metrics capturing the degree to which individual economies are globalized we discuss metrics of globalization for individual economies as distance measures between fully integrated and trade restricted equilibria in economies initially operating under less than full integration with the global economy such metrics can be used to construct country globalization metrics reflecting the distance of economies from full global integration due to trade barriers barriers to factor flows barriers to international financial intermediation solved technological diffusion and other economy specific features yielding less than full integration into the global economy many distance metrics present themselves and none are wholly satisfactory since they each behave differently across various displacements from integration distance measures can for instance be small in goods space but large in price space we present alternative measures constructed for eight oecd economies and comment in a concluding section on other measures used elsewhere in the literature such as trade gdp ratios

women as policy makers evidence from a randomized policy experiment in india this paper uses political reservations for women in india to study the impact of women s leadership on policy decisions since the mid 1990 s one third of village council head positions in india have been randomly reserved for a woman in these councils only women could be elected to the position of head village councils are responsible for the provision of many local public goods in rural areas using a dataset we collected on 265 village councils in west bengal and rajasthan we compare the type of public goods provided in reserved and unreserved village councils we show that the reservation of a council seat affects the types of public goods provided specifically leaders invest more in infrastructure that is directly relevant to the needs of their own genders

post hoc ergo propter once more an evaluation of does monetary policy matter in the spirit of james tobin christina and david romer s paper does monetary policy matter advocates the so called narrative approach to causal inference we demonstrate that this method will not sustain causal inference first it is impossible to distinguish monetary shocks from oil shocks as causes of recessions second a world in which the fed only announces intentions to act cannot be distinguished from one in which it in fact acts third the techniques of dynamic simulation used in the romers study are inappropriate and quantitatively misleading and finally their approach provides no basis for establishing causal asymmetry

liberalising the movement of natural persons a lost decade liberalisation of international trade in services through the movement of natural persons mode 4 remains one of the least negotiated issues of trade policy among the 144 members of the world trade organisation economists believe that there is a basic convergence of economic interest between the developed and the developing world for liberalising mode 4 yet the multilateral trading system has not facilitated greater worker mobility between the labour surplus and labour scarce countries is there any economic logic as to why cross border movements of workers have not followed the pattern predicted by international trade theory or are there strong socio political barriers that have come in the way of liberalising mode 4 these are some of the questions the paper attempts to answer the paper shows that the economic arguments against the free movement of natural persons are based on the narrow perspective of the welfare of domestic workers while ignoring the benefit it brings to the economy as a whole further non economic arguments miss the point that the movement of workers under mode 4 of gats is temporary in nature and so unlikely to have any lasting social and cultural spillovers the paper gives specific illustrations from the recent past where temporary import of workers from labour surplus countries has enabled both developed and developing countries sustain their economic growth it concludes by arguing that the environment for renegotiating wto commitments under this important sector of international trade in services is better than ever before even though the current world economic slowdown may delay actual negotiations for a while copyright 2004 blackwell publishing ltd

manager impartiality worker firm matching and the gender wage gap using a rich matched employer employee data set from sweden the author examines whether female managers in a firm narrow the gender pay gap the study s main contribution is its ability to account for unobserved heterogeneity among both workers and firms that is potentially correlated with manager gender the results show a substantial negative association between the representation of female managers and the establishment s gender wage gap estimates that account for sorting on unobserved worker skills however do not support the conclusion that managers favor same sex workers in wage setting additional results show that organizations with more female managers recruit more nonmanagerial high wage women together these findings suggest that associations between manager gender and male female wage gaps should be interpreted with caution as worker sorting seems to be a crucial component behind this relationship

when performance trumps gender bias joint vs separate evaluation gender bias in the evaluation of job candidates has been demonstrated in business government and academia yet little is known about how to overcome it blind evaluation procedures have been proven to significantly increase the likelihood that women musicians are chosen for orchestras and they are employed by a few companies we examine a new intervention to overcome gender bias in hiring promotion and job assignments an evaluation nudge in which people are evaluated jointly rather than separately regarding their future performance evaluators are more likely to base their decisions on individual performance in joint than in separate evaluation and on group stereotypes in separate than in joint evaluation making joint evaluation the profit maximizing evaluation procedure our work is inspired by findings in behavioral decision research suggesting that people make more reasoned choices when examining options jointly rather than separately and is compatible with a behavioral model of information pr

beauty and the labor market the authors examine the impact of looks on earnings using interviewers ratings of respondents physical appearance plain people earn less than average looking people who earn less than the good looking the plainness penalty is 5 to 10 percent slightly larger than the beauty premium effects for men are at least as great as for women unattractive women have lower labor force participation rates and marry men with less human capital better looking people sort into occupations where beauty may be more productive but the impact of individuals looks is mostly independent of occupation suggesting the existence of pure employer discrimination copyright 1994 by american economic association

how does the stock market respond to changes in bank lending standards i investigate the industry level responses of u s stock returns to unanticipated changes in bank lending standards exploiting cross industry variation in the levels of dependence on external finance i document that on average cumulative stock returns fall significantly by 1 36 percentage points two years after an unexpected one standard deviation tightening in lending standards moreover moving from an industry at the 10th percentile of financial dependence to one at the 90th percentile adds between 1 24 and 2 19 additional percentage points to this effect

race and gender discrimination in bargaining for a new car more than three hundred paired audits at new car dealerships reveal that dealers quoted significantly lower prices to white males than to black or female test buyers using identical scripted bargaining strategies ancillary evidence suggests that the dealerships disparate treatment of women and blacks may be caused by dealers statistical inferences about consumers reservation prices but the data do not strongly support any single theory of discrimination copyright 1995 by american economic association

