a theory of socio economic disparities in health over the life cycle motivated by the observation that medical care explains only a relatively small part of the ses health gradient we present a life cycle model that incorporates several additional behaviours that potentially explain jointly a large part of observed disparities as a result the model provides not only a conceptual framework for the ses health gradient but more generally an improved framework for the production of health we derive novel predictions from the theory by performing comparative dynamic analyses more generally our comparative dynamic method can be applied to models of similar form e g human capital health deficits firm investment to name a few

comparative dynamics in a health investment model the method of comparative dynamics fully exploits the inter temporal structure of optimal control models i derive comparative dynamic results in a simplified demand for health model the effect of a change in the depreciation rate on the optimal paths for health capital and investment in health is studied by use of a phase diagram

building the family nest premarital investments marriage markets and spousal allocations we develop a model of the household in which spousal incomes are determined by premarital investments the marriage market is characterized by assortative matching and endogenously determined sharing rules form the basis of intra household allocations by incorporating pre marital investments and spousal matching into the collective household model we are able to identify the fundamental determinants of endogenously determined and maritally sustainable intra marital sharing rules in particular we find that all sharing rules along the assortative order support unconditionally efficient outcomes where both pre marital investments and intra household allocations are efficient the efficiency of both pre marital choices and household allocations then enables us to show that for each couple the marriage market generates a unique and maritally sustainable sharing rule that is a function of the distribution of pre marital endowments and the sex ratios in the market

interrupted work careers depreciation and restoration of human capital the quantitative effects and even the existence of a human capital depreciation phenomenon have been a subject of controversy in the recent literature prior work however was largely cross sectional and the longitudinal dimension if any was retrospective using longitudinal panel data on married women in nls we have now established that real wages at reentry are indeed lower than at the point of labor force withdrawal and the decline in wages is greater the longer the interruption another striking finding is a relatively rapid growth in wages after the return to work this rapid growth appears to reflect the restoration or repair of previously eroded human capital the phenomenon of depreciation and restoration is also visible in data for immigrants to the united states however while immigrants eventually catch up with and often surpass natives returnees from the nonmarket do not fully restore their earnings potential

human capital formation and local economic performance bradley s and taylor j 1996 human capital formation and local economic performance reg studies 30 1 14 this paper is concerned with the interaction between the vocational education and training system vet and local economic performance in britain after briefly discussing the shortcomings of britain s vet system the paper examines the way in which the education and training system and the local economy interact in particular it is argued that the outputs from the local education and training system determine and are determined by the locality s stock of high skill workers these high skill workers in turn help to determine the competitiveness and hence the economic performance of the local economy this has feedback effects on the stock of high skill workers through its effect on the occupational mix of in migrants some empirical tests of the model are provided based on data relating to 107 local education authority areas in england bradley s et taylor j 1996 la formation du capi

does family income matter for schooling outcomes using adoptees as a natural experiment one would expect that family income is an important positive factor in children s school attainment however evidence is often tainted by the lack of control for parental ability since at least a portion of ability is transferred genetically to children this paper uses a sample of adopted children and offers genetically unbiased estimates we further correct for biases arising from unobserved parenting qualities and from parents differentiation between their own birth and adopted children family income still has a significant effect it implies that high ability children in low income families face binding credit constraints that society may wish to relieve

optimal aging and death understanding the preston curve does prosperity lead to greater longevity if so what is the strength of the income channel to address these questions we develop a life cycle model in which households are subject to physiological aging in modeling aging we draw on recent research in the elds of biology and medicine the speed of the aging process and thus the time of death are endogenously determined by optimal health investments a calibrated version of the model accounts well for the observed non linear cross country link between longevity and income also known as the preston curve

