the empirical content of the roy model this paper clarifies and extends the classical roy model of self selection and earnings inequality the original roy model based on the assumption that log skills are normally distributed is shown to imply that pursuit of comparative advantage in a free market reduces earnings inequality compared to the earnings distribution that would result if workers were randomly assigned to sectors aggregate log earnings are right skewed even if one sectoral distribution is left skewed most major implications of the log normal roy model survive if differences in skills are log concave however few implications of the model survive if skills are generated from more general distributions we consider the identifiability of the roy model from data on earnings distributions the normal theory version is identifiable without regressors or exclusion restrictions sectoral distributions can be identified knowing only the aggregate earnings distribution for general skill distributions the model is not identified and has no empirical content with sufficient price variation the model can be identified from multimarket data cross sectional variation in regressors can substitute for price variation in restoring empirical content to the roy model

income tax evasion revisited the impact of interest rate yields on tax free municipal bonds 1 introductionincome tax evasion remains a timely issue as evidenced by recently published studies e g see feige 1989 1994 alm jackson and mckee 1992 pestieau possen and slutsky 1994 cebula 1997 2001 alm mcclelland and schulze 1999 atkins 1999 panteghini 2000 ali cecil and knoblett 2001 saltz 2001 in an effort to provide further insight into the determinants of tax evasion this study hypothesizes that the tax evasion decision may include an assessment of the tax free interest rate yield on say high grade municipal bonds relative to the taxable interest rate yield on alternative high quality bond issues such as 10 year treasury notes presumably the higher the interest rate yield on high grade municipals whose interest is legally exempt from federal income taxation relative to the taxable interest rate yield on 10 year treasury notes the more attractive those municipals become ceteris paribus in effect the interest paid on tax free bonds especially for households in higher tax brackets may offer an attractive legal alternative income tax avoidance to illegal income tax evasion 1 thus it is hypothesized that the higher the tax free interest rate yield on high grade municipals relative to the taxable yield on 10 year treasury notes or equivalent taxable issues the less the incentive for and hence the less the degree of income tax evasion this study investigates empirically whether higher yields on tax free municipals relative to the taxable yields on 10 year treasury notes reduce the degree of aggregate federal personal income tax evasion section 2 provides the model which includes a variety of variables already established in the literature to affect tax evasion section 3 describes the data sections 4 and 5 provide the empirical findings and concluding remarks 2 the modelthe economy consists of agents who generate economic value that is reflected in the form of income and choose whether to report none some or all of their income to the internal revenue service irs the probability that the representative economic agent will not report taxable income pnr is treated as an increasing function of the expected gross benefits to the agent of not reporting income eb and a decreasing function of the expected gross costs to the agent of not reporting income ec formula omitted see article image the expected gross benefits from not reporting income to the irs are hypothesized to be an increasing function of income tax rates unlike previous studies this study focuses on both the average effective federal personal income tax rate aept and the maximum marginal federal personal income tax rate max such that formula omitted see article image furthermore as suggested by feige 1994 and cebula 2001 the higher the level of public dissatisfaction dis with the perceived performance of government employees and elected government officials the greater the subjective benefit taxpayers derive from tax evasion accordingly becomes formula omitted see article image finally as explained in section 1 it is hypothesized in this study that the higher the tax free interest rate yield on high grade municipal bonds tf relative to the taxable interest rate yield on 10 year treasury notes ten the greater the incentive to engage in legal tax avoidance and the lower the incentive to engage in tax evasion thus becomes formula omitted see article image the expected gross costs of not reporting income to the irs are hypothesized to be an increasing function of the expected risks thereof in this study to the representative economic agent the expected penalty from not reporting taxable income to the irs if said activity is detected by the irs is measured in part by the total pecuniary penalties including both penalties per se and interest previously assessed by the irs on audited tax returns pen

a new decision rule for lateral transshipments in inventory systems this paper deals with a single echelon inventory system consisting of a number of parallel local warehouses facing compound poisson demand there are standard holding and backorder costs as well as ordering costs at all warehouses normally the warehouses replenish from an outside supplier however lateral transshipments between the warehouses are also possible such transshipments take no time but incur additional costs when a demand occurs at a warehouse the question is whether the whole demand or part of it should be covered by a lateral transshipment from another warehouse given a set of alternative decisions our decision rule minimizes the expected costs under the assumption that no further transshipments will take place this rule is then used repeatedly as a heuristic a simulation study illustrates how the suggested technique performs under different conditions

