gender wage gaps reconsidered a structural approach using matched employer employee data in this paper we study the extent to which wage differentials between men and women can be explained by differences in productivity disparities in friction patterns segregation and wage discrimination for this purpose we propose an equilibrium search model that features rent splitting on the job search and two sided heterogeneity in productivity the model is estimated using german matched employer employee data overall the results reveal that female workers are less productive and more mobile than males in addition female workers have on average slightly lower bargaining power than their male counterparts

an equilibrium model of incentive contracts in the presence of information manipulation abstract this paper develops an agency model in which stock based compensation is a double edged sword inducing managers to exert productive effort but also to divert valuable firm resources to misrepresent performance we examine how the potential for manipulation affects the equilibrium level of pay for performance sensitivity and derive several new cross sectional implications that are consistent with recent empirical studies in addition we analyze the impact of recent regulatory changes contained in the sarbanes oxley act of 2002 and show how policies intended to increase firm value by reducing misrepresentation can actually reduce firm value or increase the upward bias in manipulated disclosures

limited liability and incentive contracting with ex ante action choices abstract this article examines a principal agent model of financial contracting in which a risk neutral entrepreneur agent makes an unobservable ex ante effort choice while employing the investment funds of a risk neutral investor principal the key innovation is that the investment contract is subject to statutory liability limits given these liability limits two settings are considered one in which the investor payoff function is also constrained to be monotonically nondecreasing in firm profit and another in which no such monotonic contract constraint is imposed in the former case a standard debt contract is shown to emerge and a first best effort choice is not achieved in the latter setting the optimum is characterized by a live or die payoff function and a first best effort level may or may not be realized

crime rates and local labor market opportunities in the united states 1979 1997 the labor market prospects of young unskilled men fell dramatically in the 1980s and improved in the 1990s crime rates show a reverse pattern increasing during the 1980s and falling in the 1990s because young unskilled men commit most crime this paper seeks to establish a causal relationship between the two trends previous work on the relationship between labor markets and crime focused mainly on the relationship between the unemployment rate and crime and found inconclusive results in contrast this paper examines the impact of both wages and unemployment on crime and uses instrumental variables to establish causality we conclude that both wages and unemployment are significantly related to crime but that wages played a larger role in the crime trends over the last few decades these results are robust to the inclusion of deterrence variables controls for simultaneity and controlling for individual and family characteristics

monetary policy under alternative asset market structures the case of a small open economy can the structure of asset markets change the way monetary policy should be conducted following a linear quadratic approach the present paper addresses this question in a new keynesian small open economy framework our results reveal that the configuration of asset markets significantly affects optimal monetary policy and the performance of standard policy rules in particular when comparing complete and incomplete markets the ranking of policy rules is entirely reversed and so are the policy prescriptions regarding the optimal level of exchange rate volatility

inequality and violent crime abstract we investigate the robustness and causality of the link between income inequality and violent crime across countries first we study the correlation between the gini index and homicide and robbery rates within and between countries second we examine the partial correlation by considering other crime determinants third we control for the endogeneity of inequality by isolating its exogenous impact on these crime rates fourth we control for measurement error in crime rates by modeling it as both unobserved country effects and random noise finally we examine the robustness of this partial correlation to alternative measures of inequality the panel data consist of nonoverlapping 5 year averages for 39 countries during 1965 95 for homicides and 37 countries during 1970 94 for robberies crime rates and inequality are positively correlated within countries and particularly between countries and this correlation reflects causation from inequality to crime rates even after controlling for ot

a comparison of event study methodologies using daily stock returns a simulation approach accounting research studies commonly use measures of abnormal security returns to test hypotheses about accounting information and policies alternative methods are used in these studies to detect abnormal performance and thereby examine the information content of identified events the ability of these methods to detect abnormal returns using simulation techniques is examined by brown and warner 1980 1984 morse 1984 addresses this issue analytically the analytical approach presumes that the event study data is generated by the process modeled while the simulation approach uses the security return data generated by the market simulation provides a tractable means of dealing with situations where an analytical approach may yield results suggesting direction but not magnitude or where such techniques are unusually cumbersome both limitations face us in this study brown and warner 1980 use monthly data to examine the comparative abilities of several combinations of return generating models and