are tenured judges insulated from political pressure tenured public officials such as judges are often thought to be insulated from political pressure and as a result indifferent to the concerns of the electorate we investigate this proposition empirically using data on promotion decisions taken by senior english judges between 1985 and 2005 throughout this period the popular view was one of ill disciplined elitism senior judges were alleged to be favouring candidates from elite backgrounds over their equally capable non elite counterparts we find evidence in support of this view to be surprisingly weak most of the unconditional difference in promotion prospects between the two groups can simply be explained by differences in promotion relevant characteristics we then exploit an unexpected proposal to remove control over promotions from the judiciary and find that judges behaviour dramatically changed when faced by the prospect of losing autonomy senior judges began to favour non elite candidates as well as candidates who were unconnected to members of the promotion committee

do competitive workplaces deter female workers a large scale natural field experiment on job entry decisions an important line of research using laboratory experiments has provided a new potential reason for gender imbalances in labour markets men are more competitively inclined than women whether and to what extent gender differences in attitudes toward competition lead to differences in naturally occurring labour markets remains an open question to examine this we run a natural field experiment on job entry decisions where we randomize almost 9000 job seekers into different compensation regimes by varying the role that individual competition plays in setting the wage and the gender composition we examine whether a competitive compensation regime by itself can cause differential job entry the data highlight the power of the compensation regime in that women disproportionately shy away from competitive work settings yet there are important factors that attenuate the gender differences including whether the job is performed in teams whether the position has overt gender associations and the age of the job seekers we also find that the effect is most pronounced in labour markets with attractive alternative employment options furthermore our results suggest that preferences over uncertainty can be just as important as preferences over competition per se in driving job entry choices

migration theories and evidence an assessment abstract this paper presents a critical survey of theories of migration their welfare and policy implications and their empirical relevance we also develop some extensions to the theory beginning with the harris and todaro ht model in particular the ht model is extended to examine risk averse behaviour within families where the migration of members of families serves to diversify risk the welfare implications of the individual migration decision and government intervention in the form of employment subsidies are examined recent evidence on international migration is presented it is shown that migration does not flow automatically in response to wage differentials characteristics of migrants and the process of self selection are found to be important determinants of the rate of migration

taking stock a critical assessment of recent research on inventories empirical and theoretical aspects of inventory behavior became hot topics in the 1950s and early 1960s no one seemed to notice the tension that was developing between the emerging macroeconomic and microeconomic views of inventories macroeconomists routinely thought of inventories as a destabilizing factor yet the prevailing micro theory viewed inventories as a stabilizing factor it was a fascinating question that was barely explored instead somewhat inexplicably interest in inventories dried up as if inventories were of minor economic significance and little intrinsic interest by the early 1980s then economists once again knew something they had known in the 1950s that inventory investment is of first order importance in business cycles but they were also beginning to realize that the standard production smoothing buffer stock model of inventories was in deep trouble this paper focuses on developments since that realization

services provision and temporary mobility freedoms and regulation in the eu international posting of workers and mobility of self employed service suppliers lie between outright migration and trade in goods their regulation for both distributional and marketcorrecting purposes is not as difficult to harmonize as that of labour markets but personal mobility is more visible and socially intrusive than product market interactions this paper analyzes economic and legal tensions between national regulatory frameworks and international competition in these areas in both the intra eu and global contexts highlighting how interactions between the external and internal roles of the european commission may foster efficient integration of markets and policies in this and other fields

globalisation and values this paper discusses a central element in globalisation debate little addressed by economists namely the interactions at global national and community levels between globalisation and societally based values social values refer to wider notions of collective identity religious values attitudes towards materialism moral beliefs and a sense of collective awareness and are a broader and more encompassing concept than social capital discussed in recent economics and sociology literature social capital relates to trust honesty and the social fabric of accepted norms central to the successful implementation of individual optimising decisions and denotes a communal asset reflecting strength of joint collective commitment whose amount can be increased or improved upon through investment of time and resources social values are much discussed in sociological literature going back to comte durkheim parsons and others the issues taken up here are how different social values might interact and change as societies and their economies integrate globalise processes of value competition displacement and joint assimilation occur naturally to economists but seem little studied by sociologists who seemingly place less stress on analytical comparative statics scenarios for how values can interact under globalisation are discussed in the text

immigration and globalization a review essay this essay revisits the argument that the removal of worldwide immigration restrictions would induce a very large increase in world gdp the recent books exodus how migration is changing our world by paul collier and the price of rights regulating international labor migration by martin ruhs raise a number of questions about the underlying economic model the essay shows how these concerns can greatly attenuate the predicted gains

identifying the macroeconomic effect of loan supply shocks the inability to clearly distinguish the effects of shocks to loan supply from those to loan demand has made it difficult to quantify the economic importance of the credit channel in the transmission mechanism of monetary policy this study provides an innovative approach to identifying loan supply shocks three different results confirm that loan supply shocks have been successfully isolated from shifts in loan demand our measure is particularly important for explaining inventory movements the component of gdp most dependent on bank lending the effect is present even during periods with strong loan demand and the effect remains even when the unpredictable part of the loan supply shock is isolated this identification enables us to show that loan supply shocks have had economically important effects on the u s economy

the grecian horse does immigration lead to the deterioration of american institutions concerns about the institutional impact of immigration particularly in the united states are not new we can trace them back to benjamin franklin thomas jefferson and alexander hamilton more recently in response to a literature that questions the desirability of current immigration restrictions borjas j econ lit 53 961 974 2015 speculates that immigrants coming from countries with poor institutions could reduce substantially the institutional quality in the united states to a point where it could negate all economic gains associated with immigration in terms of gdp and income using the economic freedom of north america index since 1980 we find no evidence to corroborate borjas s concerns however we find mixed evidence that immigration increases minimum wages and union density

