authors show that african americans join unions for protection against discriminatory treatment in nonunion sectors a model predicted wage series also shows that among women black white weekly wage gaps would be between 13 and 30 lower if union representation remained at high levels the effect of deunionization on racial wage inequality for men is less substantial but without deunionization weekly wages for black men would be an estimated 49 higher the results recast organized labor as an institution vital for its economic inclusion of african american men and women this study points to the need to move beyond class based analyses of union decline to an understanding of the gendered role unions once played in mitigating racial inequality

strike three discrimination incentives and evaluation major league baseball umpires express their racial ethnic preferences when they evaluate pitchers strikes are called less often if the umpire and pitcher do not match race ethnicity but mainly where there is little scrutiny of umpires pitchers understand the incentives and throw pitches that allow umpires less subjective judgment e g fastballs over home plate when they anticipate bias these direct and indirect effects bias performance measures of minorities downward the results suggest how discrimination alters discriminated groups behavior generally they imply that biases in measured productivity must be accounted for in generating measures of wage discrimination

when being in the minority pays off relationships among sellers and price setting in the champagne industry economic sociologists have studied how social relationships shape market prices by focusing mostly on vertical interactions between buyers and sellers in this article we examine instead the price consequences of horizontal relationships that arise from intergroup processes among sellers our setting is the market for champagne grapes using proprietary transaction level data we find that female grape growers a minority in the growers community charge systematically higher prices than do male grape growers we argue that the underlying mechanism for this unexpected pattern of results involves the relationships developed and maintained by minority members specifically in depth fieldwork reveals that female growers get together to compensate for their isolation from the majority this behavior enables them to overcome local constraints on the availability of price relevant information constraints that stem from prevailing norms of market behavior individualism and secrecy we discuss the implications

customer racial discrimination in major league baseball most studies of racial discrimination concentrate on identifying the existence rather than the source of discrimination in contrast this paper tests directly for racial discrimination by major league baseball customers by examining the market for baseball cards in tobit regressions the market prices of cards consistently reflect player performance records and other demand variables when interactive race productivity variables are included in the models a significant and complex pattern of fan discrimination against black pitchers and black hitters is found discrimination against latin players is not found

litigation costs and returns to experience we develop a model linking maximum damage awards available to plaintiffs in wrongful termination lawsuits workers propensity to sue as a function of experience and returns to experience using equal employment opportunity commission data on protected worker discrimination complaints and labor market data from the current population survey we examine how returns to experience among protected workers changed around the passage of the civil rights act of 1991 we show that employers reactions to employment protections may induce redistributive effects furthermore these effects operate not merely across groups of differing protected status but also within groups of identical protected status

racial discrimination and professional basketball salaries in the 1990s racial differences in professional basketball player salaries are examined to determine whether the 20 premium paid to whites in the mid 1980s has persisted into the 1990s ols and tobit regressions indicate no difference between white and black salaries controlling for player and team characteristics for the 1994 95 season however censored quantile regressions show substantial racial differences at certain points in the salary distribution whites earn less than blacks at the lower end of the distribution although the difference is not statistically significant and varies with minutes played in contrast whites receive a significant premium 18 at the upper end of the salary distribution these findings are consistent with a form of consumer discrimination in which sports fans prefer to see white star players all else equal

the influence of entrepreneur s personal characteristics on mses growth through innovation abstractresearch in the separate areas of innovation and growth has considerably intensified in recent years however little scholarly attention has been paid to the entrepreneurs personal characteristics that might explain the growth of micro and small enterprises mses through innovation this study examines the key entrepreneurs personal characteristics affecting micro and small enterprises mses upgrading defined here as substantial growth through innovation six major determining types of entrepreneurs characteristics were identified from the innovation and the growth literature education work experience gender motivations nationality and age the empirical results which are based on t tests of the differences between upgraders and non upgraders the linear probability model and the logit model all suggest that work experience and motivations are cornerstones in the likelihood that an mse will upgrade the policy implications of this study on promoting mses upgrading are also discussed

labor market effects of september 11th on arab and muslim residents of the united states we investigated whether the september 11 2001 terrorists attacks had any effect on employment earnings and residential mobility of first and second generation arab and muslim men in the united states we find that september 11th did not significantly affect employment and hours of work of arab and muslim men but was associated with a 9 11 percent decline in their real wage and weekly earnings with some evidence that this decline was temporary the adverse earnings effects were strongly linked to hate crime incidence estimates also suggest that the terrorists attacks reduced intrastate migration of arab and muslim men

