contingent democrats industrialists labor and democratization in late developing countries many classic works of political economy have identified capital and labor as the champions of democratization during the first wave of transition by contrast this article argues for the contingent nature of capital and labor s support for democracy especially in the context of late development the article offers a theory of democratic contingency proposing that a few variables namely state dependence aristocratic privilege and social fear account for much of the variation found in class support for democratization both across and within cases conditions associated with late development make capital and labor especially prone to diffidence about democratization but such diffidence is subject to change especially under the impact of international economic integration poverty reducing social welfare policies and economic growth that is widely shared case material from korea indonesia mexico zambia brazil tunisia and other countries is offered as evidence

commutes neighborhood effects and earnings an analysis of racial discrimination and compensating differentials abstract recent tester studies indicate that minority workers face restricted residential and employment opportunities because of racial discrimination in housing and labor markets these restrictions may create a spatial mismatch between where urban minorities reside and where metropolitan area jobs are located resulting in reduced proximity of minority workers to jobs prior studies of racial discrimination and urban spatial mismatch however have paid little attention to the possibility that differences in employment commutes may be partially offset by compensating variations in neighborhood amenities quality adjusted house prices and earnings such effects could help to mitigate the impact of discrimination on minority workers using a unique subset of the 1985 and 1989 american housing surveys we estimate a fixed effects commute time model that controls for quality adjusted house prices neighborhood amenities and earnings results indicate that although blacks have longer commutes than comparably skilled white and asian workers roughly one third of the estimated difference is offset by neighborhood amenity and housing price differentials however even after controlling for neighborhood fixed effects and earnings educated black workers have significantly longer commutes than comparably skilled asian and white workers additional findings indicate that regardless of race household mobility is an important mechanism through which the market attains a spatial equilibrium providing further support for arguments that restricted proximity to residential opportunities and jobs reduces the economic welfare of minority households

government old age support and labor supply evidence from the old age assistance program many major government programs transfer resources to older people and implicitly or explicitly tax their labor in this paper we shed new light on the labor supply and welfare effects of such programs by investigating the old age assistance program oaa a means tested and state administered pension program created by the social security act of 1935 using newly available census data on the entire us population in 1940 we exploit the large differences in oaa programs across states to estimate the labor supply effects of oaa our estimates imply that oaa reduced the labor force participation rate among men aged 65 74 by 5 8 percentage points nearly half of its 1930 40 decline however both reduced form evidence and an estimated structural model of labor supply imply that the welfare cost to recipients of the high tax rates implicit in oaa s earnings test were small the evidence also suggests that social security could account for at least half of the large decline in late life work from 1940 to 1960

nonparametric structural estimation of labor supply in the presence of censoring this paper extends the nonparametric structural method to estimate labor supply developed by blomquist and newey 2002 to handle cases in which there are individuals who do not work the method is then applied to married women in sweden from 1973 to 1999 i find an uncompensated wage elasticity of 0 98 and an income elasticity of 0 10 with the participation margin accounting for one third of the wage elasticity and two thirds of the income elasticity the elasticities vary however a lot over time due to differences in tax systems and demographics i also find results consistent with tax rates being around the net government revenue maximizing rates

the era of electoral authoritarianism in recent years scholarly attention has shifted from the study of democratization to the phenomenon of electoral authoritarianism in these regimes regular elections are held for national legislatures and chief executives yet they fail to live up to democratic standards of freedom and fairness a range of new research has investigated these regimes and especially the capacity of elections to either dislodge or reinvigorate authoritarian incumbents this article reviews some of the current work on electoral authoritarianism and attempts to find ways to achieve synthesis and better theoretical development it notes the need for greater conceptual consensus attention to context and better evaluation of what electoral competiveness means under authoritarian conditions it argues that the next stage for research should be smaller and contextual comparison that can allow for greater attention to concepts while allowing for strong midrange theory

the link between pensions and retirement timing lessons from california teachers abstract i exploit a major unanticipated reform of the california teachers pension to provide quasi experimental evidence on the link between pension features and retirement timing using two large administrative data sets i conduct a reduced form analysis that leverages the nonlinearities in the return to work generated by the pension features and the reform induced shifts of these nonlinearities for identification the implied estimates of the elasticity of lifetime labor supply with respect to the return to work are centered around 0 04 in the medium run and are less than 0 1 in the long run

beyond the racial census the political salience of ethnolinguistic cleavages in south africa careful attention to social demographics can be valuable in understanding how patterns of interethnic competition vary between countries but social demographics can also vary across different levels of social aggregation within the same polity it may be improper to draw conclusions about the political importance of a particular cleavage based on data from only one level of social aggregation in south africa race is considered to be the primary cleavage around which political competition is organized intraracial ethnolinguistic cleavages are often dismissed as unimportant especially at the national level by focusing the analysis on the local level this article demonstrates that ethnolinguistic identities are in fact broadly salient in south africa these subracial identities appear to influence aggregate political outcomes and individual vote choices the article thereby offers substantive lessons for students of south african politics and methodological lessons for students of ethnic politics more

a new method of estimating risk aversion i show existing evidence on labor supply behavior places an upper bound on risk aversion in the expected utility model i derive a formula for the coefficient of relative risk aversion in terms of the ratio of the income elasticity of labor supply to wage elasticity and degree of complementarity between consumption and labor i bound the degree of complementarity using data on consumption choices when labor supply varies across states using labor supply elasticity estimates i find a mean estimate of 1 then show generating 2 requires that wage increases cause sharper labor supply reductions jel d81 j22

labor supply deadweight loss and tax reform act of 1986 a nonparametric evaluation using panel data abstract tax reform act of 1986 tra 1986 has provided an invaluable source of variation in tax rates to study the effects of tax reforms on labor supply in the us most existing studies exploiting variation generated by tra 1986 have used cross sectional variation in tax rates or assumed a linear labor supply function or have not couched their analysis in a nonlinear budget set framework this paper uses the drastic variation in the budget set induced by tra 1986 as a source of identification and combines two novel approaches to estimate behavioral effects of tax reforms i first use nonparametric estimation methods with nonlinear budget sets blomquist soren newey w 2002 nonparametric estimation with nonlinear budget sets econometrica 70 6 2455 2480 to estimate a labor supply function using waves of psid just before and after tra 1986 nonparametric method developed in hausman and newey hausman j whitney newey 1995 nonparametric measurement of exact consumer s surplus and deadweight loss econometrica 63 1145 76 is then applied to estimate the deadweight loss from tra 1986 the nonparametric estimate of the compensated wage elasticity is 0 22 i find that tra 1986 had a small but positive effect on labor supply of men of about 2 at the sample mean tra 1986 was associated with robust reduction in deadweight loss from the pre tra 1986 level and this reduction is positively correlated with income and wages