the factor content of foreign trade in the factor proportions trade theory the heckscher ohlin theory the factor content of the pattern of trade plays a major role both in theoretical and in empirical investigations it is therefore valuable to identify restrictions on permissible vectors of the factor content of trade which necessarily hold in equilibrium if certain restrictions are empirically testable they can be used for preliminary testing of the theory before a more thorough examination is undertaken or they can be used to reject the theory it is my intention to develop in this paper a set of restrictions on the vectors of the factor content of trade which can be used for these purposes it is well known that autarky commodity prices impose restrictions on possible patterns of trade these restrictions provide a precise prediction of the pattern of trade for a two country two commodity world in the sense that the exporter of a good is readily identifiable from autarky price data as the country with the lower relative price of the good i will start by showing that in the presence of factor price equalisation autarky factor rewards impose restrictions on the factor content of trade patterns which are completely analogous to the restrictions imposed by autarky commodity prices on the commodity patterns of trade this result is in line with the view that in the factor proportions model trade in commodities represents indirect trade in factor services unfortunately these restrictions rely on autarky information and they are therefore not very useful for empirical work in order to overcome this difficulty i explore an alternative approach i argue that common predictions of the factor content of trade flows which are based on post trade observable data the data relevant for empirical studies rely on unnecessarily restrictive assumptions i e the assumption that preferences are homothetic and identical across countries and the assumption of factor price equalisation the assumption of identical homothetic preferences seems to be necessary when factor price equalisation is assumed because in this case there is an indeterminancy in the pattern of production nevertheless the two assumptions taken together imply the same factor content of a country s net import vector from the rest of the world for every equilibrium production pattern however in a many country world the factor content of bilateral trade flows depends on the realised production patterns and they cannot therefore be predicted i will show that in the absence of factor price equalisation which many

unemployment and early school leaving theoretical predictions about the effect of unemployment on school leaving are ambiguous unemployment might affect the decision to leave school in a number of different ways i current youth unemployment a higher probability of current unemployment for those who choose to leave school would tend to discourage early school leaving first by reducing the expected gains from job search a discouraged worker effect and second by reducing the opportunity cost of additional education ii expected future unemployment the theoretical predictions here are less clear cut an increase in the probability of future unemployment that affected both those with and without additional education would tend to reduce the rate of return to education and hence education demand on the other hand those with more education may be less affected by rises in unemployment and this may encourage further schooling these two opposing effects have been formalised as a shift and a tilt in the unemployment probability schooling relationship kodde i988 fig i suggests that in the united kingdom both effects could have accompanied the transition from the late 1970s to the i98o the full effects of uncertainty on education investment in a two period model depend on the correlation between the uncertainty in the two periods levhari and weiss 1974 how current unemployment rates are used to form expectations of future unemployment is clearly an important issue here also some individuals may be able to undertake job search before committing themselves to leave school and whilst affected by the risk of future unemployment may be comparatively unaffected by the risk of current unemployment iii effects ofparental unemployment parents unemployment in general reduces family income their children s educational demand may fall as a consequence for three reasons first the consumption demand for education will be lower second a reduction in the first period income reduces the investment demand for education assuming decreasing absolute risk aversion kodde i 988

the direction of developing country trade empirical evidence of differences between south south and south north trade abstract declining market opportunities in northern markets led to views that greater south south trading might provide an alternative growth stimulus this paper analyses the characteristics of south south trade in manufactures and recent changes in the level of such trade to help clarify the potential of greater self reliance within the south south south trade is found to be more intensive in the use of both physical and human capital hence less rational from the static comparative advantage viewpoint than south north trade there is indirect but strong evidence that exporting countries with greatest orientation towards the south are those with greater distortions less rapid movements up the ladder of comparative advantage and weaker export performance finally it is observed that the recent boom in south south trade is largely explained by simple market size effects very rapid growth of rich oil exporters and the faster gnp growth of developing compared to developed countries the paper concludes that while south south trade of about the present magnitude one of greater developing country exports is certainly rational there is little evidence to support views that greater south south trade should be especially promoted arguments of dynamic comparative advantage may favor south south trade but so far these have been more speculative and not yet well researched empirically

sources of changes in factor intensity of trade the factor proportions hypothesis of trade theory has been the subject of a large number of empirical tests but few of them have analyzed the changes in the factor content of trade in a country over time or across countries this study analyzes the changes in factor intensity of trade in mexico japan korea taiwan and israel during the 1960s it traces back the changes in capital labor ratios in the production of exports and import substitutes to variations in the sectoral composition of trade changes in factor output ratios and changes in input output coefficients