using electoral cycles in police hiring to estimate the effect of police on crime comment previous empirical studies have uncovered little evidence that police reduce crime possibly due to simultaneity problems this paper uses the timing of mayoral and gubernatorial elections as an instrumental variable to identify a causal effect of police on crime increases in the size of police forces are shown to be disproportionately concentrated in mayoral and gubernatorial election years increases in police are shown to substantially reduce violent crime but have a smaller impact on property crime the null hypothesis that the marginal social benefit of reduced crime equals the costs of hiring additional police cannot be rejected

price stability in open economies this paper studies the conditions under which price stability is the optimal policy in a two country open economy model with imperfect competition and price stickiness special conditions on the levels of country specific distortionary taxation and the intratemporal and intertemporal elasticities of substitution need to be satisfied these restrictions apply to both cooperative and non cooperative settings most importantly we show that cooperative and non cooperative solutions do not coincide despite market completeness and producer currency pricing in this framework our analysis suggests a role for international policy coordination

search bargaining and employer discrimination this article analyzes becker s 1957 1971 theory of employer discrimination within a search and wage bargaining setting discriminatory firms pay workers who are discriminated against less and apply stricter hiring criteria to these workers the highest profits are realized by firms with a positive discrimination coefficient moreover once ownership and management are separated both highest profits and highest utility can be realized by firms with a positive discrimination coefficient thus market forces like entry or takeovers do not ensure that wage differentials due to employer discrimination disappear

the dynamic structure of optimal debt contracts abstract in a two period model of costly state verification the optimal contract is characterized and shown to exist the optimal contract is interpreted as a bond contract the model extends the result of one period models that the verification region must be a left tail interval to a multi period setting conditions are identified for the optimal contract to exhibit features such as call prepayment option coupon payment or sinking fund the optimality of certain bond covenants such as refinancing covenants and dividends covenants is also studied

youth unemployment and crime in the english regions and wales this paper investigates the relationship between unemployment and crime in england and wales taking account of both age and gender in the unemployment measures the study is for 1985 95 and is disaggregated to the regional level we allow for different types of crime and the deterrence effects of detection and punishment we also consider the relationship between ethnicity and crime in the light of the contentious public debate on this issue our results indicate that there is a systematic positive relationship between burglary rates and male unemployment regardless of age however we find that while youth unemployment is consistently and positively related to criminal damage and robbery rates there is no systematic evidence of a relationship between adult male unemployment and these specific crimes instead our evidence supports a positive link between adult unemployment and theft we find no compelling evidence of a link between ethnicity and crime

unemployment and crime is there a connection a panel of swedish counties over the years 1988 1999 is used to study the effects of unemployment on property crime rates the period under study is characterized by turbulence in the labor market the variation in unemployment rates was unprecedented in the latter part of the century hence the data provide a unique opportunity to examine unemployment effects according to the theory of economics of crime increased unemployment rates lead to higher property crime rates a fixed effects model is estimated to investigate this hypothesis the model includes time and county specific effects and a number of economic and socio demographic variables to control for unobservables and covariates the results show that unemployment had a positive and significant effect on some property crimes burglary car theft and bike theft

incarceration length employment and earnings this paper estimates effects of increases in incarceration length on employment and earnings prospects of individuals after their release from prison i utilize a variety of research designs including controlling for observable factors and using instrumental variables for incarceration length based on randomly assigned judges with different sentencing propensities the results show no consistent evidence of adverse labor market consequences of longer incarceration length using any of the analytical methods in either the state system in florida or the federal system in california

optimal monetary policy in open economies revisited abstract this paper revisits optimal monetary policy in open economies in particular focusing on the noncooperative policy game under local currency pricing in a two country dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model we first derive the quadratic loss functions which noncooperative policy makers aim to minimize then we show that noncooperative policy makers face extra trade offs regarding stabilizing real marginal costs induced by deviations from the law of one price under local currency pricing and that optimal monetary policy seeks to stabilize cpi inflation rates and more so under noncooperation than it does under cooperation as a result of the increased number of stabilizing objectives welfare gains from cooperation emerge even when two countries face only technology shocks still gains from cooperation are not large implying that frictions other than nominal rigidities are necessary to strongly recommend cooperation as an important policy framework to increase global welfare

