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

inequality of opportunity in energy consumption in china abstract this paper proposes an empirical implementation of the concept of inequality of opportunity in energy consumption expenditure and applies this to data from chinese general social survey cgss we examine the role played by circumstances beyond the control of individuals for instance gender hukou status family background and region of birth in generating inequality in energy consumption expenditure in china this study shows that the relative share of inequality of opportunity ior in energy consumption expenditure in china is 10 02 for the entire sample ior turns out to be larger for the older cohort peaking at 14 40 for the 1955 64 cohort a shapley value decomposition presents that hukou status and region of birth are the two largest contributors to inequality of opportunity across birth cohorts a heterogeneity analysis further shows that more disadvantaged groups for instance female individuals born in the west of rural china with worse family backgrounds are facing more unequal opportunities in energy consumption in china these results suggest that energy policies focused on zero discrimination in opportunities should be encouraged

implicit contracts and the cyclicality of the skill premium to examine the cyclical behavior of the skill premium this paper introduces implicit labor contracts in a dsge model where production is characterized by capital skill complementarity and the utilization of capital is endogenous it is shown that this model can reproduce the observed cyclical patterns of wages and the skill premium the feature of capital skill complementarity coupled with variable capital utilization rates does not come at odds with the acyclical behavior of the skill premium the paper argues that the skill complementarity of capital is not a quantitatively significant factor at high frequencies the key aspects are the contracts and the capital utilization margin

the medicaid notch labor supply and welfare participation evidence from eligibility expansions i assess the impact of losing public health insurance on labor market decisions of women by examining a series of medicaid eligibility expansions targeted toward young children these targeted expansions severed the historical tie between afdc and medicaid eligibility the reforms allowed a mother s earnings to increase without losing public health insurance for her young children increasing the income limit for medicaid resulted in a decrease in afdc participation and an increase in labor force participation among these women the effects were large for ever married women and negligible for never married women

comparing electricity consumption trends a multilevel index decomposition analysis of the genevan and swiss economy abstract switzerland including the canton of geneva aims to reduce its electricity consumption following its decision to phase out nuclear electricity production to investigate whether national policies and a regional programme both of which aim at improving electricity efficiency may have had an effect we disentangle the effects of changes in economic structure overall economic activity and structure corrected energy intensity scei on the electricity consumption in the canton of geneva and in switzerland on multiple aggregation levels the primary sector being negligibly small we define the economy as the secondary and tertiary sector our analysis shows that changes in electricity consumption in the genevan and swiss economy were mainly caused by changes in activity and scei although structural changes were not negligible specifically we have shown that correcting for structural change may significantly impact comparisons between regional scei trends our analysis shows that economy wide electric energy efficiency improved both in geneva and switzerland this is the case both for the time period 2000 2007 first period before implementation of the energy efficiency programme eep eco21 in geneva and for the period 2008 2014 second period after implementation of the eep excluding 2015 in switzerland the average reductions in scei in the study periods were similar 1 2 per year in the first period and 1 0 per year in the second period the average reduction in scei in geneva was faster in the second period 2 6 per year than in the first period 1 5 per year these findings suggest that national energy efficiency policies that have been in place since 2001 have been effective a strong increase in scei by 4 6 occurred in geneva in 2015 diminishing the gap between the genevan and swiss scei we found that this increase was likely to be caused by weather effects when including the year 2015 the average reduction in scei in the second period was 1 7 for geneva and 1 1 for switzerland moreover we have shown that weather effects were more strongly correlated with scei than with absolute electricity consumption highlighting the importance of correcting for structure and weather effects further weather effects made it difficult to identify contributions from the eep to the reduction of the genevan scei we found that the applicability ida for tracing the effectiveness of eeps needs to be critically assessed in view of data availability confounding influences such as weather effects as well as the maturity and size of the eep

