inequality in the working class the unanticipated consequences of union organization and strikes this paper explores one possible explanation for the uniquely apolitical character of the u s labor movement compared to the labor movements of other western capitalist democracies employing a neo marxist class perspective the author examines the relationship of union density union members as a percentage of the nonagricultural work force and of strike frequency to the distribution of earned income in the united states from 1949 to 1976 time series regression analysis of the quintile distribution of earned income and the gini index of the inequality of earned income shows that union density has had mixed effects on inequality with higher union density tending to redistribute income from middle income workers to both the least prosperous and most prosperous workers whereas higher strike frequency has tended to reduce income inequality generally the author suggests that union organization may be a source of divisiveness within the working class in the postwar era

welfare benefits and unemployment in affluent democracies the moderating role of the institutional insider outsider divide the effect of generous welfare benefits on unemployment is highly contested the dominant perspective contends that benefits provide disincentive to work whereas others portray benefits as job sea

credit constraints house prices and the impact of life cycle dynamics abstract how does the life cycle impact house price dynamics this paper investigates how equilibrium house prices respond to a tightening in credit constraints under two different but similarly calibrated models one an infinite horizon setting and the other a life cycle environment the main conclusion is that house price dynamics are magnified by the presence of life cycle features two primary explanations stand out the distinction between stocks and flows of mortgage debt in the cross section and the importance of gross housing tenure flows i e churn

daily house price indexes construction modeling and longer run predictions we construct daily house price indexes for ten major u s metropolitan areas our calculations are based on a comprehensive database of several million residential property transactions and a standard repeat sales method that closely mimics the procedure used in the construction of the popular monthly case shiller house price indexes our new daily house price indexes exhibit similar characteristics to other daily asset prices with mild autocorrelation and strong conditional heteroskedasticity which are well described by a relatively simple multivariate garch type model the sample and model implied correlations across house price index returns are low at the daily frequency but rise monotonically with the return horizon and are all commensurate with existing empirical evidence for the existing monthly and quarterly house price series a simple model of daily house price index returns produces forecasts of monthly house price changes that are superior to various alternative forecast procedures based on lower frequency data underscoring the informational advantages of our new more finely sampled daily price series

unequal organizations or unequal attainments an empirical comparison of sectoral and individualistic explanations for aggregate inequality explanations derived from the sectoral perspective in sociology and the humancapital screening perspectives in economics are used to predict income inequality in the american states the sectoral perspective is represented by an indicator of the dispersion of concentration in product markets across manufacturing establishments within each state and by the dispersion of employment across enterprises in eight size categories individualistic explanations favored by neoclassical economists are operationalized with the dispersion in educational attainments and by the dispersion in the age experience of the labor force with the percentage of blacks and three additional variables in the equations four hypotheses receive consistent support the strongest determinant of income inequality is the dispersion in educational attainments but the indicator of concentration is significant in all equations states with more blacks and greater variance in establishment size also were likely to be comparatively unequal these results are consistent with both the individualistic emphasis in the neoclassical perspective and the emphasis on economic power in the sectoral perspective they also indicate that studies of income inequality by human capital economists may have been biased by a failure to control for the institutional variables that are emphasized in sectoral theories

the rise of intra occupational wage inequality in the united states 1983 to 2002 wage inequality has increased dramatically in the united states since the 1980s this article investigates the relationship between this trend and occupational structure measured at the three digit level using the current population survey from 1983 to 2002 we find that the direct association between occupations and wage inequality declined over this period as within occupational inequality grew faster than betweenoccupational inequality we estimate multilevel growth models using detailed occupational categories as the unit of analysis to assess how the characteristics of occupations affect changes in mean wages and levels of wage inequality across this time period the results indicate that changes in mean wages across occupations vary depending on the characteristics of individuals in those occupations and that intraoccupational inequality is difficult to predict using conventional labor force data these findings seem largely inconsistent with the common sociological view of occupation as the most fundamental feature of the labor market correspondingly a more comprehensive approach one that incorporates the effects of organizational variables and market processes on rising wage inequality in the new economy is warranted

