economic dynamics in the malthusian era evidence from the 1609 spanish expulsion of the moriscos we investigate economic dynamics in the malthusian era using the 1609 expulsion of moriscos from spain sharp population declines in former morisco districts were accompanied by decreased output and increased per capita output while these short run results are consistent with standard malthusian predictions malthusian convergence was delayed up to 1786 in former morisco districts archival sources and historical accounts suggest extractive institutions and cultural differences may have contributed to delayed convergence in population and output per capita this historic episode provides an unusually rich setting to examine malthusian dynamics highlighting the potential for sustained differences in per capita output in the malthusian era

measuring and decomposing the gender pay gap a new frontier approach abstract the gender pay gap measures the differences in the wages earned by female workers when compared to male workers accurately measuring the gender pay gap is an important exercise in order to assess how far we are from the ideal of equal pay for work of equal value determining the different sources of the gender pay gap is also very important in order to design appropriate policies for eliminating this gap we develop an enhanced method to measure and decompose the gender pay gap this method is based on the data envelopment analysis dea technique and on the malmquist index mi we use dea and the mi to construct an index reflecting an adjusted measure of the gender pay gap taking into account multiple productive characteristics and multiple types of pay furthermore we propose a decomposition of the gender pay gap into four components same gender pay gap cross gender frontier gap magnitude productive characteristics bias and pay package bias the method is applied to data relative to 15 712 men and 17 175 women working as business and administration associate professionals in the finance and insurance industry in 20 countries the results reveal the existence of a gender pay gap in all countries and that the value of the gap and of its components vary considerably between countries requiring different policies to tackle it

the political economy of gender explaining cross national variation in the gender division of labor and the gender voting gap mainstream political economy has tended to treat the family as a unit when examining the distributional consequences of labor market institutions and of public policy in a world with high divorce rates we argue that this simplification is more likely to obscure than to instruct we find that labor market opportunities for women which vary systematically with the position of countries in the international division of labor and with the structure of the welfare state affect women s bargaining power within the family and as a result can explain much of the cross country variation in the gender division of labor as well as the gender gap in political preferences

endogenous inequality in integrated labor markets with two sided search we consider a market with red and green workers where labels are payoff irrelevant workers may acquire skills skilled workers search for vacancies while firms search for workers a unique symmetric equilibrium exists in which color is irrelevant there are also asymmetric equilibria in which firms search only for green workers more green than red workers acquire skills skilled green workers receive higher wages and the unemployment rate is higher among skilled red workers discrimination between ex ante identical individuals arises in equilibrium and yet firms have perfect information about their workers and strictly prefer to hire minority workers

does marriage really make men more productive this paper presents new descriptive evidence regarding marital pay premiums earned by white males longitudinal data indicate that wages rise after marriage and that cross sectional marriage premiums appear to result from a steepening of the earnings profile data from a company personnelfile that includes information on job grades and supervisor performance ratings reveal large marital status pay differences within a narrow range of occupations managers and professionals and environments a single firm married workers tend to be located in higher paying job grades there are very small pay differentials within grades married men receive higher performance ratings than single men as a result they are much more likely to be promoted controlling for rated performance however eliminates the promotion differential sanders korenman is an assistant professor of economics and public affairs at princeton university and is a faculty associate of the office of population research at princeton university and a research affiliate of the national bureau of economic research nber david neumark is an assistant professor of economics at the university of pennsylvania and a research affiliate of the nber korenman wishes to acknowledge the hewlett foundation and the harvard university center for population studies for financial support the authors are grateful to james medofffor making available an extract from the company personnelfile questions regarding data availability should be directed to professor james

gendering the varieties of capitalism a study of occupational segregation by sex in advanced industrial societies this article explores the unintended gendered consequences of employment protection and vocational training systems it develops a micrologic of skill investment by workers and employers to identify the mechanism by which specific skills become disadvantageous for women the central claim of the article is that institutions that encourage male investment in specific skills exacerbate occupational sex segregation the article finds that coordinated market economies because of their robust institutional protection of male skill investments are generally more sex segregating than are liberal market economies the empirical section provides cross sectional analyses of advanced industrial countries

is there a glass ceiling over europe exploring the gender pay gap across the wages distribution using harmonised data from the european union household panel we analyse gender pay gaps by sector across the wages distribution for ten countries we find that the mean gender pay gap in the raw data typically hides large variations in the gap across the wages distribution we use quantile regression qr techniques to control for the effects of individual and job characteristics at different points of the distribution and calculate the part of the gap attributable to differing returns between men and women we find that first gender pay gaps are typically bigger at the top of the wage distribution a finding that is consistent with the existence of glass ceilings for some countries gender pay gaps are also bigger at the bottom of the wage distribution a finding that is consistent with sticky floors third the gender pay gap is typically higher at the top than the bottom end of the wage distribution suggesting that glass ceilings are more prevalent than sticky floors and that these prevail in the majority of our countries fourth the gender pay gap differs significantly across the public and the private sector wages distribution for each of our eu countries

occupational attainment and gender earnings differentials in mexico women earned about 20 8 less than men in mexico in 1987 a difference that increased to 22 0 by 1993 using 1987 93 data from mexico s national urban employment survey the authors study the role of occupational attainment in this wage differential most of the 1987 93 increase in the gender log monthly earnings gap they find can be explained by relative chnges in human capital endowments wage coefficient changes would have slightly reduced the gap all else equal the increasing male female earnings differential was tempered by a substantial decline in gender differences in occupational attainment from 1987 to 1993 most of the male female differences in earnings in both 1987 and 1993 can be explained by differences in rewards to individual endowments rather than gender differences in endowments