changes in male labor supply and wages in the 1980s both wages and labor supply of poorly educated men fell substantially relative to those of educated men some observers have interpreted this positive association between changes in w

determinants of energy demand in the french service sector a decomposition analysis abstract this paper analyzes the changes in the energy consumption of the service sector in france over the period 1995 2006 using the logarithmic mean divisia index i lmdi i decomposition method the analysis is carried out at various disaggregation levels to highlight the specifics of each sub sector and end use according to their respective determinants the results show that in this period the economic growth of the service sector was the main factor that led to the increase in total energy consumption structure productivity substitution and intensity effects restricted this growth but with limited effect by analyzing each end use this paper enables a more precise understanding of the impact of these factors the activity effect was the main determinant of the increase in energy consumption for all end uses except for air conditioning for which the equipment rate effect was the main factor structural changes in the service sector primarily impacted energy consumption for space heating and cooking improvements in productivity limited the growth of energy consumption for all end uses except for cooking finally energy efficiency improvements mainly affected space heating energy use

a cohort analysis of the association between work hours and wages among men the results of some recent ingenious labor supply research may appear incompatible with the notion that uncompensated wage elasticities for men are small perhaps negative this paper argues there is no incompatibility the methodology in this recent research results in computing wage responses that come closer to measuring intertemporal wage elasticities than to uncompensated wage elasticities to demonstrate this i use pseudopanel data constructed from the march current population surveys from 1967 to 1998 to measure both intertemporal wage elasticities and uncompensated wage elasticities the latter appear sensitive to the particular specification of the hours equation

labor supply of older men does social security matter 1 introduction interest in the economic affairs of the elderly has grown tremendously in the past decades this increased interest in the economics of aging is only natural if one considers the demographic changes that have taken place since world war ii in 1950 8 1 of the u s population was age 65 or older compared to 12 7 in 1999 u s bureau of the census 1999 current projections estimate that by 2050 over 20 of the u s population will be at least 65 years old at the same time that these demographic changes have taken place the working habits of the elderly have also changed the labor force participation rates of older males have decreased significantly over the past 30 years as retirement ages have fallen sharply in 1950 over two thirds of all males age 55 or older participated in the labor market by 1993 this number had decreased to 38 u s bureau of the census 1999 these developments raise many important questions and concerns one obvious and much publicized area of concern is the viability of th e social security system whether the trend toward earlier retirement will continue is uncertain in any case a better understanding of this trend and its causes seems vital if we are to make informed public policy decisions the literature to date offers no consensus as to the causes of the drastic decline in postwar participation rates of the elderly one prominent hypothesis has been the proliferation of the social security program established in 1935 the program has rapidly increased coverage and generosity since 1950 art additional fact that has encouraged investigations into the link between social security and labor force participation are the precipitous declines observed in male participation rates at ages 62 and 65 the early and normal social security retirement ages respectively despite the attention social security has been given in the literature there exists a great amount of uncertainty as to how much of the observed declines in labor force participation can be attributed to changes in social security retirement benefits this article reexamines the effects of social security on the aggregate labor supply of older men the empirical analysis utilizes a panel data set containing participation wage and social security information for cohorts defined by birth year and educational attainment from 1967 to 1996 using ordinary least squares and within cohort estimates i present evidence of a negative and significant relationship between the level of social security wealth and labor force participation rates i also find a significant positive effect of the monetary return to working on labor force participation rates next to wages this monetary return to working includes adjustments made to social security payments due to the postponement of retirement within cohorts i find evide nce of sharp decreases in the return to working at ages 62 and 65 which might explain the prevalence of retirements from the labor force at these ages between cohorts i find little evidence that changes in the return to working caused by social security are responsible for sizable reductions in the labor force participation rates of older men increases in social security wealth levels on the other hand are found to be capable of explaining most of the observed decline in labor force participation the remainder of the article is organized as follows the next section describes the decline in labor force participation for older men this is followed by discussion of the social security program the fourth section presents the empirical analysis using the results of the empirical analysis i then simulate the effects of the 1977 amendments and show that labor force participation rates for the first birth cohorts affected by the law change would have been significantly lower under the old law the final section presents the conclusions ii the decline in participation throughout this study data to analyze labor force participation will be taken from the march current population survey cps files

