labour im mobility and monopsonistic exploitation of workers in the urban informal sector lessons from a field study it is well recognised in labour economics that employers in monopsonistic competition have market power to set wages below the productivity of workers if workers are immobile which causes monopsonistic exploitation of workers monopsonistic exploitation is propelled by employers expectations about the degree of im mobility of workers and therefore by ex post mobility of workers it hence begs a question of what determines the relative im mobility of informal workers which has significant implications for monopsonistic exploitation and working poverty in the urban informal sector from our field study of urban and peri urban labour markets in bangladesh by modifying the method of stochastic frontier analysis we explain the behavioural foundation to the relative im mobility of informal workers we thereby unravel the effects of individual and household characteristics sociological institutional factors and household ties including worker s kinship on the relative immobility of a worker that can in turn explain monopsonistic exploitation and working poverty widely prevalent in the urban informal sector of south asia

korean inflation during the us military administration of 1945 1948 a further analysis this paper investigates the dynamic process of korean inflation under the us military administration using a structural vector autoregression svar incorporating cointegration relations among the variables the results show that government expenditure shocks are primarily responsible for price movements together with money demand shocks having noticeable short run impacts the study also shows that government expenditure shocks are the most important source of fluctuations in each of the other variables investigated the paper concludes that a reform of fiscal and monetary system is necessary to stop the sustaining process of inflation as well as fluctuations in other macro variables

common factors in latin america s business cycles this paper constructs new business cycle indices for argentina brazil chile and mexico based on common dynamic factors extracted from a comprehensive set of sectoral output external trade fiscal and financial variables the analysis spans the 135 years since the insertion of these economies into the global economy in the 1870s the constructed indices are used to derive a business cycle chronology for these countries and characterize a set of new stylized facts in particular we show that all four countries have historically displayed a striking combination of high business cycle volatility and persistence relative to benchmark countries and that such volatility has been time varying with important differences across policy regimes we also uncover a sizeable common factor across the four economies which has greatly limited scope for regional risk sharing

bargaining powers and market segmentation in freight transport the heterogeneity of services in the freight transport market and the presence of imperfect information motivate the development of an empirical model for detecting market imperfection and bargaining powers of the two agents concluding a contract the fact that agents typically bargain simultaneously on price and attributes leads to models without exogeneity assumption the model is accordingly based on estimation of the support of the joint distribution of the price and of the attributes of the transport rather than on expectation of the price conditional to the attributes the model proposes an innovative and integrated approach for measuring market imperfection and bargaining powers furthermore the paper examines the sensitivity of the results to the choice of attributes and in order to detect potential market segmentation to selection of the data the empirical work is based on a new dataset obtained from a survey based on face to face interviews providing data on the price and qualitative attributes of a set of actual contracts negotiated on the belgian freight market copyright c 2007 john wiley sons ltd

life satisfaction and self employment a matching approach despite lower incomes the self employed consistently report higher satisfaction with their jobs but are self employed individuals also happier more satisfied with their lives as a whole high job satisfaction might cause them to neglect other important domains of life such that the fulfilling job crowds out other pleasures leaving the individual on the whole not happier than others moreover self employment is often chosen to escape unemployment not for the associated autonomy that seems to account for the high job satisfaction we apply matching estimators that allow us to better take into account the above mentioned considerations and construct an appropriate control group in terms of balanced covariates using the bhps dataset that comprises a large nationally representative sample of the british populace we find that individuals who move from regular employment into self employment experience an increase in life satisfaction up to 2 years later while individuals moving from unemployment to self employment are not more satisfied than their counterparts moving from unemployment to regular employment we argue that these groups correspond to opportunity and necessity entrepreneurship respectively these findings are robust with regard to different measures of subjective well being as well as choice of matching variables and also robustness exercises involving simulated confounders

