the distribution of income in china preface notes on the contributors introduction k griffin z renwei part 1 the distribution of income household income and its distribution a r khan k griffin c riskin z renwei three features of the distribution of income during the transition to reform z renwei part 2 income and wealth in rural china the determinants of household income in rural china a r khan the distribution of wealth in rural china t mckinley income distribution and poverty in rural china c riskin part 3 employment and human capital workers in china s rural industries j knight s lina why urban wages differ in china j knight s lina the determinants of educational attainment j knight l shi annex the 1988 household sample survey m eichen z ming index

mean reversion in closed end fund discount evidence from half life this article examines the mean reversion properties of the discount on uk and us closed end funds while the discounts are tested i 1 strong statistical evidence of mean reversion is ascertained by bias corrected bootstrap half life estimates the estimates also indicate that equity based funds converge to the steady state level faster than fixed income funds in addition although an equilibrium pricing condition postulates an inverse relation between half life and the discount size correlation estimates fail to show strong support for the relation

regional variation in earnings inequality in reform era urban china this article studies the regional variation in earnings inequality in contemporary urban china focusing on the relationship between the pace of economic reforms and earning determination through

role of parental income in educational attainment during the post world war ii era u s governmental policy has often been based on the idea that in the absence of government action access to college and to a lesser extent high school education may be limited because of liquidity constraints the federal and state and local governments have instituted a number of policies to overcome these constraints these policies include the basic opportunity grants loan programs that have been issued at or below market interest rates the expansion of state supported colleges that charge below market tuitions rates and the inception and expansion of local community or county colleges that also charge below market tuition rates while there may be noneconomic reasons that explain these changes or their magnitude economic reasons that rely on differences between private and social costs and benefits can also be advanced these include a wiser societal choices made by a more educated society b recoupment of social costs from higher tax revenues c the reduction of private risks from lending arising from the pooling of risks thereby making the social supply of funds curve available to all individuals at the social discount rate and d state and local economic development reason c implies that in the absence of governmental initiative some children would be restricted from achieving their socially optimal amount of education because parents income and wealth limit their children s choices gary becker 1975 arthur okun 1975 and jere behrman and myself 1985 argue that governmental policy to reduce private borrowing costs to the level of social costs reduces inefficiency while increasing equity a rare result in the realm of economics in this paper i consider why parental income might influence offspring s educational attainment and the policy implications of such an influence

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

the effects of religion and denomination on earnings and the returns to human capital the effects of religious and denominational background on earnings and the returns to human capital are examined when religious differences are constrained to be additive apart from a jewish differential there is virtually no evidence that religious or denominational background affects earnings this contrasts with greeley s claims of sizable catholic advantage in separate earnings regressions we find that the marginal returns to catholics from college education exceed those to similar protestants this offsets the disadvantage of lower precollege returns earnings differences between protestant denominations appear to reflect the sorting of protestants into denominations according to schooling and income

perceptual and structural barriers to investing in natural capital economics from an ecological footprint perspective this paper argues that perceptual distortions and prevailing economic rationality far from encouraging investment in natural capital actually accelerate the depletion of natural capital stocks moreover conventional monetary analyses cannot detect the problem this paper therefore makes the case for direct biophysical measurement of relevant stocks and flows and uses for this purpose the ecological footprint concept to develop the argument the paper elaborates the natural capital concept and asserts the need of investing in natural capital to compensate for net losses it shows how the ecological footprint can be used as a biophysical measure for such capital and applies this concept as an analytical tool for examining the barriers to investing in natural capital it picks four issues from a rough taxonomy of barriers and discusses them from an ecological footprint perspective it shows why marginal prices cannot reflect ecological necessities how interregional risk pooling encourages resource liquidation how present terms of trade undermine both local and global ecological stability and how efficiency strategies may actually accelerate resource throughput affirming the necessity of biophysical approaches for exploring the sustainability implications of basic ecological and thermodynamic principles it draws lessons for current development

religion and income heterogeneity between countries this paper tests whether the behaviour of households in different countries is homogeneous with respect to the influence of religion on income the violation of the homogeneity assumption would have two consequences first results based on country studies might not be applicable to other countries second one should be careful when pooling cross country data in this type of research data at household level from the european and world values survey are pooled for 25 western countries we estimate simultaneously an income and a religion equation to correct for the endogeneity of religiousness we find that estimation outcomes are different for low and high income countries whereas church membership is found to have a positive effect on income for high income countries this effect is negative for low income countries this result is robust to denominational distribution participation effects and alternative measures of religiousness

returns to schooling for urban and migrant workers in china a detailed investigation abstractwe use a new data set the 2009 rural urban migration in china rumic to estimate returns to schooling in china using instrumental variable iv estimation after identifying a set of instruments we conduct comprehensive validity and relevance testing of different combinations of instruments as well as robustness analysis of our estimates for rural to urban migrants and urban residents in china we find that our point estimates are in the 6 9 range for urban workers compared to 7 8 for migrant workers returns for men at 8 9 are slightly higher than for women at 6 7 thus private returns to education in urban china in 2009 were not as high as other transition and developing countries but substantial and have increased over time comparing ols and iv estimates we also find that the attenuation bias due to measurement error is generally large and more important in the migrant sample compared to the urban sample