do interest groups affect us immigration policy while anecdotal evidence suggests that interest groups play a key role in shaping immigration policy there is no systematic empirical analysis of this issue in this paper we construct an industry level dataset for the united states by combining information on the number of temporary work visas with data on lobbying activity associated with immigration we find robust evidence that both pro and anti immigration interest groups play a statistically significant and economically relevant role in shaping migration policy across sectors barriers to migration are lower in sectors in which business interest groups incur larger lobbying expenditures and higher in sectors where labor unions are more important

biased screening and discrimination in the labor market the traditional economic analysis of discrimination is based on gary becker s study of taste discrimination by employers employees and consumers more recent work by kenneth arrow 1972 1973 has attempted to interpret intergroup wage differences in an alternative framework as a rational reaction to uncertainty in labor markets his model of statistical discrimination demonstrates that when the screening process used to determine a worker s qualifications is costly and prior expectations of productivity differ across race or sex groups then wage differentials may arise between workers of identical productivity by implicitly assuming a perfect screening process arrow ignores a potentially important source of wage differentials namely the fact that the screening process might be a more reliable predictor of productivity for one group than for another our paper generalizes the arrow model in two ways first in contrast to arrow we assume that all groups have identical distributions of productivity secondly the screening process used by the firm to determine an applicant s productivity is biased in the sense that a members of various groups may pass the test in different proportions despite their identical productivity distributions and b the predictive power of the test might vary across groups our objective is to analyze the effects of these types of biases in the screening process on the wage differentials between different population groups

review of nsf economics proposals gender and institutional patterns in a recent article in this journal rebecca blank 1991 reported on the results of an experiment in which articles submitted to the american economic review were randomly assigned to a doubleor single blind category for review among the patterns she found were that women referees gave lower ratings to single blind papers and men were harsher on double blind papers but that there were no significant differences in the acceptance rates by gender for singleor double blind reviewing other research has found gender differences in the outcomes of the reviewing process in economics journals by correlating acceptance rates with the type of reviewing procedure marianne ferber and michelle teiman 1980 linda edwards and ferber 1989 based on reviews of grant proposals to the national science foundation nsf this study presents evidence of significant differences in the reviewing of female and male authors by male and female referees even when author quality is controlled by comparing ratings on the same paper female reviewers rate female authored papers lower than do their male colleagues this result still holds when controls for institutional affiliation and experience of reviewer are also included this indicates that there is a significant downward bias in the ratings by female reviewers of female proposals independent of paper quality and reviewer background

the economic impact of medical migration an overview of the literature this paper provides an overview of the evidence and applied literature on medical migration the economic impacts of medical migration have been little researched causing a polarisation in the debate between its critics and its proponents the paucity of quantitative studies may be explained by the lack of comprehensive and consistent data investments in statistical resources on medical migration are therefore a major priority the available evidence suggests that particularly english speaking countries in sub saharan african countries and the caribbean with relatively few health workers and a high disease burden suffer most from the medical brain drain however the exodus of health workers is not the main cause of the health status crisis but rather a symptom of deeper underlying problems which often extend beyond the health sector towards the broader economic and political environment in such situations medical brain drain does pose challenges for human resource management and health service delivery the only effective and long term sustainable policy is one that addresses the underlying push and pull factors reforms have to be country led but may be supported via temporary migration schemes remittances enhancement of diaspora networks and financial aid for which a strong moral case exists

of age sex and money insights from corporate officer compensation on the wage inequality between genders this paper shows that the gender and age of the wage setter are crucial determinants of the disparity in wages between sexes we document our findings using a data set on compensation of corporate officers that is uniquely suited for this analysis because officer wages are set by chief executive officers ceos we show that ceos pay officers of the opposite gender less than officers of their own gender even when controlling for job characteristics older and male ceos exhibit the greatest propensity to differentiate on the basis of sex female officers receive smaller raises if the firm is headed by a man our results suggest that ceo gender and age are economically more important determinants of officer compensation than are firm stock performance stock volatility or return on assets this paper was accepted by uri gneezy behavioral economics

do women shy away from competition do men compete too much we examine whether men and women of the same ability differ in their selection into a competitive environment participants in a laboratory experiment solve a real task first under a noncompetitive piece rate and then a competitive tournament incentive scheme although there are no gender differences in performance men select the tournament twice as much as women when choosing their compensation scheme for the next performance while 73 percent of the men select the tournament only 35 percent of the women make this choice this gender gap in tournament entry is not explained by performance and factors such as risk and feedback aversion only playa negligible role instead the tournament entry gap is driven by men being more overconfident and by gender differences in preferences for performing in a competition the result is that women shy away from competition and men embrace it

the new economic case for migration restrictions an assessment abstract migration barriers tend to reduce global production by impeding efficient spatial reallocation of labor recent research argues for a countervailing effect of barriers tending to raise global production by preventing the spread of impoverishing institutions from poor to rich countries while evidence of this mechanism is scarce it is theoretically plausible at high migration rates we propose and calibrate a simple model of dynamically efficient migration when migrants spread economic institutions between countries the net effect of migration depends on three parameters transmission the degree to which origin country total factor productivity is embodied in migrants assimilation the degree to which migrants productivity determinants become like natives over time in the host country and congestion the degree to which transmission and assimilation change at higher migrant stocks on current evidence about the magnitudes of these parameters dynamically efficient policy would not imply open borders but would imply relaxation of current restrictions

efficiency and distributional implications of global restrictions on labour mobility calculations and policy implications abstract in this paper a procedure for calculating the annual efficiency gains from various alternative changes in existing global immigration restrictions is presented along with an evaluation of impacts of wage rate changes on non migrating labour a simple methodology uses data on u s dollar gnp capita across countries to infer differences in the marginal productivity of labour both between countries and across major world trading areas two key assumptions used are that the worldwide labour supply is fixed and full employment occurs in all regions differences occuring in labour s marginal product across regions are assumed to arise because of barriers to inward mobility of labour in high wage countries when these are removed labour reallocates and efficiency gains occur while the calculations are based on contentious assumptions a striking feature is the size of the annual worldwide gains in some cases annual gains can easily exceed existing worldwide gnp generated in the presence of labour mobility restrictions while all gains do not accrue to ldc s the size of the gains nonetheless suggests that this issue may be much more important to these countries than other issues raised thus far in the north south debate the losses to labour already employed in high wage countries dramatize the incentives for labour unions in the developed world to oppose liberalization