the relationship between factor endowments and commodity trade abstract the paper establishes general propositions concerning the relationship between a nation s factor endowments and its pattern of commodity trade in a multi factor multi product context inequality relationships between endowments and autarky prices autarky and free trade prices and between autarky prices and free trade net exports are established using a general model of trade attention is then restricted to a multi product multi factor version of the heckscher ohlin samuelson model of trade from an initial autarky equilibrium a comparative statics analysis yields the effect on net exports of a change in one nation s endowment a bilinear inequality between the changes in endowments and net exports is established it is also shown that if a good were to be exported imported when endowments changed and world prices were held fixed then it will continue to be exported imported when world prices have adjusted to re establish free trade equilibrium

negligible senescence an economic life cycle model for the future abstract we propose a model of aging and health deficit accumulation model with an infinite time horizon and a steady state of constant health the time of death is uncertain and endogenous to lifestyle and health behavior this setup can be conceptualized as a strive for immortality that is never reached we discuss adjustment dynamics and show that the new setup is particularly useful to understand aging of the oldest old i e of individuals for which morbidity and mortality have reached a plateau we then show how the existence of a steady state can be used to perform comparative dynamics exercises analytically as an illustration we investigate the effects of more expensive health investment and of advances in medical technology on optimal short run and long run health behavior

the factor content of international trade without factor price equalization abstract within the basic two factor multi commodity model of a two country world the present paper shows that international factor price equalization is unnecessary for deriving the heckscher ohlin theorem in its factor content version according to which the bundle of goods exported by the capital abundant country will use more capital and less labour than the bundle exported from the labour abundant country the factor content version remains valid when the model is generalized to include trade impediments intermediate goods or additional countries except perhaps if the first of these extensions is combined with either of the other two

do recessions keep students in school the impact of youth unemployment on enrolment in post compulsory education in england in this paper i assess the impact of the youth labour market on enrolment in post compulsory education to that end i construct data for a panel of english regions and identify youth labour market effects using variation in youth unemployment rates across regions and over time my estimates suggest that the youth labour market has large enrolment impacts at least twice as large as suggested by uk estimates based on time series data this helps to explain why enrolment growth slowed down from the mid 1990s and suggests that a weakening youth labour market could cause enrolment to increase again

a model of the demand for longevity and the value of life extension we specify a demand function for longevity or quantity of life along with corresponding demand functions for indicators of quality of life and a value of health and life extension function we show that the demand for health must be derived in conjunction with that for longevity and the related consumption plan and that all choices depend on initial individual endowments and terminal conditions our comparative dynamics predictions indicate that optimal health and longevity are increasing functions of endowed wealth rather than necessarily current income that improvements in opportunities to produce health can accentuate the differences between endowed health and attained longevity levels and that the value individuals ascribe to their health may be increasing over a good portion of their life cycle we use this model to analyze observed empirical variations in levels and trends of life expectancy and in exposure to health risks across different population groups

the meaning of death some simulations of a model of healthy and unhealthy consumption simulations of a model of healthy and unhealthy consumption are used to investigate the impact of various terminal conditions on life span pathways of health related consumption and health a model in which life span and the death stock of health are fixed is compared to versions in which i the death stock of health is freely chosen ii life span is freely chosen iii both the death stock of health and life span are freely chosen the choice of terminal conditions has a striking impact on optimal plans results are discussed with reference to the existing demand for health literature and illustrate the application of iterative processes to determine optimal life span the role played by the marginal value of health capital in determining optimal plans and the importance of checking the second order conditions for the optimal choice of life span

the wage expectations of european business and economics students expected earnings and expected returns to education are seen by labor economists as a major determinant of educational attainment in spite of this the empirical knowledge about expectations and their formation is scarce in this paper we report the results of the first systematic study of the wage expectations of european university students our data are based on a uniform questionnaire answered by about 3 000 business and economics university students across europe we study the determinants of wage expectations and expected employment probabilities the variability of these expectations and their variation across countries and universities we also examine the tradeoff between expected starting wages and expected wage growth

