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

does corporate governance influence earnings management in latin american markets although us and european research has documented improvement in earnings quality associated with corporate governance characteristics the situation in latin america is questionable given the business environment in which firms operate which is characterized by controlling family ownership and weak legal protection the purpose of this study is to examine the relation between the internal mechanisms of corporate governance and earnings management measured by discretionary accrual we use a sample of listed latin american non financial companies from the period 2006 2009 our results show how in the latin american context the role of external directors is limited and that boards which meet more frequently take a more active position in the monitoring of insiders so showing a lower use of manipulative practices in addition we find a non linear relation between insider ownership and discretionary accruals also pointing to the fact that ownership concentration may be a manipulative practices constrictor mechanism only when the ownership of main shareholders is moderate the findings have important policy implications since this is to the best of our knowledge the first study to analyze the relation between the effectiveness of the government and the earnings management behavior as policy implications we document how when a country implements controls aimed at reducing corruption strengthening the rule of law or improving the effectiveness of government this leads to a reduction in firm earnings management

group loyalty and the taste for redistribution interpersonal preferences preferences that depend on the characteristics of others are typically hard to infer from observable individual behavior as an alternative approach this paper uses survey data to investigate interpersonal preferences i show that self reported attitudes toward welfare spending are determined not only by financial self interest but also by interpersonal preferences these interpersonal preferences are characterized by a negative exposure effect individuals decrease their support for welfare as the welfare recipiency rate in their community rises and racial group loyalty individuals increase their support for welfare spending as the share of local recipients from their own racial group rises these findings help to explain why levels of welfare benefits are relatively low in racially heterogeneous states

why do corrupt governments maintain public support this article addresses an issue often neglected by the current literature on political corruption why do citizens support corrupt governments the authors argue that people in countries where gove

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

opposition parties and the urban poor in african democracies africa s urban poor increasingly represent a key constituency for electoral mobilization opposition parties which are pivotal for democratic consolidation have nevertheless exhibited disparate success at obtaining votes from this constituency to explain why this study focuses on the case of zambia and draws on interviews with political elites as well as a survey of informal sector workers in lusaka instead of vote buying ethnic alignments or economic voting these data show that the urban poor s voting decisions are related to the strategies used by political parties to incorporate them into the political arena opposition parties that employ populist strategies are more likely to win support from the urban poor than parties reliant on alternative modes of mobilization the advantages of a populist strategy include greater differentiation from the myriad of purely personalistic parties in africa and greater congruence with the policy priorities of the urban poor including service delivery and jobs

does commercialization undermine the benefits of decentralization for local services provision evidence from mexico s urban water and sanitation sector summary decentralization has been promoted as a means to better reflect citizen preferences and improve local services many developing countries decentralized and promoted neoliberal policies such as commercialization simultaneously leaving mayors with the responsibility of improving public services through self financing reforms this study evaluates experiences in three mexican cities to assess whether decentralization and commercialization practices have resulted in improved water and sanitation services it finds that commercialization has increased social conflict surrounding urban services provision and that local institutional constraints further undermine mayor s ability to adopt politically contentious policies the result has been stalled and uneven service improvements

public participation and poverty alleviation the experience of reform communists in india s west bengal abstract public participation is essential to making poverty alleviation programs responsive to the needs of the poor but it requires a political process that adequately represents their interests yet as long as the poor remain poor they are disadvantaged in securing equitable representation this article highlights the problems stemming from this paradox of participation it shows how implementing poverty alleviation programs through elected governing councils has simultaneously made policy more responsive to the poor while permitting the organizational interests of the ruling communist party to distort implementation the article highlights the importance of political competition among parties and nongovernment organizations for maximizing responsiveness to the poor

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

hedonic wages and labor market search this article investigates the consequences of labor market search for the theory of hedonic wages we find that the introduction of search has surprising consequences for the theory of hedonic wages in particular we demonstrate that the equilibrium distribution of wage and nonwage amenity bundles generally bears little resemblance to workers underlying preferences a consequence of this analysis is that estimates of workers marginal willingness to pay derived from the conventional hedonic wage methodology are biased in addition we demonstrate that search generates differences between firm level and employee level data that can cause substantial deviations in the estimates of hedonic wage equations