obstacles to school progression in rural pakistan an analysis of gender and sibling rivalry using field survey data abstract this paper aims to identify the obstacles to school progression by using field surveys that were conducted in twenty five pakistani villages the full information maximum likelihood fiml estimation of the sequential schooling decision model reveals important dynamics of the gender difference in educational attainment intrahousehold resource allocation patterns and transitory income and wealth effects in the descriptive statistics as well as the econometric analyses we find a high educational retention rate and observe that school progression rates between male and female students after secondary school are comparable in particular we find gender specific and schooling stage specific birth order effects on education our overall findings are consistent with the implications of optimal schooling behavior under binding credit constraints and the self selection of education friendly households finally we find serious supply side constraints which might arise from a village level lack of demand for primary schools for girls

strategic analysis of diffusion of renewable energy in the nordic countries abstract today there are concerns related to security of energy supply growing energy demands limitations of fossil fuels and threats of disruptive climate changes to overcome the challenges diversification and utilization of renewable energy resources are defined as the main strategies however successful diffusion of renewable energy requires consideration to many factors including social economic and technical ones nordic countries are among the leading countries on successful development of renewable energy and energy efficiency this research in the frame of a strategic conceptual analysis studies the policies and achievements of the nordic region in their development of renewable energy the framework consists of four layers including dimensions characters objectives and key schemes

religious adherence and county economic growth in the us abstract we estimate a barro type conditional convergence model using religious adherence data from the american religious data archive to analyze independent effects of church adherence rates on economic growth in the united states at the county level per capita income growth is modeled as a function of initial per capita income initial human capital stock and a set of control and related variables including religious adherence religious diversity and regional indicator variables we also investigate the independent effects of three main denominations namely catholics evangelical christians and mainline christians on county economic growth our results indicate that the religious adherence in general is significantly greater than zero and not beneficial for us county income growth we find mixed results for effects of various denominations

impact of institutions on social network formation communist party membership and social network investment in china using the 2003 wave of china general social survey 2003cgss we study the influence of the communist party on individual s social networks in urban china and thereby present a case of socio political institutions being an important ingredient in social network formation we adopt a counterfactual framework and estimate the effect of communist party membership on social network investment as an average treatment effect we find the treatment to be significant

confidence intervals for half life deviations from purchasing power parity existing point estimates of half life deviations from purchasing power parity ppp around 3 5 years suggest that the speed of convergence is extremely slow this article assesses the degree of uncertainty around these point estimates by using local to unity asymptotic theory to construct confidence intervals that are robust to high persistence in small samples the empirical evidence suggests that the lower bound of the confidence interval is between four and eight quarters for most currencies which is not inconsistent with traditional price stickiness explanations however the upper bounds are infinity for all currencies so we cannot provide conclusive evidence in favor of ppp either

education and ethnicity in canada an intergenerational perspective ethnic and intergenerational aspects of human capital investment are explored levels of and cross sectional returns to education across ethnic groups in canada are estimated and large differences observed for men a positive correlation exists between ethnic group average years of education and its return we also find large negative correlations between ethnic group average educational outcomes and the previous generation s fertility suggesting a role for home production as a complement to formal education and supporting models of child quantity quality trade offs very slow intergenerational convergence in ethnic group level educational and labor market outcomes is also observed

standard ecological footprint method for small highly specialized economies abstract the negative impact of human endeavour on the biosphere has becoming increasingly clear in recent decades this has spurred a surge in the creation of sustainability indicators one of the most used sustainability indicators of recent years is the ecological footprint ef the ef uses trade flows to estimate environmental impacts of consumption the purpose of this study was to test ef s ability to deal with a small but highly specialized economy for this we used iceland as a case study but the icelandic economy is dominated by strong specialization with fisheries dwarfing all other sectors global footprint network s standard methodology was utilized with only the addition of local data being used where these data proved more robust than international databases the results from the two editions of the gfn calculation models 2008 and 2014 yielded a footprint of 56 59 and 25 26 gha per capita respectively for iceland three main reasons were identified for the drop in the footprint between the two editions all within the fishing grounds footprint a much improved coverage of extraction rates changes in fish species trophic levels and changes to aggregate errors for traded cod and halibut a correction of co2 intensities for exports also had a big impact but resulted in a rise in the ef for the latter edition the study highlighted the rapid development of the methodology as a major strength while the method s main weakness was revealed as the uncertainties associated with the marine footprint local consumption figures from the icelandic directorate of health indicated that a further drop in the marine footprint is in store with increased accuracy of the method mainly to do with accurate allocation between export and consumption footprints although the indicator s accuracy has been much improved in recent years additional improvements are thus still needed the extremes of the icelandic economy highlight errors to the extent that the huge footprint the calculations yielded make the country an outlier in a global context the indicator seems in this respect not accurate enough yet to be able to deal with such a degree of specialization especially where the main sectors are very large in relation to the population at least not when the sector in question is the marine sector the upside of this is that highly specialized economies may in this way be very useful for identifying and correcting inaccuracies within the methodology for their sector of specialization