immigration remittances and business cycles we use data on border enforcement and macroeconomic indicators from the united states and mexico to estimate a two country business cycle model of labor migration and remittances the model matches the cyclical dynamics of labor migration to the united states and documents how remittances to mexico serve an insurance role to smooth consumption across the border during expansions in the destination economy immigration increases with the expected stream of future wage gains but it is dampened by a sunk migration cost that reflects the intensity of border enforcement during recessions established migrants are deterred from returning to their country of origin which places an additional downward pressure on the wage of native unskilled workers thus migration barriers reduce the ability of the stock of immigrant labor to adjust during the cycle enhancing the volatility of unskilled wages and remittances we quantify the welfare implications of various immigration policies for the destination economy

narrative and var approaches to monetary policy common identification problems abstract romer and romer romer c d romer d h 1989 does monetary policy matter a new test in the spirit of friedman and schwartz in blanchard o j fischer s eds nber macroeconomics annual 1989 mit press cambridge ma pp 121 170 romer c d romer d h 1994 monetary policy matters journal of monetary economics 34 75 88 adopted a narrative approach to address the identification problems in time series models of monetary policy based on federal reserve documents the romers created a dummy variable equal to one in periods when the federal reserve contracted in response to perceived inflationary pressures this paper shows 1 the dummy variable is predictable from past macroeconomic variables reflecting the endogenous response of policy to the economy 2 unpredictable changes in the dummy do not generate dynamic responses that look like the effects of monetary policy the identification problems that plague time series models also afflict the narrative approach

bridging trade theory and labour econometrics the effects of international migration this paper surveys current theoretical and empirical research on international migration with a particular emphasis on the links between trade theory and labour empirics

the economic costs to international labor restrictions revisiting the empirical discussion summary in a 1984 article hamilton and whalley calculated the annual efficiency gains from free international migration we update that study to compare developments over time with the aim of producing more reasonable and politically relevant scenarios our results suggest that the estimated gains from the liberalization of global immigration controls have increased substantially indeed we find that even a small liberalization of international migration restrictions can still yield substantial gains in particular we estimate that a 10 increase in international migration corresponds to an efficiency gain of about us 774 billion 1998 dollars

gender economics an assessment concerns about gender equality have jumped to the forefront of public debate in recent years and gender economics is slowly affirming its place as a major field of study this assessment examines where we are in terms of gender equality it reviews the theoretical foundations that can explain existing inequalities and documents the empirical findings supported by the theories identifying avenues for future research and providing a fruitful framework to think about the effectiveness of policies and interventions targeting gender inequality in doing so i provide the foundations against which the contributions in this issue can be placed

canadian economics research on immigration through the lens of theories of justice we assess the current state of knowledge in the economics of immigration and consider how economic theories of knowledge can be used to further the goal of developing a just immigration policy in the process we highlight the contributions of economists working in canada and canadian economists internationally in furthering our understanding of this important research area we identify research gaps such as the need for more research on the underlying causes of the poor returns to foreign work experience for immigrants from non traditional source countries and the effect of immigrants on stimulating innovation more research is also needed on the implications of temporary foreign worker tfw programs and the growing importance of employers in immigrant selection systems la recherche canadienne en economie de l immigration a travers la lentille des theories de la justice on jauge l etat present des connaissances en economie de l immigration et on examine comment les theories economiques de la connaissance peuvent etre utiles dans la poursuite d un objectif qui serait de mettre en place une politique d immigration juste dans ce processus on souligne les contributions des economistes travaillant au canada a notre comprehension de ce chantier de recherche on identifie certaines zones d ombre comme la recherche pour comprendre les causes sous jacentes aux pauvres rendements de l experience de travail des immigrants en provenance des pays qui ne sont pas des sources d immigration traditionnelles et celle pour comprendre les effets des immigrants sur la stimulation de l innovation il faudra aussi davantage de recherches sur les implications des programmes pour attirer et accueillir les travailleurs etrangers temporairement et sur l importance croissante des employeurs dans les systemes de selection d immigrants

inventories as factors of production and economic fluctuations this paper presents a theory of inventory investment by stage of processing and uses it to examine the role of inventory investment in economic fluctuations the model in which inventories are treated as factors of production is estimated for four durable goods industries three conclusions emerge from the estimation first the estimates generally satisfy the theoretical restrictions second the elasticity of inventory demand with respect to output is high indicating an important accelerator effect finally the estimates suggest that shifts in the demand for inventories are an important source of economic fluctuations copyright 1989 by american economic association

why do rich countries prefer free trade over free migration the role of the modern welfare state abstract according to traditional trade theory heckscher ohlin free trade and free migration are equivalent measures of economic integration leading both to an equalization of factor prices this prediction is in sharp opposition to the observed preference of rich countries for free trade over free migration we provide an explanation for this inconsistency the redistribution policies in the countries social welfare in countries with a relatively small number of low skilled native workers is higher with free trade than with free migration due to redistribution of income towards immigrating workers