monitoring the monitor an incentive structure for a financial intermediary this paper studies financial intermediation i e delegated monitoring in a costly state verification model there are a finite number of agents thus the intermediary cannot fully diversify its portfolio and is subject to default risk the role of the intermediary is to satisfy simultaneously the different portfolio preferences of borrowers and lenders two questions arise when a delegated monitor is subject to non trivial default risk a what arrangement solves the problem of monitoring the monitor b what intermediary portfolio accomplishes optimal asset transformation between borrowers and lenders unlike previous delegated monitoring studies the law of large numbers is not sufficient to obtain our results instead we appeal to a stronger results the large deviation principle which establishes that convergence in the law of large numbers is exponential

inequality and crime this paper considers the relationship between inequality and crime using data from urban counties the behavior of property and violent crime are quite different inequality has no effect on property crime but a strong and robust impact on violent crime with an elasticity above 0 5 by contrast poverty and police activity have significant effects on property crime but little on violent crime property crime is well explained by the economic theory of crime while violent crime is better explained by strain and social disorganization theories

international financial integration and national price levels the role of the exchange rate regime abstract this paper proposes a new perspective on systematic deviations from purchasing power parity panel evidence for oecd countries shows that international financial integration increases the national price level under managed exchange rate regimes and lowers the price level under floating exchange rates an open economy sticky price model reproduces these findings by relating them to the possibility of insurance against consumption losses in internationally integrated financial markets the utilization of insurance is reflected by relative price adjustments which manifest themselves in changes of the national price level the direction of relative price adjustments however depends on the extent to which insurance is used under different exchange rate regimes under a peg financial integration raises the national price level under a float however financial integration lowers the national price level

are emily and greg more employable than lakisha and jamal a field experiment on labor market discrimination we study race in the labor market by sending fictitious resumes to help wanted ads in boston and chicago newspapers to manipulate perceived race resumes are randomly assigned african american or white sounding names white names receive 50 percent more callbacks for interviews callbacks are also more responsive to resume quality for white names than for african american ones the racial gap is uniform across occupation industry and employer size we also find little evidence that employers are inferring social class from the names differential treatment by race still appears to still be prominent in the u s labor market jel j71 j64

on the political economy of income redistribution and crime this article analyzes a general equilibrium model in which agents choose to specialize in either legitimate or criminal activities expenditures on police to apprehend criminals as well as income redistribution are determined endogenously through majority voting we investigate how crime redistribution and police expenditures depend on characteristics of the underlying distribution of income earning abilities and on the apprehension technology our model accounts for the positive correlation between inequality and crime the positive correlation between expenditures on police and redistribution and the lack of correlation between crime and redistribution observed in u s data

examining the link between crime and unemployment a time series analysis for canada we use national and regional canadian data to analyse the relationship between economic activity as reflected by the unemployment rate and crime rates given potential aggregation bias we disaggregate the crime data and look at the relationship between six different types of crimes rates and unemployment rate we also disaggregate the data by region we employ an error correction model in our analysis to test for short run and long run dynamics we find no evidence of long run relationship between crime and unemployment when we look at both disaggregation by type of crime and disaggregation by region lack of evidence of a long run relationship indicates we have no evidence of the motivation hypothesis for selected types of property crimes we find some evidence of a significant negative short run relationship between crime and unemployment lending support to the opportunity hypothesis inclusion of control variables in the panel analysis does not alter the findings qualitatively or quantitatively

costly distortion of information in agency problems anecdotal evidence suggests that agents often spend resources distorting information transmitted to principals we present a model where costly information distortion emerges as equilibrium behavior the information structure we focus on is intermediate between and encompasses the cases of private information and public information the agent can falsify the privately observed state at some cost although the principal can design contracts that induce no falsification these may involve excessive iinformation rents falsification can be beneficial in spite of the waste of resources involved because it helps reduce information rents we examine how optimal contract and equilibrium payoffs change as the information structure ranges from private to public information

financial intermediation and delegated monitoring this paper develops a theory of financial intermediation based on minimizing the cost of monitoring information which is useful for resolving incentive problems between borrowers and lenders it presents a characterization of the costs of providing incentives for delegated monitoring by a financial intermediary diversification within an intermediary serves to reduce these costs even in a risk neutral economy the paper presents some more general analysis of the effect of diversification on resolving incentive problems in the environment assumed in the model debt contracts with costly bankruptcy are shown to be optimal the analysis has implications for the portfolio structure and capital structure of intermediaries