customer discrimination and employment outcomes for minority workers this paper investigates the effects of customer discrimination on the employment and earnings of minorities particularly blacks data are used from a new survey of employers in four large metropolitan areas in the united states our results show that the racial composition of an establishment s customers has sizable effects on the race of who gets hired particularly in jobs that involve direct contact with customers and in sales or service occupations race of customers also affects wages with employees in establishments that have mostly black customers earning less than those in establishments with mostly white customers

voting behavior discrimination and the national baseball hall of fame we investigate whether black latin and white major league baseball players receive the same consideration by the baseball writers association of america in voting for membership into the national baseball hall of fame the first stage of heckman s two step procedure indicates that the probability a black player will ever receive at least one vote is significantly lower than that for his white counterpart the second stage suggests that race or ethnicity sometimes matter in determining the number of votes a candidate receives for hall of fame membership jel j7 d72

the visible hand race and online market outcomes we examine the effect of race on market outcomes by selling ipods through local online classified advertisements throughout the us each advertisement features a photograph including a dark or light skinned hand or one with a wrist tattoo black sellers receive fewer and lower offers than white sellers and the correspondence with black sellers indicates lower levels of trust black sellers outcomes are particularly poor in thin markets suggesting that discrimination may not survive competition among buyers and those with the most racial isolation and property crime consistent with channels through which statistical discrimination might operate economic outcomes in the us are highly correlated with race but the causal mechanisms underlying these correlations are not well understood in particular it remains unclear how much of the correlation is due to discrimination and how much is due to other characteristics that are correlated with race such as education there is an extensive literature on the effect of race on market outcomes focusing on both labour and goods including housing markets however discrimination is not a monolithic phenomenon and it is important to investigate its extent and causes in a variety of different contexts across which they may differ our study asks the following question when the typical person engages in a consumer transaction usually as a buyer does he or she try to avoid dealing with minority sellers and does she treat minority sellers differently

black white wage inequality employment rates and incarceration the observed gap in average wages between black men and white men inadequately reflects the relative economic standing of blacks who suffer from a high rate of joblessness the authors estimate the black white gap in hourly wages from 1980 to 1999 adjusting for the sample selection effect of labor inactivity among working age men in 1999 accounting for labor inactivity including prison and jail incarceration leads to an increase of 7 20 in the black white wage gap adjusting for sample selectivity among men ages 22 30 in 1999 increases the wage gap by as much as 58 increasing selection bias which can be attributed to incarceration and conventional joblessness explains about two thirds of the rise in black relative wages among young men between 1985 and 1998 apparent improvement in the economic position of young black men is thus largely an artifact of rising joblessness fueled by the growth in incarceration during the 1990s

performance of inflation targeting based on constant interest rate projections monetary policy is sometimes formulated in terms of a target level of inflation a fixed time horizon and a constant interest rate that is anticipated to achieve the target at the specified horizon these requirements lead to constant interest rate cir instrument rules using the standard new keynesian model it is shown that some forms of cir policy lead to both indeterminacy of equilibria and instability under adaptive learning however some other forms of cir policy perform better we also examine the properties of the different policy rules in the presence of inertial demand and price behaviour

the structure of disadvantage individual and occupational determinants of the black white wage gap this study is motivated by the idea that the racial gap in earnings is generated not only by individual differences but also by systematic variation in the occupational structure that attenuates or exacerbates the effects of race using data from the 1990 census and the dictionary of occupational titles a hierarchical linear modeling approach is employed that allows the simultaneous exploration of the mechanisms of income inequality operating both within and between occupations among private sector employees striking evidence shows that racial disparities increase in both absolute and percentage terms as one moves up the occupational earnings hierarchy the association between average occupational earnings and within occupation racial disadvantage reveals an overlooked source of racial earnings inequality which constrains the opportunities available to upwardly mobile black men in the private sector this association cannot be explained by measured individual characteristics or by the status demographic composition or skill demands of occupations in the public sector on the other hand racial inequality in earnings is not systematically associated with average occupational earnings and is instead more closely tied to individual human capital and occupational placement the implications of these results are considered and directions for future research are suggested