the wealth distribution with durable goods in the united states the distribution of houses is less egalitarian than that of earnings for the total population but these two distributions are remarkably similar for homeowners additionally housing as a fraction of total wealth decreases with the level of wealth in order to understand the different factors that account for these wealth composition patterns we introduce illiquid houses and collateral credit in a general equilibrium model of heterogeneous agents with idiosyncratic uncertainty a combination of very persistent shocks to earnings frictions in the housing market and a rental market is necessary to obtain numbers in line with the evidence

consumption income and retirement the authors use canadian family expenditure survey data to estimate consumption and income age profiles for married couple families paying attention to the transition between work and retirement the common presumptions of numerical simulation life cycle models upward sloping consumption age profiles and dissaving in retirement are not supported there is some evidence that the consumption of certain blue collar households declines discontinuously near retirement which casts doubt upon the frequently encountered assumption that the marginal utility of consumption is independent of the quantity of leisure consumed the results also imply that the functional form of euler equations should be sufficiently flexible to permit preretirement consumption to have an inverted u shape in addition the paper shows that the uncertain lifetime model with the addition of a bequest motive can rationalize the empirical results

financial intermediation house prices and the welfare effects of the u s great recession abstract this paper quantifies the welfare costs of the great recession in the united states and their distribution between borrowing and saving households we use a calibrated dynamic general equilibrium model with shocks to aggregate income and to the financial intermediation sector the model matches the boom bust cycle in house prices the dynamics of household leverage and the increase in inequality of wealth observed in the u s after 2007 we find large welfare costs for financially constrained households the borrowers savers instead benefited from a redistribution of housing wealth due to the de leveraging of borrowers caused by the plunge in house prices this redistribution mechanism was exacerbated by the financial intermediation shock we also show that the welfare costs for borrowers would have been lower if aggregate leverage had remained at pre 2001 levels

mandatory retirement and the consumption puzzle disentangling price and quantity declines this study investigates changes in household consumption at retirement based on a comprehensive diary based household survey from china we focus on disentangling price changes from quantity changes at retirement the mandatory retirement policy in china provides a quasi experimental setting for nonparametric identification of the true causal effects of fully anticipated retirement using a regression discontinuity design we find that food expenditure declines at retirement particularly among the less educated group we further show that this decline is driven by a reduction in prices rather than quantities these findings along with a documented increase in shopping time for food upon retirement among the less educated households are consistent with a time allocation model in which education enhances the value of leisure jel j26 c21

quality quantity and spatial variation of price this paper develops and implements a method for estimating price elasticities of demand using cross sectional household survey data geographically clustered households report unit values which when corrected for quality effects and for measurement error indicate the underlying spatial variation in prices and can be matched to variation in demand patterns a simple model of quality choice is proposed while the correction for measurement error exploits the clustered design of such surveys data from a 1979 household survey from the ivory coast are used to estimate price elasticities for beef meat fish cereals and starches copyright 1988 by american economic association

gender domestic labor time and wage inequality this paper explores the relationship between domestic labor and wage labor by estimating the relative influence of hours spent in domestic labor e g housework and child care on women s and men s wages it is hypothesized that involvement in domestic activities negatively affects wages and is likely to be an important factor in explaining women s lower wages relative to men findings from ols regression analyses of white currently employed currently married women and men indicate that domestic labor time significantly decreases both sexes wages in order to assess whether this relationship differs by class the sex specific earnings equations also are estimated within the working class and the non working class the negative effect of domestic labor time on both sexes income persists in the within class analyses working class men are more vulnerable to the detrimental influence of domestic production unexpectedly housework and child care time decreases non workingclass women s wages more so than working class women s wages it is noted that these findings should be interpreted with caution due to the cross sectional nature of the data which precludes an unequivocal assessment of potential nonrecursivity in the linkages among key variables in the model overall the findings imply that a more equitable distribution of work in the home is necessary before labor market inequalities between the sexes can be ameliorated

housing demand during the boom the role of expectations and credit constraints i use a life cycle model of housing demand to infer expectations about house prices and home equity requirements for the housing boom of the 2000s from observed household choices expectations and credit constraints are separately identified from the intensive and extensive margins of housing demand the main results are that 1 expected price growth was close to average long run growth 2 home equity requirements were lax initially but tightened after the bust and 3 subjective uncertainty about future price growth was large given the option to default on mortgage debt greater price uncertainty leads to higher optimal household leverage