measuring the incentives to learn in colombia using new quantile regression approaches abstract this paper employs newly developed quantile regression techniques to investigate a policy that could differentially affect students performance the colombian vouchers were assigned using lotteries and were renewable as long as the students maintained satisfactory academic progress this second aspect of the program may provide incentives for low attainment students to work harder the evidence supports the hypothesis that incentives could account for the impact of the vouchers including lower repetition rate the effect of the vouchers is largest in the lower tail of the educational attainment distribution a possibility that was conjectured by others but has not yet been confirmed empirically the evidence suggests that the incentive effect of the program increases weak students test scores by at least 0 1 standard deviations roughly the score gain associated to a half year of school learning

the demand for and impact of learning hiv status this paper evaluates an experiment in which individuals in rural malawi were randomly assigned monetary incentives to learn their hiv results after being tested distance to the hiv results centers was also randomly assigned without any incentive 34 percent of the participants learned their hiv results however even the smallest incentive doubled that share using the randomly assigned incentives and distance from results centers as instruments for the knowledge of hiv status sexually active hiv positive individuals who learned their results are three times more likely to purchase condoms two months later than sexually active hiv positive individuals who did not learn their results however hiv positive individuals who learned their results purchase only two additional condoms than those who did not there is no significant effect of learning hiv negative status on the purchase of condoms

note periodic review s s policies for joint replenishment inventory systems this note deals with the joint replenishment problem with stochastic demands a new class of policies called ps s policy is proposed for this problem the proposed policy uses independent periodic review s s policies for each item results on test problems show that the proposed policy is superior to other classes of policies for the problem

financial inclusion and financial integrity aligned incentives summary the financial action task force embraces financial inclusion as complementary to anti money laundering and counter terrorist financing as it enhances transparency this support is based on the premise that the increased use of formal financial services leads to a reduction of usage of informal services we present evidence on eight african countries that both are not negatively associated moreover informal employment and cash preference reduce the inclination to use mobile financial services if an increase in transparency acts as disincentive to use formal services the alignment of financial inclusion and integrity will fail

might fundamental tax reform increase criminal activity fundamental tax reform replacing the income tax with a sales tax is commonly thought to reduce levels of criminal and other underground economic activity by implicitly taxing their returns this paper finds instead that the impact of tax reform depends on the relative labour intensity of production in the legitimate and illegitimate sectors of the economy in the likely event that illegitimate output is produced by using more labour intensive techniques than is legitimate output then replacing an income tax with a sales tax reduces the cost of criminal and other underground activity thereby stimulating its growth

on the economic rationale of estimating the hidden economy the estimation of the hidden economy may be considered as a human passion for knowing the unknown although a large literature on the hidden economy exists the subject is still controversial at a very basic level there are disagreements about 1 the definition of the hidden activities 2 the terms used to describe these activities 3 the estimation or measurement procedures and finally 4 on the use of these estimates in economic analysis in this paper we will only consider the issues related to estimation economic and econometric analysis of the hidden economy thus we implicitly accept the term hidden economy and explicitly state the definition before entering into the main discussions for a comprehensive study of past literature readers are referred to feige 1989 gaertner and wenig 1985 and tanzi 1982 and the large number of references in these books the use of the hidden economy estimates for economic and econometric analysis can be classified into three potentially distinct but interrelated categories a the derivation of economic theory and or its implication for the existing theories b the formulation of economic policies and c econometric modelling if we consider that the tax evaded income is the only constituent of the hidden economy then the issues are almost obvious for all three categories however as we will see later such a simple interpretation of the hidden economy estimates is generally not possible for example in this paper we define the hidden economy as the unrecorded national income the unrecorded national income is calculated as the difference between the potential national income for the given currency in circulation and the recorded national income this definition of the hidden economy suggests that in principle it is larger than the tax evaded income the empirical illustrations are taken from the studies conducted in the united kingdom and india where this is a workable definition however for many other countries such an approach is totally inadequate as a measure of unrecorded national income since the method of estimating the hidden economy is constrained by the structure of the economy in this paper we shall present a brief description of a general method of estimating the hidden economy and appraise the applicability and limitation of the method due to space constraint we shall discuss very briefly the importance of the hidden economy on economic theory and on the empirical

assessing the case for social experiments rs ecent academic debates pit two alternative approaches to policy evaluation against one another the first is the experimental approach based on the random assignment of accepted program applicants to a recipient or treatment group and a non recipient or control group the second is the nonexperimental or econometric approach that uses a variety of microdata sources statistical methods and behavioral models to compare the outcomes of participants in social programs with those of nonparticipants the central question addressed in this paper is whether or not randomized social experiments aid in securing answers to basic questions about the evaluation of social programs there are many distinct and complementary approaches to the study of the impact of public policy including full general equilibrium analysis of policy impacts tinbergen 1956 auerbach and kotlikoff 1987 shoven and whalley 1992 kydland and prescott 1991 and less ambitious partial equilibrium microeconomic structural research programs such as those designed to estimate the impact of taxes on labor supply both approaches offer answers to many interesting counterfactual policy questions but their credibility rests critically on the quality of the empirical input used to generate their answers

