can falling supply explain the rising return to college for younger men a cohort based analysis although the college high school wage gap for younger u s men has doubled over the past 30 years the gap for older men has remained nearly constant in the united kingdom and canada the college high school wage gap also increased for younger relative to older men using a model with imperfect substitution between similarly educated workers in different age groups we argue that these shifts reflect changes in the relative supply of highly educated workers across age groups the driving force behind these changes is the slowdown in the rate of growth of educational attainment that began with cohorts born in the early 1950s in all three countries

joint confidence intervals for income shares and lorenz curves in a recent paper beach and davidson 1983 extended the principles of statistical inference to lorenz curves and income shares by establishing the asymptotic distribution and covariance structure of a vector of lorenz curve ordinates corresponding to a set of quantile abscissae one can thus use the lorenz curve and income shares no longer just as descriptive devices for summarizing distribution information but now also as analytical tools for comparing alternative distributions and carrying out conventional statistical inference on them it would clearly be desirable however to extend and complement this work by providing a method for computing a set of joint confidence intervals about these income shares and for illustrating graphically a joint confidence band about a set of estimated lorenz curve ordinates the present paper provides a new and simple technique for doing this when analyzing differences between sets of income shares or lorenz curves one typically wants to elicit more detailed information than is provided by a standard joint chi square test on the overall set of shares that is when the hypothesis of two sets of shares being the same is rejected we generally want to know further which particular differences in shares are different from zero and of these nonzero differences which are positive and which negative savin 1980 a natural way of providing such information is through multiple comparison procedures developed in this paper in a recent work richmond 1982 has developed a general method of finding multiple comparison intervals that is particularly suited to the present problem and in this situation appears to dominate other conventional alternatives in contrast for example to scheff s s projection method richmond s approach focuses on a set of primary points of interest income shares among a more general set of points including the lorenz curve ordinates and optimizes the joint confidence interval lengths on this primary set of points since estimated lorenz curve ordinates are built up from underlying income shares these shares perhaps further supplemented are natural choices for the primary set the method however also provides a joint confidence band that geometrically bounds the set of lorenz curve ordinates and interpolated segments between them the present

contracts as a barrier to entry it is shown that an incumbent seller who faces a threat of entry into his or her market will sign long term contracts that prevent the entry of some lower cost producers even though they do not preclude entry completely moreover when a seller possesses superior information about the likelihood of entry it is shown that the length of the contract may act as a signal of the true probability of entry

international comparisons of welfare and poverty dominance orderings for ten countries inference based stochastic dominance procedures are applied to luxembourg income study data to rank ten western countries in terms of standards of living and poverty first order dominance comparisons ranks more than 50 percent of all pairwise comparisons and second order generalized lorenz dominance adds another 25 percent truncated dominance analysis is used to make inferences about poverty and up to 98 percent of the truncated distributions are ordered the results differ substantially from those obtained when only relative incomes and inequality are considered

inequality in male and female earnings the role of hours and wages the authors decompose annual earnings into hours of work and hourly earnings and analyze male female differences in earnings inequality using canadian data their results indicate that the larger female inequality in earnings is due to a greater inequality in the distribution of hours of work the distributions of wages for men and women are either statistically indistinguishable or more equal for women the authors compare two data points 1988 and 1981 and find the same structure in the gender comparisons also changes between 1988 and 1981 in earnings inequality are generated from movements in the hours distributions copyright 1996 by mit press

information and the market for lemons this paper revisits akerlofs 1970 classic adverse selection market and asks the following question do greater information asymmetries reduce the gains from trade perhaps surprisingly the answer is no better information on the selling side worsens the buyers curse thus lowering demand but may shift supply as well whether trade increases or decreases depends on the relative sizes of these effects a characteization is given on the other hand improving the buyers information i e making private information public unambiguously improves trade so long as market demand is downward sloping

the economics of career concerns part i comparing information structures many incentives in organizations arise not through explicit formal incentive contracts but rather implicitly through career concerns this paper models career concerns through agents trying to manipulate the market assessment of their future productivity the information flow from current actions to market assessment is therefore crucial in determining the nature of these incentives improved information may either increase or reduce incentives the impact of information provides a major distinction between the explicit and implicit incentives model the paper derives general results on comparisons of information structures which serve as counterparts to the standard results on information structures in the principal agent model sufficient statistic impact of a blackwell garbling comparison of inclusive information structures 1999 the review of economic studies limited