what mean impacts miss distributional effects of welfare reform experiments labor supply theory predicts systematic heterogeneity in the impact of recent welfare reforms on earnings transfers and income yet most welfare reform research focuses on mean impacts we investigate the importance of heterogeneity using random assignment data from connecticut s jobs first waiver which features key elements of post 1996 welfare programs estimated quantile treatment effects exhibit the substantial heterogeneity predicted by labor supply theory thus mean impacts miss a great deal looking separately at samples of dropouts and other women does not improve the performance of mean impacts we conclude that welfare reform s effects are likely both more varied and more extensive than has been recognized

assessing empirical approaches for analyzing taxes and labor supply recent surveys on the labor supply responses of men document a divergence in the estimates of substitution and income effects obtained using various estimation approaches generally studies accounting for nonlinear tax schedules in a static setting via a piecewise linear approach produce estimates that typically imply higher substitution and lower income responses than are suggested by empirical work applying other approaches this paper demonstrates that maximum likelihood estimation of a consumer choice problem with nonlinear budget sets implicitly relies on the satisfaction of inequality constraints that translate into behaviorally meaningful restrictions these constraints arise not as a consequence of economic theory but instead as a requirement to create a properly defined statistical model in the analysis of piecewise linear budget sets the implicit constraints required by maximum likelihood in estimation amount to imposition of slutsky conditions at all wage income combinations associated with kink points in the analysis of differentiable budget sets the tacit constraints invoked by maximum likelihood also involve inequality restrictions on slutsky terms the empirical work presented in this study supports the contention that these implicit constraints play a major role in explaining the discrepancies in estimates found in the literature on men s labor supply

nonparametric estimation of the impact of taxes on female labor supply this paper proposes a simple extension of nonparametric estimation methods for nonlinear budget set models derived in blomquist and newey 2002 to censored dependent variables the nonparametric method is applied to estimate female labor supply elasticities using data on married women from the 1985 and 1989 waves of the panel study of income dynamics exploiting the substantial variation in budget sets caused by the tax reform act of 1986 as a source of identification the estimated wage elasticities from this new method are 0 56 overall and 0 27 on the intensive margin the income elasticity estimates are close to 0 67 overall and 0 13 on the intensive margin compared with the linear labor supply model the estimated elasticities are usually larger for the nonparametric specifications that account for nonlinear budget sets copyright 2010 john wiley sons ltd

the perceived budget constraint under social security evidence from reentry behavior if as is usually assumed older individuals face a continuous choice of work hours without fixed costs or take account of the actuarial adjustment of social security benefits postponed as a result of the earnings test the earnings limit should not affect their labor supply before age 65 we test and reject these assumptions by estimating the hazard function for labor market reentry after retirement using white men in the retirement history survey we find that the earnings limit does affect reentry and that older men behave myopically responding to current benefits rather than to social security wealth several policy implications follow

bridge jobs and partial retirement the job stopping process of older workers often includes some combination of postcareer bridge employment partial retirement and reverse retirement fewer than two fifths of household heads retire directly from career jobs over half partially retire at some point in their working lives and a quarter reenter the labor force after initially retiring in addition postcareer employment is frequently located outside the industry and occupation of the career job and there are important differences in postcareer labor force experiences by gender permanent income and career job pension status

an analysis of the correlates of discrimination facing young hispanic job seekers this study examines the extent and correlates of discrimination faced by young accented hispanic males in chicago and san diego using the outcomes of job applications by matched pairs of anglo and hispanic job seekers this is one of the first examples of audits being used in the labormarket area the audit methodology provides a powerful basis for examining discriminatory hiring practices because it permits direct comparison of hiring outcomes for pairs of anglo and hispanic jobseekers with similar labor market qualifications in this paper we first present differences in anglo hispanic success rates in filing applications obtaining interviews and obtaining jobs this builds on the descriptive analysis presented in harry cross et al 1990 we then focus on the correlates of differential success in obtaining interviews and in subsequent job acquisition i the audit methodology

trade offs in means tested pension design abstract the means testing of age pension programs allows governments to control the receipt of pension benefits extensive margin and the benefit level intensive margin we investigate how the presence of the extensive margin influences the trade off between protecting the poorer elderly and the economic costs of distorting incentives to work and save of young individuals the means test effect via the extensive margin improves the insurance aspect but introduces opposing impacts on incentives that potentially have ambiguous welfare outcomes we characterize combinations of the maximum pension benefit and taper rate that balance the negative incentive effects and positive insurance effects

defeating dictators electoral change and stability in competitive authoritarian regimes what explains electoral stability and change in competitive authoritarian regimes this article addresses the question by comparing eleven elections six of which led to continuity in authoritarian rule and five of which led to the victory of the opposition that took place between 1998 and 2008 in competitive authoritarian regimes countries located in the postcommunist region using interviews conducted with participants in all of these elections and other types of data and constructing a research design that allowed the authors to match these two sets of elections on a number of important dimensions they assess two groups of hypotheses those that highlight institutional structural and historical aspects of regime and opposition strength on the eve of these elections and others that highlight characteristics of the elections themselves the authors conclude that the key difference was whether the opposition adopted a tool kit of novel and sophisticated electoral strategies that made them more popular and effective challengers to the regime

new evidence on earnings and benefit claims following changes in the retirement earnings test in 2000 abstract this paper examines the labor force activity and timing of benefit claims of workers aged 65 69 in response to the removal of the retirement earnings test in 2000 we use the 1 sample of longitudinal social security administrative data that covers the period from 4 years before to 4 years after the removal of the test using a reduced form quantile regression method we find that effects on earnings are limited to workers with earnings just around the test threshold and above as predicted by economic theory our estimated effects suggest that labor supply elasticities with respect to the net of tax rate are approximately 0 05 0 07 for working primary beneficiaries aged 65 69 whose earnings are between the median and the 80th percentile further results show that applications for social security benefits following the earnings test removal accelerated by 2 to 5 percentage points among individuals aged 65 69 and by 3 to 7 percentage points among those reaching age 65