analysis of rural residential energy consumption and corresponding carbon emissions in china the analysis of rural residential energy consumption in china from 2001 to 2008 and corresponding impacts on climate change is presented in the paper it is found that rural residential energy consumption has shown obvious transition from non commercial energy to commercial energy the percentage of biomass energy consumption dropped from 81 5 in 2001 to 70 9 in 2008 while the percentage of commercial energy increased from 17 1 to 25 1 besides other renewable energy increased very fast with annual growth rate of 19 8 correspondingly total co2 emissions from rural residential energy consumption had significant increase from 152 2 million tons in 2001 to 283 6 million tons in 2008 the annual growth rate of per capita co2 emissions was nearly 2 times faster than that of urban area the major driving force for the consumption of commercial energy was the income of rural farmers while strong rural energy policies supported the development of renewable energy to satisfy the goals of energy supply and co2 emissions reduction in rural areas it is advised to change the energy structure and improve the energy efficiency such as to generate electricity using renewable technologies and to replace coal with modern biomass energy for cooking and heating

the demand for energy using assets among the world s rising middle classes we study household decisions to acquire energy using assets in the presence of rising incomes we develop a theoretical framework to characterize the effect of income growth on asset purchases when consumers face credit constraints we use large and plausibly exogenous shocks to household income generated by the conditional cash transfer program in mexico oportunidades to show that asset acquisition is nonlinear depends as predicted in the presence of credit constraints on the pace of income growth and both effects are economically large among beneficiaries our results may help explain important worldwide trends in the relationship between energy use and income growth

addressing nurse shortages what can policy makers learn from the econometric evidence on nurse labour supply this paper provides a detailed review of the international studies that have used formal econometric models to investigate the labour supply decision of registered nurses rns the main finding is that at least in the short run rn labour supply appears to be fairly unresponsive to wage changes consequently even large wage increases are unlikely to be successful in tackling current and predicted nurse shortages this finding points to the importance of non pecuniary job aspects in influencing labour supply however the paper concludes by arguing that these empirical findings should be viewed with some caution given both theoretical and econometric limitations

the effect of social security on retirement in the early 1970s we analyze detailed longitudinal data on a cohort of males aged 58 67 in 1969 1973 a period of substantial increases in real social security benefits we find the following 1 the accelerating decline in labor force participation of elderly men in 1969 1973 can be explained by the large increase in real social security benefits 2 there is evidence of a liquidity constraint effect for an important subgroup of the elderly 3 the magnitude of this induced retirement effect is large enough that ignoring it can lead to serious underestimation of the fiscal implications of changes in benefit provisions our results are interpreted in the historical context of a particular cohort undergoing major unanticipated transfers of wealth the steady state effects of social security on retirement may not be the same

manufacturing energy use in oecd countries decomposition of long term trends abstract in this paper we examine manufacturing energy use in 13 oecd countries over the period 1971 1995 we describe changes in aggregate energy intensity using the adaptive weighting divisia decomposition method we contrast the development in the periods after the oil price shocks of 1973 and 1979 with the period of relatively stable energy prices after the oil price crash of 1986 the results show that manufacturing output grew in most countries pushing up energy use the share of electricity increased in almost every sector while there was a clear trend away from oil and coal towards natural gas changes in the structure of output drove up energy use between 1973 and 1994 in some countries and down in others changes in energy intensities had a profound and downward effect on manufacturing energy use in all countries however contrasting the period after oil prices fell in 1986 with earlier years we see that for most countries the rate of energy intensity decline slowed slightly but did not reverse with falling prices in a few countries efficiency improvements continued to have a strong effect this suggests that even without higher prices improvements of energy efficiency seems to take place