oil price shocks economic policy uncertainty and industry stock returns in china asymmetric effects with quantile regression abstract this paper investigates the impact of crude oil shocks and china s economic policy uncertainty on stock returns at different locations on the return distributions based on monthly data from 1995 1 to 2016 3 we address this issue by employing the quantile regression technique this approach enables a more detailed investigation in different market circumstances namely bearish normal and bullish markets empirical results indicate that the effects of oil price shocks and economic policy uncertainty are asymmetric and highly related to stock market conditions moreover both the nexus of oil and economic policy uncertainty stock are changed at the onset of a crisis specially rising oil prices have greater negative effects on stock returns when stock markets are bullish extreme higher quantiles before a crisis whereas the effects are significantly positive under different market conditions after the onset of the crisis falling oil prices lower stock returns when stock markets are bullish and normal before the crisis whereas lower stock returns under different market conditions except extreme bullish after the onset of the crisis these findings might be related to the optimistic or pessimistic investor sentiments and investors might become more frightened after the crisis

the underground economies tax evasion and information distortion list of contributors preface introduction edgar l feige part i the meaning measurement and policy implications of the underground economies 1 the meaning and measurement of the underground economy edgar l feige 2 information distortions in social systems the underground economy and other observer subject policymaker feedbacks robert r alford and edgar l feige 3 policy illusion macroeconomic instability and the unrecorded economy robert t mcgee and edgar l feige 4 how large or small should the underground economy be bruno frey part ii the underground economy in western developed nations measurement in different laboratories 5 monetary perspective on underground economic activity in the united states richard d porter and amanda s bayer 6 the unrecorded economy and the national income accounts in the netherlands a sensitivity analysis g a a m broesterhuizen 7 assessing the underground economy in the united kingdom michael o higgins 8 the underground economy in the federal republic of germany a preliminary assessment enno langfeldt 9 the underground economy in sweden ingemar hansson 10 the irregular economy of italy a survey of contributions bruno contini 11 the hidden economy in norway with special emphasis on the hidden labor market arne jon isachsen and steiner strom 12 canada s underground economy rolf mirus and roger s smith 13 the underground economy in france philippe barthelemy part iii the underground economy under central planning 14 the soviet second economy in a political and legal perspective f j m feldbrugge 15 second economy and socialism the hungarian experience istvan r gabor bibliography

the informal sector in developed and less developed countries a literature survey the main goal of this study is two fold 1 to provide ageneral overview of the contributions to the literature on theinformal sector with a special focus on the public choiceapproach and 2 to compare these contributions across twoinstitutionally different types of countries developed andless developed developing and transition countries thepaper focuses on the criteria used to define the informalsector the relationship between the formal and informaleconomy tax evasion and public choice analysis it isstressed throughout this paper that the distinction betweenthe two types of countries is of key importance

is universal child care leveling the playing field abstract we assess the case for universal child care programs in the context of a norwegian reform which led to a large scale expansion of subsidized child care we use non linear difference in differences methods to estimate the quantile treatment effects of the reform we find that the effects of the child care expansion were positive in the lower and middle parts of the earnings distribution of exposed children as adults and negative in the uppermost part we complement this analysis with local linear regressions of the child care effects by family income we find that most of the gains in earnings associated with the universal child care program relate to children of low income parents whereas upper class children actually experience a loss in earnings in line with the differential effects by family income we estimate that the universal child care program substantially increased intergenerational income mobility to interpret the estimated heterogeneity in child care effects we examine the mediating role of educational attainment and cognitive test scores and show that our estimates are consistent with a simple model where parents make a tradeoff between current family consumption and investment in children taken together our findings could have important implications for the policy debate over universal child care programs suggesting that the benefits of providing subsidized child care to middle and upper class children are unlikely to exceed the costs our study also points to the importance of universal child care programs in explaining differences in earnings inequality and income mobility across countries and over time

who benefits from job corps a distributional analysis of an active labor market program summary using recently developed econometric techniques to estimate quantile treatment effects qte and experimental data we examine the impact of job corps on earnings distribution our results indicate a great deal of heterogeneity in the effects of job corps the qtes show an increasing pattern along the earnings distribution with much more pronounced differences at the upper quantiles for males whites and ages 20 24 moreover we find the qtes to be very small at quantiles below the median for males ages 16 17 and 18 19 and non resident students we propose strong economic conditions and skill hypotheses to explain the heterogeneity observed over the earnings distribution copyright 2013 john wiley sons ltd