a two tiered earnings frontier estimation of employer and employee information in the labor market this pap er develops a two tiered frontier estimation procedure to decompose the residual of an earnings function into three components the first component can be interpreted as being purely random search theory is used to show that the other two components represent employee and employer ignorance of offer and reservation wages respectively relative employee and employer ignorance estimates are presented for various population strata copyright 1987 by mit press

estimating reservation wages of employed workers using a stochastic frontier according to search theory workers form reservation wages such that employment offers paying wages less than the reservation wage are rejected the first job offer paying a wage higher than the reservation wage is accepted and search is terminated though the reservation wage is clearly a matter of individual taste and unobservable a number of empirical articles have nevertheless appeared on the subject the present paper adds to this literature its novel aspects are that it uses data on employed workers rather than unemployed workers as is usually the case and that it applies a comparatively new econometric technique stochastic frontier estimation to the problem of estimating reservation wages our interests in this paper are twofold first the paper provides estimates of worker reservation wages utilizing the stochastic frontier regression technique second we use these estimates to test various hypotheses regarding the response of reservation wages to factors that search theory suggests are important in the determination of reservation wages the remainder of the paper is organized as follows section ii discusses the previous empirical literature on the reservation wage section iii sketches the theory and estimation techniques we use section iv lays out a framework for assessing the validity of the approach used here finally section v presents the empirical results

valuing alternative work arrangements abstract we employ a discrete choice experiment in the employment process for a national call center to estimate the willingness to pay distribution for alternative work arrangements relative to tr

the greek stabilization of 1944 46 it is a matter of great contention among economists whether economic stabilization programs can be instituted without imposing high real costs those believing in the core or underlying rate of inflation hypothesis argue that relying only on conventional monetary and fiscal policies will impose high costs the rational expectations proponents on the other hand argue that a convincing antiinflation program will likely minimize these costs as economic agents respond to a genuine regime change or change in the rules under which monetary and fiscal policies are conducted a way of discriminating between these contending views is to examine the stabilization phase of the world s episodes of hyperinflation thus far the work of thomas sargent 1982 on the post world war i experiences in austria hungary poland and germany and william bomberger and myself 1983 on post world war ii hungary have adduced evidence in support of the rationalists view price level stability was achieved rapidly without a prolonged period of high unemployment the greek stabilization of 1944 46 is not so straightforward and as such provides an interesting contrast to the other episodes its unique feature is that price level stability took over a year to achieve following the initial reform of november 11 1944 it was not achieved until in a third reform in early 1946 the greek 1018 1024

mean reversion in long horizon real exchange rates evidence from latin america abstract this paper examines mean reversion in real effective exchange rates in six leading latin american economies during the xxth century using a new data set a unit root approach is complemented by an error correction model including key fundamentals such as terms of trade trade openness and relative productivities unit root testing shows a very slow process of reversion if any to a constant mean in the original series rejecting the strict ppp hypothesis however mean reversion is found after allowing for trends and structural breaks with a half life average of 1 years for the six countries we also found reversion to a conditional mean defined by the co integrating relationship with an average half life of 2 years our estimates although lower than the 3 5 year range that motivated the rogoff s puzzle still indicate the presence of important obstacles to the adjustment process that need further investigation

the hungarian hyperinflation and stabilization of 1945 1946 inflation in hungary after world war ii was the most intense on record the reforms of august 1946 were immediately and entirely successful in stabilizing prices this paper describes and analyzes the unique policies and institutions that produced these phenomena despite its severity the hungarian experience was consistent with the less extreme inflation and stabilization experiences examined by sargent price stabilization was accomplished by fiscal rather than purely monetary measures and was paradoxically accompanied by rapid and prolonged money growth