the joint choice of retirement age and postretirement hours of work in this paper we develop and estimate the first complete and internally consistent model of the effect of social security on the labor supply of the aged we develop a simple life cycle model that captures the effect of social security on the joint choice of the date of retirement and hours of work immediately after retirement we show that in the presence of social security the budget constraint relating these choices is highly complex and nonlinear and we develop a maximum likelihood procedure for the model that yields consistent parameter estimates our procedure avoids the selectivity biases present in prior studies that have ignored the nonlinearity of the constraint or have examined only self selected subsamples that exclude nonretirees our results show that social security has a significant though relatively small effect on the age of retirement and postretirement hours of work and that the effect of social security grows with advancing age

customer discrimination and employment outcomes for minority workers this paper investigates the effects of customer discrimination on the employment and earnings of minorities particularly blacks data are used from a new survey of employers in four large metropolitan areas in the united states our results show that the racial composition of an establishment s customers has sizable effects on the race of who gets hired particularly in jobs that involve direct contact with customers and in sales or service occupations race of customers also affects wages with employees in establishments that have mostly black customers earning less than those in establishments with mostly white customers

effects of social security policies on benefit claiming retirement and saving abstract an enhanced version of a structural model jointly explains benefit claiming wealth and retirement including reversals from states of lesser to greater work the model is estimated with health and retirement study data alternative beliefs about the future of social security affect claiming behavior effects of three potential policies are also examined increasing the early entitlement age increasing the full retirement age and eliminating the payroll tax for seniors predicted responses to increasing the full entitlement age are sensitive to beliefs

electoral institutions ethnopolitical cleavages and party systems in africa s emerging democracies do electoral institutions and ethnopolitical cleavages shape the structure the fragmentation or concentration of party systems separately or jointly if they shape the structure of party systems jointly how can this joint effect be theoretically specified and empirically tested if ethnopolitical groups and associated ethnopolitical cleavages are not primordially fixed but constructed in the course of social economic and political interactions as the accumulated findings of over three decades of comparative research on ethnopolitics attest how can constructed ethnopolitical groups be specified and associated eth

authoritarian state building and the sources of regime competitiveness in the fourth wave the cases of belarus moldova russia and ukraine this article explores the sources of regime competitiveness in the post cold war era through a structured comparison of regime trajectories in belarus moldova russia and ukraine for the period 1992 2004 an examination of these cases suggests the need for a fundamental rethinking of the commonly held view of the transition process especially in countries that face relatively weak international democratizing pressures approaching these countries as unconsolidated autocracies rather than as simply emerging democracies draws attention to key sources of political competition that have largely been ignored in the literature on competitive regimes thus competitive politics in belarus moldova russia and ukraine were rooted less in robust civil societies strong democratic institutions or leadership than in the inability of incumbents to maintain power or concentrate political control by preserving elite unity controlling elections and or using force against opponents such pluralism by default has been the outgrowth of the strength of anti incumbent national identity and incumbent weakness as defined by a lack of know how ineffective incumbent organization and or the weakness of certain dimensions of state power

retirement wages and labor supply of the elderly a model of labor force participation market wages and labor supply of annual hours and weeks of work is estimated for married males and unmarried females in a sample from the retirement history survey 1969 75 matched with social security earnings records emphasis is placed on the effects of variables associated with retirement and old age and on the estimation of net age profiles purged of biases associated with specific years and cohorts and with the other included variables the effects of most of the usual variables appear to be consistent with the theory and with other empirical findings for both sexes in addition age itself has a strong net autonomous effect on each of the dependent variables due to biological societal or institutional factors

do stronger age discrimination laws make social security reforms more effective supply side social security reforms to increase employment and delay benefit claiming among older individuals may be frustrated by age discrimination we test for policy complementarities between supply side social security reforms and demand side efforts to deter age discrimination specifically studying whether stronger state level age discrimination protections enhanced the impact of the increases in the social security full retirement age fra that occurred in the past decade the evidence indicates that for older individuals who were caught by the increase in the fra benefit claiming reductions and employment increases were sharper in states with stronger age discrimination protections

using the medicare buy in program to estimate the effect of medicaid on ssi participation aaron s yelowitz this article assesses the importance of receiving supplemental health insurance on participation in supplemental security income ssi for the elderly the implementation of the qualified medicare beneficiary qmb program offered a substitute for medicaid and expanded health insurance eligibility to a higher income level using a sample of elderly respondents aged 66 to 75 i find that the qmb program reduced ssi participation more than half of the qmb participants were previously covered by ssi and medicaid the calculations suggest that the qmb program was not as expensive as it might first appear because of reductions in ssi expenditure jel h53 138 j14 i introduction the supplemental security income ssi program in the united states provides assistance to elderly blind and disabled individuals who are poor it is federally financed and administered by the social security administration although much more attention has been focused on the former aid to families with dependent children afdc program which primarily targets poor single parent families more money was spent on cash relief for ssi recipients in 1993 23 6 billion compared to 22 3 billion 1 in addition to cash ssi recipients receive supplemental health insurance coverage for medicare similar to private medigap policies through the medicaid program this provides a second important benefit to ssi recipients in fiscal year 1993 medicaid expenditure for elderly categorically needy ssi recipients amounted to 14 1 billion 2 several studies have examined the importance of health insurance for working age adults in the labor market 3 in addition the effects of recent medicaid expansions for younger populations have been extensively studied 4 little is known however about the quantitative importance of medicaid on the ssi participation of the elderly the key obstacle in assessing this effect is that until recently medicaid eligibility had been closely related to ssi eligibility in most states this study analyzes the introduction of the qualified medicare beneficiary qmb program enacted in different states from 1987 to 1992 which offered supplemental health insurance coverage to the elderly without the need to participate in ssi the qmb program offered some of the same medicare cost sharing benefits that an elderly ssi recipient would receive from medicaid including the payment of medicare premiums deductibles and copayments 5 moreover the qmb program expanded medicaid coverage to individuals with higher inc omes and assets than the ssi program 6 the primary goal of this article is to document the link between the qmb program and the decision to participate in ssi i find that raising the income limit in qmb program significantly reduces ssi participation particularly among african americans and the less educated the coefficient estimates suggest that in the absence of the qmb buy in program ssi participation would have been 45 higher in 1992 than it actually was the caseload growth in the elderly ssi population would have looked very similar to the caseload growth of the disabled 851 population a group not eligible for qmb in addition the qmb program was considerably less expensive than one would infer from simply calculating the increased health care expenditure because of reductions in ssi expenditure for cash benefits the rest of the article is arranged as follows section ii outlines some relevant features of the ssi medicaid and qmb programs in particular it reviews how the income eligibility limits for qmb and ssi are computed the difference between those limits is a measure of how closely are medicaid and ssi linked it will subsequently be used as the key independent variable in the regression analysis this section also shows the cross sectional and time series variation in the qmb program section iii models the potential effects on ssi participation of the introduction of the qmb program and considers the role of information