identifying the effect of unemployment on crime abstract in this paper we analyze the relationship between unemployment and crime using u s state data we estimate the effect of unemployment on the rates of seven felony offenses we control extensively for state level demographic and economic factors and estimate specifications that include state specific time trends state effects and year effects in addition we use prime defense contracts and a state specific measure of exposure to oil shocks as instruments for unemployment rates we find significantly positive effects of unemployment on property crime rates that are stable across model specifications our estimates suggest that a substantial portion of the decline in property crime rates during the 1990s is attributable to the decline in the unemployment rate the evidence for violent crime is considerably weaker however a closer analysis of the violent crime of rape yields some evidence that the employment prospects of males are weakly related to state rape rates

optimal monetary policy and the timing of asset trade in open economies this paper analyses the timing of asset trade and its implications for monetary policy and welfare in open economies optimal policy is shown to differ significantly depending on whether asset trade takes place before or after policy decisions are made 2006 elsevier b v all rights reserved

do inequality unemployment and deterrence affect crime over the long run abstractdo inequality unemployment and deterrence affect crime over the long run regional studies this paper investigates the long run relationship between crime inequality unemployment and deterrence using us state level data from 1978 to 2013 the novelty is to use non stationary panels with a factor structure the results show that 1 a crime theoretical model fits the long run relationship well 2 income inequality and unemployment have a positive impact on crime whereas that of deterrence is negative 3 the effect of income inequality on crime is larger when inequality is measured on a wider population proportion and 4 property crime is generally highly sensitive to the deterrence effect of police

labor market discrimination against men with disabilities in the year of the ada the americans with disabilities act ada provides civil rights protections to persons with disabilities but the debate that preceded passage of the act was not based on empirical estimates that could be used to measure its performance this article estimates the extent of wage discrimination against men with disabilities in 1990 providing a reference that can be used to evaluate the impact of the ada the results show large productivity standardized wage differentials between disabled and nondisabled men that are weakly correlated with the strength of prejudice against different impairments physical limitations explain part but not all of the wage differentials the results also show that low employment rates are a more serious problem than wage discrimination for workers with disabilities provide civil rights protections to persons with disabilities the act s supporters promised that it would increase the employment and wages of persons with disabilities and reduce their dependency on public programs the promises were not based on empirical estimates of discrimination and there is no empirical base against which to compare the promises to the performance of the ada this article estimates the extent of wage discrimination against men with disabilities in 1990 providing a reference that can be used to evaluate the impact of the act the ada does not grant a right to employment to all persons with disabilities it requires that persons with disabilities be able to perform the jobs they seek subject to reasonable accommodations by employers this article therefore considers men who are able to work even though their health limits the amount or kind of work they can perform the ada s provisions assume that low wages and low employment rates for persons with disabilities are the result of discrimination caused by prejudice prejudice against persons with disabilities is well documented but so are the limiting effects of physical impairments on workplace productivity hahn 1987 margolis and shapiro 1987 clogston 1990 the core of the debate concerning the value of the ada is whether the poor labor market outcomes of persons with disabilities are the result of discrimination or the limiting effects of health con

the effect of arrests on the employment and earnings of young men many young men commit crime and many are arrested i estimate the effect of arrests on the employment and earnings of arrestees using a large longitudinal data set constructed by merging police records with ui earnings data i find that the effects of arrests are moderate in magnitude and rather short lived

reasonable doubt and the optimal magnitude of fines should the penalty fit the crime models of the enforcement compliance relationship have assumed that both the probability and magnitude of fines are independent choice variables of policy makers these models indicate that it may be optimal to monitor with lowfrequency but to inflict uniformly maximal penalties for all infractions detected this article shows that if the judicial system is built on the reasonable doubt test then the penalty and the probability of conviction are not independent in particular as the penalty increases the probability of conviction falls as a result uniformly maximal penalties may actually encourage crime rather than deter it this article shows that optimal fines should rise with the severity of the infraction that is the penalty should fit the crime models of the enforcement compliance relationship generally treat both the probability and magnitude of fines as independent choice variables of the government this approach has led becker 1968 and others to conclude that it is optimal to set uniformly maximal penalties for all crimes and to set the probability of conviction at the minimum level necessary to enforce compliance with the law while this normative prescription is natural and intuitive there still remains a larger positive question of why in most nations of the world penalties are not uniformly high but rather rise with the severity of the crime one possible resolution of the positive and normative questions may lie in the fact that penalties and probabilities of conviction are not generally independent convictions are typically determined by judges or jurors who are instructed to convict only if the evidence convinces them beyond a reasonable doubt that the accused is guilty psychologists however have found that a juror s willingness to convict may be influenced by more than just the evidence jurors are very sensitive to the potential penalties that defendants may pay