firm incentives to promote technological change in pollution control reply abstract the process of technological change in pollution control is broken into three basic steps innovation diffusion and optimal agency response firm incentives to promote these steps are then examined under five regulatory regimes direct controls emission subsidies emission taxes free marketable permits and auctioned marketable permits on a relative basis emission taxes and auctioned permits provide the highest firm incentives to promote technological change at times free permits generate lower incentives direct controls which are common regulatory tools usually provide the lowest relative firm incentives to promote technological change

swimming upstream floating downstream comparing women s relative wage progress in the united states and denmark applying a new decomposition method to u s psid and danish longitudinal sample data the authors compare how u s and danish gender wage gaps developed between 1983 and 1995 in denmark they find the wage gap widened because the worsening in women s relative returns to observable human capital attributes as well as in their ranking relative to men in unobserv able productive attributes more than offset their wage gains from improved observable qualifications relative to men s in the united states in contrast the gender convergence in qualifications offset adverse influences including in creasing wage dispersion throughout the labor market to result in a narrowing of the gap the largest increase in the gap in denmark was experienced by women in the top earnings decile and the largest decline in the gap in the united states affected those at the top and in the middle of the distribution

what can we learn from the grand policy experiment lessons from so2 allowance trading stable url http links jstor org sici sici 0895 3309 28199822 2912 3a3 3c69 3awcwlft 3e2 0 co 3b2 tthe journal of economic perspectives is currently published by american economic association your use of the jstor archive indicates your acceptance of jstor s terms and conditions of use available athttp www jstor org about terms html jstor s terms and conditions of use provides in part that unless you have obtainedprior permission you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles and you may use content inthe jstor archive only for your personal non commercial use please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work publisher contact information may be obtained athttp www jstor org journals aea html each copy of any part of a jstor transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission the jstor archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long term preservation and access to leading academicjournals and scholarly literature from around the world the archive is supported by libraries scholarly societies publishers and foundations it is an initiative of jstor a not for profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community takeadvantage of advances in technology for more information regarding jstor please contact support jstor org http www jstor orgtue jun 26 16 25 17 2007

an interim evaluation of sulfur dioxide emissions trading ide iv of the 1990 clean air act amendments established the first large scale long term environmental program to rely on tradable emissions permitscalled allowances in this program to control pollution this program was designed to cut acid rain by reducing sulfur dioxide so2 emissions from electric generating plants to about half their 1980 level beginning in 1995 it is of interest both as a response to an important environmental issue and as a landmark experiment in environmental policy this experiment comes at a particularly important time since emission trading is under serious consideration with strong u s backing for use to deal with global climate change by curbing emissions of carbon dioxide co2 the economic stakes in climate change surpass those in acid rain by several orders of magnitude intergovernmental panel on climate change 1996 this article summarizes the results to date of our ongoing empirical analysis of compliance costs and allowance market performance under the u s acid rain program

minority advantage and disadvantage in competition and coordination abstract we explore how a minority advantage or disadvantage endogenously arises in two contrasting environments a population comprises two unequally sized groups each individual allocates effort between a majority skill and a minority skill it is cheaper to invest in the skill of one s own group individuals are subsequently pairwise matched in an environment that encourages either competition or coordination we find both theoretically and experimentally that under competition the minority players earn more than the majority players when the share of the minority group is sufficiently small as players acquire more of the majority skill to maximize the chance of winning against a majority opponent moreover when there are no theoretical predictions for a relatively large share of the minority we find experimentally that the minority players still enjoy an advantage and the advantage is smaller under coordination in contrast payoffs are reversed both theoretically and experimentally players are more likely to coordinate on the majority skill and this yields a minority disadvantage the minority disadvantage grows with the imbalance in the size of the two groups

the historical fertility transition a guide for economists the historical fertility transition is the process by which much of europe and north america went from high to low fertility in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries this transformation is central to recent accounts of long run economic growth prior to the transition women bore as many as eight children each and the elasticity of fertility with respect to incomes was positive today many women have no children at all and the elasticity of fertility with respect to incomes is zero or even negative this paper discusses the large literature on the historical fertility transition focusing on what we do and do not know about the process i stress some possible misunderstandings of the demographic literature and discuss an agenda for future work jel i12 j13 n30

assessment economic policy towards the environment the article presents an overview and assessment of economic policy toward the environment the first part reviews the core theoretical literature a classification of environmental externalities differentiated by institutional contexts is presented conventional economic theory approaches are reviewed with their associated strong informational assumptions these are then relaxed demonstrating why cooperative solutions to global externalities may prove hard to achieve having reviewed the theoretical nature of environmental problems the article then turns to policy options including privatization taxes and marketable permits and presents a number of suggestions for future policy copyright 1990 by oxford university press

long run growth empirics and new challenges for unified theory annual estimates of productivity are reported for periods over 500 years for eight countries and for five other countries over shorter periods one and two break time series models are used to investigate discontinuities in productivity growth the results support two break models of long run productivity and they favour approaches to unified growth modelling with three epochs however the lessening of productivity gaps and the decisive shifts to higher productivity occurred in the twentieth century chiefly in the years around the world war ii the timing of the breaks and the complexity of the historical record highlights a need for unified models to connect more closely with economic history

increasing earnings inequality and the gender pay gap in canada prospects for convergence this paper retraces the evolution of canadian women s labour force participation and of the gender earnings ratio across the generations to understand better the prospects for gender convergence in pay using data from the public use labour force surveys lfs and administrative annual earnings data from the longitudinal worker files lwf the paper assesses the role of increasing top earnings inequality in the persistence of the gender pay gap having identified a growing role for the under representation of women among top earners the paper then performs an evaluation and critical analysis of existing gender equality policies centred on horizontal occupational gender segregation and discusses alternative policies for the future