the purchasing power parity persistence paradigm abstract rogoff journal of economic literature 1996 34 647 668 describes the remarkable consensus of 3 5 year half lives of purchasing power parity deviations among studies using long horizon data these studies however focus on rejections of unit roots in real exchange rates and do not use appropriate techniques to measure persistence our half life estimates explicitly account for serial correlation sampling uncertainty and most importantly small sample bias calculating confidence intervals as well as point estimates for long horizon and post 1973 data we find that even though most of the point estimates lie within the 3 5 year range univariate methods provide virtually no information regarding the size of the half lives

parental background educational attainments and returns to schooling and to marriage the case of israel this paper investigates the effect of family background attainments and on returns to own and wife s schooling for jewish males israel three dimensions of paternal background are referred to father s education the prestige of the father s occupation and whether the father is of a western origin an advantage in the western oriented israeli society for each of these types of segmentation it is found that both the level of and the returns to own and wife s schooling after some years of marriage are higher for those coming from a more favourable background these empirical findings are consistent with an investment in schooling model in which differences in demand productivity of own and wife s schooling vary more than differences in supply of investment funds

measuring the immeasurable a survey of sustainability indices sustainability indices for countries provide a one dimensional metric to valuate country specific information on the three dimensions of sustainable development economic environmental and social conditions at the policy level they suggest an unambiguous yardstick against which a country s development can be measured and even a cross country comparison can be performed this paper reviews the explanatory power of various sustainability indices applied in policy practice we show that these indices fail to fulfill fundamental scientific requirements making them rather useless if not misleading with respect to policy advice

markets and income inequality in rural china political advantage in an expanding economy when market reform generates rapid growth in an agrarian subsistence economy changes in inequality may be due to economic growth and structural change rather than to the intrinsic features of markets the case of post mao china is examined using nationally representative survey data gathered in 1996 to address unresolved questions about findings from 1980s surveys well into reform s second decade political officeholding has a large net impact on household income comparable to that of operating a private enterprise contrary to findings based on earlier surveys and expectations about the impact of growth cadre household advantages are stable across levels and forms of economic expansion returns to entrepreneurship however decline sharply with the spread of wage employment future declines in relative returns to political position are therefore unlikely to occur due to the further spread of private household entrepreneurship and theories of change based on this mechanism appear untenable

the economics of communist party membership the curious case of rising numbers and wage premium during china s transition abstract as the chinese communist party has loosened its grip in a more market oriented economy why have membership and the economic benefits of joining risen we use three national household surveys over 11 years to answer this question for wages in urban china individual demand for party membership is treated as an investment in political capital that brings monetary rewards in terms of a wage premium that has risen in recent years however this does not explain why the wage premium is higher for the personal characteristics that reduce the probability of membership rationing with a scarcity value for members with those characteristics provides an explanation

estimating returns to education using twins in urban china abstract this paper empirically estimates the return to education using twins data that the authors collected from urban china our ordinary least squares estimate shows that one year of schooling increases an individual s earnings by 8 4 if we use a within twin fixed effects model the return is reduced to 2 7 but rises to 3 8 after the correction of measurement error these results suggest that a large portion of the estimated returns to education is due to omitted ability or the family effect we further investigate why the true return is low and the omitted ability bias high and find evidence showing that it may be a consequence of china s education system which is highly selective and exam oriented more specifically we find that high school education may mainly serve as a mechanism to select college students but as a human capital investment per se it has low returns in terms of earnings in contrast both vocational school education and college education have a large return that is comparable to that found in the united states

education s role in china s structural transformation abstract we explore education s role in improving the allocation of labor between china s agricultural and nonagricultural sectors and measure the portion of china s recent growth attributable to this channel using detailed micro level data and an empirical model that allows for the endogenous selection of education and sector of employment we estimate the relationship between an individual s educational attainment sector and income we find that about 11 of aggregate growth in output per worker from 1978 to 2004 is accounted for by increased education with 9 coming through the labor reallocation channel and 2 attributable to increased within sector human capital

the economics of animal farm this paper uses george orwell s fictional story animal farm to make a comparison between orwell s predictions and the chinese experience with communism an analogy is made between two characters from his novel napoleon the boar who attains power and boxer the horse who does not these are analogous to members and nonmembers of the communist party respectively readily available data by griffen and renwei 1988 are then used to compare the economic conditions of approximately 22 000 individuals the empirical results strongly support many of orwell s predictions a theoretical predatory growth model that potentially explains the results is also introduced

borrowing constraints and progress through school evidence from peru this paper investigates the effect of borrowing constraints on the timing of human capital investment in a developing country by looking at how quickly children with different family backgrounds progress through the primary school system in peru the main findings are that children start withdrawing from school earlier as indicated by repetition of grades in households with lower income and durable good holdings and when children are more closely spaced behavior also differs as predicted between children from households that appear to be borrowing constrained and those that appear unconstrained copyright 1994 by mit press

returns to education a further international update and implications this paper updates evidence on the returns to investment in education by adding estimates for new countries and refining existing estimates to bring the total number of country cases to over 60 the new cross country evidence confirms and reinforces earlier patterns namely that returns are highest for primary education the general curricula the education of women and countries with the lowest per capita income the findings have important implications for directing future investment in education which for efficiency and equity purposes should concentrate on these priority areas