information externalities in the labour market and the duration of unemployment a matching model is analysed in which firms imperfectly test workers prior to hiring them if some firms hire only workers who pass the test there is an informational externality unemployment duration is a signal of productivity in equilibrium if it is profitable for a firm to test it is also profitable for it to condition its hiring decision on duration hiring those whose duration is less than a critical value this testing equilibrium is inefficient with too much testing and too low a critical duration value sensitivity analysis of the latter suggests explanations for the dependence of re employment probabilities on duration and the instability of the u v curve

managers compensation and misreporting a costly state verification approach i introduction the use of stock options in compensation packages as a way of providing the firm management with the right incentives has been quite popular in the 1990s the favor encountered by options started however to decrease in the past few years the decline in the use of option grants in top executives compensation packages occurred mainly as a reaction to the recent accounting scandals which has prompted the design of alternative stock based compensation schemes e g restricted stock grants or indexed options as reported by hall and murphy 2003 the grant date value of options assigned to all employees of an average standard poor s 500 firm measured in millions of 2002 constant us increased from 22 in 1992 to 238 in 2000 and subsequently decreased to 141 in 2002 although percentages varied from year to year the ceos share of the total grant has fallen from about 7 in the mid 1990s to less than 5 in 2000 2002 1 the decline in the use of options for top management is widely confirmed according to a pearl meyer partners study for the new york times stock option grants that accounted for 52 of the pay of the average ceo of a major company in 2002 were down to an estimated 35 in 2003 a recent watson wyatt report states that the value of new stock option awards granted to ceos at large companies fell by nearly 60 between 2001 and 2003 with the average value of new stock option grants declining from us 10 2 million in 2001 to us 4 2 million in 2003 the decline in options has been softened by the sharp increase in restricted stock grants and other long term incentive award values 2 in this paper we aim to reevaluate the role of stock options as an ingredient of top management compensation packages able to align the interests of managers and shareholders avoiding misreporting of the firm value at the same time 3 in a costly state verification csv model with moral hazard we show that incentive compatible contracts inducing both incentive alignment and truthful revelation of the firm value must entail a strictly convex compensation schedule that is a fixed payment wage when the firm value is sufficiently low and a state contingent claim increasing in the firm value otherwise a simple and commonly observed way to achieve a convex compensation scheme is to design a remuneration including a fixed wage and a call option on the firm equity as we will show such remuneration allows on the one hand to preserve top management incentives providing for a compensation increasing in equity value and on the other hand to reduce the verification costs that must be incurred to avoid misreporting as verification is not needed in the region where the remuneration is fixed 4 options are by no means the only way to achieve a convex compensation however many other schemes having otherwise desirable properties over options do not have the convex shape discussed above for instance combining a fixed wage with restricted stock grants defines a compensation linearly increasing in the firm s equity value which does not allow to reduce misreporting verification costs that always have to be sustained in this case using an incentive compatible compensation scheme fixed wage plus call options we characterize the contract offered by the firm under the assumption of a deterministic and perfect audit technology showing that for any given value of the option package the manager should receive the largest possible number of options at the highest strike price allowing shareholders to reduce the expected verification cost furthermore the strike price of the option turns out to be determined by incentive compatibility i e the option value must be such that the manager is induced to exert the desired level of effort while the magnitude of the fixed wage is defined by individual rationality there are three main policy implications of our analysis

foreign money shocks and the welfare performance of alternative monetary policy regimes the welfare properties of monetary policy regimes for a country subject to foreign money shocks are examined in a two country sticky price model money targeting is found to be welfare superior to a fixed exchange rate when the expenditure switching effect of exchange rate changes is relatively weak but a fixed rate is superior when the expenditure switching effect is strong however price targeting is superior to both these regimes for all values of the expenditure switching effect a welfare maximising monetary rule yields lower output and exchange rate volatility than price targeting for a wide range of parameter values