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

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

the workers value of the remaining employment contract duration this paper introduces and applies a method for estimating workers marginal willingness to pay for job attributes employing data on job search activity worker s willingness to pay for the remaining duration of the employment contract is derived we provide evidence that workers attach substantial value to the remaining contract duration a temporary worker with a remaining contract of 6 months is willing to pay about 10 of the wage to increase the contract by one month

the provision of public goods under alternative electoral incentives politicians who care about the spoils of office may underprovide a public good because its benefits cannot be targeted to voters as easily as pork barrel spending we compare a winner take all system where all the spoils go to the winner to a proportional system where the spoils of office are split among candidates proportionally to their share of the vote in a winner take all system the public good is provided less often than in a proportional system when the public good is particularly desirable we then consider the electoral college system and show that it is particularly subject to this inefficiency

incentives to cultivate a party vote in candidate centric electoral systems evidence from brazil a prominent question in comparative electoral studies concerns the so called personal vote typically scholars approach this question at a cross national as opposed to a cross party level in this

offer heterogeneity in a two state model of sequential search the econometric method in the c flinn and j heckman 1982 study for estimating a markovian model of search unem ployment and job tenure is further augmented by introducing a possibi lity that jobs may differ by separation rates or nonwage attributes a set of reservation wages is obtained as a solution to the value fun ctions differences in reservation wages estimate the compensating no nwage utility differentials among jobs the unemployment spell distri bution is characterized as one of competing risk based on which type of job is finally accepted the model is implemented using data from the employment opportunities pilot project copyright 1988 by mit press

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

corruption as a self fulfilling prophecy evidence from a survey experiment in costa rica an influential body of scholarship argues that corruption behaves as a selffulfilling prophecy the idea of this work is that levels of corruption emerge endogenously as a result of a society wide coordination game in which ther individual returns to corrupt behavior are a function of how disposed towards corruption the other members of society are perceived as being an empirical implication of this logic is that if one were to exogenously perturb beliefs about societal levels of corruption upward willingness to engage in corruption should increase as a consequence the current paper evaluates this claim by utilizing an information experiment embedded in a large scale household survey conducted in the gran area metropolitana gam of costa rica from october 2013 to april 2014 n 4200 changes in beliefs about corruption were induced via the random assignment of an informational display depicting the increasing percentage of costa ricans who have experienced or directly observed an act of corruption from 2006 to 2011 the paper finds that on average assignment to this display relative to the control condition increased the probability that a respondent would be willing to pay a bribe to a police officer by approximately 0 04 to 0 08 thereby providing supporting evidence for the self fulfilling prophecy hypothesis

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

voter heterogeneity and political corruption abstract we show that policies that eliminate corruption can depart from socially desirable policies and this inefficiency can be large enough to allow corruption to live on political competition between an honest welfare maximiser and corrupt politicians is studied in our model the corrupt politician is at a distinct disadvantage there is no asymmetric information no voter bias and voters are fully rational yet corruption cannot be eliminated when voters have heterogeneous preferences

making land rights accessible social movements and political legal innovation in the rural philippines abstract in recent years rule of law and legal reform has grown to be a major concern of national governments international financial institutions development agencies and donor organisations part of this concern has focused on expanding access to justice for the poor however little effort has gone into understanding the role of justice sector institutions in shaping the opportunities and limits of redistributive justice little attention has been paid to the actual workings of obstacles entrenched within the justice sector to land reform for example instead pro market scholars cite difficult legal problems as a reason to turn away from state led land reform and toward market oriented land policies yet as this paper shows a closer look at the details of dynamics around land reform in the philippines suggests that political legal problems associated with implementation of the agrarian reform law can be overcome under certain conditions it is argued that for rural poor claimants it is important

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

the political economy of government responsiveness theory and evidence from india the determinants of government responsiveness to its citizens is a key issue in political economy here we develop a model based on the solution of political agency problems having a more informed an politically active electorate strengthens incentives for governments to be responsive this suggests that there is a role both for democratic institutions and the mass media in ensuring that the preferences of citizens are reflected in policy the ideas behind the model are tested on panel data from india we show that public food distribution and calamity relief expenditure are greater controlling for shocks where governments face greater electoral accountability and where newspaper circulation is highest

bringing home the bacon an empirical analysis of the extent and effects of pork barreling in australian politics which electorates receive targeted funding and does targeted funding swing votes to answer these questions i analyze four discretionary programs funded by the australian federal government during the 2001 2004 election cycle controlling for relevant demographic characteristics of the electorate those electorates held by the governing coalition received a larger share of discretionary funding and a larger number of program grants among government seats funding does not appear to have been directed towards those that were more marginal more discretionary funding particularly on road building was associated with a larger swing towards the government in the 2004 election