taste change in the united kingdom 1900 1955 a search is made for violations of the axiom of revealed preference in aggregate consumption data for the united kingdom no such violations are found this is taken as evidence that tastes remained constant throughout the period under study the strength of this evidence is estimated within the context of a particular model of taste change

testing the heckscher ohlin vanek theory with a natural experiment i use the historical episode of near elimination of commuting from the west bank into israel to test three key predictions of the heckscherohlinvanek model of trade and find strong support for them on the production side i use variation between districts and find that wage changes were not correlated with the size of the shock to the labour force factor price insensitivity and that districts that received larger influx of returning commuters shifted production more towards labour intensive industries rybczynski effect on the consumption side data are consistent with identical homothetic preferences which combined with the production results supports the heckscherohlinvanek theorem on the factor content of trade

the quiet revolution that transformed women s employment education and family the modern economic role of women emerged in four phases the first three were evolutionary the last was revolutionary phase i occurred from the late nineteenth century to the 1920s phase ii was from 1930 to 1950 phase iii extended from 1950 to the late 1970s and phase iv the quiet revolution began in the late 1970s and is still ongoing three aspects of women s choices distinguish the evolutionary from the revolutionary phases horizon identity and decision making the evolutionary phases are apparent in time series data on labor force participation the revolutionary phase is discernible using time series evidence on women s more predictable attachment to the workplace greater identity with career and better ability to make joint decisions with their spouses each of these series has a sharp break or inflection point signifying social and economic change these changes moreover coincide by birth cohort or period the relationship between the development of modern labor economics and the reality of women s changing economic role is explored the paper concludes by assessing whether the revolution has stalled or is being reversed women who graduated college in the early 1980s did not opt out but recent cohorts are too young to evaluate this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

refuting two claims about virtual water trade abstract using the heckscher ohlin trade model i refute two prominent but incorrect claims on virtual water trade these claims are that virtual water trade i levels uneven water distribution and ii reduces the potential for water conflict both claims are based on an incorrect understanding of comparative advantage in the production of water intensive goods the results show that both claims only hold under certain conditions but do not necessarily follow from the heckscher ohlin trade model

factor trade and goods trade world equilibria with trade in both goods and some factors are studied when international factor endowment differences are the cause of trade a generalized heckscher ohlin theorem is presented the goods trade patterns with and without factor trade are compared factor trade and goods trade tend to be substitutes complements if traded and non traded factors are cooperative non cooperative

high tech and productivity evidence from israeli industrial firms abstract the main purpose of this study is to characterize and analyze high technology industrial firms a technology index is constructed and used to classify firms the largest concentration of hightech firms is israel is found in electronics and transport equipment industries and the lowest in textiles and clothing high tech firms appear to be more productive more export oriented pay higher wages and earn higher rates of return than low tech firms the fact that high tech firms in israel are export oriented is shown to be consistent with the international trade theories of comparative advantage and strategic rent seeking

measurement of the factor content of foreign trade with traded intermediate goods abstract in a recent article helpman 1984 develops readily testable bilateral restrictions in a model of international trade which preserves the spirit of heckscher ohlin trade theory important in any empirical exploration of the heckscher ohlin model is the decision of whether to employ direct or direct plus indirect calculations in determining the factor content of trade this paper extends helpman s analysis to a world of freely traded intermediate goods and shows that direct factor content calculations are the theoretically appropriate measure for use in evaluating these empirical implications of the heckscher ohlin model

new products and the factor content of international trade this paper extends the multicommodity two input version of the heckscher ohlin model to include new products on which considerable interest has been focused by the product cycle hypothesis and related analyses the extended model is then used to reexamine the implications of relative factor abundance for the capital and labor content of international commodity trade as this analysis shows the presence of new products might in principle resolve the leontief paradox under certain specific conditions

a qualitative characterization of the competitive nonrenewable resource extracting firm abstract using variational differential equations a systematic qualitative analysis is carried out for the competitive nonrenewable resource extracting firm the parameters of interest are the output price variable input price discount rate lease length initial resource stock and various tax rates the effects of changes in these parameters on the entire optimal time paths of the current shadow value of the stock the resource stock and the extraction rate are characterized in the perturbed phase plane