tax evasion and public expenditures on tax revenue services in an endogenous growth model abstract this paper analyzes the relationship between tax evasion and the two main policy instruments affecting tax compliance namely the announced tax rate and the share of tax revenues allocated to tax monitoring mechanisms for doing so we adopt a simple one sector endogenous growth model modified under tax evasion following the roubini and sala i martin 1995 analysis on income taxes and tax compliance our model confirms barro s 1990 theoretical finding stating that the optimal tax rate is equal to the elasticity of public capital however introducing a welfare function where governments care also about the degree of fiscal corruption in the economy the effective tax rate is lower than the output elasticity of public capital in line with futagami et al 1993 and turnovsky 1997 theoretical results finally our model is calibrated using data on tax evasion from 35 oecd and 110 non oecd countries for 2011 simulation results suggest that both tax evasion and output growth are decreasing with the share of tax revenues allocated to monitoring expenses while government s utility maximization imply an announced tax rate lower from the elasticity of public capital for both groups of countries

set identification in models with multiple equilibria we propose a computationally feasible way of deriving the identified features of models with multiple equilibria in pure or mixed strategies it is shown that in the case of shapley regular normal form games the identified set is characterized by the inclusion of the true data distribution within the core of a choquet capacity which is interpreted as the generalized likelihood of the model in turn this inclusion is characterized by a finite set of inequalities and efficient and easily implementable combinatorial methods are described to check them in all normal form games the identified set is characterized in terms of the value of a submodular or convex optimization program efficient algorithms are then given and compared to check inclusion of a parameter in this identified set the latter are illustrated with family bargaining games and oligopoly entry games copyright 2011 oxford university press

approaches for estimating noncompliance examples from federal taxation in the united states crime and underground economic activity are a fact of life around the world most societies attempt to control these activities through the expenditure of resources on monitoring prosecution punishment and educational programmes gathering statistics about who is engaging in illegal or underground activity the frequencies with which various crimes or underground transactions are occurring and the severity or magnitude of these acts is crucial for making good decisions regarding our allocation of resources in this area unfortunately in general it is very difficult to obtain accurate information about these issues this is partly because the individuals engaged in such activities wish not to be identified and often take actions to avoid detection and partly because by their very nature the activities tend not to generate economic accounting legal demographic or other cultural records the fact that it is difficult to obtain accurate information about the activities however does not in any way imply that we should not make a concerted effort to try to obtain the best information we can i believe the cost associated with attempting to determine the extent and nature of these activities is in most circumstances well below the expected benefit which includes the likelihood of improved decisionmaking by relevant government personnel and the general public as a result i also believe the debate about developing estimates of illegal or underground economic activity should primarily focus on practical issues related to how best to go about developing estimates that are as reliable as possible in this short article i shall discuss the measurement of noncompliance with laws and regulations my particular area of expertise and shall not discuss the measurement of other kinds of hidden economic behaviours such as informal contracting unmeasured home production and grey market activities in particular i shall discuss three approaches for estimating the aggregate amount of noncompliance with respect to a specific law or regulation i intensive data collection for a focused subsample of the population ii detection controlled estimation and iii the comparision of estimates generated by distinct datasets and models for each i shall describe in general terms what the approach is and how it is implemented review limitations of the approach and present an example of the application of the approach to the measurement of tax noncompliance in the united states my discussion shall necessarily be short and i refer the interested reader to a variety of original research publications for more details especially about the specific examples

the impact of piped water provision on infant mortality in brazil a quantile panel data approach abstract we examine the impact of piped water on the under 1 infant mortality rate imr in brazil using a recently developed econometric procedure for the estimation of quantile treatment effects with panel data the provision of piped water in brazil is highly correlated with other observable and unobservable determinants of imr the latter leading to an important source of bias instruments for piped water provision are not readily available and fixed effects to control for time invariant correlated unobservables are invalid in the simple quantile regression framework using the quantile panel data procedure in chen and khan chen s khan s semiparametric estimation of non stationary censored panel model data models with time varying factor econometric theory 2007 forthcoming our estimates indicate that the provision of piped water reduces infant mortality by significantly more at the higher conditional quantiles of the imr distribution than at the lower conditional quantiles except for cases of extreme underdevelopment these results imply that targeting piped water intervention toward areas in the upper quantiles of the conditional imr distribution when accompanied by other basic public health inputs can achieve significantly greater reductions in infant mortality