wealth inequality theory measurement and decomposition this paper reviews the basic principles of inequality measurement underlining the advantages and shortcomings of alternative measures from a theoretical standpoint and in the context of the study of the distribution of wealth adopting the two most popular measures the gini index and the p shares the paper documents wealth inequality in canada using the 1999 2005 and 2012 survey of financial security sfs it carries out several decompositions with covariates featuring dfl type reweighting methods and gini and p shares rif regressions the latter parallel decompositions deepen our understanding of how changes in socio demographic characteristics including the compensating role of family formation and human capital impact wealth inequality

vintage human capital and learning curves abstract i study a vintage human capital model in which long lived workers accumulate human capital following an exogenous learning curve different skill levels inside a vintage are complementary in production this makes the ex ante homogeneous workers enter different vintages the continuous time framework allows me to study the timing decision for the technology phase out differentially and to derive sharp characterization for wages and the distribution of workers in the dying technology i show how to posit and solve a planner s problem and construct equilibrium in this way consistent with empirical evidence i show that the experience premium is always positive but diminishes as a technology ages the connection between workers learning curves and the technology s progress curve is characterized

the impact of food stamps on us poverty in the 1980s a marginal dominance analysis the relative effectiveness of the us food stamp program in reducing the incidence and depth of poverty is compared at a number of poverty lines across time the analysis is based upon an extension of dominance methods for ordering poverty recently developed statistical inference procedures and a merged data set that permnits an unusually comprehensive measure of income the comparative effectiveness of the food stamp program in reducing headcount poverty over time is contingent on the poverty line selected however the reduction in poverty gaps is greater in 1990 than in 1982 regardless of the poverty line chosen the sensitivity of the results to the income concept equivalence scale and time period used for measuring income are also considered

testing for the monotone likelihood ratio assumption although monotonicity of the likelihood ratio for conditioned densities is a common technical assumption in economic models empirical tests for its plausibility do not appear to have been conducted this article develops such a test based on the theory of order restricted inference that is robust with respect to the correlation structure of the distributions being compared the test is applied to study the technology revealed by agricultural production experiments for the data under scrutiny the results support the monotone likelihood ratio assumption in a second application we find some support for the assumption of affiliation among bids cast in a multiple round vickrey auction for a consumption good

up or out contracts a signaling perspective a firm will typically gather information concerning its own workers that is not available to other potential employers while other firms will attempt to reduce this information asymmetry by observing the actions of the initial employer i argue that this process can be important in environments characterized by up or out contracts in that the retention decision can serve as a signal of productivity the article investigates this argument in an environment where up or out contracts are employed because they provide workers with an incentive to accumulate general human capital and where learning takes place in a diffuse fashion

testing for marginal changes in income distributions with lorenz and concentration curves asymptotically distribution free statistical tests for comparing absolute and relative lorenz and concentration curves are provided the procedures do not require independent samples and can be used to test for marginal changes in income distributions the tests are illustrated using a large sample of tax returns that have been randomly selected for audit by the internal revenue service the tests reveal the marginal effects of systematic underreporting of income and tax liabilities on the u s income distribution copyright 1994 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

age specific dynamic labor demand and human capital investment abstract to study the optimal age specific labor demand and human capital investment at the firm level we extend the standard dynamic labor demand model by introducing age as a second dynamic variable and distinguish between two types of workers low skilled and high skilled applying an age structured optimal control model we derive qualitative features of the optimal age specific hiring and training effort for the case of a linear revenue and production function we prove that firms do not anticipate changes in adjustment costs in their optimal decisions this result no longer holds if a nonlinear revenue or production function is considered

the effect of food stamp cashout on undernutrition abstract we investigate the effect of food stamp cashout on undernutrition using household data from cashout experiments in alabama and san diego california we apply dominance methods to test for differences in nutrient distributions at or below the recommended dietary allowances

truncation bias and the ordinal evaiuation of income inequality lorenz dominance analysis is used to examine the effect of top coding on the ordinal evaluation of u s income inequality across time current population survey microdata are adjusted for truncation bias and statistical inference procedures are used to examine biennial changes in unadjusted and adjusted lorenz curves beginning in 1985 the truncation bias has a significant effect on ordinal rankings of income inequality

statistical inference and the sen index of poverty statistical inference procedures are developed for a k sen s distribution sensitive index of poverty and each of its components the headcount ratio income gap ratio and the gini index of the poor using results from u statistics the authors show that estimates of the index and its components all have a jointly asymptotically normal distribution and the variance covariance structure can be consistently estimated the inference tests are illustrated by applying them to the same microeconomic data set used in estimating official u s poverty statistics the application reveals that the sen index increased significantly in each of the three periods considered copyright 1997 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