consumer credit liquidity and the transmission mechanism of monetary policy i introduction despite calls for its obsolescence the lending channel of the monetary transmission mechanism continues to generate interest among monetary economists recently den haan sumner and yamashiro 2007 find the loan supply effect is evident for consumer lending and real estate loans in data up to 2004 the loan supply effect or lending channel arises in the transmission mechanism if tight monetary policy forces banks to contract the supply of loans independent of a direct interest rate effect i e the liquidity effect and such a contraction has real effects for bank dependent borrowers although some such as perez 1998 and ashcraft 2006 have emphasized the lending channel s lack of relevance for the monetary transmission mechanism den haan sumner and yamashiro s 2007 results support a number of recent papers that offer detailed and disaggregated reasons why the channel is alive and well for certain lenders and borrowers for recent examples see nilsen 2004 and peek rosengren and tootell 2003 den haan sumner and yamashiro s 2007 findings suggest that the role of the consumer in the lending channel may be deserving of more attention 1 this paper asks whether consumer lending is or has become a significant component of the lending channel even if it was not thought crucial in lending channel studies published in the 1990s specifically i take a closer look at the statistical and possible economic significance of the consumer loan supply effect with disaggregated monthly consumer credit data from both commercial bank and nonbank sources and for the nonrevolving and revolving components of consumer credit from each source with this array of data i test the assumptions of the channel by considering whether households are forced to use more expensive nonbank credit as bank credit declines or that a household might switch into more costly revolving credit as installment loans decline to examine the consumer lending channel i estimate impulse response functions for the disaggregated consumer loan components mentioned above with the monthly data spanning 1968 2006 the sources of which are discussed later this strategy follows the examples of numerous lending channel studies that analyze the responses of disaggregated data to a monetary policy shock to discern evidence of the loan supply effect den haan sumner and yamashiro 2007 e g compare the behavior of commercial and industrial loans with real estate and consumer loans i follow the methods of previous studies in order to compare as closely as possible the results of this paper with the rich body of lending channel literature for robustness this paper estimates the impulse response functions from both a typical vector autoregression var model and using jorda s 2005 linear projection technique the latter method provides impulse response functions less prone to misspecification than in a var along with conditional standard errors to aid in the statistical inference of the responses see also jorda 2009 and further discussion in section iii finally for additional robustness i employ den haan sumner and yamashiro s 2007 identification strategy for isolating the loan supply effect in preview of the results ultimately the consumer credit data analyzed in this paper suggest that both the statistical and by extension the economic significance of the consumer loan supply effect is weak in the least the effect has weakened over time although monthly consumer credit data from commercial banks from 1968 through 2006 substantiate previous research on consumer lending matching the decline documented by gertler and gilchrist 1993 and den haan sumner and yamashiro 2007 after 1984 the responses of both nonrevolving and revolving consumer bank credit are not consistent with the lending channel instead both series increase similar to the result found by den haan sumner and yamashiro 2007 for commercial lending in fact total nonrevolving and revolving consumer credit increase for 2 yr after the monetary shock

banks funding stress lending supply and consumption expenditure we employ a unique identification strategy linking survey data on household consumption expenditure to bank level data to estimate the effects of bank funding stress on consumer credit and consumption expenditures we show that households whose banks were more exposed to funding shocks report lower levels of nonmortgage liabilities this however only translates into lower levels of consumption for low income households hence adverse credit supply shocks are associated with significant heterogeneous effects

do gender stereotypes reduce girls or boys human capital outcomes evidence from a natural experiment schools and teachers are often said to be a source of stereotypes that harm girls this paper tests for the existence of gender stereotyping and discrimination by public high school teachers in israel it uses a natural experiment based on blind and non blind scores that students receive on matriculation exams in their senior year using data on test results in several subjects in the humanities and sciences i found contrary to expectations that male students face discrimination in each subject these biases widen the female male achievement difference because girls outperform boys in all subjects except english and at all levels of the curriculum the bias is evident in all segments of the ability and performance distribution and is robust to various individual controls several explanations based on differential behavior between boys and girls are not supported empirically however the size of the difference is very sensitive to teachers characteristics suggesting that the bias against male students is the result of teachers and not students behavior

should we have a wto for international migration the international movement of labour remains much more restricted than movement of goods or capital and the worldwide economic gains to liberalizing migration are large this paper asks whether those gains could be realized through better international cooperation on migration along the lines of the wto for trade although public opinion is marginally more negative towards the liberalization of migration than of trade the key impediment is the lack of a basis for reciprocity in negotiations over migration and this is because migration is largely driven by absolute advantage rather than by comparative advantage as in the case of trade consequently there is no basis for wto style negotiations over migration and therefore no grounds for reforming the international architecture in the hope of fostering liberalization timothy j hatton

breaking the glass ceiling the effect of board quotas on female labor market outcomes in norway in late 2003 norway passed a law mandating 40 representation of each gender on the board of public limited liability companies the primary objective of this reform was to increase the representation of women in top positions in the corporate sector and decrease the gender disparity in earnings within that sector we document that the women appointed to these boards post reform were observably more qualified than their female predecessors along many dimensions and that the gender gap in earnings within boards fell substantially however we see no robust evidence that the reform benefited the larger set of women employed in the companies subject to the quota moreover the reform had no clear impact on highly qualified women whose qualifications mirror those of board members but who were not appointed to boards finally we find mixed support for the view that the reform affected the decisions of young women while the reform was not accompanied by any change in female enrollment in business education programmes we do see some improvements in labour market outcomes for young women with graduate business degrees in their early career stages however we observe similar improvements for young women with graduate science degrees suggesting this may not be due to the reform overall seven years after the board quota policy fully came into effect we conclude that it had very little discernible impact on women in business beyond its direct effect on the women who made it into boardrooms

can gender parity break the glass ceiling evidence from a repeated randomized experiment this paper studies whether the gender composition of recruiting committees matters we make use of the unique evidence provided by spanish public examinations where the allocation of candidates to evaluating committees is random we analyse how the chances of success of 150 000 female and male candidates for positions in the four main corps of the spanish judiciary from 1987 to 2007 were affected by the gender composition of their evaluation committee we find that a female male candidate is significantly less likely to be hired whenever she he is randomly assigned to a committee where the share of female male evaluators is relatively greater evidence from multiple choice tests suggests that this is due to the fact that female majority committees overestimate the quality of male candidates

