aspects of labor market adjustments in japan this article discusses some aspects of labor market adjustments in japan that may be relevant to the low unemployment rate there japanese statistics treat kyugyosha persons not at work as being employed but some of these workers would be counted as unemployed in the united states the kyugyosha group appears to increase in size during downturns and decreases during upturns suggesting that temporarily laid off persons are an important part of this group japanese employers evidently rely less on employment adjustments and more on adjustments in hours of work and inventory while employers in the united states rely more on employment adjustments to deal with cyclical changes in product demand japanese manufacturing employment became less sensitive and hours of work more sensitive to demand shocks after the introduction of the employment insurance law in 1975

labor supply and fertility of married women an analysis with grouped and individual data from the 1970 u s census 1970 us census data were used to examine how much studies with grouped data can be reconciled with models that apply to individual families in contrast to its 1960 predecessor the 1970 census public use sample pbus identifies households in standard metropolitan statistical areas smsa and offers the opportunity to estimate a model of labor supply and fertility using both individual and grouped data from a common sample 3 data sets from the 1970 census are available the 5 sample smsa averages published by the us bureau of the census which are similar to the data used in previous studies grouped by smsa observations from the 1 100 pbus which are superior to the published averages in several respects and which are detailed here and individual observations from the 1 1000 pbus if these 1970 estimates are found to be stable with regard to aggregation and similar to those found with non census data confidence in the grouped data results from the 3 previous censuses would be strengthened estimates derived from the individual pbus observations generally agreed with findings from alternative and arguably superior microdata sets the labor force participation and hours of white wives were sensitive to wage and income variations both wages and hours of work among workers appeared to be subject to selection bias economic factors had little impact on the hours of black workers but wage offers influenced the participation decision wage selectivity was particularly strong among black women the samples for both black and white women indicated that the wifes wage played a major role in determining the number of children ever born the published smsa data provided labor supply estimates similar to those found with individual observations wage elasticities for both black and white women and the white income elasticities were similar in sign and magnitude to the total marginal effects of these variables upon hours of work among individuals wages effects upon fertility persisted only among blacks grouping of the pbus data by smsa led to very different labor supply results labor force participation rates showed little association with mean hourly wages and income effects were weak fertility responses resembled those found with the published data realizing theoretical expectations only in the case of the black sample further analysis showed that a probable source of the dissimilar labor supply estimates was the positive bias induced by the unavoidable inclusion of unmarried women in the sample used to calculate mean weekly wages from the published data in sum it has been shown that estimates such as those made are highly sensitive to the level of aggregation and that grouped data results may be seriously misleading

capture and governance at local and national levels 135 despite the importance of this issue not much systematic research appears to have been devoted to assessing the relative susceptibility of national and local governments to interestgroup capture here we describe a model of two party electoral competition with probabilistic voting behavior and lobbying by specialinterest groups based on david baron 1994 and gene grossman and elhanan helpman 1996 that helps identify determinants of relative capture at different levels of government these include relative levels of voter awareness and interest group cohesiveness electoral uncertainty electoral competition heterogeneity of districts with respect to inequality and the electoral system while some of these uphold the traditional madisonian presumption others are likely to create a tendency for lower capture at the local level so the net effect is theoretically ambiguous this suggests that the extent of relative capture may be context specific and needs to be assessed empirically

labor market participation of chinese agricultural households empirical evidence from zhejiang province abstract this work is devoted to the analysis of the different labor market participation regimes of chinese farm households over the reform process in the 1980s and 1990s using household data over the period 1986 2002 from the province zhejiang we apply a multinomial logit model to empirically examine household farm and regional characteristics affecting the probability that farmers participate in one of four alternative labor market regimes as generally accepted off farm participation is the dominant form of farm households labor market participation but rural households show additionally a significant impact on rural employment mainly linked with non agricultural household business results suggest that labor market decisions are significantly related to several family farm and village characteristics in particular we find education to be a key determinant of participation furthermore results point to a higher probability of female household members to take up off farm work