returns to education in china a meta analysis within labour economics returns to education is an area of focused research moreover amongst studies looking at emerging economies china is the most widely studied economy while there is a gen

determinants of entrepreneurial activities in china abstract the institutional environment including protection of private properties and contract enforcement has been rather unfavorable for the emergence and development of china s private enterprises this is in sharp contrast to the case of the developed economies where the institutional environment is conductive to the entrepreneurial activities and only the personal attributes of would be entrepreneurs determine their entrepreneurship decision we thus propose a theoretical framework for the entrepreneurship decision in china with a focus on the role of the institutional environment using a life histories survey data of 2854 respondents from twenty cities in china we find strong support for the impacts of the institutional environment and its interactions with other determinants of entrepreneurship decision

health human capital height and wages in china abstract we estimate the returns to height using data from 12 chinese cities we present both ordinary least squares ols and two stage least squares tsls estimates in the latter height is instrumented using proxies for health human capital accumulated in childhood and adolescence which influence adult height the tsls estimates are much higher reflecting the fact that the ols estimates are determined by the random genetic factors influencing height while the tsls estimates also take into account returns from investment in health human capital during childhood and adolescence these results imply considerable returns to investment in health human capital

does having a cadre parent pay evidence from the first job offers of chinese college graduates abstract we estimate the wage premium associated with having a cadre parent in china using a recent survey of college graduates carried out by the authors the wage premium of having a cadre parent is 15 and this premium cannot be explained by other observables such as college entrance exam scores quality of colleges and majors a full set of college human capital attributes and job characteristics these results suggest that the remaining premium could be the true wage premium of having a cadre parent

ownership organization and income inequality market transition in rural vietnam in transitional economies the scale of economic enterprise and the allocation of property rights shape social structures and influence income distribution in agrarian economies where labor intensive family enterprises dominate political officials income advantages decline rapidly relative to those of private entrepreneurs larger enterprises however provide greater income opportunities for officials especially when a government retains an ownership stake in the initial phases of reform this article replicates the findings from an earlier study of rural china using comparable survey data from vietnam we find that during the first two decades of rural market reform in vietnam and china the scale and ownership of firms differed radically small family enterprises dominated rural development in vietnam whereas china s development was dominated by larger firms initially established by rural governments consequently while cadre income advantages have kept pace with those of private entrepreneurs

non leaky buckets optimal redistributive taxation and agency costs abstract economists generally have argued that income redistribution comes at a cost in aggregate income we provide a counter example in a model where private information gives rise to incentive constraints in the model a wage tax creates the usual distortion in labor leisure choices but the redistributive grants that it finances reduce a distortion in investment in higher education we prove that simple redistributive policies can yield pareto improvements and increase aggregate income indeed redistributive policies are under most circumstances more effective in increasing efficiency than corrective taxes or subsidies where higher education is beyond the reach of the poor

marital status and earnings of young men a model with endogenous selection it is a matter of course in applied labor economics to presume that marital status is a predetermined contributor to earnings among young males we find no evidence to support that proposition we estimate a model of earnings determination that permits endogenous selection of marital status our estimates are based on a sample of young employed males from the michigan panel survey of income dynamics they indicate that marital status viewed in this manner does not significantly shift the mean earnings profile our sensitivity tests indicate that this conclusion is robust with respect to a variety of alternative specifications excerpt

understanding preferences for income redistribution abstract recent research suggests that income redistribution preferences vary across identity groups we employ statistical learning methods that emphasize pattern recognition classification and regression trees cart and random forests randomforests to uncover what these groups are using data from the general social survey we find that out of a large set of identity markers only race gender age and socioeconomic class are important classifiers for income redistribution preferences further the uncovered identity groupings are characterized by complex patterns of interaction amongst these salient classifiers we explore the extent to which existing theories of income redistribution can explain our results but conclude that current approaches do not fully explain the findings

australia s genuine progress indicator revisited 1962 2013 abstract the genuine progress indicator gpi has been proposed as an alternative to gdp as an indicator of national progress gpi includes 26 components that adjust gdp for inequality include household and volunteer work and subtract a number of social and environmental costs best seen as negatives the gpi has been estimated for over 20 countries and many states and territories this paper updates australia s gpi to determine whether australia as a nation has progressed overall since the 1960s and compares two alternative approaches that differ in some important details we find that despite these differing approaches we find that gpi remained largely stagnant from the 1960s through to the 1990s and only at the turn of the century has gpi started to increase despite increasing negative environmental costs while gpi is well placed to serve as an improved australian and global measure of national progress further work is needed to measure national well being and support its integration into political decision making and to include the full range of subjective and objective indicators ultimately this paper argues that while gpi is well placed to serve as a new australian and global measure of well being we stress the need for an alternative indicator like gpi to supplement gdp and to better inform policy decisions

estimates of the economic returns to schooling from a new sample of twins this paper uses a new survey to contrast the wages of genetically identical twins with different schooling levels multiple measurements of schooling levels were also collected to assess the effect of reporting error on the estimated economic returns to schooling the data indicate that omitted ability variables do not bias the estimated return to schooling upward but that measurement error does bias it downward adjustment for measurement error indicates that an additional year of schooling increases wages by 12 to 16 percent a higher estimate of the economic returns to schooling than has been previously found copyright 1994 by american economic association