male white black wage gaps 1979 1994 a distributional analysis 1 introductionnumerous studies show that during the 1980s the mean white black wage gap among new entrant 0 10 years of potential experience males expanded 1 juhn murphy and pierce 1991 jmp attribute the mean gap s expansion to a widening of the overall u s wage distribution caused by a host of economy wide race neutral changes that led to labor demand shifts toward better educated and better skilled workers regardless of race because african americans tend to be at lower levels of the overall skill distribution the shifts adversely impacted african american men more than white men leading to an expansion in the mean wage gap to arrive at this conclusion jmp decompose the expansion in the mean new entrant wage gap into four components the first two components measure the wage gap s increase because of a widening in observable racial differences in measured characteristics and their prices for example educational attainment and the returns to education the third component captures the contribution of growing racial discrimination and widening differences in unmeasured skills to the wage gap s expansion this term s contribution is measured by the drop in the mean percentile rank of blacks in the white residual wage distribution the fourth component identifies the role of increases in the prices of unmeasured skills and is measured by the increase in the variance of the white residual wage distribution when applied to the march annual demographic files of the current population survey jmp find that from 1979 to 1987 increases in the price of unmeasured skills explain all of the new entrant mean wage gap s expansion indicating that factors that adversely impacted less skilled workers regardless of race are the primary cause of the wage gap s expansion in related work reardon 1997 uses a national sample of white and african american men from the 1980 and 1990 decennial censuses and shows that the mean racial wage gap s expansion is caused by increased variance in the distribution of residual wages generated by labor demand shifts toward high skilled whites and away from medium skilled whites and high skilled african american men the wage gap expands because high skilled african american men earn wages that are similar to those of whites in the middle and upper third of their wage distribution the labor demand shifts led to a stretching or increased variance in the wage distribution that favored high skilled whites relative to high skilled african americans and medium skilled whites this paper makes several contributions to the literature on racial wage gaps and the technical literature on wage decompositions first i examine whether jmp s 1991 results hold up when the analysis is disaggregated by experience and educational attainment this is an important extension for two reasons bound and freeman 1992 rodgers 1997a and others have found that the racial wage gap among high school graduates and particularly among college graduates expanded significantly after the late 1970s over the same time period the variance of wages within these educational categories increased second it is important to determine the extent to which racial inequality that was generated while a cohort was a new entrant persists as it ages the paper s technical innovation is the development of a distribution or skill specific decomposition that identifies whether the stretching of the white wage distribution uniformly contributes to an expansion in racial inequality at all skill levels or quantiles of the wage distribution or whether the contribution of the wage distribution s stretching is specific to a skill level for example does the increase in the price of unmeasured skills explain a greater portion of the increase in the racial wage gap between high skilled african americans and whites than it does between medium skilled african americans and whites

learning about monetary policy rules abstract we study macroeconomic systems with forward looking private sector agents and a monetary authority that is trying to control the economy through the use of a linear policy feedback rule we use stability under recursive learning a la evans and honkapohja learning and expectations in macroeconomics princeton university press princeton new jersey 2001 as a criterion for evaluating monetary policy rules in this context we find that considering learning can alter the evaluation of alternative policy rules

time varying rational expectations models abstract this paper develops a comprehensive theory for rational expectations models with time varying random coefficients based on the multiplicative ergodic theorem it develops a linear algebra in terms of lyapunov exponents defined as the asymptotic growth rates of trajectories together with their associated lyapunov spaces they provide a perfect substitute for the eigenvalue eigenspace analysis used in constant coefficient models in particular they allow the construction of explicit solution formulas similar to the standard case these methods and their numerical implementation is illustrated using a canonical new keynesian model with a time varying policy rule and lagged endogenous variables

are central banks projections meaningful central banks projections i e forecasts conditional on a given interest rate path are often criticized on the grounds that their underlying policy assumptions are inconsistent with the existence of a unique equilibrium in many forward looking models the present paper describes three alternative approaches to constructing projections that are not subject to that criticism using a standard new keynesian model as a reference framework yet and even though they imply an identical path for the interest rate the three approaches are shown