selectivity and distributional assumptions in static labor supply models the technique of estimating labor supply models has drastically changed since the early 1970s while early studies 28 23 estimated a single labor supply equation the occurrence of nonworkers soon became an issue of concern that complicated both the model estimated and the estimation technique people choose to work or not to work based on their opportunity set workers are therefore special they have poorer than average alternatives or better than average wage offers 15 the sample of workers is not random anymore but rather self selected ols estimators are biased and inconsistent and new estimation techniques are needed to correct that deficiency this realization led to an expansion of the labor supply model with a wage equation as wage offers of non workers are generally unobservable 9 while at the same time an array of new econometric techniques came forth to deal with problems of self selection and dichotomous endogenous variables two step and maximum likelihood are standard estimation methods nowadays stimulated by work of heckman and others 18 19 in turn these improved techniques allowed for more sophisticated labor supply models involving tax and transfer schedules 8 cost of labor force entry and institutional constraints 12 16 29 and wage rates interactively determined by labor hours 30 all of these new studies have one assumption in common the random disturbances are assumed to be generated by the normal distribution in an appeal to the familiar central limit theorem this theorem states roughly that the combined influence of numerous independent neglected factors may be represented by a single disturbance term that is approximately normally distributed

the real bills doctrine versus the quantity theory a reconsideration two competing monetary policy prescriptions are analyzed within the context of overlapping generations models the real bills prescription is for unfettered private intermediation or central bank operations designed to produce the effects of such intermediation the quantity theory prescription in contrast is for restrictions on private intermediation designed to separate money from credit although our models are consistent with quantity theory predictions about money supply and price level behavior under these two policy prescriptions the models imply that the quantity theory prescription is not pareto optimal and the real bills prescription is

estimating the costs of partial coverage rent controls a stochastic frontier approach this paper presents a modified frontier approach to estimate hedonic regressions for data on rent controlled and uncontrolled apartments this new approach allows the author to estimate the size of the subsidy from landlords to tenants of rent controlled apartments in addition this method provides the first estimates of the amount by which controls increase rents for uncontrolled apartments the study shows that in new york city in 1968 rents in the controlled sector would rise 22 to 26 percent upon decontrol while rents in the uncontrolled sector would fall about 22 to 25 percent upon removal of rent controls copyright 1993 by mit press

measuring direct discrimination in labor markets using a frontier approach evidence from cps female earnings data numerous studies of earnings differentials have attempted to measure discrimination against females or minorities by decomposing the total differential between males and females or whites and non whites into an explained and unexplained portion typically these studies follow the work of oaxaca 8 however a number of criticisms can be raised with these techniques 9 5 4 of which two are particularly important that the reduced form wage equations for the two groups will not be identical in every case and that there may be large and unobservable differences between the characteristics of the two groups for which the wage equations cannot account either of these problems are sufficient to make it impossible to use residual analysis to measure discrimination attempts to address these problems and obtain reliable and consistent estimates of the extent of discrimination are important for policy purposes low and villegas 7 address the first of these problems by suggesting the use of hedonic wage equations which contain only human capital characteristics or proxies and characteristics which directly affect the hedonic parameters in this framework perfect substitution between the workers is assumed their work however leaves the second problem unresolved in this paper a stochastic earnings frontier with a discrimination discount is used to estimate discrimination against women an earnings frontier for females that depends upon marginal productivity as measured by human capital and labor market characteristics of females is estimated discrimination is assumed to be the amount female earnings are removed from the frontier less any labor market inefficiency since these estimates will depend solely on female data they do not depend upon an assumption of similarity between males and females this procedure allows