responses to social security by men and women myopic and far sighted behavior the labor supply response to critical aspects of the social security program depends on whether behavior is myopic conditioned by current benefits only or far sighted conditioned by the entire future benefit stream this behavior reflects attitudes toward risk and ability to borrow as well as underlying time preferences the individual s effective time horizon is treated as an empirical question in this paper responses to the social security earnings test and the delayed retirement credit are examined as well as the question of whether older men and women are able to work while keeping their earnings below the exempt earnings limit in other words whether the earnings test affects participation as well as hours of work hazard functions for labor market reentry after retirement are estimated using the longitudinal retirement history study we find striking gender differences in that women respond to social security wealth and are not deterred from working by the earnings test while men respond to current benefits and their labor force participation is impeded by the test increases in the delayed retirement credit as provided by the 1983 amendments to the social security act should therefore increase the labor supply of older women but not of men though its intention was to increase the supply of both however increasing or abolishing the earnings limit as proposed in congress would increase older men s participation but not that of older women

exact consumer s surplus and deadweight loss consumer s surplus is a widely used tool in applied welfare economics both economic theorists and cost benefit analysis often use consumer s surplus despite its somewhat dubious reputation the basic idea is to evaluate the value to a consumer or his willingness to pay for a change in price of a good from say pricep to pricep because price changes affect consumer welfare an evaluation of this effect is often a key input to public policy decisions yet consumer s surplus is probably the most controversial of widely used economic concepts both paul samuelson and ian little conclude that the economics profession would be better off without it it is my feeling of the situation that substantial agreement exists on the correct quantities to be measured the amount the consumer would pay or would need to be paid to be just as well off after the price change as he was before the price change the quantities correspond to john hicks compensating variation measures an alternative measure which takes ex post price change utility as the basis of comparison is hicks equivalent variation the controversy arises in the measurement of these quantities the usual measurement procedure is to use the area to the left of the marshallian market demand curve between two price levels jules dupuit originated this measure of welfare change and alfred marshall and hicks derived appropriate conditions for its use the primary condition for the area to the left of the demand curve to correspond to the compensating variation is to have constant marginal utility of income marshall gave this condition and if it holds the same quantity will be derived as the area to the left of the compensated hicksian demand curve this area to the left of the compensated demand curve is exactly what the compensating variation and equivalent variation measure thus the constant marginal utility of income is a sufficient condition for marshallian consumer s surplus to be equal to hicks consumer s surplus in this case arnold harberger s plea to use the welfare triangle as one half times the product of the price change times the quantity change to measure deadweight loss corresponds to the correct theoretical amount of welfare change in a recent paper robert willig derives bounds for the percentage difference between the correct measure of either the compensating or equivalent variation and the marshallian measure derived form the market demand curve his bounds which depend on the income elasticity of demand for the single good in the region of price change being considered as well as the proportion of the consumer s income spent on the good demonstrate that the marshallian consumer s surplus is often a good approximation to hicks consumer s surplus the fact that the proportion of the consumer s income spent matters as well as the income elasticity was first pointed out by harold hotelling willig contends that the approximation error will be less than the errors involved in estimating the demand curve thus he hopes to remove the need for apology that applied economists often need to give to theorists who remark on the inappropriateness of using marshallian consumer s surplus to measure welfare change however in this paper i show that for the case primarily considered by willig of a single price change which is also the situation in which consumer s surplus is often used in applied work no approximation is necessary professor of economics massachusetts institute of technology and research associate national bureau of economic research i would like to thank peter diamond erwin diewert daniel mcfadden robert merton robert solow hal varian joel yellin and the referees for help and comments research support from the national science foundation is acknowledged the reason that we still have two rather than one of samuelson s six measures of consumer s surplus arises from an index number problem of the correct basis for the welfare comparison i will give both measures but plan to concentrate on the compensating variation

did soviet elderly employment respond to financial incentives evidence from pension reforms abstract this study answers the open question of whether workers respond to financial incentives in a command economy to do this i evaluate pension reforms in soviet russia in 1964 and 1969 that allowed pensioners to receive a greater share of their pensions if they worked resulting in a progressive elimination of benefit reduction rates variation in group eligibility and variation in benefit reduction rates in eastern and western regions allow for the use of several difference in differences frameworks i collect and digitize novel data from the soviet archives on pensioner employment constructing the first database of the soviet old age labor market i find that soviet pensioners are responsive to financial incentives by 1969 after the benefit reduction rate fell from an average of 47 8 to 24 1 pensioner employment rates rose by 5 7 percentage points representing a 47 increase finally i provide illustrative estimates of the employment elasticity with respect to the average net of tax rate that range from 0 6 to 1 4

using differences in knowledge across neighborhoods to uncover the impacts of the eitc on earnings we develop a new method of estimating the impacts of tax policies that uses areas with little knowledge about the policy s marginal incentives as counterfactuals for behavior in the absence of the policy we apply this method to characterize the impacts of the earned income tax credit eitc on earnings using administrative tax records covering all eitc eligible lers from 19962009 we begin by developing a proxy for local knowledge about the eitc schedule the degree of sharp bunching at the exact income level that maximizes eitc refunds by individuals who report self employment income the degree of self employed sharp bunching varies signi cantly