consumer durables and inertial behaviour estimation and aggregation of s s rules for automobile purchases the s s model originally introduced in the study of inventories see arrow et al 1951 scarf 1959 has recently received renewed attention both in the durable consumption and in the investment and labour demand literatures caballero 1993 for instance appeals to these type of models to explain the time series properties of durable expenditure and in particular the persistence or slow adjustment of such a variable in this paper i model the purchase behaviour of automobiles by u s households as an s s rule i estimate a flexible specification of such a rule using a large microeconomic data set and study some of the aggregate implications of this type of inertial behaviour the paper is one of the first attempts at estimating directly the parameters of an s s rule using micro data because of this some of the methodological issues concerning the specification and the estimation of s s rules are relevant for many potential applications furthermore the paper is one of the first to discuss and quantify the aggregate implications of an s s rule estimated on micro data in the presence of non convex transaction costs a full and consistent characterization of individual behaviour is very hard and typically requires strong restrictions grossman and laroque 1991 prove that an s s rule is optimal for a consumption and investment problem under very special circumstances some of their results were extended by eberly 1991 and beaulieu 1993a b eberly 1991 in particular has derived some closed form solutions for durable consumption in the presence of transaction costs while caballero and engel 1994 construct a model of investment where an s s rule is optimal the main problem with these theoretical results is that it is only possible to show optimality of s s rules under very stringent conditions in particular a necessary condition to derive them is that the optimization problem faced by an individual consumer can be reduced to a problem with a single state variable unfortunately as pointed out by bar ilan and blinder 1992 even simple generalizations are extremely difficult to analyse

the care economy gender economic restructuring and job polarization in the u s labor market the u s job structure became increasingly polarized at the turn of the twenty first century as high and low wage jobs grew strongly and many middle wage jobs declined prior research on the sourc

life cycle prices and production we use scanner data and time diaries to document how households substitute time for money through shopping and home production we document substantial heterogeneity in prices paid for identical goods for the same area and time with older households shopping the most and paying the lowest prices doubling shopping frequency lowers a good s price by 7 to 10 percent we estimate the shopper s price of time and use this series to estimate an elasticity of substitution between time and goods in home production of roughly 1 8 the observed life cycle time allocation implies a consumption series that differs markedly from expenditures

durables nondurables down payments and consumption excesses abstract we examine a model that generalizes the standard buffer stock model of saving to accommodate durables nondurables down payment requirements and adjustment costs in the durables market we find that nondurable consumption becomes more volatile relative to income as down payments decrease at the individual and at the aggregate level moreover for plausible parameter values the model can explain the excess smoothness and excess sensitivity observed in u s aggregate data the result follows from a gradual adjustment of consumption to permanent income shocks when agents attempt to spread out the burden of down payments over time compounded by slow adjustment due to transaction costs

mortgage debt consumption and illiquid housing markets in the great recession using a model with housing search endogenous credit constraints and mortgage default this paper accounts for the housing crash from 2006 to 2011 and its implications for aggregate and cross sectional consumption during the great recession left tail shocks to labor market uncertainty and tighter down payment requirements emerge as the key drivers an endogenous decline in housing liquidity amplifies the recession by increasing foreclosures contracting credit and depressing consumption balance sheets act as a transmission mechanism from housing to consumption that depends on gross portfolio positions and the leverage distribution low interest rate policies accelerate the recovery in housing and consumption

a dynamic model of housing demand estimation and policy implications in the u s macroeconomic policy makers are concerned about how consumers will respond to falling incomes nominal home prices falling income rising mortgage interest rates and tightening credit standards in order to address these questions we estimate and simulate a dynamic structural model of housing demand in the model consumers maximize expected discounted lifetime utility from housing services and a composite consumption good the model allows for realistic features of the housing market including non convex adjustment costs from buying and selling a home and credit constraints from minimum downpayment requirements we use the forward simulation procedure of bajari benkard and levin 2007 to estimate the structural parameters especially the elasticity of substitution between consumption and housing services using data from the panel study of income dynamics given the estimated model parameters we simulate the partial equilibrium consumption and housing and