female labor supply in japan implications of the informal sector for labor force participation and hours of work this paper extends previous work on labor supply in japan by treating the simultaneous labor force participation and hours of work decisions for japanese wives both employees and family workers it estimates a trichotomous participation model for a sample from the tokyo metropolitan area and then estimates hours and wage equations and aggregate labor supply elasticities the empirical results generally confirm the economic model s theoretical predictions although the estimated aggregate wage and income elasticities for employees are somewhat higher than previous estimates for the u s they are of the same order of magnitude however the level of the husband s income has an unexpected positive effect on the annual hours that employees work and the elasticities estimated for family workers are usually large

ontology and the study of social reality emergence organisation community power social relations corporations artefacts and money the conception of social reality i have previously defended and here extend positing features such as social relations positions and powers is thoroughly naturalistic and even consistent with modern interpretations of quantum field theory it also serves to ground a social science that can be scientific in the sense of natural science this is the thesis defended here central to the argument is an emphasis on a strong form of emergence and the category of organisation in process to bring out various salient features of the position defended i take the opportunity to compare aspects of it with relevant components of the contribution of john searle whose ontological conception appears at once to be both very similar yet also very different copyright the author 2012 published by oxford university press on behalf of the cambridge political economy society all rights reserved oxford university press

ontology and the history of economic thought the case of anti reductionism in the work of friedrich hayek tony lawson has long advocated an ontological turn in the history of economic thought this essay aims to contribute towards that goal by considering how one aspect of the methodology adopted by a prominent heterodox economist was informed by ontological considerations the economist is friedrich hayek the aspect of his methodology concerns the possibility of reductionism while the ontological category that informs his anti reductionist methodology though not as we shall see in a wholly consistent way is that of emergence the account presented below suggests that the notion of emergence played an increasingly important and also increasingly explicit role in the arguments hayek mounts against reductionism in his postwar work on theoretical psychology and social theory in the case of his theoretical psychology notwithstanding the fact that he had access to a set of concepts that afforded him the opportunity to mount an emergentist case against reductionism hayek s most prominent argument against reductionism was and remained computational rather than emergentist in nature in the case of his mature post 1960 social theory however hayek explicitly advanced a consistently emergentist case against reductionism based on the importance of organising relations for the generation of higher level structural properties such as the coordinative powers of the liberal market economy the implications of this ontologically informed discussion of hayek s arguments against reductionism for existing interpretations of hayek s work are considered

decentralizing antipoverty program delivery in developing countries we study the effects on accountability in government service delivery of decentralizing administration of an antipoverty program while governments at both central and local levels are vulnerable to antipoor policy biases owing to political capture centralized delivery systems are additionally prone to bureaucratic corruption owing to problems in monitoring bureaucratic performance decentralizing the delivery system promotes cost effectiveness and improves intraregional targeting at low program scales but interregional targeting may deteriorate as central grants to high poverty regions shrink owing to high capture of local governments by local elites in such regions

from mill town to board room the rise of women s paid labor the widespread participation of women in paid labor outside of the home and in the highest echelons of society would have been unheard of a century ago this paper documents this dramatic change in women s social and economic status and argues that it was determined both by contemporaneous demand factors and by the characteristics expectations and social norms regarding work and family of different cohorts of women history suggests that change in women s labor force experiences may be slow because it must await the entry of new cohorts of women and also of men into the labor market