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

statistical inference of progressivity dominance an application to health care financing distributions this paper employs a distribution free statistical test suitable for comparisons based on dependent samples to analyse changes in health care financing distributions on finnish data in distinction to the more general summary index approach used in most studies of progressivity measurement the difference between the lorenz curve of income inequality and the concentration curves of various taxes and payments is used to evaluate progressivity dominance and changes in progressivity sample weights are applied to account for the effect of sampling design and non response the analysis demonstrates that the dominance approach can be successfully applied to various types of distributional problems besides comparisons concerning differences in income distributions as an empirical application the paper presents estimation results for the progressivity of various health care financing sources using data from the 1987 and 1996 finnish health care surveys

relative deprivation and economic welfare a statistical investigation with gini based welfare indices the average level of relative deprivation is considered as a measure of the economic welfare or standards of living for a society this approach yields welfare indices that are weighted combinations of the mean income and the gini coefficient there has been no systematic international comparison of these gini based welfare indices in this paper they are applied to compare relative deprivation and economic welfare using data from the luxembourg income study the asymptotic distributions of estimators of gini based welfare indices are provided under weighted sampling

the economics of career concerns part ii application to missions and accountability of government agencies the paper uses a simple multitask career concern model in order to analyse the incentives of government agencies officials incentives are impaired by the agency pursuing multiple missions a lack of focus is even more problematic in the case of fuzzy missions that is when outsiders are uncertain about the exact nature of the missions actually pursued by the agency consequently agencies pursuing multiple missions receive less autonomy the paper further shows that professionalization creates a sense of mission for the agency and that the specialization of officials raises their incentives last the paper compares its predictions with the stylized facts on government bureaucracies 1999 the review of economic studies limited

capital accumulation under technological progress and learning a vintage capital approach abstract in standard capital accumulation models all capital goods are equally productive and produce goods of the same quality however due to technological progress in reality it holds most of the time that newer capital goods are either more productive process innovation or produce goods of better quality product innovation implications of process innovation for the firm s investment policies are investigated while the output price development is subject to a business cycle and a given generation of capital goods gets more productive over time due to learning the problem is turned into an optimal control model that distinguishes the vintages of capital goods and where unlike most of the recent contributions it is possible to keep on investing in older technologies it is shown that i learning is one of the reasons why a firm may invest in old technologies even when apparently superior technologies are available ii investments in machines of a given age increase more over time under faster technological progress iii under faster technological progress investments are more vulnerable to output price developments and iv on average machines are older during recessions in deciding whether to invest in newer or older capital goods also the lower productivity due to aging versus differences in cost of discounting and acquisition have to be taken into account

explaining interstate variation in income inequality this paper investigates interstate variation in income inequality by avoiding inequality indices and focusing directly on the lorenz curve the authors provide a more general explanation of the differences in inequality they find that mean family income the standard deviation of years of schooling per capita educational expenditure and property income are robust predictors of inequality of particular interest is their finding that ceteris paribus higher per capita education expenditures tend to be associated with states that have income inequality which is greater than the u s average copyright 1992 by mit press