a comparative analysis of the nativity wealth gap this paper investigates the source of the gap in the relative wealth posi tion of immigrant households residing in australia germany and the united states our results indicate that in germany and the united states wealth difierentials are largely the result of disparity in the educational attainment and demographic composition of the native and immigrant populations while income difierentials are relatively unimportant in understanding the nativity wealth gap in contrast the relatively small wealth gap between australian and foreign born households exists because immigrants to australia do not translate their relative educational and demographic advantage into a wealth advantage on balance our results point to substantial cross national disparity in the economic well being of immigrant and native families which is largely consistent with domestic labor markets and the selection policies used to shape the nature of the immigration ow

intergroup conflict and intra group punishment in an experimental contest game we study how conflict in a contest game is influenced by rival parties being groups and by group members being able to punish each other our main motivation stems from the analysis of socio political conflict the relevant theoretical prediction in our setting is that conflict expenditures are independent of group size and independent of whether punishment is available or not we find first that our results contradict the independence of groupsize prediction conflict expenditures of groups are substantially larger than those of individuals and both are substantially above equilibrium towards the end of the experiment material losses in groups are 257 of the predicted level there is however substantial heterogeneity in the investment behaviour of individual group members second allowing group members to punish each other after individual contributions to the contest effort are revealed leads to even larger conflict expenditures now material losses are 869 of the equilibrium level and there is much less heterogeneity in individual group members investments these results contrast strongly with those from public goods experiments where punishment enhances efficiency and leads to higher material payoffs

the gender gap in pay in company boards the aim of this study is to analyze whether a gender wage gap exists in the boards of directors bd of companies listed on the madrid stock exchange from 2004 to 2011 we hypothesize that the percentage of female directors on a bd the presence of female directors on the nomination and compensation committee the presence of well qualified independent women directors on bd the sector and the geographical region have an effect on the gender wage gap the results show that the percentage of female directors on a bd and the geographical region have no effect on the gender wage gap on the other hand the finding reports that women s presence on the nomination and compensation committee increases the gender gap in pay and it is reduced when there are independent female directors who have gained a degree on the bd and when the company operates in the finance and real estate services sector in addition the results also demonstrate that the seniority of the female directors decreases the gender gap in pay while there is a rise when the companies are bigger and the size of the bd and the return on assets increase these conclusions should encourage regulatory bodies to adopt forceful rules to mitigate the gender gap in pay

equal pay as a moving target international perspectives on forty years of addressing the gender pay gap this paper provides an overview of the key factors impacting upon the gender pay gap in the uk europe and australia forty years after the implementation of the first equal pay legislation the pay gap remains a key aspect of the inequalities women face in the labour market while the overall pay gap has tended to fall in many countries over the past forty years it has not closed in some countries it has been stubbornly resistant or has even widened in reviewing the collection of papers that make up this special issue we identify four broad themes with which to group the contributions and draw out the explanations for diverse trends theoretical and conceptual debates legal developments and their impacts wage setting institutions and changing employer demands and newly emerging pay inequalities between and within educational and ethnic groups across the four themes we underline how the trends in the gender pay gap capture the dynamism of inequalities as the market power of different groups and stakeholders changes over times three key dimensions emerge from the papers to provide a framework for future research and policy discourse the relationship between litigation and bargaining strategies the interaction between wage setting institutions and new organisational practices and the increasing and range of diversity or equality strands competing for equal treatment we conclude that progress towards closing the gender pay gap will not be easy will require a collective effort of various actors and will not be quick

can affirmative action be cost effective an experimental examination of price preference auctions one of the most controversial questions facing our economy and society in recent years is the question of affirmative action the debate centers around an issue of minority representation in which the rights of the majority are depicted as being compromised by affirmative action programs set up to increase the welfare of minorities implicit in this discussion is the assumption that all affirmative action programs must be cost increasing this result it is claimed follows trivially from economic theory since any interference into the competitive process which prevents the most capable from being chosen must be wasteful and costly in this paper we challenge this claim with experimental results demonstrating that pricepreference auctions in which high cost minority firms are given preferential treatment in the awarding of contracts in such a way that it is possible for these firms to win a contract but not have submitted the lowest bid can be programs that both enhance minority representation and are cost effective in that they decrease the cost of government procurement in the theoretical literature on asymmetric auctions eric maskin and john riley 1995 and the optimal auction literature roger myerson 1981 it has been shown that in asymmetric auctions in which firms draw their costs from

the european union s emissions trading system this paper investigates the european union s emissions trading system eu ets which is often presented as the cornerstone of the eu s strategy for fighting climate change the paper analyses the basic design of the scheme its workings during the first trading period 2005 07 the adjustments made for the second trading period 2008 12 and its performance during the years 2008 and 2009 it also discusses the european commission s ec proposal to revise the eu ets for the period 2013 20 and the agreement reached the paper offers a critical assessment of the eu ets from a value theoretic and class based standpoint challenging mainstream accounts following the consultation and co decision processes that preceded the adoption of the eu ets directive and its amendment one reaches the conclusion that the eu ets has become the flagship of the european climate change programme because it is more conducive to the dominant eu industrial capitals that compete with non eu capitals under strenuous international market conditions the limited environmental effectiveness the windfall profits and distributional injustice that characterise the scheme from its start are pitfalls generated from the embeddedness of the scheme in the eu capitalist economies

competitiveness and exemptions from environmental taxes in europe a number of european countries have introduced a variety of environmental taxes a common characteristic of their implementation is the inclusion of exemptions and tax relief in particular for some sectors of manufacturing industry this paper analyses the pattern and motivation of exemptions as they have developed in western european countries making clear the difference between the nominal and effective tax rates once the exemptions have been taken into account the principal motivation for exemptions relates to concern about competitiveness while particular environmentally intensive sectors may have some grounds for concern even these might be able to achieve cost effective environmental improvements such that their competitive position is not over disadvantaged while for an economy structured like the uk s an environmental tax plus rebate scheme sometimes called an ecological tax reform would be likely to yield benefits in terms of competitiveness the exemptions usually run counter to the environmental economic logic of using environmental taxes to internalise social costs and give economic signals that are based on the full costs of production and they are likely to increase the costs of achieving a given level of emission reduction with little justification for them also on the grounds of competitiveness it would therefore be undesirable on both economic and environmental grounds for them to remain a feature of the implementation of environmental taxes in the future