gender interactions within hierarchies evidence from the political arena this paper studies gender interactions within hierarchical organizations using a large data set on the duration of italian municipal governments elected between 1993 and 2003 a municipal government can be viewed as a hierarchy whose stability over time depends on the degree of cooperation between and within ranks we find that in municipalities headed by female mayors the probability of early termination of the legislature is higher this result persists and becomes stronger when we control for municipality fixed effects as well as for non random sorting of women into municipalities using regression discontinuity in gender mixed electoral races decided by a narrow margin the likelihood that a female mayor survives until the end of her term is lowest when the council is entirely male and in regions with less favourable attitudes towards working women this evidence is suggestive that group dynamics are an important factor in driving the gender difference other interpretations receive less support in the data our results may provide an alternative explanation for the underrepresentation of women in leadership positions

the probability of return migration migrants work effort and migrants performance abstract this paper demonstrates that differences in earnings between migrants and the native population may reflect differences in incentives rather than differences in characteristics the analysis indicates that in the presence of a positive probability of return migration migrants work effort is higher than that of comparable native born workers this differential may explain why even if all workers are perfectly homogeneous in skills migrants often outperform the native born workers in the receiving economy

liberalising temporary movement of natural persons an agenda for the development round we discuss liberalising the temporary mobility of workers under mode 4 of the gats particularly the movement of medium and low skilled service providers between developing and developed countries such mobility potentially offers huge returns a flow equivalent to three per cent of developed countries skilled and unskilled work forces would generate an estimated increase in world welfare of over us 150 billion shared fairly equally between developing and developed countries the larger part of this emanates from the less skilled essentially because losing higher skilled workers cuts output in developing countries severely the mass migration of less skilled workers raises fears in developed countries for cultural identity problems of assimilation and the drain on the public purse these fears are hardly relevant to temporary movement however the biggest economic concern from temporary mobility is its competitive challenge to local less skilled workers but as populations age and the average levels of training and education rise developed countries will face an increasing scarcity of less skilled labour temporary mobility thus actually offers a strong communality of interest between developing and developed countries the remainder of the paper looks at the gats provisions on mode 4 and the commitments that have been made under it the paper reviews several official proposals for the doha talks including the very detailed one from india and considers several countries existing schemes for the temporary movement of foreign workers many countries have long had bilateral foreign worker programmes and some regional agreements provide for liberal and flexible movement these show what is feasible and how concerns can be overcome we caution that to be useful any wto agreement must increase mobility not just bureaucratise it the paper concludes with some modest and practical proposals we suggest inter alia that licensing firms to arrange the movement of labour is the most promising short term approach to increasing temporary mobility

economics and identity this paper considers how identity a person s sense of self affects economic outcomes we incorporate the psychology and sociology of identity into an economic model of behavior in the utility function we propose identity is associated with different social categories and how people in these categories should behave we then construct a simple game theoretic model showing how identity can affect individual interactions the paper adapts these models to gender discrimination in the workplace the economics of poverty and social exclusion and the household division of labor in each case the inclusion of identity substantively changes conclusions of previous economic analysis

testing the rationality of price forecasts new evidence from panel data this paper tests the rationality of individual price forecasts in a panel of professional forecasters here unlike in most previous studies rationality is not rejected the results here differ because 1 using individual forecasts avoids aggregation bias 2 comparison of forecasts to initial data avoids bias due to data revision 3 the professional forecasters have economic incentives to state their expectations accurately and 4 a new covariance matrix estimator consistent when forecast errors are correlated across individuals is used copyright 1990 by american economic association

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

international spillovers from euro area and us credit and demand shocks a focus on emerging europe abstract in this paper we examine the international effects of contractions in loan supply loan demand and aggregate demand in the euro area and the usa all three shocks have been at the forefront in spreading stress during the period of the global financial crisis and in particular so to countries that are strongly integrated with the euro area we find that these shocks decrease international output and total credit to a varying degree loan demand and aggregate demand shocks in the euro area trigger significant negative spillovers on output in most other regions evidence for global negative output effects of euro area loan supply shocks is fraught with considerable estimation uncertainty when these three types of shocks emanate from the usa we find significant negative spillovers on output also for loan supply shocks in general international effects on total credit are an order of magnitude larger than those on output with again more evidence that is significant for us than euro area shocks last and taking a regional stance our results indicate that economies from emerging europe are most vulnerable to all shocks considered through their strong economic integration with the euro area these economies are likewise exposed to euro area and us shocks and spillover effects are often larger than the domestic response in the country of shock origin

efficiency gains from liberalizing labor mobility in this paper we quantify the effect of a complete liberalization of cross border migration on the world gdp and its distribution across regions we build a general equilibrium model endogenizing bilateral migration and income disparities between and within countries our calibration strategy uses data on effective and potential migration to identify total migration costs and visa costs by education level data on potential migration reveal that the number of people in the world who have a desire to migrate is around 400 million this number is much smaller than that predicted in previous studies and reflects the existence of high incompressible migration costs in our benchmark framework liberalizing migration increases the world gdp by 11 5 12 5 percent in the medium term our robustness analysis reveals that the gains are always limited in the range of 7 0 percent with schooling externalities to 17 9 percent if network effects are accounted for