electoral rules and corruption is corruption systematically related to electoral rules recent theoretical work suggests a positive answer but little is known about the data we try to address this lacuna by relating corruption to different features of the electoral system in a sample of about eighty democracies in the 1990s we exploit the cross country variation in the data as well as the time variation arising from recent episodes of electoral reform the evidence is consistent with the theoretical priors larger voting districts and thus lower barriers to entry are associated with less corruption whereas larger shares of candidates elected from party lists and thus less individual accountability are associated with more corruption individual accountability appears to be most strongly tied to personal ballots in plurality rule elections even though open party lists also seem to have some effect because different aspects roughly offset each other a switch from strictly proportional to strictly majoritarian elections only has a small negative effect on corruption jel e62 h3

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

the difficult transition from clientelism to citizenship lessons from mexico author s fox jonathan a abstract electoral competition is necessary but not sufficient for the consolidation of democratic regimes not all elections are free and fair nor do they necessarily lead to actual civilian rule or respect for human rights if there is more to democracy than elections then there is more to democratization than the transition to elections but in spite of the rich literature on the emergence of electoral competition the dynamics of political transitions toward respect for other fundamental democratic rights is still not well understood political democracy is defined here in classic procedural terms free and fair electoral contestation for governing offices based on universal suffrage guaranteed freedoms of association and expression accountability through the rule of law and civilian control of the military although analyses of democratization typically acknowledge that these are all necessary criteria most examine only electoral competition this study however develops a framework for explaining progress toward another necessary condition for democratization respect for associational autonomy which allows citizens to organize in defense of their own interests and identities without fear of external intervention or punishment

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

democracy by undemocratic means elites political pacts and regime transition in brazil why has brazil failed to develop strong democratic institutions despite widespread opposition to authoritarianism and support for civilian rule in the 1980s this article argues that the political pacts bargained by elites that made the regime transition possible limited the extension of democracy by restoring to old regime elites many sources of their political power as the price for their support for democratization political pacts left the military with a substantial degree of formal and informal power over civilians preserved clientelism and undermined the ability of political parties to transform themselves into genuine transmission belts for nonelite interests the undemocratic character of the brazilian state as embodied by military autonomy technocratic modes of policymaking and executive dominance over the legislature moreover was reinforced by the defeat of parliamentarism by the constituent assembly in 1988

the relevance of relative distribution favoritism information and vote choice in africa relative distribution whether one is favored or disfavored by government seems to matter to voters in many african countries but why i demonstrate theoretically that voters who do not have inform

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

shadow prices of social capital in rural india a nonparametric approach this article studies the role of social capital on cotton production efficiency and productivity for a sample of small farms in maharashtra india using data envelopment analysis input shadow prices are computed as an indicator of the importance of social capital relative to other inputs results suggest social capital to be the input with the highest contribution to production efficiency after land the luenberger indicator is used to assess the productivity improvement associated to an investment in social capital which is found to be on the order of 12 undertaking collective production activities is found to play an important role in improving productivity this is especially relevant to agricultural households facing important economic and institutional restrictions that make it difficult to increase conventional expensive inputs

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

hands off my regime governments restrictions on foreign aid to non governmental organizations in poor and middle income countries many resource strapped developing country governments seek international aid but when that assistance is channeled through domestic civil society it can threaten their political control as a result in the last two decades 39 of the world s 153 low and middle income countries have adopted laws restricting the inflow of foreign aid to domestically operating nongovernmental organizations ngos governments recognize that such laws harm their international reputations for supporting democracy and may invite donor punishment in terms of aid reductions yet they perceive foreign aid to ngos as supporting political opponents and threatening their grip on power in the aftermath of competitive electoral victories governments often take new legal steps to limit these groups funding we test this argument on an original dataset of laws detailing the regulation of foreign aid inflows to domestically operating ngos in 153 low and middle income countries for the period 1993 2012 using an event history approach we find that foreign aid flows are associated with an increased risk of restrictive law adoption a log unit increase in foreign aid raises the probability of adoption by 6 7 this risk is exacerbated after the holding of competitive elections the interaction of foreign aid and competitive elections increases the probability of adoption by 11