economic segmentation worker power and income inequality how economic segmentation generates income inequality constitutes a central question for theories of economic and social organization and of socioeconomic achievement previous research emphasizes two sources of the structural variation in income 1 employers with large amounts of resources for a variety of reasons may find it in their interests to pay workers higher wages and 2 some workers are able to acquire power against their employers as well as against other workers and can therefore extract higher earnings in this paper we investigate several issues involved in the links among economic segmentation worker power and income inequality we argue that the structure of economic segmentation is multidimensional and reflects such distinct concepts as concentration economic scale state intervention in the market capital intensity and organization size worker power also is derived from diverse sources such as union membership occupational skill and licensing class position and tenure wi

unwelcome immigrants the labor market experiences of 1980 mariel cuban and haitian refugees in south florida this article examines the situation of 2 recently arrived and disadvantaged immigrant groups in the context of 2 competing theoretical traditions classical assimilation and recent labor market segmentation theories predictions of both concerning us labor market entry of foreign minorities and determinants of subsequent mobility are tested on the basis of representative surveys most are not confirmed the analysis supports the hypothesis of heterogeneous modes of incorporation into the labor market including substantial numbers of refugees who remain outside of it sizable proportions have only managed to find fringe employment in a energing informal economy in south florida among cubans employment in the ethnic enclave is associated with positive returns comparable to those of entry into the primary labor market haitians lack an enclave option and thus cluster into secondary and informal employment although most remain without work determinants of these various situations are examined on the basis of multivariate logistic regressions implications of results for immigration theory and policy are discussed authors

when unionization disappears state level unionization and working poverty in the united states although the working poor are a much larger population than the unemployed poor u s poverty research devotes much more attention to joblessness than to working poverty research that does exist o

on the taxation of durable goods this paper proposes a mirrleesian theory of commodity taxation in the presence of durable goods nondurable goods should be taxed uniformly provided that the preferences over nondurable consumption are weakly separable from labor effort a uniform taxation across all goods is optimal if the utility from durable consumption is linear and the preferences are additively separable between durable goods nondurable goods and labor effort if those conditions are not met wealth effects and substitution effects justify the use of differential commodity taxes to characterize the sign of the tax differential the paper exploits a substitution euler equation that links the marginal rate of substitution between durable and nondurable consumption across time finally an application of this theory suggests that housing investment should face higher tax rates than nondurable consumption

getting paid wage arrears and stratification in russia1 wage arrears have played an important yet unappreciated role in the stratification of contemporary russian society delays in wage payments became rampant and persistent during the 1990s because of the particular structural institutional and policy context that accompanied russia s market reforms recent improvements in russia s economy have reduced but not eliminated wage arrears an innovative practice that has become institutionalized in some but not all postsocialist societies analyses of survey data collected in early 1998 confirm the independent stratifying role of arrears inequality in getting paid is socially structured in a different manner than inequality in contracted wages and the former proves equally or more decisive in shaping inequality in actual wages arrears occur with some regularity in other national and historical contexts this study of russia shows that where arrears are rampant researchers should incorporate them into conceptual and empirical models of earnings inequalit

consumption dynamics during recessions when will durable expenditures respond strongly to economic stimulus we build from micro evidence and show that in a heterogeneous agent business cycle model with xed costs of durable adjustment responsiveness is substantially dampened during recessions our model estimates imply that during the great recession durable expenditures were half as responsive to additional stimulus as during the boom in the 1990s this procyclical responsiveness is driven by changes in the distribution of households desired durable holdings over the cycle we directly test our model by estimating this distribution empirically using psid micro data and nd that the distribution in the data moves cyclically as predicted in addition to this micro evidence we also provide support for our model s procyclical responsiveness using aggregate time series data and we show this time series evidence is inconsistent with simpler models featuring smooth adjustment costs

aging in place housing maintenance and reverse mortgages we study the role of housing wealth in financing retirement consumption in our model retirees 1 derive utility benefits from remaining in their home aging in place and 2 choose in each period whether to maintain their house the evidence that we present shows that these features are important in explaining the saving decisions of the elderly the costs and the maintenance requirement of reverse mortgages rms reduce or eliminate the benefits of the loans for retirees who wish to do less maintenance we evaluate the impact of different loan features on retirees utility cash flows to lenders and to the government agency that provides mortgage insurance we show that combining rms with insurance against a forced home sale e g due to a move to a nursing home is pareto improving and can lead to increased demand for the loans due to product complementarities