is fdi integrating the world economy fdi s spectacular growth in diverse forms during the past two decades represented an important force generating greater economic integration fdi increased substantially in relation to global productive capacity cross border mergers and acquisitions component of fdi put domestic corporate laggards on notice and the spread of fdi to non tradable service sectors generated the possibility that these traditionally low productivity sectors would be brought closer to the standards of international efficiency yet fdi did not perform an integrating role in a more fundamental sense there is little evidence that fdi served to speed up income convergence across countries this was the case for two reasons first fdi flows remained highly concentrated second the benefits from fdi appear to have accrued principally where conditions were already conducive to investment and growth hence though cross country disciplines through bilateral regional and multilateral efforts are important in reducing the distortions that lead to misallocation of capital domestic efforts to raise absorptive capacity will ultimately be critical efforts to increase labour mobility as foreseen for example under gats could have a significant effect in raising the benefits from fdi as the more mobile labour serves to bridge the cultural institutional and contractual differences across nations

assessing the benefits to developing countries of liberalisation in services trade this paper discusses the potential impacts of services trade liberalisation on developing countries and reviews existing quantitative studies its purpose is to distill themes from current literature rather than to advocate specific policy changes the picture emerging is one of valiant attempts to quantify in the presence of formidable analytical and data problems yielding only a clouded image of likely impacts on trade consumption production and welfare emerging to the point that the policy implications of results are not always clear a central intuition would seem to be that with genuine two sided oecd non oecd liberalisation in services that are seemingly considerably labour intensive in delivery the potential should be there for significant developing country gains from global liberalisation allowing full cross border delivery however this picture is neither fully endorsed by available studies neither is it explicitly contradicted this seems to be the case for a number of reasons one difficulty with the studies is that the conceptual underpinnings of what determines trade in services and how this trade differs analytically from that of trade in goods if at all is an issue prior to assessments of impacts of liberalisation of trade in services on developing countries being discussed key issues here are the treatment of mobility for service providers both firms and workers and the differing analytical structures needed to analyse individual service items banking insurance telecoms etc some recent analytical work suggests that liber alisation in some service items such as banking need not always yield gains and this contrasts with quantitative studies where analytical structures mirror conventional trade in goods treatments the discussion and measurement of barriers to service trade in both developed and developing countries is also problematic one is talking of domestic regulation entry barriers portability of providers competition policy regimes more so than only barriers at national borders as with tariffs both representing and quantifying such barriers raise major difficulties and these are also spelled out in the paper which barriers actually restrict trade and which do not because they are redundant is one issue for instance it is also often misleading to represent barriers in simple ad valorem equivalent form as a result numerical modelling work on the effects of service trade barriers which is based on ad valorem equivalent modelling is often not fully convincing in addition individual country results vary considerably across studies in ways that it is frequently hard for outsiders to understand studies do however point towards a tentative conclusion that effects are small and positive for developed and most developing countries if fdi flow changes accompanying service trade liberalisation are excluded from the analysis but much larger and more variable across countries if they are present this could be taken to suggest that mode 3 gats liberalisation roughly captured in some studies might be important for developing countries but mode 4 gats liberalisation could be even more important given large barriers to labour flows across countries thus if service trade liberalisation is thought of primarily as a surrogate for improved functioning of global factor markets in which more capital flows to developing countries and more labour flows from them to developed countries then developing countries could benefit in a major way from genuine two sided oecd non oecd liberalisation developing countries fear however that in global negotiations on services liberalisation where there is an asymmetry of power that largely one sided liberalisation may be the outcome and their gains will be correspondingly limited the paper concludes by evaluating econometric studies on linkage between services liberalisation and country growth rules and briefly discusses some key sectoral issues in health services and transportation

the real effects of financial sector interventions during crises we assess the importance of supply side credit market frictions by studying the impact of bank recapitalization on firm growth in 50 countries during the recent crisis our identification strategy exploits the crisis as a shock to credit supply and combines an exogenous measure of firms dependence on external financing with policy interventions aimed at restoring bank capital we find that the growth of financially dependent firms is disproportionately positively affected by bank recapitalization this effect is quantitatively important and robust to controlling for other policies these results provide new evidence of the influence of credit market frictions on economic activity

loan supply shocks during the financial crisis evidence for the euro area this paper employs a panel vector autoregressive model for the member countries of the euro area to explore the role of banks during the slump of the real economy that followed the financial crisis in particular we seek to quantify the macroeconomic effects of adverse loan supply shocks which are identified using sign restrictions we find that loan supply shocks significantly contributed to the evolution of the loan volume and real gdp growth in all member countries during the financial crisis however concerning both the timing and the magnitude of the shocks our results also indicate that the euro area was characterized by a considerable degree of cross country heterogeneity

do female officers improve law enforcement quality effects on crime reporting and domestic violence escalation we study the impact of the integration of women in us policing between the late 1970s and early 1990s on violent crime reporting and domestic violence escalation along these two key dimensions we find that female officers improved police quality using crime victimization data we find that as female representation increases among officers in an area violent crimes against women in that area and especially domestic violence are reported to the police at significantly higher rates there are no such effects for violent crimes against men or from increases in the female share among civilian police employees furthermore we find evidence that female officers help prevent the escalation of domestic violence increases in female officer representation are followed by significant declines in intimate partner homicide rates and in rates of repeated domestic abuse these effects are all consistent between fixed effects models with controls for economic and policy variables and models that focus exclusively on increases in female police employment driven by externally imposed affirmative action plans resulting from employment discrimination cases

gender and promotions evidence from academic economists in france the promotion system for french academic economists provides an interesting environment to examine the promotion gap between men and women promotions occur through national competitions for which we have information both on candidates and on those eligible to be candidates thus we can examine the two stages of the process application and success women are less likely to seek promotion and this accounts for up to 76 percent of the promotion gap being a woman also reduces the probability of promotion conditional on applying although the gender difference is not statistically significant our results highlight the importance of the decision to apply