innis lecture inference on income distributions this paper attempts to provide a synthetic view of varied techniques available for performing inference on income distributions two main approaches can be distinguished one in which the object of interest is some index of income inequality or poverty the other based on notions of stochastic dominance from the statistical point of view many techniques are common to both approaches although of course some are specific to one of them i assume throughout that inference about population quantities is to be based on a sample or samples and formally all randomness is due to that of the sampling process inference can be either asymptotic or bootstrap based in principle the bootstrap is an ideal tool since in this paper i ignore issues of complex sampling schemes and suppose that observations are iid however both bootstrap inference and to a considerably greater extent asymptotic inference can fall foul of difficulties associated with the heavy right hand tails observed with many income distributions i mention some recent attempts to circumvent these difficulties ce memoire tente de fournir une vue synthetique des diverses techniques disponibles pour faire des inferences a partir des repartitions de revenus on peut distinguer deux approches principales l une dans laquelle l objet vise est un indice d inegalite de revenus ou de pauvrete l autre est construite sur des notions de dominance stochastique d un point de vue statistique plusieurs techniques sont utilisees par les deux approches mais certaines techniques sont specifiques a l une ou a l autre approche l auteur postule que l inference a propos de quantites demographiques est fondee sur un echantillon ou des echantillons et que formellement tout le caractere aleatoire est attribuable au processus d echantillonnage l inference est soit asymptotique soit derivee par des technique de bootstrap en principe la seconde facon de proceder est un outil ideal puisque dans ce memoire l auteur ignore les problemes de procedures d echantillonnage complexes et presume que les observations sont idd cependant la seconde facon de proceder et encore plus la premiere peuvent rencontrer des difficultes associees au fait que l on observe des queues de distribution epaisses vers la droite dans plusieurs profils de repartition des revenus l auteur mentionne certains efforts recents pour contourner ces difficultes

lorenz dominance and welfare changes in the u s distribution of income 1967 1986 this paper examines income inequality in the untied states over the period 1967 86 using recently developed tests for differences in lorenz curves the authors are able to rank eighteen of nineteen annual comparisons in contrast standard techniques are able to rank only twelve these results suggest that the lorenz dominance principle is more empirically relevant than previously thought the tests reveal a sharp rise in u s inequality between 1978 and 1982 as well as a shift toward greater inequality over the entire period the authors also examine changes in economic welfare using the joint mean lorenz dominance principle copyright 1991 by mit press

poverty in america 1970 1990 who did gain ground an application of stochastic dominance criteria employing simultaneous inequality tests in a partial panel atkinson 1987 proposed stochastic dominance criteria for analysing poverty which under certain conditions establish orderings of states for any poverty line and any poverty measure within given class refocusing debate on the nature of the income distribution of the poor employing new empirical techniques these criteria are implemented for the united states from 1970 to 1990 using the panel study of income dynamics results highlight the pivotal role of family size scale economies in consumption indicate different experiences for white versus non white groups and suggest that optimism over the progress of the poor is not warranted copyright 2003 john wiley sons ltd

the measurement and trend of housing inequality in the united states 1978 85 inequality in housing services for renters owners and all households in the united states is estimated for 1978 and 1985 hedonic techniques are applied to data from the american housing survey to derive values for housing services that include publicly provided as well as subsidized housing we find significant disparities in housing but substantially less inequality than in incomes in 1978 the top decile garnered 19 2 of housing services while the bottom decile received only 5 1 the trend however is towards greater equality in housing with large and statistically significant shifts across all deciles by 1985 the share of the top decile dropped to 16 3 a percentage decrease in share of 15 3 while that of the bottom decile rose to 5 7 a percentage increase of 11 4

the impact of young workers on the aggregate labor market an increase in the share of youth in the working age population of one state or region relative to the rest of the united states causes a sharp reduction in that state s relative unemployment rate and a modest increase in its labor force participation rate this is inconsistent with many theories of the labor market but can be easily explained by a model of frictional unemployment with on the job search the theory makes strong predictions regarding the behavior of wages which are shown to be consistent with the data the paper also reconciles its findings with an existing body of apparently contradictory empirical evidence

labor demand and the structure of adjustment costs this study examines the costs firms face in adjusting labor demand to exogenous shocks evidence on monthly plant level data shows that adjustment proceeds in jumps employment is unchanged in response to small shocks but moves instantaneously to a new equilibrium if the shocks are large results in the large literature that assumes smooth adjustment are due to aggregation of this nonlinear relation the finding has implications for cyclical changes in productivity for severance pay layoff and plant closing restrictions and for all other policies that affect the cost of adjusting employment copyright 1989 by american economic association

nutrition and nonparticipation in the us food stamp programme microdata from the national food consumption survey are used to test for differences in caloric and protein intake distributions we compare poor households that participate in the us food stamp programme to eligible households that do not participate tests for stochastic dominance provide unambiguous evidence that eligible nonparticipants suffer from relative undernutrition compared to participating households probit analysis is used to identify characteristics of participating and nonparticipating households