do field experiments on labor and housing markets overstate discrimination a re examination of the evidence since 2000 more than 80 field experiments across 23 countries consider the traditional dimensions of discrimination in labor and housing markets such as discrimination based on race these studies

optimal exercise prices for executive stock options although exercise prices for executive stock options can be set either below or above the grant date market price in practice virtually all options are granted at the money we offer an economic rationale for this apparent puzzle by showing that pay to performance incentives for risk averse undiversified executives are typically maximized by setting exercise prices at or near the grant date market price we provide an operationally useful alternative to black scholes 1973 for the purpose of both valuing executive stock options and measuring the incentives created by options our framework has implications not only for exercise price policies but also for indexed options option repricings exchanges of cash for stock based compensation and the design of bonus plans

an investigation into sexual orientation discrimination as an explanation for wage differences this study explores the effects of sexual orientation on earnings it is found that ceteris paribus men living with male partners tend to earn less than other men and women living with female partners tend to earn more than other women these earnings differentials tend to vary by region they also vary by education and occupation for men and with the presence of minor children for women in addition the age earnings profiles of women living with female partners tend to be higher flatter and less concave than those of other women

crime inequality and unemployment in england and wales a model of crime is developed based on principles from the existing literature with some original insight the implications of the model are that income inequality and unemployment are important explanatory variables for crimes motivated by economic gain but do not offer much explanatory power for other types of crime panel data of uk regions over the years from 2002 to 2007 are then used to test these predictions the empirical results strongly support the hypothesis that crime is an economic phenomenon

monetary policy in an era of global supply chains abstract we study the implications of global supply chains for the design of monetary policy using a small open economy new keynesian model with multiple stages of production within the family of simple monetary policy rules with commitment a rule that targets separate producer price inflation at different production stages in addition to output gap and real exchange rate is found to deliver a higher welfare level than alternative policy rules as an economy becomes more open measured by export share the optimal weight on the upstream inflation rises relative to that on the final stage inflation if we have to choose among aggregate price indicators targeting ppi inflation yields a smaller welfare loss than targeting cpi inflation alone as the production chain becomes longer the optimal weight on ppi inflation in the policy rule that targets both ppi and cpi inflation will also rise a trade cost shock such as a rise in the import tariff can alter the optimal weights on different inflation variables

the phillips curve as a long run phenomenon in a macroeconomic model with complex dynamics abstract in this paper we derive a phillips curve as the image of a chaotic attractor of the state variables of a non linear dynamical system describing the evolution of an economy this has two important consequences the phillips curve in our model is a true long run phenomenon but to exploit the apparent unemployment inflation trade off may require unrealistically complex policy measures the model is based on an overlapping generations non t tonnement approach involving temporary equilibria with stochastic rationing in each period and price adjustment between successive periods in this way we are able to obtain complex sequences of consistent allocations allowing for recurrent unemployment and inflation

ban the box criminal records and racial discrimination a field experiment ban the box btb policies restrict employers from asking about applicants criminal histories on job applications and are often presented as a means of reducing unemployment among black men who disproportionately have criminal records however withholding information about criminal records could risk encouraging racial discrimination employers may make assumptions about criminality based on the applicant s race to investigate btb s effects we sent approximately 15 000 online job applications on behalf of fictitious young male applicants to employers in new jersey and new york city before and after the adoption of btb policies these applications varied whether the applicant had a distinctly black or distinctly white name and the felony conviction status of the applicant we confirm that criminal records are a major barrier to employment employers that asked about criminal records were 63 more likely to call applicants with no record however our results support the concern that btb policies encourage racial discrimination the black white gap in callbacks grew dramatically at companies that removed the box after the policy went into effect before btb white applicants to employers with the box received 7 more callbacks than similar black applicants but btb increased this gap to 43 we believe that the best interpretation of these results is that employers are relying on exaggerated impressions of real world racial differences in felony conviction rates

field experiments of discrimination in the market place controlled experiments using matched pairs of bogus transactors to test for discrimination in the marketplace have been conducted for over 30 years and have extended across 10 countries significant persistent and pervasive levels of discrimination have been found against non whites and women in labour housing and product markets rates of employment discrimination against non whites in excess of 25 have been measured in australia europe and north america a small number of experiments have also investigated employment discrimination against the disabled in britain and the netherlands and against older applicants in the united states