the economic reward for studying economics undergraduate advisors in economics departments suggest that the study of economics is good preparation for a variety of careers including economics consulting analysis and administration and they argue that economics is a solid prelaw or pre mba major in this article we provide some empirical evidence about each of these contentions we find that among college graduates who do not earn advanced degrees economics majors generally earn more than similar individuals with other majors we show also that among individuals who pursue graduate degree programs in business and law economics majors earn more than undergraduate majors in most other academic disciplines jel j31

what is the price of prevention new evidence from a field experiment how does increasing access to treatment affect the demand for preventive testing in this paper we present results from a field experiment in nigeria in which we offered cervical cancer screening to women at randomly chosen prices to test our hypothesis we also offered women a lottery where the payoff was a subsidy towards the cost of cervical cancer treatment conditional upon a diagnosis of cervical cancer we find that women randomly selected to receive the conditional cancer treatment subsidy were about 4 percentage points more likely to take up screening than those in the control group we also show that reducing the price of screening by 10 cents increased take up by about 1 percentage point these results offer compelling evidence that the optimal set of subsidies to increase take up of preventive testing in developing countries must include subsidies towards treatment costs in addition to price subsidies

making the most out of programme evaluations and social experiments accounting for heterogeneity in programme impacts the conventional approach to social programme evaluation focuses on estimating mean impacts of programmes yet many interesting questions regarding the political economy of programmes the distribution of programme benefits and the option values conferred on programme participants require knowledge of the distribution of impacts or features of it this paper presents evidence that heterogeneity in response to programmes is empirically important and that classical probability inequalities are not very informative in producing estimates or bounds on the distribution of programme impacts we explore two methods for supplementing the information in these inequalities based on assumptions about participant decision making processes and about the strength in dependence between outcomes in the participation and non participation states dependence is produced as a consequence of rational choice by participants we test for stochastic rationality among programme participants and present and implement methods for estimating the option values of social programmes

who is more rational we report on the results of a large scale field experiment that enables us to test for consistency with utility maximizing behavior and to investigate the correlation between individual behavior and demographic and economic characteristics we conducted the experiment with the centerpanel a representative sample of over 2 000 dutch households using procedures similar to those used by choi et al 2007b in a setting with risk we find a high level of consistency in the individual level decisions there is also considerable heterogeneity in subjects consistency scores high income and high education subjects display greater levels of consistency men are more consistent than women and young subjects are more consistent than those who

land values in a newly zoned city the introduction of a new zoning ordinance to chicago in 1923 offers a natural experiment that allows us to determine the effects of zoning on relative land value growth rates policymakers claimed at the time that land use zoning would raise aggregate land values by reducing negative externalities associated with mixed land use after controlling for initial land use and the endogeneity of zoning decisions we find that residential zoning led to higher land value growth rates than commercial zoning

shadow economies size causes and consequences using various methods the size of the shadow economy in 76 developing transition and oecd countries is estimated average size varies from 12 percent of gdp for oecd countries to 23 percent for transition countries and 39 percent for developing countries increasing taxation and social security contributions combined with rising state regulations are driving forces for the increase of the shadow economy especially in oecd countries according to some findings corruption has a positive impact on the size of the shadow economy and a growing shadow economy has a negative effect on official gdp growth

is the quantity quality trade off a trade off for all none or some abstract although the theoretical trade off between the quantity and quality of children is well established empirical evidence supporting such a causal relationship particularly on child health is limited we use two measures of child health to assess the quantity quality trade off across the entire distribution using data from the indonesia family life survey and controlling for the potential endogeneity of child quantity we find modest statistically meaningful evidence of a causal trade off

the shadow economy as an equilibrium outcome abstract we construct a dynamic general equilibrium model of tax evasion where agents choose to report some of their income unreported income requires using a payment method that avoids recordkeeping in some markets cash trade using cash to avoid taxes is the shadow economy in our model we then calibrate our model using money interest rate and gdp data to back out the size of the shadow economy for a sample of countries and compare our measures to traditional reduced form estimates

a heuristic joint replinishment policy for the case of heterogeneity among items abstract the q s s policy is considered among the best for solving the well known stochastic joint replenishment problem however it has some shortcomings if much heterogeneity exists among the items consequently a new heuristic control policy is constructed the cornerstone is a policy iteration improvement step assuming a single possibility for making a joint order and thus to deviate from the rule that the items are governed by independent re order and order up to s s policies but this policy iteration improvement step is done repeatedly at each demand epoch it is only required the development of one dimensional value functions of state variables in order to accomplish the policy iteration improvement step knowledge about good order up to values is important furthermore a relaxation parameter is introduced such that one can make it easier or more difficult to issue a joint order when following the policy iteration improvement step finally in case a joint order is made a vector of can order points is used to include additional items the policy is denoted a c s policy numerical results shows that the new policy performs significantly better than the q s s policy for cases with heterogeneity among items furthermore from a given optimal can order policy one can construct a better c s policy