cluster sample methods in applied econometrics inference methods that recognize the clustering of individual observations have been available for more than 25 years brent moulton 1990 caught the attention of economists when he demonstrated the serious biases that can result in estimating the effects of aggregate explanatory variables on individual specific response variables the source of the downward bias in the usual ordinary least squares ols standard errors is the presence of an unobserved state level effect in the error term more recently john pepper 2002 showed how accounting for multi level clustering can have dramatic effects on t statistics while adjusting for clustering is much more common than it was 10 years ago inference methods robust to cluster correlation are not used routinely across all relevant settings in this paper i provide an overview of applications of cluster sample methods both to cluster samples and to panel data sets

male female wage differentials in job ladders much of the male female wage differential exists because men and women are assigned to different jobs within narrow job categories there is no male female differential only a tortured taste theory of discrimination can reconcile these facts we argue that differential movement along job ladders entails comparative advantage so the ability standard for promotion is higher for women this implies that more able women will be passed over in favor of less able men women assumed to have the same ability distribution as men earn less the differential reflects females lower promotion probability not within job discrimination

is bank supervision central to central banking whether central banks should play an active role in bank supervision and regulation is being debated both in the united states and abroad while the bank of england has recently been stripped of its supervisory responsibilities and several proposals in the united states have advocated removing bank supervision from the federal reserve system other countries are considering enhancing central bank involvement in this area many of the arguments for and against these proposals hinge on the effect this change would have on the ability of the central bank to conduct monetary policy we find that confidential supervisory information on bank ratings significantly improves

women and power unpopular unwilling or held back we use spain s equality law to test for the existence of agency problems between party leaders and their constituents the law mandates a 40 percent female quota on electoral lists in towns with populations above 5 000 using pre and postquota data by party and municipality we implement a triple difference design we find that female quotas resulted in slightly better electoral results for the parties that were most affected by the quota our evidence shows that party leaders were not maximizing electoral results prior to the quota suggesting the existence of agency problems that hinder female representation in political institutions

endophilia or exophobia beyond discrimination the discrimination literature treats outcomes as relative but does a differential arise because agents discriminate against others exophobia or because they favour their own kind endophilia using a field experiment that assigned graders randomly to students examinations that did did not contain names we find favouritism but no discrimination by nationality nor by gender we are able to identify these preferences under a wide range of behavioural scenarios regarding the graders that endophilia dominates exophobia alters how we should measure discriminatory wage differentials and should inform the formulation of anti discrimination policy

sex and credit do gender interactions matter for credit market outcomes abstract this paper studies the effects of gender interactions on the supply of and demand for credit using data from a large albanian lender we document that first time borrowers assigned to officers of the opposite sex are less likely to return for a second loan the effect is larger when officers have little prior exposure to borrowers of the other gender and when they have more discretion to act on their gender beliefs as proxied by financial market competition and branch size we also find that first time borrowers matched with opposite sex officers pay higher interest rates and receive smaller and shorter maturity loans but do not experience higher arrears our results are consistent with the existence of a gender bias and learning effects that lead to the disappearance of the bias

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

the impact of gender composition on team performance and decision making evidence from the field we investigate whether the gender composition of teams affects their economic performance we study a large business game played in groups of three in which each group takes the role of a general manager there are two parallel competitions one involving undergraduates and the other involving mba students our analysis shows that teams formed by three women are significantly outperformed by all other gender combinations both at the undergraduate and mba levels looking across the performance distribution we find that for undergraduates three women teams are outperformed throughout but by as much as 0 47 of a standard deviation of the mean at the bottom and by only 0 09 at the top for mba students at the top the best performing group is two men and one woman the differences in performance are explained by differences in decision making we observe that three women teams are less aggressive in their pricing strategies invest less in research and development and invest more in social sustainability initiatives than does any other gender combination this paper was accepted by brad barber teck ho and terrance odean special issue editors

wage effects of labour migration with international capital mobility wage effects of immigration are investigated in a setting with international capital mobility which eliminates two thirds of the native wage effects of immigration without international capital mobility overall gains from migration in the immigration region are only a small fraction of total losses to native workers but with perfect international capital adjustment overall gains are larger than total losses to native workers two alternative tax policies to eliminate the negative wage effects of immigration on low skilled native workers are evaluated

capital regulation and the macroeconomy empirical evidence and macroprudential policy abstract we present new evidence on the macroeconomic effects of changes in microprudential bank capital requirements using confidential regulatory data from the basel i and ii regimes in the united kingdom our central result is that an increase in capital requirements lowered lending to firms and households reduced aggregate expenditure and raised credit spreads a financial accelerator effect is found to have amplified the macroeconomic responses to shifts in bank credit supply results from a counterfactual experiment that links capital requirements to house prices and mortgage spreads indicate that tighter macroprudential policy would have had a moderating effect on house price and mortgage lending growth in the early 2000s with easier monetary policy acting to offset its contractionary effects on output

a numerical simulation analysis of hukou labour mobility restrictions in china abstract we use numerical simulation methods to analyze the hukou system of permanent registration in china which many believe has supported growing relative inequality over the last 20 years by restraining labour migration both between the countryside and urban areas and between regions and cities our aim is to inject economic modelling into the debate on sources of inequality in china which thus far has been largely statistical we first use a model with homogeneous labour in which wage inequality across various geographical divides in china is supported solely by quantity based migration restrictions urban rural areas rich poor regions eastern central and western non coastal zones eastern and central western development zones eastern central western zones more disaggregated 6 regional classifications and an all 31 provincial classification we calibrate this model to base case data and when we remove migration restrictions all wage and most income inequality disappears results from this model structure points to a significant role for hukou restrictions in supporting inequality in china we then present a further model extension in which urban house price rises retard rural urban migration the impacts of removing hukou restrictions on migration are smaller but are still significant finally we modify the model to capture labour productivity differences across regions calibrating the modified model to estimates of both national and regional gini coefficients removal of migration barriers is again inequality improving but less so