using baseball card prices to measure star quality and monopsony i introduction measuring productivity presents problems in many areas of economics this is especially true in sports economics where appropriate indicators of individual productivity apart from team productivity have been the subject of much debate and where the issue of fairness in compensation has become especially contentious in recent years due to the extremely high salaries being paid to participants baseball has been studied more widely than any other sport largely because of the vast amount of data that has been assembled for it and its fairly well defined indicators hits home runs earned run averages eras and so on however even in this sport controversies over productivity and compensation continue problems were severe enough in 1994 to have resulted in a 232 day general strike and the first ever cancellation of the world series events that are estimated to have cost major league baseball mlb and the economy close to 1 billion 1 this research will utilize baseball card prices a relatively neglected source of market evaluation of players reflecting their value to the ultimate consumer to measure the important but intangible characteristic of star quality or charisma possessed by some players star quality which exists over and above productivity as indicated in official game statistics is generally acknowledged to bring fans to the stadiums and impact team revenues in a significant way this research will determine a numerical measure of star quality as the residual in a model of baseball card prices based on traditional performance variables we shall use this in the computation of a total productivity figure for a sample of baseball players for the period leading up to the strike of 1994 from this we will derive a measure of the players marginal revenue product mrp and examine the issue of monopsonistic exploitation by comparing this expanded mrp to the players salaries ii monopsonistic exploitation the institutional arrangements and operating policies of mlb have acted to restrict mobility in that labor market and have led to numerous charges of monopsonistic exploitation over the years historically players were drafted into a team and reserved to employment by that team alone unless they were traded to another team at the discretion of management however several lawsuits and labor grievances in the 1970s resulted in the introduction of free agency which limits a team s control over a player to six years the mlb players association argues that even this shortened restrictive period together with the collusive operating policies permitted under baseball s special exemption from antitrust laws gives rise to monopsonistic exploitation this implies that many players receive less than their mrp to their team this sentiment was an element in the players rejection of management s position in the 1994 contract negotiations which led to the strike that canceled part of two seasons previous research on measuring productivity roger noll 1974 was one of the first researchers to study baseball productivity and one of the few to address the issue of star quality noll attempted to capture the star quality effect by entering the number of star players on a team as an explanatory variable in his attendance regression other researchers have advanced the technique for determining productivity from performance statistics but have not addressed the star quality factor directly the productivity study of scully 1974 focused on a player s slugging percentage total number of bases divided by total at bats as the statistic with the greatest influence on a team s winning percentage and hence on team revenues using 1968 69 data scully found that a one point increase in a team s slugging percentage increased total team revenue by over 9 500 medoff 1976 focused on runs scored as the major indicator of player performance as it contributed to team revenues in 1972 74

testing the significance of income distribution changes over the 1980s business cycle a cross national comparison using kernel density estimation we describe the distribution of household size adjusted real income and how it changed over the business cycle of the 1980s in the united states and the united kingdom we confirm previous studies that show income inequality increased in the two countries and the middle of the distribution was squashed down using a series of statistical tests however we find that while the mass in both tails of the distribution increased significantly in both countries over the period by far the greatest gains were in the upper tail copyright 1999 john wiley sons ltd

customer racial discrimination in the market for memorabilia the case of baseball because consumer discrimination can reduce productivity it is often impossible to tell whether differential productivity is the effect of discrimination or of differential ability detailed data for the sports labor market make it possible to separate consumer discrimination from ability we use a unique approach to determine whether the entertainment value of baseball players is related to their race we examine whether race directly affects the value of a player in the market for baseball cards in contrast to studies that use salaries there is no room for owner or coworker discrimination our evidence supports the hypothesis of consumer discrimination

how unregulated is the u s labor market the penal system as a labor market institution1 comparative research contrasts the corporatist welfare states of europe with the unregulated u s labor market to explain low rates of u s unemployment in the 1980s and 1990s in contrast this article argues that the u s state made a large and coercive intervention into the labor market through the expansion of the penal system the impact of incarceration on unemployment has two conflicting dynamics in the short run u s incarceration lowers conventional unemployment measures by removing able bodied working age men from labor force counts in the long run social survey data show that incarceration raises unemployment by reducing the job prospects of ex convicts strong u s employment performance in the 1980s and 1990s has thus depended in part on a high and increasing incarceration rate