comparative advantage in manufactured goods a re appraisal japanese input coefficients are used to investigate the pattern of comparative advantage in the exportation of manufactured products in a cross country framework estimates are made for the imports of manufactured products as well as for net exports also alternative techniques of estimation are utilized and an attempt to explain the residuals in the regression equations and to indicate the predictive power of these equations is made the paper shows that patterns of comparative advantage in manufactured goods can be explained by reference to commodity characteristics and country characteristics in turn intercountry differences in the extent of trade orientation the concentration of exports and foreign direct investment explain part of the residuals of the cross country regression equations finally it has been found that the method applied permits projecting the factor intensity of trade for individual countries

investment in schooling and the marriage market we present a model in which investment in schooling generates two kinds of returns the labor market return resulting from higher wages and a marriagemarket return defined as the impact of schooling on the marital surplus share one can extract men and women may have different incentives to invest in schooling because of different market wages or household roles this asymmetry can yield a mixed equilibrium with some educated individuals marrying uneducated spouses when the labor market returns to schooling rises home production demands less time and the traditional spousal labor division norms weaken more women may invest in schooling than men

comparative dynamic analysis of the full grossman model the paper applies the method of comparative dynamic analysis to the full grossman model for a particular class of solutions it derives the equations implicitly defining the complete trajectories of the endogenous variables relying on the concept of frisch decision functions the impact of any parametric change on an endogenous variable can be decomposed into a direct and an indirect effect the focus of the paper is on marginal changes in the rate of health capital depreciation it also analyses the impact of either initial financial wealth or the initial stock of health capital while the direction of most effects remains ambiguous in the full model the assumption of a zero consumption benefit of health is sufficient to obtain a definite for any direct or indirect effect

non monotonic health behaviours implications for individual health related behaviour in a demand for health framework a number of behaviours influence health in a non monotonic way physical activity and alcohol consumption for instance may be beneficial to one s health in moderate but detrimental in large quantities we develop a demand for health framework that incorporates the feature of a physiologically optimal level an individual may still choose a physiologically non optimal level because of the trade off in his or her preferences for health versus other utility affecting commodities however any deviation above or below the physiologically optimal level will be punished with respect to health distinguishing between two individual types we study a the qualitative properties of optimal time paths of health capital and health related behaviour b the perturbations of the optimal time paths that result from changes in exogenous parameters and c steady state properties predictions of the model and the implications for empirical analysis are discussed at length some comments on potential future extensions conclude the paper

consumption and investment demand when health evolves stochastically abstract the health capital model of grossman 1972 is extended to account for uncertainty in the rate at which a stock of health depreciates two general versions of the model are contemplated one with a fully functioning financial market and the other in its absence the comparative dynamics of the feedback form of the consumption and health investment demand functions are studied in these general settings where it is shown that the key to deriving refutable results is to determine how a parameter or state variable affects the expected lifetime marginal utilities of health and wealth to add further reach to the results a simplified stochastic control problem is explicitly solved yielding estimable structural feedback demand functions

firless firwoes how preferences can interfere with the theorems of international trade abstract an example is presented of a two country two factor four good trade model in which free trade causes factor prices to be drawn farther apart than they were in autarky the example is equivalent to a two good model with a double factor intensity reversal fir and thus demonstrates that the problems associated with firs can arise in many dimensions without them these problems include the undermining of other trade theorems as well and can be avoided only by making some assumption about demand as well as about technology for example the model becomes well behaved if preferences and technology are both cobb douglas

the commodity pattern of trade and the heckscher ohlin theorem in the presence of aggregate and commodity specific factor intensity reversals abstract theoretical analyses of the h o theorem s prediction of the commodity pattern of trade in the multicommodity two factor model tend to assume away factor intensity reversals but the empirical literature has investigated whether reversals between individual goods technologies are prevalent phenomena with the evidence then being presented as bearing upon the h o theorem since the consequence of a factor intensity reversal for the theorem is well defined in the 2 2 2 model we establish via aggregation over individual goods technologies an analogue 2 2 2 setting for the multicommodity model the implications of factor intensity reversals in commodity specific technologies for the reversal behavior of the aggregate technologies and for the h o theorem are examined commodity specific reversals such as are the focus of the empirical studies are shown to have no direct bearing upon the theorem