aggregation and the role of energy in the economy methods for investigating the role of energy in the economy involve aggregating different energy flows a variety of methods have been proposed but none has received universal acceptance this paper shows that the method of aggregation has crucial effects on the results of the analysis we review the principal assumptions and methods for aggregating energy flows the basic heat equivalents approach economic approaches using prices or marginal product for aggregation emergy analysis and thermodynamic approaches such as exergy we argue that economic approaches such as the index or marginal product method are superior because they account for differences in quality among fuels we apply various economic approaches in three case studies in the us economy in the first we account for energy quality to assess changes in the energy surplus delivered by the extraction of fossil fuels from 1954 to 1992 the second and third case studies examine the importance of energy quality in evaluating the relation between energy use and gdp first a quality adjusted index of energy consumption is used in an econometric analysis of the causal relation between energy use and gdp from 1947 to 1996 second we account for energy quality in an econometric analysis of the factors that determine changes in the energy gdp ratio from 1947 to 1996 without adjusting for energy quality the results imply that the energy surplus from petroleum extraction is increasing that changes in gdp drive changes in energy use and that gdp has been decoupled from between aggregate energy use all of these conclusions are reversed when we account for changes in energy quality 2000 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

early retirement and economic incentives in norway early retirement programmes have gradually reduced the retirement age from 67 to 62 for a majority of the labour force based on micro data for 1990 and 1992 we estimate a competing risk model with three states full retirement partial retirement part time work and full time work we then use the estimated model in simulations to study how financial incentives can be strengthened to extend working life financial incentives educational background and industry affiliation are found to influence retirement behaviour for low and medium incomes the tax system shifts the incentives heavily towards early retirement and in particular towards partial retirement combined with part time work

changes in the labor supply behavior of married women 1980 2000 using march current population survey data we investigate married women s labor supply from 1980 to 2000 we find a large rightward shift in their labor supply function for annual hours in the 1980s with little shift in the 1990s these shifts account for most of the slowdown in the growth of labor supply during this period a major development was the dramatic decrease in the responsiveness of married women s labor supply to their own and husbands wages their own wage elasticity fell by 50 56 while their cross wage elasticity fell by 38 47 in absolute value

a synthetic cohort analysis of female labour supply the case of thailand abstractthis study analyzes trends and patterns in employment hours worked and women s wages for thai women and relations among these variables in models of female labour supply labour supply behaviour of thai women is investigated with synthetic cohort data defined by age year of birth and level of educational attainment constructed from annual labour force surveys from 1985 to 2004 according to pseudo panel estimates wage increases lead to a reduction in hours worked but also an increase in the employment population ratio with elasticity estimates that are robust across a variety of specifications estimates based on disaggregation by marital status show that marriage provides protection against wage decreases allowing married women greater choice between hours of work and other household activities alternative disaggregations find that younger cohorts of women and those with the highest education show the greatest positive response of the employment rate to wage changes leading to a fut

do changes in pension incentives affect retirement a longitudinal study of subjective retirement expectations this paper investigates the responsiveness of individuals retirement decisions to forward looking measures of pension accumulations in contrast to previous research we use within person variation in retirement incentives and are able to control for unobserved heterogeneity in tastes for retirement by studying a panel of subjective retirement expectations we confirm that individuals do respond as expected to pension incentives even when we control for individual fixed effects however the magnitude of these responses differs when estimated from models based on within person versus cross sectional variation the inclusion of fixed effects reduces the response by about half

the returns to education in thailand a pseudo panel approach summary this study employs the pseudo panel approach for estimating returns to education in thailand while treating the endogeneity bias common to estimates from data on individuals pseudo panel data are constructed from repeated cross sections of thailand s national labor force surveys of workers born during 1946 67 estimates show a downward bias of the returns to education in least squares regressions with individual data a result confirmed with instrumental variable estimation the overall rate of return is between 14 and 16 females have higher returns than males and workers in urban areas have higher returns than those in rural areas