retirement consumption insights from a survey abstract prior research has established that consumption falls significantly at retirement what is not known is the extent to which this fall is anticipated during the working years using data from a new survey we show that many working households do expect a considerable fall in consumption when they retire in fact those who are already retired report significantly smaller falls in consumption than are expected by those who are still working

changes in consumption at retirement evidence from panel data abstract previous empirical literature has found a sharp decline in consumption during the first years of retirement implying that individuals do not save enough for their retirement this phenomenon is called the retirement consumption puzzle we find no evidence of the retirement consumption puzzle using panel data from 1980 to 2000 consumption is defined as nondurable expenditure a more comprehensive measure than only food used in many of the previous studies we find that food expenditure declines at retirement which is consistent with previous studies

economic dualism a critical review in this paper we examine the model underlying the dual economy approach to labor market segmentation we provide a specification of the components of the model as well as the linkages between components this construction of the underlying model allows us to evaluate it systematically as a model to consider and to evaluate each component and linkage separately while we conclude that there are several important contributions to retain from the dual approach including the insight that capital structure conditions labor market outcomes we argue that it is inadequate for sustaining theoretical and empirical development as a new starting point for the study of economic and labor market segmentation we suggest a resource perspective which retains insights from the dual approach but avoids its overly restrictive assumptions

a structural decomposition of black white earnings differentials this research demonstrates the impact of labor market structure and segmentation on differentials in black and white earnings this paper argues that there are two very different factors which create black white earnings differences 1 differences between blacks and whites within divisions of the labor market and 2 differences between labor market divisions in earnings combined with the differential distribution of blacks and whites across labor market divisions use of a decomposition based on a regression standardization approach discloses that the second factor accounts for a minimum of 14 of the black white earnings gap this implies that eliminating all black white differences within labor market divisions would still leave a significant earnings gap between blacks and whites due to the structure of the labor market

further evidence on returns to schooling by establishment size stolzenberg 1978 has argued thatfor white male employees the effect of schooling on logearnings is greater in larger establishments we replicate stolzenberg s study using the 1979 current population survey this survey includes information on establishment size and provides a much larger sample size to work with our results do not indicate a positive establishment size schooling interaction to the contrary when stolzenberg s 1978 model specification is used ourfindings suggest that the interaction may be negative we explore the sources of this discrepancy and are skeptical of the conventional wisdom that returns to schooling increase with establishment size

why does consumption fall at retirement evidence from germany abstract analyzing the consumption behavior over retirement in germany this paper finds a negative correlation between income replacement and the increase in home production related activities this might reconcile the observed drop in consumption at retirement with the predictions of the standard life cycle model however since individuals with fairly stable income over retirement also increase home production this increase cannot be entirely attributed to a substitution effect

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

the retirement consumption puzzle evidence from a regression discontinuity approach in this paper we investigate the size of the consumption drop at retirement in italy we use micro data on food and total non durable household spending covering the period 1993 2004 and evaluate the change in consumption that accompanies retirement by exploiting the exogenous variability in pension eligibility to correct for the endogenous nature of the retirement decision we take a regression discontinuity design approach and make the identifying assumption that consumption would be the same around the threshold for pension eligibility if individuals would not retire we check in our data that a non negligible fraction of individuals retire as soon as they become eligible and estimate at 9 8 the part of the non durable consumption drop that is associated with retirement induced by eligibility we show that such fall is not driven by liquidity problems for the less well off in the population and can be accounted for by drops in goods that are work related expenses or leisure substitutes however we also show that retirement induces a significant drop in the number of grown children living with their parents and this can account for most of the retirement consumption drop

mythologies of work a comparison of firms in state socialism and advanced capitalism comparative studies of capitalist and state socialist countries have rested on weak empirical bases namely the comparison of ideal type models or comparisons of the realities often distorted of one society with an ideal type of the other this is particularly true of the firm which has remained a black box in conventional analyses of state socialism on the basis of case studies of two comparable firms one in the united states and one in hungary we criticize eight stereotypes that underly the presumption that state socialist firms are necessarily less efficient than capitalist firms we then propose conditions under which capitalistfirms may be less technically efficient than state socialist firms

consumption over the life cycle facts from consumer expenditure survey data this paper uses consumer expenditure survey data and a seminonparametric statistical model to estimate life cycle profiles of consumption controlling for demographics cohort and time effects we construct age profiles for total and nondurable consumption as well as expenditure patterns for consumer durables special emphasis is placed on the comparison of different approaches to control for changes in demo graphics over the life cycle we find significant humps over the life cycle for total nondurable and durable expenditures changes in household size account for roughly half of these humps bootstrap simulations suggest that our empirical estimates are tight in that standard errors are small