the general validity of the heckscher ohlin theorem despite a number of attempts to extend it the heckscher ohlin theorem remains woefully restricted in terms of the generality of the assumptions needed for its proof in its traditional form as a statement about the commodity composition of trade the theorem is valid only in the highly abstract environment of the two factor two good twocountry model that has been the mainstay of trade theory for half a century a weaker version of the theorem involving the factor content of trade rather than its commodity composition has been proved for any number of factors goods and countries but this generality has so far been bought only at the cost of other and perhaps equally restrictive assumptions 2 the purpose of this paper is to provide statements and proofs of the heckscher ohlin h o theorem that are more general than those currently available the approach taken is similar to that used in my 1980 article for an extension of the theory of comparative advantage in terms of correlations between autarky prices and trade in section i i lay out the assumptions on which the analysis is based these assumptions provide the outlines of a reasonably general model in which there may be any numbers of goods and factors and in which factor prices may be equalized or not trade impediments in the form of tariffs or export taxes are permitted though transportation costs are not 3 in section ii i discuss the difficulty of inferring the factor content of trade in a world of unequal factor prices and i provide several alternative definitions of that concept for use later in the paper these together with the assumptions of section i are used in section iii to prove a theorem on the value at autarky prices of the factor content of trade in section iv this theorem is used to prove a first corollary that makes a more direct statement about the pattern of trade it says that worldwide there must be a negative correlation between the factor content of trade by factor and country and the corresponding autarky factor prices it is precisely these autarky factor prices that constitute the ohlin measure of factor scarcity therefore the corollary provides a formal statement of the general idea that countries tend to export the services of those factors which they have in relative abundance and it may be regarded as a generalization of the factor content version of the h o theorem finally a generalization of the commodity version of the theorem is proved in section v the concept of a covariance is generalized university of michigan i have benefitted greatly from the comments of paul degrauwe wolfgang mayer michael mussa carl simon and robert stern as well as others who participated in seminars at the universities of michigan chicago and cincinnati and at the national bureau of economic research an anonymous referee also made valuable comments with additional goods and factor price equalization the theorem runs afoul of the indeterminacy of production and trade noted by paul samuelson 1953 and james melvin 1968 without factor price equalization trade impediments and intermediate production can cause reversals of the pattern of trade as shown in my 1979 article if additional factors and countries are also added it becomes difficult even to state the theorem let alone to prove it 2melvin stated such a theorem for the three good two factor case and jaroslav vanek 1968 proved it for the general case but only by assuming factor price equalization trent bertrand 1972 and jon harkness 1979 were able to drop the factor price equalization assumption but replaced it with restrictions on consumption of either goods or factors by country of origin it is unclear to me however that these restrictions can ever be met in a model that is otherwise plausible harkness 1978 has also used the factor content version of the theorems as the motivation for a regression equation relating commodity trade to factor intensities this bears some resemblance to my analysis below in section v see however james anderson 1981 and edward leamer and harry bowen 1981 who have criticized his result with a reply by harkness 1981 3for ease of exposition i do not allow here for transportation costs these were included in an earlier version of this paper following the technique in my 1980 article

a test of the heckscher ohlin vanek theorem the leontief commonplace abstract this paper provides a logically complete empirical test of the hov theorem for the united states by comparing measures of factor intensities trade and factor endowments under the appropriate computations of the factor contents of trade and production u s data are shown to diverge often from their values as predicted by hov as a result it appears that paradoxical outcomes may be common in empirical applications of the theorem

nature or nurture learning and the geography of female labor force participation one of the most dramatic economic transformations of the past century has been the entry of women into the labor force while many theories explain why this change took place we investigate the process of transition itself we argue that local information transmission generates changes in participation that are geographically heterogeneous locally correlated and smooth in the aggregate just like those observed in our data in our model women learn about the efiects of maternal employment on children by observing nearby employed women when few women participate in the labor force data is scarce and participation rises slowly as information accumulates in some regions the efiects of maternal employment become less uncertain and more women in that region participate learning accelerates labor force participation rises faster and regional participation rates diverge eventually information difiuses throughout the economy beliefs converge to the truth participation attens out and regions become more similar again to investigate the empirical relevance of our theory we use a new county level data set to compare our calibrated model to the time series and geographic patterns of participation