female labor force participation in developing and developed countries consideration of the informal sector t he steady increase in the labor force participation of married women in the united states over the last few decades has stimulated considerable interest in the economic analysis of a woman s decision to work pioneering work by mincer 1962 and cain 1966 has served as a theoretical and empirical foundation for numerous studies of female labor force participation this research typically treats a woman s current labor force status measured as a dummy variable for the individual and as a rate for the population as a measure of labor supply which depends upon economic and demographic characteristics such as female earnings male earnings non earnings income schooling work experience age number of children and so on notable examples are bowen and finegan 1969 cogan 1975 1978 gronau 1973 heckman 1974 1980 and schultz 1980 while the associated theoretical models and statistical techniques have been refined considerably especially by lewis 1972 ben porath 1973 and heckman 1974 1979 the coefficients estimated using u s data have remained reasonably robust also there is substantial agreement among micro level and aggregate results see cain 1966 and bowen and finegan 1969 for comparisons as this body of literature has grown the economic models developed within it have been implemented to analyze the labor force behavior of women in other countries however there is no consistent international pattern in the behavioral trends of the female labor force perhaps the most notable difference in the economic opportunities available to women in many other countries is that they may work in the informal sector of the labor market women may be considered economically active and may be counted as being in the labor force as they produce goods at home for market sale work on the family farm or work in a small family run business the most convenient means of categorizing workers as being in the informal sector is by their employment status following jaffe and azumi 1960 we assume that women reported as self employed or as family workers are engaged in the informal sector of the labor force almost all women in the u s labor force work as employees only 6 6 worked as self employed or family workers in 1978 given japan s advanced economic development a surprisingly large fraction 38 4 in 1978 of its female labor force comprises self employed and family workers clearly in the united states and countries with a similar distribution of the labor force by employment status the labor force participation decision may be treated as the choice to work or not to work however if individuals regard the decision to enter the labor force as an employee as being distinct from the choice to enter the labor force as a family worker then economic models of labor force participation which treat these choices as identical will incorporate a specification bias the labor force participation decision may differ between these two sectors for several reasons first the wage offers may differ by sector second while entering the informal sector may be virtually frictionless there may be fixed costs among them commuting time and child care associated with working in the formal sector third family workers may face more flexible working schedules than paid employees the latter group may be subject to contractual working hours in order to treat the labor force decisions in coiuntines with significant informal sectors this received for publication march 16 1981 revision accepted for publication september 15 1982 rutgers university this paper is a revision of work begun with my doctoral dissertation i would like to thank h gregg lewis and t dudley wallace for their suggestions and hideo okamoto for providing the data set i would also like to thank david crawford toshiaki tachibanaki two anonymous referees and the participants of the columbia labor workshop the japan economic seminar and the yale labor and population workshop for their comments remaining errors are my own this research was supported by a postdoctoral fellowship from the national institutes of health additional funding was provided by the william and flora hewlett foundation grant to the yale economic demography program i statistical abstract of the u s and japan statistical yearbook

an analysis of trends in female labor force participation in japan until recently the aggregate female labor force participation rate in japan has shown a secular declining trend throughout the postwar period of economic development participation of paid female employees alone exhibits a steadily rising trend more or less comparable to that in the united states and european countries although the fertility rate dropped drastically shortly after world war ii in the subsequent period increases in female education and a relative improvement of female wages appear to have promoted a substantial increase in paid female employment labor supply equations for paid employees estimated from time series data provide negative income and positive wage elasticities cross sectional analysis gives reasonable results particularly for middle age wives absolute values of estimated wage elasticity notably have almost always been smaller than income elasticity unlike many research findings in the united states

corruption and the costs of redistribution micro evidence from indonesia this paper examines the degree to which the corruption in developing countries may impair the ability of governments to redistribute wealth among their citizens specifically i examine a large antipoverty program in indonesia that distributed subsidized rice to poor households i estimate the extent of corruption in the program by comparing administrative data on the amount of rice distributed with survey data on the amount actually received by households the central estimates suggest that on average at least 18 of the rice appears to have disappeared ethnically heterogeneous and sparsely populated areas are more likely to be missing rice using conservative assumptions for the marginal cost of public funds i estimate that the welfare losses from this corruption may have been large enough to offset the potential welfare gains from the redistributive intent of the program these findings suggest that corruption may impose substantial limitations on developing countries redistributive efforts and may help explain the low level of transfer programs in developing countries d 2005 elsevier b v all rights reserved

modelling labour decisions of french agricultural households a joint model of labour decisions for farm couples is presented attention is given to operator and spouse participation decisions in the off farm labour market as well as the decision to use hired farm labour farm household labour choices which include both on farm and off farm work decisions and hired labour decisions are thus modelled as a household joint process the model is applied to a sample of french farm households empirical results illustrate the importance of spouse decisions on off farm labour participation and supply function structure they also show that operator labour and hired farm labour are complementary but wife labour and hired farm labour are substitutable