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

identifying electricity saving potential in rural china empirical evidence from a household survey in recent years there has been a fast growing body of literature examining energy saving potential in relation to electricity however empirical studies focusing on non western nations are limited to fill this gap this study intends to examine the electricity saving potential of rural households in china using a unique data set from the china residential electricity consumption survey crecs in collaboration with the china general social survey cgss conducted nationwide at the household level in rural china we use a stochastic frontier model which allows us to decompose residential electricity consumption into the minimum necessary amount of consumption based on physical characteristics e g house size house age number of televisions or refrigerators and estimate the consumption slack i e the amount of electricity consumption that could be saved which depends on various factors we find that rural households in china are generally efficient in electricity saving and the saving potential is affected by fast information feedback and social demographic characteristics instead of by the averaged electricity price or energy efficiency labelling signals in addition we find no evidence of regional heterogeneity on electricity saving potential for rural households policy implications are derived

powering up china income distributions and residential electricity consumption current forecasts suggest that the vast majority of growth in energy demand will come from the developing world and that china will play a major part in that growth this paper presents evidence suggesting that the shape of the income distribution which is typically omitted from forecasting models plays a major role in driving household acquisition of energy using durable goods in rural china we use province level data for rural households to show that the share of the population living above the poverty line is an important determinant of household appliance holdings even controlling for average household income

do retirement dreams come true the effect of unanticipated events on retirement plans analyzing data from the retirement history study the authors find that the retirement plans of male workers aged 58 63 in 1969 were significantly affected by unanticipated events over the next decade specifically unanticipated increases in social security wealth induced retirement earlier than originally planned as did deterioration in personal health whereas the recession of the 1970s tended to delay retirement this evidence that policy changes do affect retirement behavior in systematic ways provides support for the decision by congress to defer until the turn of the century the application of several important provisions of the 1983 amendments to the social security act

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

wages and participation during the last 25 years annual hours worked by prime aged men fell by the equivalent of six 40 hour workweeks the reduction was more pronounced among those younger than among mid age workers among black men than among white men and among those with less schooling thus hours worked not only fell but showed increased dispersion increases that paralleled the growth in wage dispersion that has become so familiar to students of trends in wages the argument advanced here is that the correspondence is not coincidental the changes in hours worked are simply the labor supply responses that follow the changes in the structure of wages

factors shaping aggregate energy intensity trend for industry energy intensity versus product mix understanding the mechanisms of change of energy consumption in industry has attracted much attention since the 1973 world oil crisis a popular line of research has been to decompose changes in the aggregate energy intensity of industry to give the relative impacts arising from energy intensity change and product mix change using a decomposition technique many empirical studies covering a large number of countries have been reported the main objective of this paper is to put together the empirical results reported in these studies in a coherent framework and identify possible systematic features of particular interest are the basic trends in this line of research the relative importance of energy intensity change and product mix change possible variations over time and between country groups in the energy impacts of these changes and inconsistencies in findings among studies an overview of the decomposition technique including its strengths weaknesses and role in industrial energy consumption studies is also presented

social security income and the utilization of home care evidence from the social security notch this paper exploits social security law changes to identify the effect of social security income on the use of formal and informal home care by the elderly results from an instrumental variables estimation strategy show that as retirement income increases elderly individuals increase their use of formal home care and become less likely to rely on informal home care provided to them by their children this negative effect on informal home care is most likely driven by male children withdrawing from their caregiving roles the empirical results also suggest that higher social security benefits would encourage the use of formal home care by those who would not have otherwise used any type of home care and would also encourage the use of both types of home care services among elderly individuals