does income inequality lead to more crime a comparison of cross sectional and time series analyses of united states counties abstract this paper estimates the effect of income inequality on crime in united states counties using both cross sectional and first differenced approaches income inequality is positively associated with crime rates in the cross section analysis but negatively associated with crime rates in the time series analysis

an empirical analysis of homosexual heterosexual male earnings differentials unmarried and unequal using data from the 1990 u s census pums 5 the authors present the first large scale study of wage differentials between heterosexual and homosexual men the homosexual sample consisting of gay men in unmarried partnered relationships are estimated to have earned 15 6 less than similarly qualified married heterosexual men and 2 4 less than similarly qualified unmarried partnered heterosexual men the authors interpret these two figures as upper and lower bound estimates of the differential between homosexual and heterosexual men the dual comparison enables the authors to disentangle the penalty to being unmarried from other determinants of the wage differential estimated at 14 1 this variable appears to be the main source of the wage gap

moral hazard renegotiation and debt abstract renegotiation of financial contracts is frequently observed in practice we show how contract renegotiation based on unverifiable information improves efficiency when both ex ante private action and ex post costly state verification moral hazard are present simultaneously we find that the final contract is always debt since renegotiation allows the parties to handle sequentially the two information problems

optimal contracts under costly state falsification we examine an exchange economy with two agents one risk neutral with a certain endowment and a second risk averse with a random endowment the realization of the endowment is public but can be falsified by the second agent at a cost for a broad class of falsification cost functions the optimal no falsification contract is noncontingent on a left hand interval and strictly increasing with a slope strictly less than one on a right hand interval under a mild further restriction optimal no falsification contracts are in addition piece wise linear optimal contracts may in general require falsifying the state but for a set of the highest endowment realizations there is no falsification we find simple conditions under which the optimal contract is a no falsification contract the model has applications that include financial insurance and employment contracts and tax policy

compensation incentives and the duality of risk aversion and riskiness the common folklore that giving options to agents will make them more willing to take risks is false in fact no incentive schedule will make all expected utility maximizers more or less risk averse this paper finds simple intuitive necessary and sufficient conditions under which incentive schedules make agents more or less risk averse the paper uses these to examine the incentive effects of some common structures such as puts and calls and it briefly explores the duality between a fee schedule that makes an agent more or less risk averse and gambles that increase or decrease risk with the growing interest in executive compensation and agency problems

optimal contracts when enforcement is a decision variable this paper analyzes choice theoretic costly enforcement in an intertemporal contracting model with a differentially informed investor and entrepreneur an intertemporal contract is modeled as a mechanism in which there is limited commitment to payment and enforcement decisions the goal of the analysis is to characterize the effect of choice theoretic costly enforcement on the structure of optimal contracts the paper shows that simple debt is the optimal contract when commitment is limited and costly enforcement is a decision variable theorem 1 in contrast stochastic contracts are optimal when agents can commit to the ex ante optimal decisions theorem 2 the paper also shows that the costly state verification model can be viewed as a reduced form of an enforcement model in which agents choose payments and strategies as part of a perfect bayesian nash equilibrium

is there less discrimination in occupations where recruitment is difficult the authors empirically test the cross sectional relationship between hiring discrimination and labor market tightness at the level of the occupation to this end they conduct a correspondence tes

is there a link between executive equity incentives and accounting fraud we compare executive equity incentives of firms accused of accounting fraud by the securities and exchange commission sec during the period 1996 2003 with two samples of firms not accused of fraud we measure equity incentives in a variety of ways and employ a battery of empirical tests we find no consistent evidence that executive equity incentives are associated with fraud these results stand in contrast to assertions by policy makers that incentives from stock based compensation and the resulting equity holdings increase the likelihood of accounting fraud

sexual orientation and labour relations new evidence from athens greece we use data from the 2008 2009 athens area study aas to provide the first evidence on the relationship between men s sexual orientation and wages in the greek capital athens gay and bisexual men are found to receive significantly lower monthly wages than heterosexual male workers after accounting for demographic and occupational characteristics the estimations reveal that educated gay and bisexual workers face lower wage differentials than less educated gay and bisexual workers which is consistent with the statistical theory of discrimination however wage gaps are significant at all educational attainment levels suggesting that these workers face strong prejudices in the athenian labour market the same pattern holds also across all occupations and sectors furthermore to better understand the determinants of the wage gaps we compare gay bisexual men with both married and unmarried heterosexual men by making these comparisons we are able to disentangle the penalty associated with being unmarr