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 varying political toll of concerns about corruption in good versus bad economic times under what conditions do citizens connect concerns about corruption to their evaluations of sitting executives in contrast to conventional scholarship positing a direct negative relationship between corruption and political support we build on a small but suggestive body of research to argue that this relationship is conditional on economic context we test this claim with national survey data collected in 19 presidential systems as part of the americasbarometer 2010 study using both fixed effects ordinary least squares and hierarchical linear regression analyses we show that individuals facing bad good collective economic conditions apply a higher lower penalty to presidential approval for perceived political corruption this result holds across both an individual level indicator of national economic assessment and a regional economic measure we further test and find less substantial results for the moderating influence of personal economic conditions on the political toll of corruption perce

estimating workers marginal willingness to pay for job attributes using duration data this paper develops and applies a method for estimating workers marginal willingess to pay for job attributes when workers job choices are characterized by imperfect information and labor market search as an application this paper analyzes the job durations of white males using data from the national longitudinal survey youth cohort and the dictionary of occupational titles estimates of workers willingness to pay derived from the job duration model are compared with those derived from an hedonic wage model

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

search for nonwage job characteristics a test of the reservation wage hypothesis previous structural models of job search behavior have been based upon the reservation wage property this article provides estimates of a more general search model that nests models with the reservation wage property the estimates lead to rejection of the reservation wage property the model includes hours of work in the utility function but other nonwage job characteristics can be included as well an experiment based on the estimated parameters indicates that a significant proportion of job offers would be mistakenly predicted to be accepted or rejected under the restrictions implied by the reservation wage property

a model of layoff search and job choice and its estimation a labor market model of search and transitions is analyzed where certain jobs carry layoff prospects and others do not the dynamic value functions are solved for reservation wages for searchers with a choice between these jobs for the laid off worker the wage at the prior job emerges as an important determinant of the optimal search strategy similarly prospect of layoff is an important consideration for permanently separated workers during search conditioning on the nonparametric estimates of the reservation wages the model is estimated using data from the employment opportunities pilot project survey copyright 1992 by mit press

from local strongman to facilitator institutional incentives for participatory municipal governance in latin america efforts to engage citizens in democratic forms of governance in developing societies are complicated by deeply rooted socioeconomic and political inequalities in this article the authors analyze

government action social capital and development reviewing the evidence on synergy abstract instead of assuming a zero sum relationship between government involvement and private cooperative efforts the five preceding articles argue for the possibility of state society synergy that active government and mobilized communities can enhance each others developmental efforts this article draws on these articles to explore the forms and sources of state society synergy i argue that synergy usually combines complementarity with embeddedness and is most easily fostered in societies characterized by egalitarian social structures ard robust coherent state bureaucracies i also argue however that synergy is constructable even in the more adverse circumstances typical of third world countries

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

clientelism and voting behavior evidence from a field experiment in benin the author conducted a field experiment in benin to investigate the impact of clientelism on voting behavior in collaboration with four political parties involved in the 2001 presidential elections clientelist and broad public policy platforms were designed and run in twenty randomly selected villages of an average of 756 registered voters using the survey data collected after the elections the author estimated the effect of each type of message by comparing voting behavior in the villages exposed to clientelism or public policy messages treatment groups with voting behavior in the other villages control groups the author found that clientelist messages have positive and significant effect in all regions and for all types of candidates the author also found that public policy messages have a positive and significant effect in the south but a negative and significant effect in the north in addition public policy messages seem to hurt incumbents as well as regional candidates finally the evidence indicates that female voters tend to have stronger preference for public policy platforms than male voters

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

who delivers partisan clients in the argentine electoral market why do some parties fail to benefit from patronage in pork ridden political systems this article analyzes the interaction between patronage and partisanship to explain why some incumbents are more likely to benefit from pork politics than others we explain such differences by focusing on political parties access to resources supply side and voters dependence on fiscal largesse demand side we show how these differences affect the patron s choice of public sector wages and employment we use subnational level data to show different electoral returns from patronage for the two major political coalitions in argentina peronism and the ucr alianza and their effect on preferences over public sector wages and employment w hy do some political parties fail to benefit from patronage in pork ridden political systems this article analyzes the interaction between patronage and partisanship to explain why some incumbents are more likely to benefit from pork politics than others we explain returns to patronage by highlighting differences in the political parties access to resources supply side and the voter s dependence on public sector jobs demand side we propose that just as political parties cater their policies to particular groups of voters they pursue different strategies when allocating pork in exchange for support on the supply side we highlight the importance of partisan biases in the fiscal and electoral institutions that regulate the access and distribution of public resources on the demand side we show that patronage is a distributive mechanism that provides different returns to voters with different skills and labor market expectations

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