residential energy consumption in urban china a decomposition analysis abstract residential energy consumption rec is the second largest energy use category 10 in china and urban residents account for 63 of the rec understanding the underlying drivers of variations of urban rec thus helps to identify challenges and opportunities and provide advices for future policy measures this paper applies the lmdi method to a decomposition of china s urban rec during the period of 1998 2007 at disaggregated product activity level using data collected from a wide range of sources our results have shown an extensive structure change towards a more energy intensive household consumption structure as well as an intensive structure change towards high quality and cleaner energy such as electricity oil and natural gas which reflects a changing lifestyle and consumption mode in pursuit of a higher level of comfort convenience and environmental protection we have also found that china s price reforms in the energy sector have contributed to a reduction of rec while scale factors including increased urban population and income levels have played a key role in the rapid growth of rec we suggest that further deregulation in energy prices and regulatory as well as voluntary energy efficiency and conservation policies in the residential sector should be promoted

global changes in residential energy consumption abstract the residential energy sector is crucial to achieving co2 emission reductions as it has an important energy saving potential and its environmental controls are difficult to displace to other countries using the latest available data this short paper provides a concise analysis of residential energy consumption trends for the period 1993 2013 in a double perspective by main world regions and by per capita gross national income levels in 2013 residential energy has been divided into three types non renewable direct renewable and indirect renewable annual rates of change energy intensity energy in per capita terms and some ratios have been analyzed notable regional differences and trends were observed in the studied variables therefore different energy policies are recommended for the regions eastern and southern asian countries the eu15 and other developed countries are the regions which should make the greatest effort to reduce residential energy consumption the promotion of direct and indirect renewable energies is recommended

booming sector and de industrialisation in a small open economy this paper presents a theoretical analysis of the dutch disease the phenomenon whereby a boom in one traded goods sector squeezes porfitability in other traded goods sectors both by directly bi

china s foreign trade and climate change a case study of co2 emissions abstract the globalization of trade has numerous environmental implications trade creates a mechanism for consumers to shift environmental pollution associated with their consumption to other countries carbon leakage exerts great influences on international trade and economy applying an input output approach the paper estimates the amount of carbon dioxide co2 embodied in china s foreign trade during 1997 2007 it is found that 10 03 26 54 of china s annual co2 emissions are produced during the manufacture of export goods destined for foreign consumers while the co2 emissions embodied in china s imports accounted for only 4 40 1997 and 9 05 2007 of that we also estimate that the rest of world avoided emitting 150 18 mt co2 in 1997 increasing to 593 mt in 2007 as a result of importing goods from china rather than manufacturing the same type and quantity of goods domestically during 1997 2007 the net additional global co2 emissions resulting from china s exports were 4894 mt then the paper divides the trade embodied emissions into scale composition and technical effect it was found that scale and composition effect increased the co2 emissions embodied in trade while the technical effect offset a small part of them finally its mechanism and policy implications are presented

social security liquidity and early retirement abstract this paper investigates the effect of social security on retirement decisions it argues that it is important to take realistic account of how recipients evaluate potential benefit flows the paper presents a simple retirement model in which liquidity constraints prompt individuals to use higher than market discount rates in evaluating future pension benefits as a consequence even an apparently actuarially fair early retirement benefit could on average discourage continued work using data on individual retirement decisions i find support for the argument that this phenomenon contributes to some of the observed increase in early retirement

induced innovation and energy prices this paper uses u s patent data from 1970 to 1994 to study the impact of energy prices on energy efficient innovations theories of technological change have focused both on demand side factors which spur innovative activity by increasing the value of new innovations and supply side factors such as scientific advancements that make new innovations possible data on demand side factors are easily obtained but data on supply side factors that influence innovation are not readily available this paper uses patent citations as a measure of the usefulness of the existing base of scientific knowledge citations to previous patents are used to construct productivity estimates which measure the usefulness of the existing stock of knowledge to inventors in a given energy field for any given year these estimates are then combined with data on demand side factors to estimate a model of induced innovation in energy technologies the results indicate that both energy prices and the supply of knowledge have strongly significant positive effects on innovation the paper concludes with a discussion of the implication of this work for environmental policy