experimental research on labor market discrimination understanding whether labor market discrimination explains inferior labor market outcomes for many groups has drawn the attention of labor economists for decades at least since the publication of gary becker s the economics of discrimination in 1957 the decades of research on discrimination in labor markets began with a regression based decomposition approach asking whether raw wage or earnings differences between groups which might constitute prima facie evidence of discrimination were in fact attributable to other productivity related factors subsequent research responding in large part to limitations of the regression based approach moved on to other approaches such as using firm level data to estimate both marginal productivity and wage differentials in recent years however there has been substantial growth in experimental research on labor market discrimination although the earliest experiments were done decades ago some experimental research on labor market discrimination takes place in the lab but far more of it is done in the field which makes this particular area of experimental research unique relative to the explosion of experimental economic research more generally this paper surveys the full range of experimental literature on labor market discrimination places it in the context of the broader research literature on labor market discrimination discusses the experimental literature from many different perspectives empirical theoretical and policy and reviews both what this literature has taught us thus far and what remains to be done

optimal strike prices of stock options for effort averse executives abstract this paper evaluates the common practice of setting the strike prices of executive option plans at the money hall and murphy hall brian murphy kevin j 2000 optimal exercise prices for executive stock options american economic review 90 2 209 214 claim this practice to be optimal since it maximizes the sensitivity of compensation to firm performance however they do not incorporate effort and the possibility that managers are effort averse into their model we revisit this question while explicitly introducing these factors and allowing the reward package to include fixed wages options and stock grants we simulate the manager s effort choice and compensation as well as the value of shareholders equity under alternative compensation schemes and identify schemes that are optimal our simulations indicate that when abstracting from tax considerations it is optimal to award managers with options that will most likely be highly valuable i e substantially in the money on their expiration date prior to 2006 the tax code and financial reporting standards provided incentives to award options that are closer to the money when issued than the options that were optimal in the absence of these considerations recent tax and reporting changes voided these incentives and thus we predict that these changes will induce firms to issue options with lower strike prices than those that were issued prior to 2006

transmission of nominal exchange rate changes to export prices and trade flows and implications for exchange rate policy we discuss how the welfare ranking of fixed and flexible exchange rate regimes in a new open economy macroeconomics model depends on the interplay between the degree of exchange rate pass through and the elasticity of substitution between home and foreign goods we identify combinations of these two parameters for which flexible and fixed exchange rates are superior with respect to welfare as measured by a representative household s utility level we estimate the two parameters for six non emu european countries czech republic hungary poland slovakia sweden and the uk using a heterogeneous dynamic panel approach

samurai accountant a theory of auditing and plunder a risk neutral principal wishes to exact a payment from a risk neutral agent whose wealth he does not know but may verify through a costly auditing procedure we characterize efficient schemes for the principal when he is allowed to choose schedules for preaudit and postaudit payments and audit probabilities subject to the constraint that only monetary incentives can be used and that the principal may never make a net payment to the agent the main results are that efficient schemes involve preaudit payments which are increasing in the agent s wealth audit probabilities are decreasing in the agent s wealth and also satisfy certain constraints as equalities in general such schemes involve stochastic auditing and rebates after an audit in this paper we analyse the problem of a principal extracting wealth from an agent who is reluctant to part with it and is also better informed than the principal as to the amount he owns we assume that the principal has a costly means of discovering the agent s

labour market discrimination against former juvenile delinquents evidence from a field experiment in view of policy action to integrate ex offenders into society it is important to identify the underlying mechanisms of the negative relationship between criminal record on the one hand and later employment and earnings on the other hand in this study we identify hiring discrimination against former juvenile delinquents in a direct way to this end we conduct a field experiment in the belgian labour market we find that labour market discrimination is indeed a major barrier in the transition to work for former juvenile delinquents labour market entrants disclosing a history of juvenile delinquency get about 22 less callback compared to their counterparts without a criminal record this discrimination is heterogeneous by the occupation for which one applies