measuring countries environmental sustainability performance a review and case study of iceland abstract evaluating the environmental sustainability performance of a nation is complex this paper considers the merits of environmental indices and how effective they are when assessing the environmental sustainability of any nation the simplicity and generic qualities of environmental indices currently necessitates a much broader analysis in order to evaluate any nation s genuine environmental sustainability credentials ultimately the development of a synthetic environmental sustainability index is required to fulfil this task using iceland as a case study this paper reviews the usefulness of four selected environmental indices environmental vulnerability index environmental performance index ecological footprint and happy planet index for governance institutions when formulating reasoned responses to challenges by adopting a holistic methodology iceland s environmental sustainability credentials are critically examined in this paper with particular focus given to the impacts deriving from expanded renewable energy utilisation in recent years abundant geothermal and hydropower energy resources have been increasingly used to power heavy industry particularly aluminium production the wider health implications and long term environmental sustainability consequences of renewable energy utilisation have not been analysed in depth within any of the indices socio economic progress in iceland has also been attained alongside the imposition of the highest ecological footprint of any nation in the world as such economic activities in iceland have not occurred in accordance with commonly accepted notions of sustainable development which is focused upon the reconciliation of economic environmental and social objectives together with recognition of current and future need across these domains

does religion constrain the risky sex behaviour associated with hiv aids this article examines the likely effectiveness of public health interventions designed to change the risky sexual behaviour associated with human immunodeficiency virus acquired immune deficiency syndrome hiv aids by faith based organizations fbos we utilize data from the general social survey gss to estimate an economic model of sexual behaviour our theoretical approach proceeds by rationalizing on evolutionary grounds the existence of sexual activity in individual preference functions with unobservable costs imposed by religious beliefs and participation given the objective of utility maximization we justify the existence of demand functions for sexual activity that generate empirically testable hypotheses about the effects of religion and religious participation on risky sexual activity our results suggest that at least in the case of heterosexuals fbos can indeed influence the risky sexual behaviour that is associated with the transmission of hiv aids

measuring sustainable development some empirical evidence for france from eight alternative indicators abstract this paper presents results from a time series analysis of eight measures of development and or sustainability for france the measures chosen are green national net product genuine savings ecological footprint indicator of sustainable economic welfare genuine progress indicator pollution sensitive human development indicator sustainable human development indicator and french dashboard on sustainable development a theoretical description of each index highlights their advantages and drawbacks underlining the fact that no indicator is perfect and no one can give an exhaustive view of sustainable development therefore the analysis of various indicators is necessary to evaluate sustainable development with accuracy empirical results of measures of well being show that french development was improving between 1990 and 2000 concerning sustainability indicators support different conclusions it seems that french development was weakly sustainable but unsustainable in the strong sense over the period examined

the external returns to education evidence from chinese cities abstract following rauch s seminal study there has been a growing interest among economists in estimating human capital externalities at the individual level j rauch productivity gains from geographic concentration of human capital evidence from the cities journal of urban economics 34 1993 380 400 in this paper we provide a first set of estimates of the external returns to education in chinese cities we find that the external returns are at least as high as the private returns to education ols estimates of the external returns range from a low of 4 9 to a high of 6 7 two stage least squares estimates indicate that a one year increase in city average education could increase individual earnings by between 11 and 13 we also examine the impact of economic reforms on the external returns to education and find suggestive evidence that economic reforms have raised the external returns to education in chinese cities

how large are the effects from changes in family environment a study of korean american adoptees i analyze a new set of data on korean american adoptees who were quasi randomly assigned to adoptive families i find large effects on adoptees education income and health from assignment to parents with more education and from assignment to smaller families parental education and family size are significantly more correlated with adoptee outcomes than are parental income or neighborhood characteristics outcomes such as drinking smoking and the selectivity of college attended are more determined by nurture than is educational attainment using the standard behavioral genetics variance decomposition i find that shared family environment explains 14 percent of the variation in educational attainment 35 percent ofthe variation in college selectivity and 33 percent of the variation in drinking behavior

property rights and stratification in socialist redistributive economies in socialist economies work organizations differ widely in the compensation they provide employees despite the absence of key product and labor market processes thought to ex plain such inequalities in market economies existing theories of stratification in socialist economies focus on the power and privilege of elites but inequalities among organizations are not created by political particularism or elite power in this paper i sketch elements of an institutional theory of stratification anchored in a conception of property rights the right to derive income from productive assets two aspects of property rights guide the analysis 1 the dispersion of property rights across a hierarchy of governmentjurisdictions and 2 the exercise of these rights by government jurisdictions as they extract revenues primarily through taxation extraction of revenues from a work organization varies with the budgetary resources of a government jurisdiction and the dependence of that jurisdiction on the out puts of the organization variation in revenue extraction in turn creates inequalities among work organizations in their abilities to provide benefits to employees an analysis of survey data on the provision of housing and benefits by work organizations in the large industrial city of tianjin china provides provisional support for these ideas s tudents of communist states have had little reason to dispute lenski s 1966 claim that the distribution of rewards in a society is a func tion of the distribution of power p 63 as ex emplified in szelenyi s wedding of elite theory to institutional economics this idea has been de veloped primarily in terms of the power of class es or occupational groups szelenyi 1978 be gan with the observation that planned economies operate according to redistributive rather than market principles however the process of re