panel estimates of the earnings gap in norway do female immigrants experience a double earnings penalty this study explores the possibility that being both a female and an immigrant will impose an earnings disadvantage on immigrant women in norway well known techniques are used to decompose the earnings gap between norwegian men and immigrant women into portions attributable to productivity differentials portions attributable to a gender effect and portions attributable to an ethnic effect the analysis supports the following conclusions first there is evidence of a double negative effect on female immigrant earnings second gender effect is more important than ethnic effect finally the discrimination estimates are robust to the alternative methods used in decomposing norwegian men immigrant women earnings gap

toward a new conception of the environment competitiveness relationship accepting a fixed trade off between environmental regulation and competitiveness unnecessarily raises costs and slows down environmental progress studies finding high environmental compliance costs have traditionally focused on static cost impacts ignoring any offsetting productivity benefits from innovation they typically overestimated compliance costs neglected innovation offsets and disregarded the affected industry s initial competitiveness rather than simply adding to cost properly crafted environmental standards can trigger innovation offsets allowing companies to improve their resource productivity shifting the debate from pollution control to pollution prevention was a step forward it is now necessary to make the next step and focus on resource productivity

gender gaps in unemployment rates in oecd countries in some oecd countries the male and female unemployment rates are very similar but in others notably the mediterranean countries the female unemployment rate is much higher than the male explaining these cross country differences is the subject of this article we show that in countries where there is a large gender gap in unemployment rates there is a gender gap in both flows from employment into unemployment and from unemployment into employment we conclude that differences in human capital accumulation between men and women interacted with labor market institutions is an important part of the explanation

asymmetric tournaments equal opportunity laws and affirmative action some experimental results this paper assesses whether affirmative action programs and equal opportunity laws affect the output of economic agents more precisely we find that equal opportunity laws and affirmative action programs always benefit disadvantaged groups equal opportunity laws also increase the effort levels of all subjects and hence the profits of the tournament administrator usually the firm the effects of affirmative action programs depend on the severity of a group s cost disadvantage when the cost disadvantage is severe these programs significantly increase effort levels and hence profits the opposite is true when the disadvantage is slight

an experimental study of statistical discrimination by employers this article reports findings of an experiment motivated by a dynamic labor market model that considers the problem faced by employers in making hiring decisions between workers of different types the question examined here is how quickly employers learn about the ability of a group of workers through observing representatives of that group if prior opinions are weak the employer will use information from the workplace to quickly update any incorrect group based stereotypes it may have on the other hand if priors are heavily weighted incorrect initial perceptions will result in persistent wage differences our experimental findings are twofold first subjects employers behavior moves quickly toward optimal choices second strong priors are hard to establish these results suggest that it would take a long time for employers to form group based stereotypes and that such stereotypes should go away quickly in response to signals that contradict these stereotypes

are emily and greg more employable than lakisha and jamal a field experiment on labor market discrimination we study race in the labor market by sending fictitious resumes to help wanted ads in boston and chicago newspapers to manipulate perceived race resumes are randomly assigned african american or white sounding names white names receive 50 percent more callbacks for interviews callbacks are also more responsive to resume quality for white names than for african american ones the racial gap is uniform across occupation industry and employer size we also find little evidence that employers are inferring social class from the names differential treatment by race still appears to still be prominent in the u s labor market jel j71 j64

malthus was right explaining a millennium of stagnation abstract we develop a simple malthusian growth model with continuous productivity growth and derive the stationary steady state equilibrium we show that linearisation around the steady state gives an empirically tractable model of malthusian wage and population behaviour using the familiar concept of convergence our empirical strategy addresses the concern in the literature over model identification and inconsistent parameter estimates based on newly constructed population data we estimate wage and population growth models using panel data for up to 17 countries from 900ce to 1870ce our results provide the first time series evidence of a strong malthusian trap that was pervasive across countries and time before the 19th century industrial revolution

the gender wage gap a comparison of australia and canada using data from the 1989 canadian labour market activity survey and for australia the 1989 90 income distribution survey the authors investigate the reasons for the significantly lower gender wage gap in australia than in canada key similarities and differences between these two countries the authors argue make them a good basis for a natural experiment to investigate the effects of different labor market institutions in particular australia has a stronger union movement and a greater degree of centralization in wage determination than canada and most of its workers are covered by legally binding minimum working conditions the authors conclude that several differences between the countries in labor market structure notably a lower rate of return to education a lower rate of return to labor market experience and a lower level of wage inequality in australia than in canada are largely responsible for the smaller gender wage gap in australia

who pays for industrial pollution abatement the distributional impact of industrial pollution abatement is measured for the years 1973 and 1977 the findings indicate that in 1977 1 09 of income or 0 510 of personal consumption expenditures of the lowest income class paid indirectly for abatement costs implicit in purchased goods for the highest income class the corresponding figures were 0 218 and 0 423 respectively in addition abatement costs per dollar of output are presented for representative industries

convergence in the gender wage gap in australia over the 1980s identifying the role of counteracting forces via the juhn murphy and pierce decomposition the paper utilises the juhn murphy and pierce 1991 decomposition to shed light on the pattern of slow male female wage convergance in australia over the 1980s the analysis allows one to distinguish between the role of wage structure and genderspecific effects the central question addressed is whether rising wage inequality counteracted the forces of increased female investment in labour market skills i e education and experience the conclusion is that in contrast to the us and the uk australian women do not appear to have been swimming against a tide of adverse wage structure changes