local industrial dominance and earnings attainment drawing on the ecological concept of local industrial dominance we examine how the industrial distribution of the metropolitan labor force influences workers earnings industrial dominance is defined as the proportional overrepresentation of the local labor force in a given industry or industrial sector a contextual analysis of census microdata for the largest 125 smsas shows that within industries and sectors workers in metropolitan areas in which their industry is dominant have significantly higher earnings than workers in areas in which that industry is less dominant these results holdfor two different measures of dominance andfour racelsex groups the effects of local dominance on earnings appear stronger for industries in the core and state sectors for financial business and personal service functions andfor public administration the influence of dominance is partly explained by the tendency of locally dominant industries to be composed of larger establishments

understanding organizational wage structures a resource dependence approach data on the salaries for high level administrative positions in 608 colleges and universities were used to examine the relative salaries for six positions controlling for other factors we found t

does firm size matter anymore the new economy and firm size wage effects researchers have long known that large firms pay higher wages than small firms for workers with similar measured characteristics however an agreed upon explanation for this firm size wage effect fswe has not been reached recent changes in the economy provide new leverage for testing competing theories for the effect while questions about the existence and nature of the new economy provide new motivation for exploring this topic this study uses the 1988 2003 current population survey and finds that the fswe has declined by about one third over the study period examining the competing explanations for the fswe this study finds that while the sorting of workers by traits unions and industry factors all contribute to some portion of the effect in cross section they fail to explain why it has declined over time market power explanations also fail to find support shifts in organizational structures particularly a decline of internal labor markets appear to best fit the results these findings

the retirement consumption puzzle and involuntary early retirement evidence from the british household panel survey this article uses data from the british household panel survey bhps to shed further light on the fall in consumption at retirement the retirement consumption puzzle comparing food spending of men retiring involuntarily early through ill health or redundancy with spending of men who retire voluntarily it finds a significant fall in spending only for those who retire involuntarily this is consistent with the observed fall in spending being linked to a negative wealth shock for some retirees

understanding the retirement consumption puzzle through the lens of food consumption fuzzy regression discontinuity evidence from urban china abstract this paper provides an understanding of the widely documented retirement consumption puzzle from the perspective of food consumption exploiting the mandatory retirement age cut off for public sector male employees in urban china to obtain a source of exogenous variation in their retirement status this paper identifies the causal impacts of retirement on four major aspects of their food consumption food expenditure time spent in food acquisition the quantity and quality of food consumed based on data from the china health and nutrition survey our fuzzy regression discontinuity analysis finds that consistent with the retirement consumption puzzle retirement reduces elderly males total food expenditure by 49 55 however retirement barely changes the quantity of food they consume measured by total calorie intakes further analysis suggests that elderly males substitute time for money in food acquisition upon retirement which helps to reconcile the differential impacts of retirement on food expenditure and food consumption finally retirement greatly changes elderly males diet structure they consume significantly less food with animal origins and thus less fat and protein and more grains and thus more carbohydrate upon retirement which undermines their diet balance by the standards provided by the chinese nutrition association

what accounts for the variation in retirement wealth among u s households even among households with similar socioeconomic characteristics saving and wealth vary considerably life cycle models attribute this variation to differences in time preference rates risk tolerance exposure to uncertainty relative tastes for work and leisure at advanced ages and income replacement rates these factors have testable implications concerning the relation between accumulated wealth and the shape of the consumption profile using the panel study of income dynamics and the consumer expenditure survey we find little support for these implications the data are instead consistent with rule of thumb mental accounting or hyperbolic discounting theories of wealth accumulation jel di d91 e21

sex segregation and sectors an analysis of gender differences in returns from employer changes sweet james 1973 women in the labor force new york seminar press vanek joann 1974 time spent in housework scientific american 231 116 20 1980 household work wage work and sexual equality pp 275 91 in sarah f berk ed women and household labor beverly hills ca sage walker k and m woods 1976 time use a measure of household production of family goods and services washington d c american home economics association