regional income stratification in unified germany using a gini decomposition approach frick j r and goebel j regional income stratification in unified germany using a gini decomposition approach regional studies using representative micro data from the german socio economic panel study soep this paper delivers new insights into the development of income inequality and regional stratification in germany after unification this paper applies a new method for detecting social stratification by a decomposition of the gini index that yields the obligatory between and within group components as well as an overlapping index for the different sub populations it is found that east germany is still a stratum on its own when using post government income but since 2001 no longer is when using pre government income these results remain stable when using alternatively defined regional classifications however there are also indications of some regional variation within west germany frick j r et goebel j les tranches de revenu regional dans l allemagne unifiee employant une decompositi

separate and unequal in the labor market human capital and the jim crow wage gap competing explanations for the long standing gap between black and white earnings attribute different weight to wage discrimination and human capital differences using new data on local school quality we find that human capital played a predominant role in determining 1940 wage and occupational status gaps in the south despite entrenched racial discrimination in civic life and the lack of federal employment protections the resulting wage gap coincides with the higher end of the range of estimates from the post civil rights era we estimate that truly separate but equal schools would have reduced wage inequality by 29 48

death effect on collectible prices it has been widely observed that the price of art or celebrity memorabilia rises around the time of the artist or figure s death previous authors attribute this death effect primarily to expectations on the part of collectors concerning the future supply of collectibles relating to the public figure as in the case of a durable goods monopolist the observations of the sports memorabilia market suggest that the increase in prices is instead due to a nostalgia effect as a result of the media attention that surrounds the death of a prominent public figure

the sports business as a labor market laboratory with superior data on compensation and productivity as well as the occurrence of abrupt dramatic market structure and player allocation rules changes sports labor markets offer an excellent setting in which to test economic hypotheses this paper reviews evidence from sports in four areas employer monopsony discrimination the coase theorem and incentive contracts supervision and performance there is considerable evidence of monopsony as well as for the existence of some forms of discrimination against minority athletes incentive contracts have strong effects on player performance and behavior and there is mixed evidence on the predictions of the coase theorem

the perils of taylor rules abstract since john taylor s 1993 carnegie rochester conf ser publ policy39 195 214 seminal paper a large literature has argued that active interest rate feedback rules that is rules that respond to increases in inflation with a more than one for one increase in the nominal interest rate are stabilizing in this paper we argue that once the zero bound on nominal interest rates is taken into account active interest rate feedback rules can easily lead to unexpected consequences specifically we show that even if the steady state at which monetary policy is active is locally the unique equilibrium typically there exist an infinite number of equilibrium trajectories originating arbitrarily close to that steady state that converge to a liquidity trap that is a steady state in which the nominal interest rate is near zero and inflation is possibly negative journal of economic literature classification numbers e52 e31 e63

post unification wage growth in east germany following monetary union with west germany in 1990 the real wage of east german workers rose 83 i use the german socio economic panel data to investigate the determinants of wage growth and assess whether they are consistent with efficient restructuring although job changing rates were initially high the share of wage growth that accrued to movers was little higher than in the west suggesting that the incentives to move were too low for 1990 to 1991 the biggest gainers were low wage workers generally and women and the less educated specifically for 1991 to 1996 the biggest gainers were women and the better educated

relative deprivation and economic welfare abstract it is shown that the theory of relative deprivation can be decomposed into two concepts deprivation and its relativity deprivation is interpreted as forgone utility due to lack of commodities thus minimizing deprivation and maximizing utility come to much the same thing the relativity of the concept stems from the existence of reference groups in the society the core of the paper deals with the effect of reference groups on the deprivation felt in the society

racial discrimination in professional basketball evidence from nielsen ratings using data on nielsen ratings for locally televised nba basketball games we find strong evidence that viewership increases when there is greater participation by white players this finding controls for a wide variety of other factors that could systematically affect nielsen ratings and signifies the presence of customer discrimination in the market for nba players we also find that higher nielsen ratings allow nba teams to realize greater advertising revenues meaning that the marginal revenue product of white players exceeds that of comparable black players this factor explains much of the race based salary gap that exists in professional basketball

incarceration and racial inequality in men s employment to estimate employment population ratios for black and white men with an adjustment for incarceration a factor overlooked by most research on employment inequality the authors combine data from sur