the effects of competition and equal treatment laws on gender wage differentials discrimination if it is inefficient can be eliminated by competition in most countries it is also forbidden by law this paper evaluates the influence of economic and legal factors on the portion of male female wage differentials that is not explained by other worker characteristics and may be due to discrimination we use a new international data set of suitable gender wage gap measures constructed from the results of existing studies meta analysis of the data shows that increased competition and adoption of international conventions concerning equal treatment laws both reduce gender wage gaps while legislation that prevents women from performing strenuous or dangerous jobs tends to increase it doris weichselbaumer and rudolf winter ebmer

malthus in sweden this paper presents some new and unique cross county data from 19th century sweden over birth death and marriage rates grain prices and harvests local grain prices correlate negatively with local harvests suggesting imperfectly integrated food markets the so called positive and preventive checks are also present good local harvests are associated with high birth and marriage rates and low death rates we also find that the fertility and marriage effects from changes in prices but not harvests are greater in counties that rely more on manufacturing consistent with an open economy model of fertility choice where agents earn income from both agriculture and manufacturing

will affirmative action policies eliminate negative stereotypes a key question concerning affirmative action is whether the labor market gains it brings to minorities can continue without it becoming a permanent fixture in the labor market the authors argue that this depends on how the policy affects employers beliefs about the productivity of minority workers they study the joint determination of employer beliefs and worker productivity in a model of statistical discrimination in job assignments the authors prove that even when identifiable groups are equally endowed ex ante affirmative action can bring about a situation in which employers correctly perceive the groups to be unequally productive ex post copyright 1993 by american economic association

statistical discrimination with peer effects can integration eliminate negative stereotypes we introduce peer effects in the costs of human capital acquisition into a model of statistical dis crimination in labour markets this creates a link between the level of segregation in social networks and racial disparities in job assignment and wages we show that this relationship is characterized by disconti nuities there is a threshold level of segregation below which negative stereotypes become unsustainable and steady state skill levels can change dramatically this change can work in either direction skill levels may either rise or fall in both groups vvtiich of these outcomes arises depends on the population share of the disadvantaged group and on the distribution of the costs of human capital investments we also examine the effects of affirmative action policies in the presence of peer effects and provide conditions under which such policies eliminate negative stereotypes

economic prescriptions for environmental problems how the patient followed the doctor s orders o ne of the dangers with ivory tower theorizing is that it is easy to lose sight of the actual set of problems which need to be solved and the range of potential solutions as one who frequently engages in this exercise i can attest to this fact in my view this loss of sight has become increasingly evident in the theoretical structure underlying environmental economics which often emphasizes elegance at the expense of realism in this paper i will argue that both normative and positive theorizing could greatly benefit from a careful examination of the results of recent innovative approaches to environmental management the particular set of policies examined here involves two tools which have received widespread support from the economics community marketable permits and emission charges pigou 1932 dales 1968 kneese and schultze 1975 both tools represent ways to induce businesses to search for lower cost methods of achieving environmental standards they stand in stark contrast to the predominant command and control approach in which a regulator specifies the technology a firm must use to comply with regulations under highly restrictive conditions it can be shown that both of the economic approaches share the desirable feature that any gains in environmental quality will be obtained at the lowest possible cost baumol and oates 1975 until the 1960s these tools only existed on blackboards and in academic journals as products of the fertile imaginations of academics however some countries have recently begun to explore using these tools as part of a broader strategy for managing environmental problems

transaction costs and tradeable permits abstract tradeable permit systems are at the center of current interest and activity in market based reforms of environmental policy because these systems can offer significant advantages over conventional approaches to pollution control unfortunately claims made for their relative cost effectiveness have often been exaggerated transaction costs which may be significant in these markets reduce trading levels and increase abatement costs in some cases equilibrium permit allocations and hence aggregate control costs are sensitive to initial permit distributions providing an efficiency justification for politicians typical focus on initial allocations

making things stick enforcement and compliance environmental rules and regulations are only useful insofar as firms can be persuaded to comply with them in full or in part we survey the rapidly growing literature on the enforcement aspects of environmental policy the difficulties facing any regulatory agency are likely to be exacerbated by information problems penalty constraints and the evasion efforts of firms and we emphasize the role that recent innovative approaches to implementation can play in bolstering more traditional enforcement instruments copyright 1998 by oxford university press

discrimination in the labor market the curse of competition between workers in an experiment we identify a crucial factor that determines whether employers engage in statistical discrimination of ex ante equal groups in the standard no competition setup of coate and loury 1993 we do not nd systematic evidence for statistical discrimination when we introduce competition between workers of dierent groups for the same job the non discrimination equilibrium ceases to be stable in line with this theoretical observation we nd systematic discrimination in the experimental treatment with competition nevertheless a substantial minority of the employers refuses to discriminate even when it is in their best interest to do so

environmental regulation a value theoretic and class based analysis following a value theoretic and class based approach it is argued in this paper that ecological problems are inseparably linked to the process of extracting surplus value in capitalism and owing to their adverse impacts instigate struggles over the appropriation of nature these struggles fought within and outside the state by competing agents shape environmental regulation in particular taxes permits command and control measures and subsidies affect prices profits and rents and have class and other social implications evidence of current environmental regulation shows that it takes places under the great influence of capitalist concerns

evidence on discrimination in employment codes of color codes of gender there is substantial racial and gender disparity in the american economy as we will demonstrate discriminatory treatment within the labor market is a major cause of this inequality the evidence is ubiquitous careful research studies that estimate wage and employment regressions help wanted advertisements audit and correspondence studies and discrimination suits that are often reported by the news media yet there appear to have been periods of substantial reductions in economic disparity and discrimination for example donohue and heckman provide evidence that racial discrimination declined during 1965 1975 1 gottschalk has produced statistical estimates that indicate that discrimination against black males dropped most sharply between 1965 and 1975 and that discrimination against women declined during the interval 1973 1994 2 but some unanswered questions remain why did the movement toward racial equality stagnate and eventually decline after the mid 1970s what factors are most responsible for the remaining gender inequality what is the role of the competitive process in the elimination or reproduction of discrimination in employment