seigniorage legal tender and the demand notes of 1861 i introduction shortly after the onset of hostilities at fort sumter the lincoln administration asked congress to authorize the first large scale issue of federal paper currency officially labeled as united states notes they were popularly known as the demand notes of 1861 the administration s action is unremarkable the extraordinary revenue requirements of long and costly wars are often met in part by issuing paper money more surprising and not widely recognized is that this initial issue of paper money carried provisions that largely prevented it from yielding sustainable revenue seigniorage these provisions were largely omitted for the successor currency to the 1861 notes also known as united states notes but popularly as greenbacks as a result its seigniorage potential was greater although seigniorage was limited by other provisions in modern software jargon the greenbacks might be viewed as 1861 notes version 2 0 a version better suited to sustain a flow of seigniorage however the government was unable to replace the latter with the former very quickly resulting in an extended period during which two paper currencies with different properties circulated side by side both with each other and with gold coin this somewhat untidy situation provides an interesting and heretofore underexploited experiment for economists these alternative monies circulated widely with market determined exchange rates for a substantial period during which the amounts of both paper currencies in circulation greatly increased before the 1861 notes were removed from circulation we have collected daily data on these exchange rates and report them as differing gold premiums for the competing paper monies below these data are exploited to calculate the seigniorage cost of the various provisions of the 1861 notes and to provide evidence on alternative theories of expectations formation during this period our paper has three sections the first presents a more extensive discussion than has been previously available of the 1861 notes in the second a simple analytical framework is used to demonstrate and where possible estimate the seigniorage costs of the provisions attached to these notes the third section analyzes the market relationship between gold and the simultaneously circulating 1861 notes and greenbacks prior to the all but complete retirement of the former in 1863 the paper concludes with a summary ii the demand notes of 1861 the major focus of this paper is on the demand notes of 1861 the first large scale federal experiment with paper money 1 we concentrate on these notes for two reasons first little has been written about them mitchell 1902 in his pioneering work on civil war finance devotes only 7 pages to them while devoting 17 pages to fractional currency and minor coins during the war in addition most of his discussion concerns the period prior to suspension more recently calomiris 1988a 1988b 1992 makes reference to the 1861 notes but only as a part of his discussion of greenbacks second the paradox of issuing largely seigniorage free paper money to help finance a war has not been well recognized and hence largely unexplained this conflict between means and ends is interesting in its own right and illuminates some of what is puzzling in the sequence of monetary events over the first half of the civil war as a part of our discussion of the 1861 notes we challenge or extend the existing literature in three ways first we demonstrate that the conclusion of studenski and krooss 1963 141 144 that these notes were only used by the government to pay salaries and hence in their words were a pseudomoney is mistaken examination of the financial press of the day suggests that these notes were not only popular but also circulated widely as money a convincing claim can be made that they were indeed a national currency

self employment in the eu quality work precarious work or both this paper estimates the differences in earnings between self employed and employees in the eu using the european union statistics on income and living conditions data and quantile regression methods it finds that in both eastern and western europe self employment pays more than regular employment only for workers at the top of the earnings distribution and considerably less than regular employment for those below the median these differences are smaller in eastern europe reflecting lower protection of regular employees this pattern is not driven by low skilled workers and it can be observed in both high skilled and low skilled occupations results are robust to accounting for differences in taxation hours worked and individual unobserved characteristics the evidence provided points to the lack of protective rights for the self employed and low earnings at the beginning of the self employment spells as the main explanations for lower earnings for the majority of self employed

measuring wage discrimination in italy a random coefficient approach using data from a representative 1989 household survey for italy we estimate random coefficient earnings frontiers by gender marital status and location these estimates are used to calculate discrimination indices our results show that fixed coefficients can be rejected in all cases a wide range on the estimated coefficients indicates a high degree of variation in the quality of the observed human capital variables as well as different degrees of ability as perceived by the employer we find reverse discrimination for single females in the south and the north for married females there is evidence of discrimination particularly in the south we isolate the effects of tenure and education on discrimination and find that these reduce discrimination for southern married females

self employment differentials among foreign born stem and non stem workers abstract this paper uses the american community survey to examine the previously overlooked fact that foreign stem science technology engineering and mathematics graduates have much lower self employment rates than their non stem counterparts with an unconditional difference of 3 3 percentage points we find empirical support for differing earnings opportunities as a partial explanation for this self employment gap high wages in stem paid employment combined with reduced earnings in self employment make self employment less desirable for stem graduates high self employment rates among other foreign born workers partially reflect weak paid employment opportunities public policy should encourage efficient use of worker skills rather than low value business venture creation