international investment restrictions and closed end country fund prices some closed end country funds trade at large premiums relative to their net asset values this paper examines whether international investment restrictions raise country fund price net asset value ratios by segmenting international capital markets we test whether a relation exists between announcements of changes in investment restrictions and changes in these ratios using weekly data from may 1981 to january 1989 the results provide evidence that some foreign markets are at least partially segmented from the u s capital market

sustainability of nations by indices comparative study between environmental sustainability index ecological footprint and the emergy performance indices abstract the present work makes a comparison between the two most used environmental sustainability indices of nations ecological footprint and environmental sustainability index with two emergy ratios renewability and emergy sustainability index all of them are gaining space within the scientific community and government officials despite the efforts for obtaining an index that adequately represents the sustainability of a region according to the result of this research nowadays there is not yet a completely satisfactory index we consider that all of them need to be improved but the results point out the possibility of obtaining one better index of sustainability through the junction of ecological footprint with renewability emergy index

incentives predestination and free will i introduction max weber s 1930 the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism argues that the protestant reformation set the stage for post medieval economic growth using an occupational study of germans from 1895 weber shows that protestants dominate the mercantile or capitalist occupations in that country at that time period weber also argues that between 1600 and 1900 protestant countries advanced faster than their catholic neighbors and that this was the result of calvin s urging acceptance of material success and the dogma of predestination 1 an ocean of work beginning with rachfahl 1909 and sombart 1913 has since attacked weber s theological generalizations see giddens 1992 for a review tawney 1926 and robertson 1933 argue weber s causal interpretation is wrong and that economic growth laid the framework for protestantism not protestantism for economic growth samuelsson 1961 disputes the very correlation between protestantism and economic success which is the basis of the weberian hypothesis the correlation between protestantism and economic success is certainly weaker than weber suggests even in the german data that weber himself uses furthermore more modem data tends to find only a modest link between protestantism and economic success as in winter 1974 and tomes 1994 2 however for centuries there were gaps in economic success between protestant and catholic nations and new findings on early modem data tend to confirm differences between protestants and catholics at least within the u s as weber s arch critic samuelsson himself writes there is some truth in the contention that the protestant countries and especially those adhering to the reformed church were particularly vigorous economically given that there was some correlation between protestantism and economic success before the mid to late 20th century the question then becomes why this correlation existed some elements of protestant theology clearly encourage capitalism usury doctrines became less rigid under calvinism nelson 1972 avarice was de emphasized as a sin weber claims that luther s concept of a calling includes worldly success and that this is a prominent difference with catholic doctrine although this theological claim has been subject to much debate e g sombart 1915 there still appears to be some basic truth to this point one of the largest theological gaps between the denominations is that calvinism accepts the dogma of predestination while catholicism argues for a dogma of free will 3 for the purposes of this paper we will follow weber and accept broad brush definitions of doctrine rather than getting mired in the more subtle features of the two doctrines under predestination a spiritual elite is preordained before the beginning of time and will receive eternal life 4 under free will it is only through a lifetime of good actions that individuals are accepted into heaven 5 weber argues that predestination creates a more lasting basis for economic growth than the dogma of free will in this paper we present a model that formally treats weber s claim under particular circumstances and show how predestination could create the correlation between protestantism and growth that existed in the pre modern era our model also suggests conditions under which a more successful society would favor the doctrine of predestination which can be seen as a formalization of tawney s and robertson s view that economic growth created the reformation in this essay both free will and predestination create incentives which spur good behavior 6 under the doctrine of free will good behavior is motivated by an increased probability of getting into heaven under the doctrine of predestination this incentive is irrelevant because individual actions do not determine spiritual outcomes instead an individual s actions are motivated by a desire to receive positive behavior from others by convincing them that he is part of the spiritual elite

incentives allocation and labour market reforms during transition the case of urban china 1986 1990 has the reform process in china resulted in the introduction of incentives directed at a more efficient allocation of resources using data on individual earnings in urban liaoning province for the period 1986 1990 and a wage equation approach we address this issue in the context of labour market reforms focusing specifically on returns to education our results indicate that failure to address the issue of endogenous selection of more able individuals into state owned enterprises soes can severely bias returns downwards unlike in soes returns in collective owned enterprises coes increased the latter having been allowed to grow out of the plan more quickly and subject to more competition in factor and product markets we conclude that decentralization without competition is unlikely to result in the introduction of an efficient incentive mechanism the more administratively determined regular wages are one avenue for increased returns we find evidence of differentiated bonuses in coes but