orchestrating impartiality the impact of blind auditions on female musicians a change in the audition procedures of symphony orchestras adoption of blind auditions with a screen to conceal the candidate s identity from the jury provides a test for sex biased hiring using data from actual auditions in an individual fixed effects framework we find that the screen increases the probability a woman will be advanced and hired although some of our estimates have large standard errors and there is one persistent effect in the opposite direction the weight of the evidence suggests that the blind audition procedure fostered impartiality in hiring and increased the proportion women in symphony orchestras

discrimination bayesian updating of employer beliefs and human capital accumulation i introduction can labor market discrimination persist over time how do employer beliefs influence minority groups and their choices previous theoretical models of discrimination can be grouped into two distinct categories based upon the source of the discrimination the most common method of modelling discrimination follows the work of becker 1972 in which the employer manager or other employees receive disutility from associating with members of a particular group in a second class of models referred to as statistical discrimination initially proposed by phelps 1972 discrimination results from differences in the groups ability to signal output or capabilities this result can be reproduced as a special case of the model presented here this paper proposes an alternative model in which discrimination results initially from differences in the employer s prior opinion of average group ability using a bayesian updating model we analyze the dynamic effects of this prior belief on human capital acquisition and the potential for continued discrimination previous research provides an abundance of evidence that society s initial perceptions about numerous characteristics including those affecting productivity differ by group for example smith 1990 summarizes the results of the general social survey which asked individuals to rank ethnic groups on a scale of one to seven in various categories 1 the survey found a significant portion of those surveyed believed that african americans hispanics and white southerners lagged behind the rest of society in intelligence and work effort in fact 53 2 percent of those surveyed ranked african americans below whites in intelligence unless employers differ systematically from the rest of society this evidence implies that the initial or prior employer assessment of ability will be lower for members of these groups in addition to strong evidence that such general priors exist numerous studies find that prior beliefs influence the evaluation of employee ability the urban institute recently conducted a study comparing the evaluation of black and hispanic workers to that of equally qualified white workers 2 given equal resumes the black and hispanic job candidates trailed white candidates at every stage in the job seeking process from receiving fewer initial interviews to a lower number of job offers similar biases have been found in experiments in which identical resumes were evaluated differently simply due to the race or gender of the applicant 3 furthermore even if worker output is unambiguously observed and evaluated in an unbiased setting studies find that success of males is attributed to ability while that of females is more likely to be attributed to luck 4 this adherence to initial perceptions suggests that agents believe strongly in their initial beliefs and hence would require substantial evidence to alter their perceptions our model incorporates the strength of the prior beliefs through a variance parameter surrounding the initial belief of mean ability level a lower variance implies a decreased willingness to admit error in one s prior beliefs and update accordingly discrimination in our model results from the entrepreneur s sincere although perhaps incorrect beliefs concerning the distribution of ability levels of a particular group although empirical results provide strong evidence of labor market discrimination persisting over many years cain 1986 most existing theoretical models of discrimination are static designs used to explain only within period discrimination we propose a dynamic model in which a bayesian employer learns about an employee s ability over time based on output observed up to a stochastic error term thus updating prior beliefs concerning both the individual and the group in each period viewing output as a signal of ability it is clear that traditional statistical discrimination models are embedded within ours the special case in which one group s signal is less reliable than another s can produce the statistical discrimination results

field experiments of discrimination in the market place controlled experiments using matched pairs of bogus transactors to test for discrimination in the marketplace have been conducted for over 30 years and have extended across 10 countries significant persistent and pervasive levels of discrimination have been found against non whites and women in labour housing and product markets rates of employment discrimination against non whites in excess of 25 have been measured in australia europe and north america a small number of experiments have also investigated employment discrimination against the disabled in britain and the netherlands and against older applicants in the united states

women in transition changes in gender wage differentials in eastern europe and the former soviet union under state socialism women fared relatively well in the labor market female male wage differentials were similar to those in the west and female labor force participation rates were among the h

the 40 year pursuit of equal pay a case of constantly moving goalposts progress towards equal pay is elusive this article reviews debates on and prescribed remedies for gender pay equality over the past 40 years of equal pay policy it looks at pay from four perspectives the economic the sociological the institutional and the organisational and explores how and why once an apparent remedy for unequal pay is pursued the goalposts tend to shift the argument is made that the difficulties in securing long term progress may be attributed to a number of factors including the multifaceted nature of pay as a social phenomenon the challenge of pursuing social objectives in a rapidly changing and fragmenting environment the need for political will not technical solutions to achieve redistribution and the potential for gender inequalities to re emerge in new forms