mismatch in local labour markets in central scotland the neglected role of demand this paper presents a model of mismatch unemployment in two local labour markets in scotland a total of seven possible sources of such unemployment are identified and examined within the context of a predominantly urban area and a mixed urban rural area these are contiguous travel to work areas ttwas the paper attempts to identify what causes recruitment difficulties and discusses the extent to which the problem is demand induced a survey of employer practices and attitudes is followed up by multiple regression analysis to determine the effect of these practices on vacancy duration the analysis shows that there are certain recruitment practices and inherent characteristics of employers which result in job offers that are either unattractive or inaccessible to the unemployed it is argued that design of policy for implementation at the local level needs to take account more explicitly of the demand side of the local labour market than has so far been evident in the uk approach to the skill mismatch issue

the effect of uncertain educational requirements on education and wages this paper examines the effects of uncertain educational requirements the level of education required to enter an occupation varies with a number of factors workers may be uncertain as to their specific job when selecting an occupation thus they are also uncertain as to how much education they will need we find that occupations with more uncertainty pay males compensating wages however females do not receive compensating wages we also find a negative relationship between uncertain educational requirements and completed schooling for both men and women

are high interest rates effective for stopping high inflation some skeptical notes high interest rates are considered an effective toolfor stopping high inflation the case for a policy of high interest rates is developed in terms of a conventional is lm model however among other things the model ignores some central aspects of modern credit markets in particular high interest rates may give rise to nonperforming bank loans thus seriously jeopardizing the effectiveness of the policy examples are developed in which it would be optimal to aim for equilibriums of low rather than high interest rates one of these examples hinges on the existence of nonindexed domestic debt this article looks at the effectiveness and desirability of relatively high interest rates in stabilization programs high interest rates refer to nominal interest rates that would result in unsustainable high real interest rates that is real rates of interest that would cause a state of generalized bankruptcy if maintained for a few months or a year if the program s inflation target were to be achieved the article evolves through a series of examples beginning with the is lm model described in section i despite its simplicity and early vintage the model is still important in discussions of policy the conventional is lm approach which gives strong support to a policy of high interest rates implies that tight money is effective in reducing economic activity and through the phillips curve is also effective in lowering inflation the larger the interest rate the sooner price stability will be achieved section ii questions the relevance of the is lm result on the basis of two observations first we live in a world in which countries are closely linked from a financial point of view therefore high interest rates are likely to signal expectations of high devaluation or inflation second high inflation rates make expected or ex ante real interest rates look much smaller than if the stabilization plan s inflation targets were to be fulfilled consequently banks may continue lending despite high nominal rates with the passage of timne however firms will find themselves in serious financial straits which eventually may result in a state

frontier estimation and firm specific inefficiency measures in the presence of heteroscedasticity the purpose of this article is to illustrate a straightforward and useful method for addressing the problem of heteroscedasticity in the estimation of frontiers a heteroscedastic cost frontier model is developed and estimated using bank cost data similar to that used by ferrier and lovell our results show dramatic changes in the estimated cost frontier and in the inefficiency measures when accounting for heteroscedasticity in the estimation process we find that the rankings of firms by their inefficiency measures is affected markedly by the correction for heteroscedasticity but not by alternative distributional assumptions about the one sided error term

inflation and monetary stabilization in mexico during the revolution abstract the mexican revolution like in so many cases of war witnessed a large inflationary process which appeared in early 1913 the group in power and other revolutionary factions resorted to seizing bank reserves and to printing money the exchange rate these various monies depreciated steadily until mid 1916 the new government tried to stabilize prices and the exchange rate by having a low level of reserves but the effort failed shortly after the government repudiated its own money by demanding that a growing amount of the various taxes to be paid in hard currency at the same time some sectors of the ecnomy also demanded their salaries to be paid in gold money finally as if by magic gold and silver coins returned to circulation reversing gresham s law and the gold standard was reassumed thus stabilizing the exchange rate and level of prices some of these results are also compared with those experienced by various countries in similar situations