beyond gdp measuring and achieving global genuine progress article i nfo while global gross domestic product gdp has increased more than three fold since 1950 economic wel fare as estimated by the genuine progress indicator gpi has actually decreased since 1978 we synthesized estimates of gpi over the 1950 2003 time period for 17 countries for which gpi has been estimated these 17 countries contain 53 of the global population and 59 of the global gdp we compared gpi with gross domestic product gdp human development index hdi ecological footprint biocapacity gini coefficient and life satisfaction scores results show a significant variation among these countries but some major trends we also estimated a global gpi capita over the 1950 2003 period global gpi capita peaked in 1978 about the same time that global ecological footprint exceeded global biocapacity life satisfaction in almost all countries has also not improved significantly since 1975 globally gpi capita does not increase beyond a gdp capita of around 7000 capita if we distributed income more equitably around the planet the current world gdp 67 trillion yr could support 9 6 billion people at 7000 capita while gpi is not the perfect economic welfare indicator it is a far better approximation than gdp development policies need to shift to better account for real welfare and not merely gdp growth

the bicausal relation between religion and income in this article the relation between religion and income is investigated using a micro dataset for the netherlands religion is measured by religious membership and by participation instead of estimating a religion equation and an income equation separately joint regression is preferred since this generally yields more efficient estimates following the single equation approach both religious measures are found to decrease income significantly and income is found to affect religion negatively however these cross effects become insignificant once the equations are estimated simultaneously in contrast the effects of socio economic characteristics on religion and income hardly differ between the approaches

individual heterogeneity in returns to education in urban china during 1995 2002 abstract this paper analyzes the individual level differences in returns to education in urban china from 1995 to 2002 we have uncovered substantial heterogeneity in schooling coefficients and we find that the extent of heterogeneity diminishes over time

the great proletarian cultural revolution disruptions to education and returns to schooling in urban china in determining whether a country s higher education system should be expanded it is important for policymakers first to determine the extent to which high private returns to post secondary education are an indication of the scarcity of graduates instead of the high unobserved ability of students who choose to attend post secondary education to this end the paper identifies the returns to schooling in urban china using individual level variation in educational attainment caused by exogenous city wide disruptions to education during the cultural revolution from 1966 to 1976 for city cohorts who experienced greater disruptions children s educational attainment became less correlated with that of their fathers and more influenced by whether their fathers held administrative positions the analysis calculates returns to college education using data from the china urban labor survey conducted in five large cities in 2001 the results are consistent with the selection of high ability students into higher education the analysis also demonstrates that these results are unlikely to be driven by sample selection bias associated with migration or by alternative pathways through which the cultural revolution could have affected adult productivity

economic reforms and gender inequality in urban china abstractthis study jointly examines the gender earnings gap and employment rate in urban china using a longitudinal data set that covers the period of 1989 2004 consistent with previous studies we find that gender earnings gap increased by 5 percentage points between 1989 and 1997 since then its changes have become much more moderate actually after controlling for observed characteristics the size of the earnings gap in 2004 is almost the same as it was in 1997 the widening earnings gap in the 1989 1997 period was accompanied by a rising employment gap between men and women particularly among those aged 45 and older the stability in the gender earnings gap in the later years co occurred with a decline in the employment of less educated women

finishing high school and starting college do catholic schools make a difference in this paper we consider two measures of the relative effectiveness of public and catholic schools finishing high school and starting college these measures are potentially more important indicators of school quality than standardized test scores in light of the economic consequences of obtaining more education single equation estimates suggest that for the typical student attending a catholic high school raises the probability of finishing high school or entering a four year college by thirteen percentage points in bivariate probit models we find almost no evidence that our single equation estimates are subject to selection bias

risk financial markets and human capital in a developing country this paper explores the link between financial market incompleteness and human capital accumulation we examine how child school attendance responds to seasonal fluctuations in the income of agrarian households using panel data from rural india to pinpoint market imperfections we study responses to aggregate and idiosyncratic as well as to anticipated and unanticipated income shocks our main finding is that seasonal fluctuations in school attendance are a form of self insurance but one which does not result in a substantial loss of human capital on average

mathematical modeling of china s state owned enterprises contract system abstract the chinese government has adopted a policy to separate the management and ownership of the state owned enterprises as a key step to move them towards modern type enterprises state owned enterprises contract system secs is a major enterprise management system in china today in this paper mathematical models are employed to examine some macro aspects of secs first the behavior of secs is analyzed through introducing two measurement indices second two incentive models of secs are developed using audit as a tool for acquiring information for decision making third from a mathematical analysis a general rule which determines optimal incentive strategy under perfect information is presented

a review of optimal energy policy instruments on industrial energy efficiency programs rebound effects and government policies abstract industrial energy efficiency programs ieeps are defined as one of the most popular government policies that aim to reduce energy consumption in industrial energy intensive sectors in this paper we review and classify the most important academic studies that have addressed the environmental and economic aspects of ieeps using a systematic review the classification of energy policy instruments has been developed based on an analytical approach we discuss also the outputs benefits and barriers of ieeps besides a comprehensive argument about the restrictive policies on the rebound effects made after the implementation of these programs the results disclose that china usa and sweden are the most addressed countries on ieeps and their applications in this regard incentive energy policies e g voluntary agreements and subsidies have been applied more than others in the last decade furthermore most of the reviewed studies emphasize energy price reform as an effective practical policy while a few analytical methods can be seen to help policy makers determine the optimal levels of decision variables finally according to the state of the art analysis the authors provide some novel recommendations to improve the performance of ieeps using some restrictive policies on the negative impacts of rebound effects