enforcement costs and the choice of policy instruments for controlling pollution i introduction when evaluating policy instruments for controlling pollution analysts generally agree that economic incentives are superior to direct controls in terms of minimizing abatement costs however when it comes to minimizing enforcement costs there is no such agreement some analysts such as freeman et al 1973 and anderson et al 1977 argue that economic incentives would be much easier to enforce than direct controls while others such as drayton 1978 argue that they would be virtually unenforceable the debate typically centers on technical difficulties in continuously monitoring emissions and to a lesser extent on political and legal issues related to the assessment of penalties 1 an issue that has not been examined is whether there are economic reasons for enforcement costs to vary across policy instruments although there is now a sizable economic literature on the problem of noncompliance with pollution control policies there have been no attempts to formally compare enforcement costs across policy instruments 2 accordingly the purpose of this note is to examine whether there are economic grounds for arguing that enforcement costs would be lower for economic incentives than direct controls 3 the policy instruments compared are marketable permits or emissions taxes and uniform standards the instruments are compared in a setting where the penalty schedule is previously specified by some judicial or legislative body and the regulator s enforcement policy is limited to the choice of audit frequency the analysis is based on the premise that for any policy instrument that targets emissions the regulator will have to periodically monitor emissions and assess penalties for noncompliance the relevant question then is whether less frequent monitoring would be required to ensure compliance with economic incentives casual analysis suggests this should be the case economic incentives minimize aggregate abatement costs and lower abatement costs imply lower costs to firms of complying this should imply in turn that less stringent enforcement is needed to achieve compliance this argument although intuitively appealing is flawed using a simple model of pollution control with costly enforcement i show that enforcement costs narrowly defined may be higher for economic incentives for purposes of exposition the result is established in a setting where the regulator ensures each firm is fully compliant however as shown in the appendix the result generalizes to the more realistic setting where firms are partially compliant ii the model consider a group of n risk neutral firms emitting a single pollutant for simplicity the damages from the pollutant are assumed to depend only on total emissions each firm s abatement costs are given by a strictly convex function c sub i x sub i that is decreasing in emissions x sub i the firm s maximum emissions level is denoted mathematical expression omitted and is defined by mathematical expression omitted with probability p sub i a regulator audits each firm and measures its emissions if the regulator finds the firm s actual emissions x sub i exceed its allowed emissions s sub i the firm is assessed a fine of f x sub i s sub i as is common in the literature on enforcement i assume the fine schedule is previously specified e g by a legislative body 4 thus the regulator can choose the probability with which it audits firms but not the fine it assesses for noncompliance i assume the fine schedule is such that both the total fine and marginal fine are increasing in the violation size x sub i s sub i f prime is greater than 0 and f prime prime is grater than 0 because the regulator is assumed to ensure full compliance no violations occur and no fines are collected therefore enforcement costs consist solely of auditing or monitoring costs to simplify the analysis the cost of conducting an audit a is assumed to be the same across firms

market power and transferable property rights the appeal of using markets as a means of allocating scarce resources stems in large part from the assumption that a market will approximate the competitive ideal when competition is not a foregone conclusion the question naturally arises as to how a firm might manipulate the market to its own advantage this paper analyzes the issue of market power in the context of markets for transferable property rights first a model is developed that explains how a single firm with market power might exercise its influence this is followed by an examination of the model in the context of a particular policy problem the control of particulate sulfates in the los angeles region

statistical discrimination and efficiency this paper asks whether statistical discrimination is a market failure i consider the problem for a utilitarian social planner who operates in an environment that can generate statistical discrimination as an equilibriumphenomenon it is found that there are potential efficiency gains from discrimination in terms of reduced mismatch between workers and jobs whether the solution to the planning problem involves discrimination depends on the trade off between the informational gains of specialization and the losses in terms of increased investment costs

dynamics and stagnation in the malthusian epoch this paper examines the central hypothesis of the influential malthusian theory according to which improvements in the technological environment during the pre industrial era had generated only temporary gains in income per capita eventually leading to a larger but not significantly richer population exploiting exogenous sources of cross country variations in land productivity and the level of technological advancement the analysis demonstrates that in accordance with the theory technological superiority and higher land productivity had significant positive effects on population density but insignificant effects on the standard of living during the time period 1 1500 ce

how costly is diversity affirmative action in light of gender differences in competitiveness affirmative action is often criticized for causing reverse discrimination and lowering the qualifications of those hired under the policy however the magnitude of such adverse effects depends on whether the best suited candidate is hired absent the policy indeed affirmative action may compensate for the distortion discrimination imposes on the selection of candidates this paper asks whether affirmative action can have a similar corrective impact when qualified individuals fail to apply for a job we evaluate the effect of introducing a gender quota in an environment where high performing women fail to enter competitions they can win we show that guaranteeing women equal representation among winners increases their entry the response exceeds that predicted by the change in probability of winning and is in part driven by women being more willing to compete against other women the consequences are substantial as the boost in supply essentially eliminates the anticipated costs of the policy this paper was accepted by uri gneezy behavioral economics

a general equilibrium model of statistical discrimination we study a general equilibrium model with endogenous human capital formation in which ex ante identical groups may be treated asymmetrically in equilibrium the interaction between an informational externality and general equilibrium effects creates incentives for groups to specialize discrimination may arise even if the corresponding model with a single group has a unique equilibrium the dominant group gains from discrimination rationalizing why a majority may be reluctant to eliminate discrimination the model is also consistent with reverse discrimination as a remedy against discrimination since it may be necessary to decrease the welfare of the dominant group to achieve parity

two paradoxes with one stone a critical reading of ecological modernization abstract the current contribution aims at critically reviewing state initiatives in the frame of ecological modernization under the lenses of the labor theory of value further the article addresses two phenomena related to ecological modernization that have received much attention namely the porter hypothesis and the jevons paradox state led environmental regulation in terms of environmental legislation as well as initiatives to promote green technology can be understood as a twofold attempt which ultimately leads to re defining socially necessary labor time first state intervention would wish to remove surplus profit from polluting or resource depleting capitals through legislation which would tend to increase socially necessary labor time in the branch of production under reference state policy might then attempt to propel the adoption of green technology which would tend to decrease socially necessary labor time in the sectors targeted through state initiatives competition among rival capitals would be re aligned so as to allow for conditions of production to be renewed the porter hypothesis can be approached as a strategy followed by individual capitals to gain an early mover advantage while the jevons paradox can be seen as the result of an imitation process when rival capitals take up technological modifications launched by innovators

population technology and growth from malthusian stagnation to the demographic transition and beyond this paper develops a unied growth model that captures the historical evolution of population technology and output it encompasses theendogenous transitionbetween three regimes that have characterized economic development the economy evolves from amalthusianregime wheretechnologicalprogressis slow andpopulationgrowthprevents anysustainedriseinincomepercapita intoapost malthusianregime wheretechnological progress rises and population growth absorbs only part of output growth ultimately a demographic transition reverses the positive relationship between income and population growth andtheeconomyentersamoderngrowthregimewithreducedpopulationgrowth