pension income indexation a mean variance approach this paper proposes a theoretical framework to study pension income indexation from the retirees point of view the theoretical model is then used to calculate the optimal indexation measure for different cohorts of retirees using historical data from uruguay the results suggest that for most of the cohorts but particularly for those retiring in the 1970s and 1990s the optimal strategy would be to choose the consumer price index cpi as the pension income indexation measure even for cohorts retiring after the 1989 constitutional reform that established the average nominal earnings index anei as the indexation measure the cpi is still the preferred indexation measure to show the robustness of the results two alternative criteria are used to assess the two indexation measures with similar results

the effect of social security on labor supply a cohort analysis of the notch generation this article uses aggregate birth year calendar year level data derived from the current population survey cps to estimate the effect of social security wealth on the labor supply of older men in the 1970s and 1980s the analysis focuses on measuring the impact of the 1977 amendments to the social security act which created a substantial unanticipated reduction in social security wealth for individuals born after 1916 this differential in benefits has become known as the benefit notch results indicate that labor supply continued to decline for the notch babies who received lower social security benefits than earlier cohorts

the labour supply effect of the abolition of the earnings rule for older workers in the united kingdom high effective tax rates on work at and around state pension age deter participation an example is the earnings test operating in several oecd countries the united states abolished its test for the 65 age group in 2000 the united kingdom offers a natural experiment of this reform as it abolished its test known as the earnings rule in 1989 we examine the effect of this change taking account of the opportunity to defer pension rights abolition of the rule raised working hours of older male workers by around 4 hours a week with a lesser impact on women s behaviour

policy variation labor supply elasticities and a structural model of retirement this paper exploits a combination of policy variation from multiple pension reforms in austria and administrative data from the austrian social security database using the policy changes for identification we estimate social security wealth and accrual elasticities in individuals retirement decisions next we use these elasticities to estimate a dynamic programming model of retirement decisions finally we use the estimated model to examine the labor supply and welfare consequences of potential social security reforms

labor market search and optimal retirement policy a popular and long standing view is that social security is a means for young unemployed people to purchase jobs from older workers can social security by encouraging retirement and hence creating job vacancies for the young improve the allocation of workers to jobs maybe according to a standard model of labor market search but public retirement programs currently pay the elderly substantially more than their jobs are worth an important effect is that retirement reduces the value of other vacant jobs our results imply that recent reforms aimed at reducing retirement incentives are likely to improve labor market efficiency i introduction the objective of this article is to formalize a popular argument about the economic rationale for social security and public pension programs in the united states and other countries we construct a model in which there can be significant frictions slowing the process of matching workers with firms and social security is a labor market policy designed to remove old workers from the labor market in this sense it can be said that social security is a means for young unemployed individuals to purchase jobs from older employed workers president franklin d roosevelt in particular in one of his fireside chats suggested that this would be an important goal for social security the program for social security now pending before the congress is a necessary part of the future unemployment policy of the government it proposes by means of old age pensions to help those who have reached the age of retirement to give up their jobs and thus give to the younger generation greater opportunities for work and to give all a feeling of security as they look toward their old age roosevelt 1938 134 35 this position on social security continues to receive some support at least enough to receive serious consideration in recent social security debates in recent discussion about the retirement earnings test in congress many agreed with the following perspective social security when it was created in 1935 sought to achieve two goals moving older workers out of the workforce to make way for younger workers and to partially replace lost income due to retirement testimony of honorable john j rhodes iii in social security retirement test 1991 these debates are not unique to the united states as is well known european countries have recently devoted much attention to youth unemployment as a result public pension programs have become more generous and increasingly used to encourage labor force withdrawal among older workers although public pension programs have been used in many countries as age targeted employment policies there has been little work aimed at understanding their implications for the market at the aggregate level in this article we begin to address whether policies aimed at discouraging work among the elderly and thereby creating job vacancies for the young can improve the allocation of workers to jobs in the labor market in particular the idea that continued employment by the old contributes to increased youth unemployment implies that the life cycle contributes to congestion problems in the labor market accordingly an important aspect of a modeling approach aimed at addressing these issues should be a setting in which unemployment is an equilibrium phenomenon and the labor market participation decisions of workers impose a negative externality on the pool of the unemployed we introduce a simple model of labor market search along the lines of mortensen 1982 and pissarides 2000 extended to include retirement decisions and show how the optimality of induced retirement depends on the model s parameter values some of which imply that the social value of retirement exceeds the private value while other parameter values imply that the private value exceeds the social value

environmental awareness consumption and labor supply empirical evidence from household survey data abstract what is the effect of environmental awareness on the households consumption of polluting goods and labor supply decisions we answer this question using household survey data from the united states and measuring environmental awareness with the decision to make environmental donations we find that environmental awareness has a negative and economically significant effect on labor supply the respective impact on the consumption of polluting goods is also negative but less robust in terms of statistical significance our results highlight the importance of understanding the foundations of household behavior related to environmental quality indeed environmentally aware households are willing to tradeoff work hours with improved environmental quality and less so to change their consumption habits

labor supply responses to marginal social security benefits evidence from discontinuities abstract a key question for social security reform is whether workers respond to the link on the margin between the social security taxes they pay and the social security benefits they will receive we estimate the effects of the marginal social security benefits that accrue with additional earnings on three measures of labor supply retirement age hours and labor earnings we develop a new approach to identifying these incentive effects by exploiting five provisions in the social security benefit rules that generate discontinuities in marginal benefits or non linearities in marginal benefits that converge to discontinuities as uncertainty about the future is resolved we find that individuals approaching retirement age 52 and older respond to the social security tax benefit link on the extensive margin of their labor supply decisions we estimate that a 10 increase in the net of tax share reduces the two year retirement hazard by a statistically significant 2 0 percentage points from a base rate of 15 the evidence with regard to labor supply responses on the intensive margin is more mixed we estimate that the elasticity of hours with respect to the net of tax share is 0 42 and statistically significant but we do not find a statistically significant earnings elasticity though we lack statistical power to estimate results within subsamples precisely the retirement response is driven mostly by the female subsample while the hours response comes from the male subsample

the econometrics of piecewise linear budget constraints a survey and exposition of the maximum likelihood method in this article maximum likelihood techniques for estimating consumer demand functions when budget constraints are piecewise linear are exposited and surveyed consumer demand functions are formally derived under such constraints and it is shown that the functions are themselves nonlinear as a result the econometric problems in estimating such functions are exposited and the importance of the stochastic specification is stressed in particular the specification of both unobserved heterogeneity of preferences and measurement error econometric issues in estimation and testing are discussed and the results of the studies that have been conducted to date are surveyed