some real evidence on the real bills doctrine versus the quantity theory researchers interested in testing between the real bills doctrine and the quantity theory approach to inflation in the face of rapid deficit financing money growth are confronted by an observation equivalence problem this paper identifies a data set which resolves the dilemma and tests the two inflation models the results provide clear evidence supporting the real bills doctrine that the value of assets backing money determines its value over the quantity theory i introduction one of the more interesting developments in monetary theory in the early 1980s was the re emergence of the real bills doctrine the doctrine identifies the value of assets backing the money supply as the prime determinant of the money s value its adherents claim that the monetization of worthless debt is responsible for inflation and not the increase in the money supply itself 1 that is an increase in the money supply will not lead to inflation so long as the money issue is backed by real assets sargent 1982 attributes the ends of four major inflations to exactly this phenomenon 2 in contrast the quantity theory claims that changes in the money supply should have inflationary consequences regardless of its backing the new interest in the old doctrine parallels a quite different line of work centering on what looks like a similar theme this second track focuses too on the rate of inflation and the fiscal wellbeing of the government though here the transmission mechanism from deficit to inflation is rather conventional in this essentially monetarist vision if the deficit is out of control and the monetary authority is to some degree subservient to the fiscal authority there must be some eventual monetization of the resultant debt resulting in inflation to the extent that higher rates of inflation are expected in the future higher rates of inflation may occur now 3 both lines of thought argue that a deficit that is out of control is responsible for inflation it is the transmission mechanism between this excessive deficit and the price level that distinguishes the two models the real bills doctrine proposes a radical departure from traditional monetary theory by suggesting that money is in effect efficiently priced the central bank is seen as being similar to any other financial intermediary purchasing debt and issuing liabilities and those liabilities money are then priced according to the value of the assets they were used to purchase the value of the assets backing the money thus money gets priced efficiently and its value is not determined by its relative or expected relative quantity but rather by the real characteristics of its backing that is ceterus paribus an increase in the money supply will not per se be inflationary the increase in the money supply will only be inflationary if the assets purchased with the money issue are of such low value as to reduce the average value of the assets backing the currency this paper provides some evidence in favor of the real bills vision of price level determination over the quantity theory the next section describes the observational equivalence problem confronting researchers interested in distinguishing between the real bills and quantity theory approach to inflation in the face of rapid deficit financing money growth and the institutional setting which resolves the observational equivalence dilemma section iii describes some tests designed to discriminate between these two hypotheses of the inflation process and their resuits and section iv contains my conclusions ii the observational equivalence of the real bills doctrine and the quantity theory a central theme of both of the real bills and quantity theory hypotheses is that fiscal deficits that are out of control will be inflationary though for very different reasons apart from any insight gained with regard to the inflation process testing the basic proposition that deficits are inflationary is problematic for two reasons first there is the standard problem of government accounting standards and practices in general and consequently of the appropriate definition of the fiscal deficit

econometric efficiency analysis a policy oriented review abstract the econometric approach to the construction of production cost and other frontiers and the measurement of efficiency relative to these frontiers historically has had a strong policy orientation this distinguishes the approach from the mathematical programming approach which has had a managerial decision making orientation geared to solving allocation problems within the public or private organization in this paper i review the development of the econometric approach to efficiency analysis i then discuss a small number of empirical studies chosen to illustrate the application of the econometric approach to a collection of public policy issues for which the notion of efficiency measurement is of prime importance examples are drawn from the areas of 1 agricultural productivity 2 labor market efficiency and equity 3 the measurement of the standard of living 4 the establishment of quality of service standards and 5 the valuation of environmental disamenities

labor market institutions and wage inequality the authors investigate how labor market institutions such as unemployment insurance unions firing regulations and minimum wages have affected the evolution of wage inequality among male workers results of estimations using data on institutions in eleven oecd countries indicate that changes in labor market institutions can account for much of the change in wage inequality between 1973 and 1998 factors found to have been negatively associated with male wage inequality are union density the strictness of employment protection law unemployment benefit duration unemployment benefit generosity and the size of the minimum wage over the 26 year period institutional changes were associated with a 23 reduction in male wage inequality in france where minimum wages increased and employment protection became stricter but with an increase of up to 11 in the united states and united kingdom where unions became less powerful and in the united states minimum wages fell