the good the bad and the different can gender quotas raise the quality of politicians the debate over political gender quotas is unduly confined to a supposed trade off between diversity and competence we characterize the effects of a political gender quota in a citizen candidate model to find that quotas do increase the overall quality of those elected whenever the rewards from public office are high or the skill premium or political gender discrimination are sufficiently low in such cases high skill women candidates run for office in sufficiently high numbers driving off low skill male and female candidates our model compares quotas with other policies in terms of their impact on the number and quality of those elected

economic instruments for environmental regulation our knowledge about economic incentive approaches to pollution control has grown rapidly in the two decades in which they have received serious analytical attention not only have the theoretical models become more focused and the empirical work more detailed but we have now had over a decade of experience with emissions trading in the u s and emission charges in europe as the world community becomes increasingly conscious of both the need to tighten environmental controls and the local economic perils associated with tighter controls in a highly competitive global marketplace it seems a propitious time to stand back and to organize what we have learned about this practical and promising approach to pollution control that may be especially relevant to current circumstances this paper draws upon economic theory empirical studies and actual experience with implementation to provide a brief overview of some of the major lessons we have learned about two economic incentive approaches emissions tradi copyright 1990 by oxford university press

a review of gregory clark s a farewell to alms a brief economic history of the world a farewell to alms advances striking claims about the economic history of the world these include 1 the preindustrial world was in a malthusian preventive check equilibrium 2 living standards were unchanging and above subsistence for the last 100 000 years 3 bad institutions were not the cause of economic backwardness 4 successful economic growth was due to the spread of middle class values from the elite to the rest of society for biological reasons 5 workers were the big gainers in the british industrial revolution and 6 the absence of middle class values for biological reasons explains why most of the world is poor the empirical support for these claims is examined and all are questionable

the condition of the working class in england 1209 2004 i use building workers wages for 1209 2004 and the skill premium to consider the causes and consequences of the industrial revolution real wages were trendless before 1800 as would be predicted for the malthusian era comparing wages with population however suggests that the break from the technological stagnation of the malthusian era came around 1640 long before the classic industrial revolution and even before the arrival of modern democracy in 1689 building wages also conflict with human capital interpretations of the industrial revolution as modeled by gary becker kevin murphy and robert tamura oded galor and david weil and robert lucas human capital accumulation began when the rewards for skills were unchanged and when fertility was increasing

performance in competitive environments gender differences even though the provision of equal opportunities for men and women has been a priority in many countries large gender differences prevail in competitive high ranking positions suggested explanations include discrimination and differences in preferences and human capital in this paper we present experimental evidence in support of an additional factor women may be less effective than men in competitive environments even if they are able to perform similarly in non competitive environments in a laboratory experiment we observe as we increase the competitiveness of the environment a significant increase in performance for men but not for women this results in a significant gender gap in performance in tournaments while there is no gap when participants are paid according to piece rate this effect is stronger when women have to compete against men than in single sex competitive environments this suggests that women may be able to perform in competitive environments per se

the short term and long term deterrence effects of ins border and interior enforcement on undocumented immigration abstract this paper analyzes the short term and long term deterrence effects of ins border and interior enforcement utilizing fy1983 fy1997 border and interior apprehensions and patrol hours data from the ins we estimate a four variable var model and find that border patrol enforcement has significant short term deterrence effects these effects are short lived as undocumented migrants seemingly adjust to new information moreover the non existent long term effects are apparently the consequence of basic economic fundamentals our analysis employing microdata from both mexico and the us suggests that the wage gap between mexico and the us is sufficiently large to maintain the illegal migratory flow

the incentive effects of affirmative action in a real effort tournament abstract affirmative action policies bias tournament rules in order to provide equal opportunities to a group of competitors who have a disadvantage they cannot be held responsible for its implementation affects the underlying incentive structure which might induce lower performance by participants and additionally result in a selected pool of tournament winners that is less efficient in this paper we study the empirical validity of such concerns in a case where the disadvantage affects capacities to compete we conducted real effort tournaments between pairs of children from two similar schools who systematically differed in how much training they received ex ante on the task at hand contrary to the expressed concerns our results show that the implementation of affirmative action did not result in a significant performance loss for either advantaged or disadvantaged subjects instead it rather enhanced the performance for a large group of participants moreover affirmative action resulted in a more equitable tournament winner pool where half of the selected tournament winners came from the originally disadvantaged group hence the negative selection effects due to the biased tournament rules were at least partially offset by performance enhancing incentive effects

post malthusian dynamics in pre industrial scandinavia theories of economic growth hypothesize that the transition from pre industrial stagnation to sustained growth is associated with a post malthusian phase in which technological progress raises income and spurs population growth while offsetting diminishing returns to labor evidence suggests that england was characterized by post malthusian dynamics preceding the industrial revolution however given england s special position as the forerunner of the industrial revolution it is unclear if a transitory post malthusian period is a general phenomenon using data from denmark norway and sweden this research provides evidence for the existence of a post malthusian phase in the transition from stagnation to growth in scandinavia

malthus to solow a unified growth theory is developed that accounts for the roughly constant living standards displayed by world economies prior to 1800 as well as the growing living standards exhibited by modern industrial economies our theory also explains the industrial revolution which is the transition from an era when per capita incomes are stagnant to one with sustained growth the authors use a standard growth model with several technologies the first denoted the malthus technology requires land labor and reproducible capital as inputs the second denoted the solow technology does not require land the authors show that in the early stages of development only the malthus technology is used and due to population growth living standards are stagnant despite technological progress eventually technological progress causes the solow technology to become profitable and both technologies are employed at this point living standards improve since population growth has less influence on per capita income growth in the limit the economy behaves like a standard solow growth model excerpt