the observer effect in international politics evidence from a natural experiment by pressuring governments to hold democratic elections and by becoming directly involved in the electoral process through technical assistance and funding or as election monitors international actors now play a visible role in domestic elections and other democratic processes throughout the developing world although scholars have documented several macrolevel relationships between international level variables and movement toward democracy there has been little attention paid to the microlevel effects of international involvement in the democratization process this article examines the effects of international election observation as a prominent form of international involvement in domestic elections and exploits a natural experiment in order to test whether international observers reduce election fraud using data from the 2003 presidential elections in armenia the article demonstrates that although observers may not eliminate election fraud they can reduce election day fraud at the polling stations they visit the unusual advantage of experiment like conditions for this study offers unique causal evidence that international actors can have direct measurable effects on the level of election day fraud and by extension on the democratization process

does affirmative action reduce gender discrimination and enhance efficiency new experimental evidence we investigate experimentally the impact of quota policies on gender discrimination in hiring decisions by testing whether affirmative action increases female employment we also ask whether firm performance is affected by such policies our experiment consists of three treatments in the baseline no quota treatment groups of two employers and six potential job candidates are formed employers have to hire two workers based on information on candidate characteristics including gender and years and subject of study the second low penalty treatment is identical to the baseline except there is a quota such that at least half of the employees hired must be women if this quota is not respected the firm has to pay a penalty the last high penalty treatment is the same as the low penalty treatment except that the penalty is significantly higher we find that women are ranked unfavorably in the absence of a quota and the introduction of a quota significantly reduces gender discrimination firm performance is not affected by the introduction of quotas

immigration reform and the earnings of latino workers do employer sanctions cause discrimination this paper investigates whether employer sanctions for hiring undocumented workers introduced by the 1986 immigration reform and control act irca adversely affected the hourly earnings of latino workers in the southwestern u s we exploit the staggering of the sanctions and employee verification requirements across sectors to estimate this effect in particular irca s employer sanctions provisions were not extended to agricultural employers until two years after their imposition on non agricultural employers hence latino agricultural workers provide a control group against which to compare changes in the wages of latinos in non agricultural employment we find substantial pre post irca declines in the hourly earnings of latino non agricultural workers relative to latinos in agriculture this pattern however is considerably stronger for latino men than latina women we do not observe similar inter sectoral shifts in relative wages among non latino white workers in fact the relative wage changes for non latino white workers are of the opposite sign finally the pre post irca relative decline in latino non agricultural wages reverses the pre irca trend where we observe the relative earnings of latino non agricultural workers increasing

can social security explain trends in labor force participation of older men in the united states after a long decline the labor force participation rate lfpr of older men in the united states leveled off in the 1980s and began to increase in the late 1990s we examine how changes in social security rules affected these trends we attribute only a small portion of the decline from the 1960s 80s to the increasing generosity of social security over this period increases in the full retirement age and the delayed retirement credit explain one quarter to one half of the recent increase in the lfpr increasing educational attainment and increasing lfpr of married women also contributed to the recent rise

economic determinants of workers retirement decisions the landscape for older workers has changed dramatically in recent decades governments have made cuts to public pension programs private pensions have shifted from defined benefit to defined contribution plans equity and housing markets have been unusually volatile and workers have experienced declining morbidity and mortality at the same time the labor force participation rate for older men and women has been rising over the past two decades implying later retirement are these phenomena related this paper reviews the large and growing body of literature exploring the economic determinants of workers retirement decisions including public and private pensions wealth and savings health and health insurance and labor demand

employers in the boom how did the hiring of less skilled workers change during the 1990s abstract employers became more willing to hire a range of disadvantaged workers during the 1990s boom including minorities workers with certain stigmas such as welfare recipients and those without recent experience or high school diplomas the wages paid to newly hired less skilled workers also increased on the other hand employers demand for specific skill certification rose over time as did their use of certain screens the results suggest that the tight labor markets of the late 1990s in conjunction with other secular changes raised hiring costs and induced employers to shift toward screens that seemed more cost effective

estimating bargaining power in the market for existing homes although bargaining is common in markets for heterogeneous goods it has largely been ignored in the hedonic literature in a break from that tradition we establish sufficient conditions that permit one to identify the effect of buyer and seller bargaining on hedonic models our model is estimated using a previously overlooked feature of the american housing survey that permits us to observe characteristics of both buyers and sellers results suggest that household wealth gender and other demographic traits influence bargaining power in addition variation in bargaining power arising from the presence of school age children accounts for anomalous seasonal patterns reported in various widely cited indices of quality adjusted house prices

early claiming of social security benefits and labor supply behavior of older americans the labor supply incentives provided by the early retirement rules of the united states social security old age benefits program are of growing importance as the normal retirement age nra increases to 67 and the labor force participation of older americans starts to increase these incentives allow individuals who claim benefits before the nra but continue to work or return to the labor force to increase their future rate of benefit pay by having benefits withheld since the adjustment of the benefit rate takes place only after the nra is reached benefits received before the nra can become actuarially unfair for those who continue to work after claiming consistent with these incentives estimates from bivariate models of the monthly labor force exit and claiming hazards using data from the health and retirement study indicate that early claimers who do not withdraw from the labor force around the time they claim are increasingly likely to stay in the labor force

economic determinants of workers retirement decisions economic determinants of workers retirement decisions the landscape for older workers has changed dramatically in recent decades governments have made cuts to public pension programs private pensions have shifted from defined benefit to defined contribution plans equity and housing markets have been unusually volatile and workers have experienced declining morbidity and mortality at the same time the labor force participation rate for older men and women has been rising over the past two decades implying later retirement are these phenomena related this paper reviews the large and growing body of literature exploring the economic determinants of workers retirement decisions including public and private pensions wealth and savings health and health insurance and labor demand