earnings patterns of japanese women 1976 1988 the structure of the japanese labor market and how it has changed in response to demographic and economic conditions has drawn considerable attention most of the well known characteristics of this system of industrial relations relate to lifetime employment contracts the seniority based wage system and the widespread use of mandatory retirement these characteristics apply to regular full time employees in japan primarily to male employees in large firms regular full time male employees have longer job tenure and more rapidly rising earnings than comparable workers in the united states japanese women are much less likely to be employed under these lifetime contracts considerably less is known concerning the structure of women s wages in japan this study provides new information concerning the determinants of earnings for female workers in japan by estimating earnings equations for full time paid employees using two different data sources first the basic survey of wage structure bsws is used to examine the earnings function of japanese women using the bsws for 1976 1981 and 1986 we estimate how the determinants of earnings have changed during the last decade second the 1988 national survey on the family hereafter referred to as the family survey is employed to examine the presence of children and the resulting intermittent pattern of female labor supply on earnings key findings indicate that earnings of women rise with job tenure however the magnitude of tenure effect on earnings has declined over time education increases the earnings of women more than it does

media monitoring and capture of public funds evidence from madagascar summary this paper investigates the role of media and monitoring in reducing capture we analyze data on capture of public expenditures by local officials in madagascar our findings indicate important constraints on decentralization of public service delivery in particular in remote areas capture could be successfully constrained through a combination of media programs and monitoring intensive monitoring and access to media reduce capture however the impact of media is conditional on characteristics of the population with high illiteracy in poor regions the effectiveness of newspaper and poster campaigns is limited and radio and television programs are more important to reduce capture

supply determinants of part time work of dutch married women the influence of taxes and social premiums labour supply is classified into five classes one for zero hours a week i e nonparticipation and four for 1 14 15 24 25 34 and more than 34 hours a week respectively this allows us to investigate whether changes in the taz and social premium system have different effects on the labour supply in different hours classes such an investigation has been carried out by applying a multinomial logit analysis in combination with a method introduced by hausman to allow the incorporatin of taxes and social premiums in the estimation of labour supply functions of dutch married women comparing the 1983 and 1985 tax and social premium systems the results of the analysis indicate that the introduction of the new system has had only a small discouraging effect on the labour supply of dutch married women

government and economic growth in the less developed countries an empirical study for 1960 1980 adam smith founded modern economics with a powerful argument that free markets are the best route to prosperity and economic growth his conclusion has been studied and debated by economists ever since including nobel prize winners friedman hayek kuznets lewis myrdal and schultz whatever economists have concluded since world war ii the majority of the less developed countries seem to have opted for extensive government regulation of the private sector and for a large public sector has the large government role slowed or accelerated the growth of ldcs obviously this is an important issue this study looks at government expenditure revenue raising and regulation greater emphasis is put on expenditure because 1 the revenue raised is presumably a function of the level of expenditure and 2 there are few internationally comparable measures of regulation there are virtually no empirical studies of the general impact of government on economic growth an extensive literature search turned up only three papers gemmell analyzed the impact of nonmarket sector growth on various measures of macroeconomic performance for 27 ldcs and developed countries for 1960 and 1970 he drew no general conclusions about the relation between the size of the nonmarket sector and economic growth marsden found a negative relation between tax gdp ratios and economic growth for a cross section of 20 ldcs and developed countries for the 1970 79 period 2 i found a negative relationship between the share of government consumption expenditure in gdp and the growth of per capita gdp for a cross section of 96 ldcs and developed countries over various time periods between 1961 and 1976 3 this paper extends the approach used in my 1983 article

missing public funds and targeting performance evidence from an anti poverty transfer program in indonesia abstract this paper investigates how failing to consider missing funds in public resource delivery can lead to misleading conclusions on the nature and correlates of targeting performance combining administrative data on disbursement and household survey data on receipt under indonesia s anti poverty program inpres desa tertinggal idt we find that only 69 of disbursements were actually received by the intended beneficiaries when these missing funds are ignored the distribution of idt benefits is pro poor and better targeting is found in districts with higher per capita expenditure however when the missing funds are taken into account the distribution of idt benefits in fact becomes less pro poor than universal equal distribution and better targeting is correlated with a higher proportion of female village heads and a higher level of villagers human capital these results underscore the importance of considering the size and allocation of missing funds in the analysis of targeting in public resource delivery