uses and abuses of estimates of the underground economy ered valuable by at least a part of society narcotics production and distribution prostitution gambling these activities can be large in some countries and should be counted in the national accounts of all countries although they rarely are their omission affects the comparability of data across countries the incomes generated by illegal activities are rarely taxed many other activities such as those associated with the subsistence or informal sectors are estimated rather than measured and are generally not taxed because of the low value they generate to those who engage in them in conclusion there are many reasons beside the ones discussed in this paper why the measurements of national output may not be complete about two decades ago a few economists became convinced that many normal economic activities that should be measured and taxed were taking place underground or in the shadow thus presumably escaping the attention of the statistical offices of the tax authorities and more generally of the government regulators some of these economists also claimed that like alice in wonderland these hidden activities were growing in a ridiculous fashion see gutmann 1977 and feige 1979 by the late 1970s the role of government had grown enormously so that the level of taxation and the tax rates had risen sharply and regulations had proliferated in many countries see tanzi and schuknecht 1997 these developments had created strong incentives for individuals and enterprises to go underground to avoid taxes and regulatory restrictions thus a good case could be made that what came to be called the underground economy was a phenomenon to worry about newspaper articles were ready to accept the

periodic versus can order policies for coordinated multi item inventory systems the coordinated multi item inventory problem refers to the problem of managing inventories where there is a joint fixed cost for replenishing plus an item by item fixed cost for each item included in the replenishment order given that the optimal solution is likely to be too complex attention has focused on fixed heuristics and in particular can order or s c s policies this paper makes two contributions first a new lower bound on the cost of the optimal policy is proposed in order that the performance of heuristics may be measured second motivated by the lower bound a simple periodic policy is proposed and shown to be an improvement over can order policies for many data sets

consumption and income smoothing this article presents a two sector dynamic general equilibrium model in which income smoothing takes place within the households intra temporally and consumption smoothing takes place among the households inter temporally idiosyncratic risk sharing within the family is based on an income smoothing contract there are two sectors in the model the regular sector and the underground sector and the smoothing comes from the underground sector which is countercyclical with respect to aggregate gdp the article shows that the simulated disaggregated consumption and income series that are the regular and underground consumption flows are more sensitive to exogenous changes in sector specific productivity and tax rates than regular and underground income flows and that this picture is reversed when the aggregate series are considered

the asymmetric role of shadow economy in the energy growth nexus in bolivia abstract this paper estimates the energy demand function to examine the asymmetric relationship between the shadow economy and energy consumption in the case of bolivia during the period of 1960 2015 the ambiguous empirical findings on shadow economy energy demand nexus has inclined us to apply the nonlinear ardl cointegration approach developed by shin et al 2014 and the hatemi j 2012 asymmetric causality test the empirical evidence confirms the presence of an asymmetric relationship between the variables of interest positive and negative shocks to official gdp true gdp and the shadow economy have positive impacts on energy consumption energy consumption is positively and negatively affected by positive and negative shocks in financial development respectively a positive negative shock to capital decreases energy consumption another important finding concerns the complex causal direction between economic growth and energy consumption this study provides new insights regarding to the use of official gdp true gdp and the shadow economy as economic tools to maintain energy demand for sustainable economic development

coordinated replenishments in a multi item inventory system with compound poisson demands in many practical applications or multi item inventory systems significant economies of scale can be exploited when coordinating replenishment orders for groups of items this paper considers a continuous review multi item inventory system with compound poisson demand processes excess demands are backlogged and each replenishment requires a lead time there is a major setup cost associated with any replenishment of the family of items and a minor item dependent setup cost when including a particular item in this replenishment moreover there are holding and penalty costs we present an algorithm which searches for a simple coordinated control rule minimizing the long run average cost per unit time subject to a service level constraint per item on the fraction of demand satisfied directly from on hand inventory this algorithm is based on a heuristic decomposition procedure and a specialized policy iteration method to solve the single item subproblems generated by the decomposition procedure the model applies to multi location inventory systems with similar cost structures for coordinated deliveries