convergence of the south and non south income distributions 1969 1979 income distribution and inequalities in the southern united states are analyzed and compared with data for the rest of the country the evidence presented in this paper reveals that in the 1970s the souths income distribution either converged or moved significantly closer to the income distribution of the rest of the country the degree of convergence depends on the definition of the recipient unit and to a degree on the particular cost of living index used to deflate southern and non southern incomes the convergence is attributed in part to the labor unionization in the northeast and the resulting relocation of companies to the south data are from the 1970 and 1980 censuses and concern total household income excerpt

international comparisons of income inequality tests for lorenz dominance across nine countries this paper examines income inequality across nine countries using the luxembourg income study data set new statistical tests and comparability of data provide an exceptionally clear picture of relative income inequality only 4 comparisons out of a possible 108 cannot be ranked in most cases differences in the definition of the recipient unit make little difference in the rankings irrespective of recipient units sweden norway and germany come out at the top of the ordinal lorenz ranking with australia canada and the united kingdom in the middle and the united states and switzerland at the bottom copyright 1991 by the london school of economics and political science

statistical tests of changes in u s poverty 1975 to 1990 since president lyndon johnson declared the war on poverty three decades ago scholars have devoted many volumes to analyzing characteristics of poverty evaluating effectiveness of antipoverty policies and measuring changes in poverty unfortunately most poverty studies have focused primarily on the incidence of poverty rather than on both the incidence of poverty and the income distribution within the poor population although a k sen s 23 seminal work on measurement of poverty demonstrated the importance of constructing and using a distribution sensitive poverty measure in evaluating poverty the u s federal government still uses the proportion of poor as virtually the only indicator of poverty with few exceptions such as bishop formby and smith 5 most recent scholarly works on poverty issues including sawhill 21 hanratty and blank 17 and slesnick 24 are also concerned exclusively with the incidence of poverty and use a single poverty line in this study we demonstrate that a more comprehensive look at poverty using distribution sensitive measures and multiple poverty lines yields a different picture of poverty changes over time compared to what official u s statistics portray practically the comparison of poverty changes can be decomposed into three parts 1 setting a poverty line an income threshold below which a person is defined as poor this step is also called the identification of the poor and is very important in poverty study 2 choosing a method to aggregate individual poverty into overall poverty different methods of aggregating may lead to different conclusions about poverty changes therefore an appropriate method is essential for poverty study and 3 statistical inference since conclusions about poverty changes are drawn from a random sample of the population it is important to know whether the estimated poverty

career concerns matching and optimal disclosure policy raiders may suffer from information disadvantage since the current employer is often better informed about his workers quality when workers have career concerns and matching influences productivity the initial employer can strategically disclose information to influence incentives and matching efficiency long term complete contracts induce full disclosure when raiders are perfectly competitive the optimal short term contract induces full disclosure if raiders are perfectly competitive and the workers are risk neutral and are not liquidity constrained these conditions are not only sufficient but also almost necessary for full disclosure partial disclosure may be optimal if any of these conditions is relaxed

changes in the distribution of wages in canada 1981 1992 this article uses microdata to study the changes in the distribution of weekly wages in canada from 1981 to 1992 changes in the distribution are analyzed using lorenz curves and eight different univariate measures of inequality evidence is presented that indicates that inequality is anticyclical increasing during recessions and falling during business cycle expansions moreover after changes in the cycle are accounted for there has been a clear upward trend in wage inequality comparisons between the canadian and the u s distributions show that wage inequality was less pronounced in canada than it was in the united states in the 1980s and was increasing in canada relative to the united states from 1989 to 1992

environmental policy the porter hypothesis and the composition of capital effects of learning and technological progress abstract in this paper the effect of environmental policy on the composition of capital is investigated by allowing for nonlinearities it generalizes xepapadeas and de zeeuw j environ econ manage 37 1999 165 and determines scenarios in which their results do not carry over in particular we show that the way acquisition cost of investment decreases with the age of the capital stock is of crucial importance we also focus more explicitly on learning and technological progress among others we obtain that in the presence of learning implementing a stricter environmental policy with the aim to reach a certain target of emissions reduction has a stronger negative effect on industry profits which implies quite the opposite as to what is described by the porter hypothesis