a comparison of the labor force behavior of married women in the united states and canada with special attention to the impact of income taxes estimation results are presented for the probability of working the hourly wage rate and the annual hours of work for wives in seven different age groups in both the u s and canada federal and state or provincial taxes are incorporated into the analysis an iterative estimation method is employed to circumvent the statistical problems resulting from the dependence of the hours of work on the tax rate and the dependence of the tax rate on the hours of work authors

the power of information in public services evidence from education in uganda in this paper we argue that innovations in governance of social services are an effective way to improve outcomes such as attainment of universal primary education to test this hypothesis we explo

local capture evidence from a central government transfer program in uganda according to official statistics 20 percent of uganda s total public expenditure was spent on education in the mid 1990s most of it on primary education one of the large public programs was a capitation grant to cover schools nonwage expenditures using panel data from a unique survey of primary schools we assess the extent to which the grant actually reached the intended end user schools the survey data reveal that during 1991 1995 the schools on average received only 13 percent of the grants most schools received nothing the bulk of the school grant was captured by local officials and politicians the data also reveal considerable variation in grants received across schools suggesting that rather than being passive recipients of flows from the government schools use their bargaining power to secure greater shares of funding we find that schools in better off communities managed to claim a higher share of their entitlements as a result actual education spending in contrast to budget allocations is regressive similar surveys in other african countries confirm that uganda is not a special case

female labor force participation in japan an aggregate model this paper extends previous work on labor supply in japan by treating the simultaneous labor force participation and hours of work decisions for japanese wives both employees and family workers it estimates a trichotomous participation model for a

the dynamics of chinese rural households participation in labor markets the work is devoted to the dynamics of labor market participation of chinese rural households based on a theoretical farm household framework the choice between four distinct labor market participation states is empirically analyzed using household data over the period 1995 2002 from the province zhejiang we apply a discrete time hazard approach to analyze households labor market participation histories in particular we investigate the movements between autarky and participation in general and more specifically the shifts between part time and full time farming estimation results suggest significant duration dependence more precisely a decreasing risk of moving from one state to another with an increasing time a household occupies one of these states further the likelihoods of starting any participation in labor markets and to start part time farming are considerably higher than to end participation or to return to full time farming in addition we find that labor market participation decisions are significantly related to several household and farm characteristics

the ontology of economic power in capitalism mainstream economics and marx mainstream economics conceives power to be incompatible with perfect competition this conception i argue derives from its deductivist method and the empirical realist ontology that it presupposes following marx i show that capitalism constantly reproduces asymmetrical constraints on classes of individuals independent of the market form my ontological argument is rooted in the philosophy of critical realism my conclusion is that the dichotomy power competition is ontologically untenable if capitalist relations necessarily involve power it is not simply because neoclassical competition does not exist in reality as radical mainstream economists suggest but rather because capitalism altogether is a system of power

poverty dominant program reforms the role of targeting and allocation rules we propose simple graphical methods to identify poverty reducing marginal reforms of transfer programs the methods are based on program dominance curves that display cumulative program benefits weighted by powers of poverty gaps these curves can be decomposed simply as sums of targeting dominance curves and allocation dominance ones and can serve to verify whether the assessment of marginal program reforms is sensitive to the choice of poverty lines and poverty measures as well as to differences across programs in revenue sources and incentive effects

family structure home time demands and the employment patterns of japanese married women a recent 1990 national survey is used in an econometric analysis of japanese women s hourly pay and employment patterns it confirms many results from western industrial countries but also indicates the important influence of japan s unique family structure the persistence of multigenerational households on married women s employment patterns younger married women are more likely to take paid employment in such households particularly on a full time basis than in nuclear family households this appears to reflect in part the child care role played by the woman s parents or parents in law