returns to education in china we were fortunate in having access to a survey of 800 adults in nanjing that was conducted by the international wool secretariate in 1986 the survey was intended for market research e g brand recognition but questions were asked about the respondent s age occupation income and education level these questions though not ideally worded were sufficient for the undertaking of a returns to education study we believe the data to be unique and of course the issue of interest is whether a member of the workforce in china faces investment decisions on education similar to those faced elsewhere the influence of sex and marital status on the level of income achieved by an individual was also examined the basic equation modeled personal income as a nonlinear function of schooling and experience but multicollinearity problems were encountered as a result a production function approach was successfully adapted to the returns toeducation model the collinearity problem was overcome and this approach allowed the ease of substitution of education for experience in income generation to be examined more formally an additional problem of errors in variables arose from a failing in questionnaire design and was handled statistically

gender segmentation at work in china s privatized rural industry some evidence from shandong and jiangsu abstract in this paper we argue that labor segmentation exists along gender lines in the newly privatized township and village enterprises in rural china the results based upon surveys of workers enterprise managers and local officials indicate that women are segregated into production type jobs in certain industries have less control over their work do not receive a return to experience and are adversely affected by wage discrimination there is a clear gender bias in favor of men in share holding a new and important form of workplace benefit that confers wealth and affects control within the workplace and thus privatization has contributed to gender segmentation the results support the general argument that the process of economic transition is not gender neutral

labor migration and returns to rural education in china this paper provides an answer to the following question why do empirical studies find low returns to schooling in rural china and yet the schooling rates are high i find that schooling played a significant role in raising the accessibility of urban formal employment to rural people in the late 1970s and early 1980s in the face of the government s restrictive policy on labor migration from rural to urban areas the large urban rural income difference provided a strong incentive for senior high school education the theory also explains the drop in the senior high school attendance in the mid 1980s

new firms and labor market entrants is there a wage penalty for employment in new firms in this paper we explore the role of new firms as an entry point to the labor market because the vast majority of new firms are short lived it is a risky decision to accept employment in a new venture it can be argued that individuals with little or no labor market experience are more willing to accept the high risks associated with employment in new firms hence new firms may work as an entry point to the labor market nevertheless some research concludes that one disadvantage of employment in a new firm is that new firms pay less shane in small bus econ 33 141 149 2009 however this empirical conclusion is primarily based on literature on the wage penalty of small firms in this paper we study whether the wage penalty of employment in a new firm persists if we focus solely on labor market entrants in the empirical analysis we employ an employer employee matched dataset that covers the swedish population during the period from 1998 to 2008 we use the propensity score matching method to study the wage differences between labor market entrants employed in new and incumbent firms we find an average wage penalty of 2 9 for labor market entrants employed in new firms over the studied period

college entry by blacks since 1970 the role of college costs family background and the returns to education college enrollment of black 18 19 year old high school graduates declined from 1980 through 1984 and then rebounded after 1984 this paper presents data from a time series of cross sections of 18 19 year old youths from 1973 through 1988 to test the role of family background direct college costs local economic conditions and returns to college in driving these trends the evidence suggests that on the one hand increases in direct college costs were driving enrollment rates downward throughout the eighties on the other hand dramatic increases in average parental education for black youths exerted upward pressure on college enrollment by blacks particularly in the latter half of the decade the net effect of these two factors contributed to the pattern of decline and recovery observed during the eighties

religion and earnings is it good to be an atheist with religious parental background abstract using german employee data we find that being raised by two religious parents and having no current religious affiliation is associated with higher earnings this conforms to the hypothesis that people who are raised religiously and reject religion as adults are economically more successful as they combine a strong internalized work ethic with an increased interest in present consumption as opposed to afterlife consumption

returns to investment in education a global update the author updates compilations of rate of return estimates to investment in education published since 1985 and discusses methodological issues surrounding those estimates some key patterns among the three main levels of education primary education continues to exhibit the highest social profitability in all world regions private returns are considerably higher than social returns because of the public subsidization of education the degree of public subsidy increases with the level of education which is regressive social and private returns at all levels generally decline by the level of a country s per capita income overall the returns to female education are higher than those to male education but at individual levels of education the pattern is more mixed the returns to the academic secondary school track are higher than the vocational track since unit cost of vocational education is much higher and the returns for those who work in the private competitive sector of the economy are higher than in the public noncompetitive sector and the returns in the self employment unregulated sector of the economy are higher than in the dependent employment sector controversies in the literature are discussed in the light of the new evidence the undisputable and universal positive correlation between education and earnings can be interpreted in many ways the causation issue on whether education really affects earnings can be answered only with experimental data generated by randomly exposing different people to various amounts of education given the fact that moral and pragmatic considerations prevent the generation of such pure data researchers have to make do with indirect inferences or natural experiments some have been attempted the author looks at the research on overeducation or surplus schooling the conclusions reinforce earlier patterns they confirm that primary education continues to be the number one investment priority in developing countries they also show that educating females is marginally more profitable than educating males that the academic secondary school curriculum is a better investment than the technical vocational tract and that the returns to education obey the same rules as investment in conventional capital that is they decline as investment is expanded