education and fertility evidence from a natural experiment declining fertility is often attributed to the increased education of women it is difficult to establish a causal link because both fertility and education have changed secularly in this paper we study the connection between fertility and education using educational reform as an instrument to control for selection our results indicate that increasing education leads to postponement of first births away from teenage motherhood and towards women having their first birth in their 20s as well as for a smaller group up to the age of 35 40 we find no evidence however that more education results in more women remaining childless or having fewer children

on the regional labour market determinants of female university enrolment in europe casarico a profeta p and pronzato c d on the regional labour market determinants of female university enrolment in europe regional studies this paper empirically investigates how young women s decisions of investing in post secondary education are affected by labour market outcomes of older women living in the same region eu silc data on educational decisions of women who completed secondary schooling are used and indicators of the regional labour market are constructed exploiting regional and time variability it is found that the share of working women with young children of women with managerial positions and the self employed positively affect the probability to enrol significant effects of these variables for men are not found

the more the merrier the effect of family size and birth order on children s education there is an extensive theoretical literature that postulates a tradeoff between child quantity and quality within a family however there is little causal evidence that speaks to this theory using a rich dataset on the entire population of norway over an extended period of time we examine the effects of family size and birth order on the educational attainment of children while we find a negative correlation between family size and children s education when we include indicators for birth order and or use twin births as an instrument family size effects become negligible in addition birth order has a significant and large negative effect on children s education we also study adult earnings employment and teenage childbearing and find strong evidence for birth order effects with these outcomes particularly among women these findings suggest the need to revisit economic models of fertility and child production focusing not only on differences across families but differences within families as well

safe port in a storm the impact of labor market conditions on community college enrollments the paper examines the impact of the business cycle on enrollments and finances at individual community colleges between the late 1960s and the mid 1980s we find that 1 percent increases in the unemployment rates of recent high school graduates and of all adults are associated with rises in full time attendance of about 0 5 percent and 4 percent respectively part time enrollment exhibits similar anticyclical patterns this link carries over in large part to degrees obtained in contrast state and local appropriations per student are procyclical we interpret this funding pattern as a failure to integrate education policy sufficiently closely with labor market policy

on adaptation and the demand for health the purpose of this paper is to analyse the impacts of adaptation to failing health this is done by integrating adaptation processes in a grossman type of pure consumption model model simulations show that adaptation affects the health variables by lowering the incentives to invest in health as well as smoothing the optimal health stock path over the life cycle whether or not the risk of mortality is an object of choice has important effects when studying adaptation as well as for the joint development of the health variables

factor content functions and the theory of international trade this paper introduces the concepts of direct and indirect factor trade utility functions and uses them to derive marshallian and hicksian factor content functions which express the quantities of factors of production embodied in net imports as functions of the exogenous variables facing the economy the properties of these functions are discussed and they are used to derive a number of new results in particular it is shown that in certain circumstances the existence of gains from trade is sufficient for the heckscher ohlin theorem to hold in its factor content form

two by two international trade theory with many goods and factors this paper adopts a new approach to the problem of generalizing the properties of the two by two heckscher ohlin model asking whether we can obtain results which hold in very general models for dichotomous categories of commodities and factors using duality theory some results of this kind are derived which generalize certain properties of the heckscher ohlin model to models which allow for any number of goods and factors joint production international factor mobility and substitution between primary factors and intermediate inputs the consequences of assuming sector specific factors and equal numbers of goods and factors are also examined

career interruptions and subsequent earnings a reexamination using swedish data this paper reexamines the link between career interruptions and subsequent wages using a rich new swedish dataset we are able to disaggregate time out of work into several components regressing

marketing orders as nontariff trade barriers previous analysis shows that under autarky all groups must lose from minimum quality standards with symmetric information we find that with international trade it is possible for one country to gain by introducing minimum quality standards however it is not possible for both countries to gain from the standards this result implies that minimum quality standards are nontariff trade barriers using the walter and baldwin criteria