are firms with foreign ceos better citizens a study of the impact of ceo foreignness on corporate social performance this study examines whether firms corporate social performance csp varies when local firms have foreign ceos building on the social identity perspective we argue that because foreign ceos are perceived as outgroup or nonprototypical leaders by the local firms stakeholders local firms with foreign ceos need to achieve a higher level of csp than do local firms with local ceos to enhance their legitimacy and trustworthiness furthermore we propose that the predicted difference in csp between foreign and local ceo led firms will be larger a for more authentic and thus trust enhancing csr activities and b in those socio economic environments where the salience of ceo foreignness and thus the need to build trustworthiness with locals is more pronounced in a sample of 1001 local firms across 18 developed countries during the period between 2003 and 2015 our empirical results support most of our predictions

variety and superstardom in popular music i introduction alfred marshall 1947 and irving fisher 1925 73 both believed that as average incomes increase the increase in the demand for quality goods and services will be greater than for those goods and services regarded as having lower quality in addition marshall pointed out that innovations in technology and mass production such as those taking place at the turn of the century would lower the per unit price of quality goods and ultimately allow the higher quality goods to capture a greater share of the market rosen 1981 1983 has termed this the superstar phenomenon marshall added a specific view that this situation had not occurred in the field of professional singers since at that time there were insufficient innovations for low cost mass production of sound rosen 1981 857 has suggested that subsequent innovations have since made the field of professional singers i e the recording industry a likely candidate for the superstar phenomenon in a recent paper hamlen 1991 provided some initial empirical evidence which indicates that the modern recording industry for popular music i e 1955 1987 fell short of the predicted marshall rosen superstar phenomenon in that study it was shown that while consumers of popular music recognized differences in quality as measured by an external objective measurement and there was an increase in total record earnings by singers with greater measured levels of ability the increase in these earnings was less than proportional to the increase in ability this would indicate that the marshall rosen concept of superstardom did not hold empirically during the period however there was no attempt in that paper to analyze why the superstar phenomenon failed to occur in a profession that has been viewed in the superstar literature as one of the most likely candidates since the knowledge of quality differences in performers is highly dependent on the transmission of information among different consumers some economists have tried to hypothesize a more precise market scenario to explain how performers with greater talent rise to stardom macdonald 1988 offered a model which he believes is relevant for musicians and singers it is based on a dynamic information accumulation process with multiple market levels singers begin in the entry level market where they compete mostly as unknowns here they share the revenues from lower income consumers who also have lower opportunity costs of time and therefore can afford to listen to many singers of relatively poor quality however in this entry level market some singers exhibit relatively high quality and receive above average success these higher quality singers are then given the opportunity to compete successfully in more select markets where the consumers have higher incomes and higher opportunity costs of time in each higher market level consumers are willing to pay a premium to listen to only the higher quality singers i e those filtered out from the lower market levels under reasonable assumptions macdonald s multi market processes can produce the superstar phenomenon described above adler 1985 pointed out a possible flaw in superstar models such as macdonald s the quality filter described above may be an imperfect filter with both type one errors some high quality singers do poorly and type two errors some lower quality singers do well adler believes that factors other than talent also determine the success and failure of singers these factors consist of those attributes which cannot be directly described as a measure of quality while some of these other factors are measurable and comparable e g musical style sex or race many may never be identified or measured e g charisma song delivery good looks etc the presence and importance of all of these other factors both measurable and nonmeasurable make up the demand for variety and tend to alter the simple relationship between quality ability and success

are workers willing to pay to join a better team using data from the major league baseball free agent market this study is the first to show that the productivity expected of the team a worker will join produces a significant negative compensating wage differential the younger workers in the sample drive this result trading 25 of their wages to join teams with an expected productivity one standard deviation higher this investment can be recouped if a reasonable increase in human capital occurs these results are robust to contract length wage simultaneity and indicate that investment in human capital motivates the observed tradeoff suggesting a new pathway through which human capital accumulation can affect wages reliable measures of workers own past productivity and the productivity expected of a worker s future team provide key advantages to identifying these effects jel j31 j24 m54

the emergence persistence and recent widening of the racial unemployment gap census data show that the ratio of black to white unemployment rates currently in excess of 2 1 was small or nonexistent before 1940 widened dramatically during the 1940s and 1950s and widened again in the 1980s the authors decompose changes in the unemployment gap over the years 1880 1990 to identify the separate contributions of changes in observable worker characteristics and shifts in labor demand nearly all of the widening of the gap during the 1940s and 1950s can be attributed to regional shifts of workers and declining demand in markets where black workers were concentrated after 1970 improvements in the relative educational status of black workers would have narrowed the unemployment gap slightly but demand shifts adverse to black workers more than canceled out these gains