measuring information in the market an application to physician services ever since stigler s 47 seminal piece on the economics of information there has been a great deal of research investigating equilibrium in markets with imperfect information while most of this research has been concerned with theoretically establishing the conditions under which there exists a distribution of prices in equilibrium the field now contains a small but growing body of empirical research this work has followed the suggestion of stigler and utilized the dispersion of prices usually the variance as a measure of incomplete information about price such as stigler 47 stigler and kindahl 49 pratt wise and zeckhauser 44 carlson and pescatrice 12 marvel 34 mathewson 35 cox deserpa and canby 13 dahlby and west 14 van hoomissen 51 and lach and tsiddon 29 there are two disadvantages to using the variance or another measure of dispersion such as the range of prices as a measure of incomplete information about price the first disadvantage recognized by stigler and others is that price can vary for many reasons other than incomplete information thus dispersion is not a pure measure of incomplete information about prices the second disadvantage which has not been commonly recognized in the empirical literature is that price dispersion encompasses incomplete information both on the part of buyers and sellers as indicated by rothschild 45 axell 4 butters 9 and telser 50 and hence fails to distinguish between these two components in this paper we propose a method for measuring incomplete information about price which

dependent self employment as a way to evade employment protection legislation this paper examines whether the strictness of employment protection legislation encourages employers to contract out work to their own paid employees by the formula of dependent self employment while making transitions to independent self employment less likely by altering the relative valuation of risk between salaried work and self employment in favour of the former in conducting this analysis discrete choice models are applied to data drawn from the european community household panel from 1994 to 2001 to test the hypotheses a tentative individual measure of the potential severance payment that a worker would receive in the case of dismissal is included as well as aggregated variables that try to capture differences in labour market institutions and macroeconomic conditions evidence for a positive impact of the strictness of employment protection legislation and the potential severance payment on transitions to dependent self employment is found the opposite effects however are detected for individuals becoming independent self employed

short waves in hungary 1923 and 1946 persistence chaos and lack of control abstract monetary policies follow a complex and chaotic process one that is enhanced when monetary growth is taken to the extreme as in hyperinflation while we have a basic understanding of the complex dynamics of hyperinflation a less explored phenomenon accompanying hyperinflationary episodes is the effect that they have on institutional development building on recent advances in economic history examining monetary policy and institutions this analysis uses more explicit recourse to complexity theory and in particular complex adaptive systems to examine two separate hyperinflationary episodes in hungary 1923 and 1946 delving into the institutional and cultural roots of the inflationary policies of the hungarian government and detailing the institutional effects which succeeded hyperinflation this paper shows that the twin experiences of hungary were both chaotic and created a chaotic and complex aftermath the results of which are still being felt indeed hungary s 1923 and especially its 1946 hyperinflation shows that some economic chaos cannot be restrained by political institutions and in fact the institutions themselves were changed when staring into the abyss hungary also found that the abyss stared back

stocasthic frontiers and wage inefficiency in venezuela this paper analyzes wage inefficiency in venezuela in 2006 based on the methodology of stochastic frontiers empirical results indicate that employers inefficiency is above 30 while for employees inefficiency is not statistical significant this can be explained by government role in the labor market and by the fact that employers may be paying efficiency wages to increase productivity

matchmaker matchmaker the effect of old boy networks on job match quality earnings and tenure firms often view job applicant referrals from current employees as more informative than direct applications or referrals through formal labor market intermediaries such as placement firms we argue that old boy networks reduce employers uncertainty about worker productivity using jovanovic s job matching model we show that workers hired through the old boy network should 1 earn higher initial salaries 2 experience lower subsequent wage growth on the job and 3 stay on the job longer than otherwise comparable workers hired from outside the network we find considerable support for this theory using data from the 1972 survey of natural and social scientists and engineers