business culture and tax evasion why corruption and the unofficial economy can persist abstract this paper shows that business and tax inspection culture can create multiple equilibria in bad equilibria high cheating and corruption increases in penalties or auditing can have perverse impacts and increase cheating the source of the multiple equilibria is the externalities created by business and tax inspection cultures as tax evasion and corruption become more common they become more acceptable and their cost is lowered a third externality that between firms and inspectors is the source of the perverse effect more cheating by firms is good for bribe taking inspectors and more bribe taking inspectors are good for cheating firms

semiparametric estimation of regression models for panel data linear models with error components are widely used to analyse panel data some applications of these models require knowledge of the probability densities of the error components existing methods handle this requirement by assuming that the densities belong to known parametric families of distributions typically the normal distribution this paper shows how to carry out nonparametric estimation of the densities of the error components thereby avoiding the assumption that the densities belong to known parametric families the nonparametric estimators are applied to an earnings model using data from the current population survey the model s transitory error component is not normally distributed use of the nonparametric density estimators yields estimates of the probability that individuals with low earnings will become high earners in the future that are much lower than the estimates obtained under the assumption of normally distributed error components

treatment effects with unobserved heterogeneity a set identification approach we propose the sharp identifiable bounds of the potential outcome distributions using panel data we allow for the possibility that statistical randomization of treatment assignments is not achieved until unobserved heterogeneity is properly controlled for we use certain stationarity assumptions to obtain the sharp bounds our approach allows for dynamic treatment decisions where the current treatment decisions may depend on the past treatments or the past observed outcomes as an empirical illustration we study the effect of smoking during pregnancy on infant birthweight we find that for the group of switchers the infant birthweight of a smoking mother is first order stochastically dominated by that of a nonsmoking mother

political cleavages in a democratizing society the case of the congo formerly zaire research into the structure of political cleavages suggests that ethnicity class and urban rural divide are the main explanatory social variables of political conflict in africa this article examines the validity of this argument and suggests that the unofficial economy seems to create new lines of political polarizations as african countries democratize anova logistic regression and two stage logistic regression of survey data collected in the congo in 1991 1992 show that the unofficial economy is more likely to minimize political cleavages than other lines of social divisions that dominate the literature on african political cleavages in addition overlapping cleavages tend to polarize a more homogeneous setting and crosscutting cleavages are typical of a heterogeneous environment

introduction to the distribution of earnings and of individual output by a d roy this article summarises the lasting contribution of roy s 1950 fundamental paper roy a d 1950 the distribution of earnings and of individual output economic journal vol 60 239 pp 489 505

designing programs for heterogeneous populations the value of covariate information normative judgments embodied in the american legal system mandate that in certain respects public policy should treat all members of the population uniformly nevertheless the legal system permits many forms of disparate treatment of the population the medicare program provides health care benefits to persons age 65 and older but not to younger americans the federal welfare to work program known as tanf permits states to treat welfare recipients differentially placing some in job training and others in basic skills classes judicial sentencing guidelines variously permit or require judges to sentence convicted offenders differentially based on past convictions public high schools track students making class assignments vary with past student achievement in these and other settings where legal constraints do not preclude disparate treatment society may choose among many alternative treatment rules a program could mandate uniform treatment of the population or require that treatment vary in particular ways with observable covariates of the persons treated e g age in the case of medicare past convictions in the case of sentencing or permit agents of society e g judges welfare case managers school counselors to make their own treatment choices subject to specified constraints research on program evaluation can help to inform public policy through efforts to learn the consequences of alternative treatment rules in particular evaluation research should seek to characterize how treatment response varies across the population if we learn that all persons respond to treatment in much the same manner then the best policy may be one that treats all persons uniformly however if we learn that treatment response varies with observable covariates of the persons treated then society may be able to do better by designing programs in which treatment varies appropriately with these covariates for example society may be able to lower recidivism among criminal offenders by sentencing some offenders to prison and others to probation it may be able to increase the life cycle earnings of welfare recipients by placing some in job training and others in basic skills classes in these and many other cases the key to success is to determine which persons should receive which treatments regrettably evaluation research has had little to say about how treatment response varies with observable covariates of the persons treated a common practice especially in observational studies has been to assume that all persons respond to treatment in the same manner studies that are sensitive to possible variation in treatment response may report findings by race or gender or age but they rarely disaggregate the population more finely as a consequence policymakers seeking to design programs for heterogeneous populations have to speculate on the consequences of alternative treatment rules this short article draws on my recent research manski 1997 2000a b to argue that increased attention to observable variation in treatment response would enhance the value of evaluation research