geography of savings in the german occupational pension system burger c geography of savings in the german occupational pension system regional studies the german pension reform of 2001 significantly decreased the level of public pensions for future generations and created instead voluntary supplementary plans this paper analyses the regional structure of savings amounts in the case of occupational pensions using a unique commercial dataset containing the records of 286 000 employees joining between the years 2002 and 2009 the analysis applies different location definitions in explaining financial behaviour the differences in the relationship between metropolitan and non metropolitan east and west and north and south are explained with the geographical nature of decision contexts implications are drawn on human behaviour and geography

measuring the effects of socio economic variables on the income distribution an application to the east german transition process this paper develops a discrete variant of the semiparametric methodology of dinardo fortin and lemieux 1996 dfl to measure the effects of socio economic variables on the income distribution although the proposed method is also based on the calculation of hypothetical income distributions by reweighting the original population it is much easier to implement the framework is applied to examine the distributional effects of rising unemployment decreasing female labor market participation and widening income structure in east germany following the reunification with west germany in 1990 the empirical results suggest that both these tendencies contributed considerably to the recent increase in income inequality in east germany

regional earnings inequality in great britain a decomposition analysis this paper investigates the degree of earnings inequality in great britain over the period 1975 96 using individual based data it finds that the contribution of within group inequality to both earnings inequality cross sectionally and to its trend over time is substantially more important than the contribution of between group inequality thus the primary source of increasing inequality in the overall earnings distribution is increasing inequality within regions and not differences in average earnings between regions a decomposition of the gini coefficient is also adopted to illustrate how regional convergence in average earnings has been accompanied by increasing overall earnings inequality in the uk a partir des donnees aupres des particuliers cet article cherche a examiner l importance de l inegalite des revenus regionaux en grande bretagne de 1975 a 1996 il en resulte que la contribution de l inegalite a l interieur du groupe a l inegalite des revenus par echantillon et sur le temps s avere nett

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

customer discrimination in professional basketball evidence from the trading card market this paper presents evidence on the existence of customer racial discrimination in professional basketball from recent prices for the trading cards of former players in the national basketball association data were collected on the 258 active roster players in the nba during the 1976 77 season 133 of whom had cards issued that year maximum likelihood estimation of a card price equation is carried out accounting both for the nonrandom selection of the players for whom cards exist and for left censoring of the dependent variable overall the empirical results suggest the absence of customer racial discrimination in the pricing of basketball trading cards however there is some evidence that the effect of career length on trading card prices is lower for whites than for blacks and that the card price premium for players who subsequently coached in the nba is lower for blacks than for whites

sources of racial wage inequality in metropolitan labor markets racial ethnic and gender differences research on racial inequality has become increasingly specialized often focusing on a single explanation and subgroup of the population in a diverse society a broader comparative framework for interpreting the causes of wage inequality for different racial ethnic and gender groups is called for the effects of a range of different factors on the wages of latinos asians and blacks relative to whites and separately for women and men are examined new sources of racial wage inequality are also considered significant differences are found in the sources of wage inequality across race ethnicity and gender differences are generally greater between racial and ethnic groups than between men and women key findings include a large negative effect of immigration on the relative wages of latinos and asians and only a small effect on the relative wages of black women and no effect on black men in contrast the relative wages of blacks remain most affected positively by the presence of manufacturing employment and unions new economy indicators of high skill services and flexible employment conditions play only a secondary role in explaining metropolitan racial wage inequality

us regional income convergence a spatial econometric perspective rey s j and montouri b d 1999 us regional income convergence a spatial econometric perspective reg studies 33 143 156 this study reconsiders the question of us regional economic income convergence from a spatial econometric perspective recently developed methods of exploratory spatial data analysis provide new insights on the geographical dynamics of us regional income growth patterns over the 1929 94 period strong patterns of both global and local spatial autocorrelation are found throughout the study period and the magnitude of global spatial autocorrelation is also found to exhibit strong temporal co movement with regional income dispersion a spatial econometric analysis of the familiar baumol specification reveals strong evidence of misspecification due to ignored spatial error dependence because of this dependence shocks originating in one state can spillover into surrounding states potentially complicating the transitional dynamics of the convergence process rey s j et montouri