business organization segmentation and location taylor m and thrift n 1983 business organization segmentation and location reg studies 17 445 465 this paper is intended to provide a coherent theoretical framework for industrial geography industrial economics and organization theory based on the notion of the segmentation of business organizations the literature on dualism and segmentation of business organizations is reviewed and found wanting an alternative process oriented account of segmentation of the business organization is presented which can account for the structural variations in present day developed economies the geographical implications of the framework are brought out

the payoff to consistency in performance this study investigates whether firms are willing to pay higher wages to workers who demonstrate consistent performance than to those whose performance is more volatile a formal model reflects a production technology view assuming the law of diminishing marginal product this model suggests that a more consistent worker produces higher expected output and therefore receives a higher wage the test of the model uses data from the national basketball association the empirical data support the model players whose performances were more consistent than the performances of other players received higher wages on average jel d41 j31 m52 z20

housing over time and over the life cycle a structural estimation we estimate a structural model of optimal life cycle housing and nonhousing con sumption in the presence of labor income and house price uncertainties the model postulates constant elasticity of substitution between housing service and nonhousing consumption and explicitly incorporates a housing adjustment cost our estimationts the cross sectional and time series household wealth and housing proles from the panel study of income dynamics 1984 to 2005 reasonably well and suggests an intratemporal elasticity of substitution between housing and nonhousing consumption of 0 487 the low elasticity estimate is largely driven by moments conditional on state house prices and moments in the latter half of the sample period and is robust to different assumptions of housing adjustment cost we then conduct policy analyses in which we let house price and income take values as those observed between 2006 and 2011 we show that the responses depend importantly on the housing adjustment cost and the elasticity of sub stitution between housing and nonhousing consumption in particular compared with the benchmark the impact of the shocks on homeownership rates is reduced but the impact on nonhousing consumption is magnied when the house selling cost is sizable or when housing service and nonhousing consumption are highly substitutable

home is where the equity is mortgage refinancing and household consumption applying a permanent income model with exogenous liquidity constraints and mortgage behavior household refinancing when mortgage interest rates are historically high and rising a persistent empirical puzzle is explained using data from the panel study of income dynamics households experiencing an unemployment shock and having limited initial liquid assets to draw upon are shown to have been 25 more likely to refinance 1991 94 on average such liquidity constrained households converted over two thirds of every dollar of equity they removed into current consumption as mortgage rates plummeted 1991 94 producing an estimated expenditure stimulus of at least 28 billion

is there a retirement consumption puzzle evidence using subjective retirement expectations abstract previous research finds a systematic decrease in consumption at retirement a finding that is inconsistent with the life cycle permanent income hypothesis if retirement is an expected event in this paper we use workers subjective beliefs about their retirement dates as an instrument for retirement after demonstrating that subjective retirement expectations are strong predictors of subsequent retirement decisions we still find a consumption decline at retirement for workers who retire when expected however our estimates of this consumption fall are about a third less than those found when we instead rely on the instrumental variables strategy used in prior studies

consumption versus expenditure previous authors have documented a dramatic decline in food expenditures at the time of retirement we show that this is matched by an equally dramatic rise in time spent shopping for and preparing meals using a novel data set that collects detailed food diaries for a large cross section of u s households we show that neither the quality nor the quantity of food intake deteriorates with retirement status we also show that unemployed households experience a decline in food expenditure and food consumption commensurate with the impact of job displacement on permanent income these results highlight how direct measures of consumption distinguish between anticipated and unanticipated shocks to income whereas measures of expenditures obscure the distinction

is there a retirement savings puzzle in this paper we ask whether households are saving enough for their retirement we use data on income expenditure and expenditure components to analyse patterns of behaviour at and around the time of retirement for successive date of birth cohorts we compare periods of unemployment to periods of retirement and separate expenditures into categories reflecting work related expenditures basic necessities and other goods we find that income typically falls by more at unemployment than retirement but the reverse is true for expenditure we observe falls in expenditure at retirement for all expenditure categories using a stochastic life cycle model including mortality rates we assess the anticipated impact of retirement on consumption against that of unemployment the inter relationship between goods and leisure explains a large part of the persistent fall in expenditure at retirement we argue that the only way in which the life cycle hypothesis could be reconciled with the remaining unanticipated dip in consumption would be with the systematic arrival of unexpected adverse information at the time of retirement