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

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

when do votes count regime type electoral conduct and political competition in africa the effects of electoral systems have been tested recently in africa raising several questions are the systematic effects of electoral rules the same across regime types does the conduct of elec

the wage elasticity of informal care supply evidence from the health and retirement study author affiliation olena nizalova nizalova kse org ua acknowledgment i gratefully acknowledge steven haider jeff biddle john strauss and john goddeeris for their helpful comments throughout the process of working on the project and important comments from the anonymous referees i am also greatly indebted to michael nolte and his colleagues from the isr data enclave for making possible the revision of this article 1 introductionfor the past two decades the policy debate on issues related to the aging population has been growing at unprecedented rates throughout the world on one hand policy measures suggested in the debate include removal of the disincentives for labor force participation for the near elderly u s dhhs 1997 apfel 2004 cbo 2004 this would have effectively raised the wage rate faced by the targeted group as in the case of the elimination of the social security earnings test for those older than 65 in the united states friedberg 2000 on the other hand the role of informal caregiving is emphasized as a means to keep many individuals at home who would otherwise require expensive institutional care u s dhhs 1997 p 6 policies targeting these two objectives may turn out to conflict with each other higher wages may decrease hours devoted to informal care for elderly parents while policies encouraging informal care may lead to fewer working hours research on the effects of the social security earnings test mostly focuses on labor supply and claiming behavior of the affected group burtless and moffitt 1984 baker and benjamin 1999 gruber and orszag 1999 friedberg 2000 haider and loughran 2008 with little attention being paid to the potential interaction between incentives for paid employment and caregiving choices this interaction may have adverse implications for the well being of the oldest old given that the prevalence of caregiving is highest among individuals in their late midlife central to the analysis of this interaction is the concept of the wage elasticity the labor supply literature suggests a positive wage elasticity of labor supply smaller for males larger for females therefore if the wage elasticity of informal care supply is close to zero as has been found in earlier studies higher wages would lead to more labor supplied with negligible effects on the provision of informal care in this case one might hope that benefits from increased labor supply will not be offset along other dimensions if on the contrary the wage elasticity of informal care supply is relatively large and negative one should be more cautious when evaluating the effects of fiscal policies on labor supply among individuals in their late midlife a substantial negative wage elasticity of informal care supply would mean that along with increasing labor supply the near elderly would cut back on the hours of informal care they provide to their elderly parents this may potentially lead to more people turning to the government in their quest for help with covering formal long term care costs the goal of this article is to study the wage elasticity of informal care supply and contribute to the literature by directly addressing the issue of omitted variables in the time allocation and monetary transfer equations informal care supply is defined as annual time spent helping elderly parents with basic personal needs as well as household chores errands and transportation this article uses a unique opportunity of access to the restricted geographic identifiers for the health and retirement study hrs respondents to instrument hourly wages with the industry structure in the state of residence allowing for differential impact by education 1the primary finding of the article suggests that the wage elasticity of informal care supply is negative and substantially larger in magnitude than previously estimated due to the weakness of the instruments there is still a significant remaining bias in the estimates of the wage elasticity

social cleavages and the number of parties how the measures you choose affect the answers you get this article explores the issues surrounding the operationalization and measurement of social cleavages in a large n context from the perspective of the party systems literature it first highlights the difficulty of measuring the concept which it argues has impeded hypothesis testing and suggests strategies for improving upon existing measures it then demonstrates that the conclusions we draw about well known hypotheses linking social cleavages to the number of electoral parties in legislative elections depend upon the measure we employ hence the article makes the case that how we measure social cleavages matters

life of the party the origins of regime breakdown and persistence under single party rule this article develops a theory of single party regime consolidation to explain the dramatic variation in longevity among these regimes the strength of the opposition and rent scarcity during party consolidation it argues structure the choices available to elites as they decide how to build a support base a weak opposition and ready access to rents makes a low cost consolidation possible but these conditions provide little incentive to build a robust coalition or strong party organization this trajectory generates weak single party rule that is likely to collapse in a crisis conversely elites who face a powerful opposition and scarce rents have no choice but to offer potential allies access to policy making and have powerful incentives to build a strong and broad based party organization ruling parties that emerge from initial conditions like these prove more resilient during later crises the author conducts an initial test of the argument against paired comparisons of guinea bissau and tanzania and of indonesia and the philippines

social divisions and institutions assessing institutional parameter variation this paper investigates the hypothesis that the association between property rights institutions and income is weaker in countries with high social divisions it argues that social divisions should have a negative effect on perceived institutional inclusiveness which in turn should depress institutional payoffs absent a property rights indicator that captures the perceived inclusiveness of institutions social divisions should then weaken the observed association between property rights institutions and income the empirical results support this hypothesis and highlight the importance of evaluating whether the institutions measure used captures the institutional framework applying to the population at large

how common is housing discrimination improving on traditional measures abstract fair housing audits are an important tool for measuring the incidence of racial and ethnic discrimination in housing markets traditional measures of incidence calculate the proportion of cases in which the white auditor is favored gross adverse treatment or the difference between the proportion of white favored and minority favored audits net adverse treatment the gross measure may overstate discrimination because treatment differences sometimes arise from differences in circumstances across auditor visits on the other hand the net measure understates discrimination because audits in which the minority auditor is favored for systematic reasons are incorrectly subtracted this paper presents a model of agent behavior that more fully accounts for the audit design and employs the estimated parameters to calculate bounds on the incidence of discrimination this approach leads to a lower bound for the incidence of discrimination that is often substantially higher than the simple net measure and to an upper bound that is close to and sometimes above the simple gross measure

the effect of the social security earnings test on male labor supply new evidence from survey and administrative data despite numerous empirical studies there is surprisingly little agreement about whether the social security earnings test affects male labor supply in this paper we provide a comprehensive analysis of the labor supply effects of the earnings test using longitudinal administrative earnings data and more commonly used survey data we find that the response to the earnings test in survey data is obfuscated by measurement error and labor market rigidities accounting for these factors our results suggest a consistent and substantial response to the earnings test especially for younger men

the fourth wave of democracy and dictatorship noncooperative transitions in the postcommunist world the transition from communism in europe and the former soviet union has only sometimes produced a transition to democracy since the crumbling of the berlin wall in 1989 and the collapse of the soviet union in 1991 most of the twenty eight new states have abandoned communism but only nine of these have entered the ranks of liberal democracies the remaining majority of new postcommunist states are various shades of dictatorships or unconsolidated transitional regimes this article seeks to explain why some states abandoned communism for democracy while others turned to authoritarian rule in endorsing actorcentric approaches that have dominated analyses of the third wave of democratization this argument nonetheless offers an alternative set of causal paths from ancien regime to new regime that can account for both democracy and dictatorship as outcomes situations of unequal distributions of power produced the quickest and most stable transitions from communist rule in countries with asymmetrical balances of power the regime to emerge depends almost entirely on the ideological orientation of the most powerful in countries where democrats enjoyed a decisive power advantage democracy emerged conversely in countries in which dictators maintained a decisive power advantage dictatorship emerged in between these two extremes were countries in which the distribution of power between the old regime and its challengers was relatively equal rather than producing stalemate compromise and parted transitions to democracy however such situations in the postcommunist world resulted in protracted confrontation between relatively balanced powers the regimes that emerged from these modes of transitions are not the most successful democracies but rather are unconsolidated unstable partial democracies