the mixing problem in programme evaluation a common concern of evaluation studies is to learn the distribution of outcomes when a specified treatment policy or assignment rule determines the treatment received by each member of a specified population recent studies have emphasized evaluation of policies providing the same treatment to all members of the population in particular experiments with randomized treatments have this objective policies mandating homogenous treatment of the population are of interest but so are ones that permit treatment to vary across the population this paper examines the use of empirical evidence on programs with homogenous treatments to infer the outcomes that would occur if treatment were to vary across the population experimental evidence from the perry preschool project is used to illustrate the inferential problem and the main findings of the analysis

calculating can order policies for the joint replenishment problem by the compensation approach abstract in this paper we consider the stochastic joint replenishment problem we coordinate the replenishment of an inventory with several items where the fixed cost of a replenishment consists of a major order cost for each order and a minor order cost for each item participating in the order the literature has focused on two kinds of policies can order policies and periodic replenishment policies generally speaking the can order policy performs better when the major ordering cost is relatively low and the periodic replenishment policies better when the major ordering cost is relatively high we present a new method for calculating can order policies which dominates existing methods on examples where the can order policy performs better than the periodic replenishment policies the method is based on a compensation approach where an item placing an order receives a compensation from other items benefitting from the order opportunity

defining and estimating underground and informal economies the new institutional economics approach abstract a taxonomy of underground economies is elaborated based on the new institutional approach to economic development members of formal sectors confront different sets of transformation and transaction costs than do members of informal sectors and these differences are regarded as crucial to the development process the paper distinguishes illegal unreported unrecorded and informal economies and examines the conceptual and empirical linkages among them alternative micro and macro methodologies for measuring underground activities are reviewed and evaluated including census and survey procedures discrepancy and monetary methods when you cannot measure your knowledge is meager and unsatisfactory lord kelvin inscription at harper library university of chicago

evaluating the employment impact of a mandatory job search program this paper exploits area based piloting and age related eligibility rules to identify treatment effects of a labor market program the new deal for young people in the u k a central focus is on substitution displacement effects and on equilibrium wage effects the program includes extensive job assistance and wage subsidies to employers we find that the impact of the program significantly raised transitions to employment by about 5 percentage points the impact is robust to a wide variety of nonexperimental estimators however we present some evidence that this effect may not be as large in the longer run jel j18 j23 j38

on the distribution of exchange rate regime treatment effects on international trade abstract this paper provides evidence of heterogeneous treatment effects on trade for six different types of exchange rate regime transitions utilizing data on 218 643 country pair year observations all together previous research mainly focused on the currency union effect on trade and widely assumed that country pairs with identical observable characteristics receive the same effect we test the hypothesis of a homogeneous treatment effect empirically and find substantive statistical support for the presence of effect heterogeneity moreover we characterize the probability distribution of effect heterogeneity among observationally equivalent country pairs by way of a random coefficients model we estimate selected features of the empirical distributions of the treatment effects for each of the six different types of exchange rate regime transitions under two different sets of assumptions about the probability distribution of effect heterogeneity our findings suggest that the immediate effects on trade from switching to an exchange rate regime different from the one in the outset have wide waists and exhibit large positive extreme values we estimate the probability of two countries to experience an immediate positive effect on the growth of bilateral trade due to the adoption of any new exchange rate regime tighter or not to be approximately one half

substitution and dropout bias in social experiments a study of an influential social experiment this paper considers the interpretation of evidence from social experiments when persons randomized out of a program being evaluated have good substitutes for it and when persons randomized into a program drop out to pursue better alternatives using data from an experimental evaluation of a classroom training program we document the empirical importance of control group substitution and treatment group dropping out evidence that one program is ineffective relative to close substitutes is not evidence that the type of service provided by all of the programs is ineffective although that is the way experimental evidence is often interpreted

using experiments to evaluate performance standards what do welfare to work demonstrations reveal to welfare reformers this paper examines how experimental demonstrations can be used to inform planners about the efficacy of social programs in light of a performance standard the problem is illustrated by considering the situation faced by state governments attempting to design programs to meet the new federal welfare to work standards data from experimental evaluations alone allow only limited inferences about the labor market outcomes of welfare recipients combined with prior information on the selection process however these data are informative suggesting either that the long run federal requirements cannot be met or that these standards will only be met under special circumstances

the size and development of the shadow economy an empirical investigation from states of india abstract using the state level data from india this paper investigates the size of the hidden economy in indian states over the period 1974 75 to 1995 96 our analysis has shown that after liberalization of the indian economy in 1991 92 the growth in the size of the hidden economy has decreased on an average our results show that the growth in the size of the hidden economy is approximately 4 less in scheduled election years than in all other years we also demonstrate that the growth is significantly lower in those states where the coalition government is in power an increased growth of newspapers and the literacy rates translate to cleaner governance e g to fewer amounts of shadow economy activities in the economy