labor supply preferences hours constraints and hours wage tradeoffs in a labor market with tied hours wage packages and wage dispersion for a particular type of job constrained workers may be willing to sacrifice wage gains for better hours when changing jobs likewise workers may accept jobs offering undesirable hours only if the associated wage gains are large we investigate this issue empirically by examining whether overemployment and underemployment on the initial and new job affects the relation between hours changes and wage changes for quitters our results generally support the view that an individual requires compensation to work in a job that given the individual s particular preferences offers unattractive hours

from formlessness to structure the institutionalization of competitive party systems in africa giovanni sartori once described african party systems as formless our contribution challenges this view in an era of resurgent multipartism that swept through the subcontinent in the early 1990s and continues until today the article brings together contemporary research on african party systems with the wider disciplinary literature on party system institutionalization using a data set including all continuous election sequences in africa from 1950 to 2008 we find that africa has some of the most volatile party systems ever recorded and yet tremendous diversity across regimes we test the relative impact of political institutions economic performance the history of party system development and social cleavage structure on party system institutionalization in africa we find that its party systems have been shaped by a set of factors unique to the subcontinent but some of the general global patterns of party system development hold true in africa as well

evidence on discrimination in consumer markets economists have contributed to the measurement of racial and ethnic discrimination in consumption and to the identification of its causes especially in housing markets and car sales to test the hypothesis that discrimination exists economists have turned to regression analysis and to audits a matched pair survey technique economists also have developed audit based measures of the incidence and severity of discrimination audit studies find continuing high levels of discrimination against minorities in the marketing of available housing and in car prices audit studies also find that discrimination can be caused both by economic agents prejudice and by their search for profits

political parties and uncertainty in developing democracies this article lays out a theoretical framework for understanding the effects of political uncertainty on party development and strategies of mobilization and competition defining uncertainty as the imprecision with which political actors are able to predict future interactions the authors identify three types of political uncertainty regime uncertainty economic uncertainty and institutional uncertainty they argue that political uncertainty is particularly high among developing democracies contributing to puzzling empirical patterns of party development and competition in these contexts taking into account the role of uncertainty in the strategic decision making of party elites will help scholars better understand the differences between parties in advanced and developing democracies but it can also help scholars understand the less dramatic differences between parties even within advanced democracies the authors theoretical framework can be applied broadly since uncertainty informs the strategic

the 1983 social security reforms and labor supply adjustments of older individuals in the long run a structural life cycle retirement model with an improved specification over previous models is used to analyze and compare the long run effects on the labor supply of older workers of the 1983 social security reforms the effects of separate provisions from the 1983 amendments are examined these include the raising of the normal retirement age to 67 the increase in the delayed retirement credit to 8 and the lowering of the reduction rate for earnings over the test amount to 1 00 for every 3 00 of earnings

the labor supply effects of the social security earnings test the social security earnings test taxes away benefits at a 33 50 rate once earnings pass a threshold amount i investigate the response to three past changes in the earnings test rules each applying to some age groups and not others i find that beneficiaries bunch in substantial numbers just below the earnings threshold and the bunching shifts when the earnings test rules change these shifts in the budget constraint are incorporated into an econometric model to identify income and substitution effects the estimation yields significant elasticities that suggest considerable deadweight loss suffered by working beneficiaries

equilibrium institutions the federal proportional trade off durable democracies display a huge variety of combinations of basic institutional formulas a quantitative logical model shows that while there are multiple equilibrium sets of institutions each involves some trade off between the size of the country the territorial structure of government and the electoral system specifically the larger the country the more important is federalism in comparison to proportional representation electoral rules for the durability of democratic institutions the explanatory power of the model is positively tested on all current durable democratic countries it is also illustrated with a few both fitting and deviant cases a relevant implication is that the room for manipulation of the choice of institutions is large but not unlimited as the choices for a durable democracy are constrained by bounded trade offs between the values of major institutional variables

pension reform and labor supply abstract we exploit a comprehensive restructuring of the early retirement system in norway in 2011 to examine labor supply responses to increases in work incentives and actuarially neutral reductions in the age of first access to pension benefits we find that increasing the returns to work is a powerful policy the removal of an earnings test implying a doubling of the average net take home wage led to an increase in average labor supply by 7 h per week 30 at age 63 and by 8 h 46 at age 64 the responses primarily came at the extensive margin in contrast reducing the access age has almost no effect on labor supply in our setting with actuarially fair work incentives

restrictions in labor supply estimation is the macurdy critique correct according to the macurdy critique the hausman method implicitly imposes restrictions that generate a positive slutsky effect this paper shows that the hausman method imposes no other restrictions than alternative methods do and that the macurdy critique is unfounded

the effect of age targeted tax credits on labor force participation of older workers abstract i analyze the effect of income tax policy changes on labor force participation of older workers i exploit two age targeted policy initiatives to promote work at older ages simultaneously implemented in sweden in 2007 an earned income tax credit and a payroll tax credit for workers above age 65 using an age based discontinuity in eligibility criteria i conduct a difference in differences analysis with the reform as an instrument for the net of tax rate i find a participation elasticity with respect to the net of participation tax rate of about 0 22 in the year following the 65th birthday for individuals who were working four years earlier

measuring racial discrimination with fair housing audits caught in the act a survey technique called a fair housing audit provides a direct measure of racial discrimination in housing this paper examines the econometric issues raised by audit data measures the discrimination uncovered by a 1981 boston study and tests hypotheses about the causes of discrimination the estimated level of discrimination is high black housing seekers are told about 30 percent fewer available housing units than are whites the hypothesis tests indicate that the primary cause of this discrimination is that housing agents illegally promote their economic interests by catering to the racial prejudice of their current or potential white customers