industrial long term agreements on energy efficiency in the netherlands a critical assessment of the monitoring methodologies and quantitative results abstract long term agreements ltas with industry were added to the mix of energy policy instruments in the netherlands at the beginning of the 1990s within a few years these agreements have become very important for the industrial energy conservation policy in this study we assessed the extent to which the targets set out by the government were achieved to this end we studied 1 whether the original policy targets for industry were adequately translated to the contracted ltas 2 whether the ltas achieved the contracted goals and 3 whether the monitoring methodologies that were developed ensure a complete comparable and objective monitoring of the energy intensity developments in manufacturing industry the policy target for manufacturing industry was to decrease energy intensity by 19 in the period 1989 2000 excluding feedstocks it turned out to be possible to contract ltas that cover 72 75 of the energy consumption in manufacturing industry the average of the contracted lta targets amounts to an 18 intensity decrease the average goal achievement of the ltas in the period 1989 1997 turned out to be in accordance with the contracted targets although more than half of the lta sectors are lagging behind the agreed rate of intensity decrease for each of the ltas a monitoring methodology was developed some aspects of these monitoring methodologies have resulted in the fact that the lta monitoring does not ensure a comparable and objective monitoring of the energy intensity results in the ltas overall we conclude that the monitoring of the energy intensity developments in the long term agreements sectors is insufficiently transparent we recommend a stricter enforcement of uniform monitoring requirements in a new generation of ltas and independent supervision and verification of the monitoring results

early retirement provisions and the labor force behavior of older men evidence from canada we examine the sequential introduction of early retirement provisions to canada s two public pension plans these reforms provide a unique opportunity to assess the effect of public pension plan parameters on labor supply behavior free of the biases that potentially affect the simple time series or cross section inference presented in many previous studies we find that the reforms led to an increase in pension receipt but had little immediate effect on labor market behavior this is due to the fact that men who initially took advantage of the early retirement provisions would otherwise have had limited labor market participation

the incidence of payroll taxation evidence from chile i provide new evidence on the incidence of payroll taxation by examining the experience of chile before and after the privatization of its social security system this policy change led to a sharp exogenous reduction in the payroll tax burden on chilean firms on average payroll tax rates fell by 25 over 6 years using data from a census of manufacturing firms i estimate that the incidence of payroll taxation is fully on wages with no effect on employment this finding is robust to a variety of empirical approaches to the problem of measurement error in firm level measures of taxes worker

income elasticity of cooking fuel substitution in rural china evidence from population census data abstract solid fuels are still widely used as primary cooking fuel in rural china which brings severe health environmental and socio economic consequences a sound understanding of the energy transition pattern of rural households will provide valuable insights for policy makers aiming to facilitate transition towards cleaner fuels the most relevant questions include whether measure of improving income could help facilitate transition and how quickly the transition would happen as household income grows using national population census data 2000 2010 for over two thousand chinese counties we estimated the income elasticities of primary cooking fuel substitution between traditional biomass coal gaseous fuels electric power and others it is found that the income effect is positive for the cleaner fuels gases and electric power but negative for dirty solid fuels like coal and biomass however our estimated elasticities show that the adoption of cleaner fuels gases and electric power as primary cooking fuel is income elastic elasticity 1 for rural village households but income inelastic elasticity

reconsidering the social security notch and retirement wealth and incentive effects using the health and retirement study we show that studies using the social security notch cannot separately identify the effects of retirement wealth and forward looking incentives on retirement because the notch natural experiment changed both factors in offsetting ways

fringe benefits and inequality in the labor market 1 introduction wage inequality has been the topic of much recent empirical research similarly inequality in the distribution of fringe benefits has also been studied 1 on the whole the vast majority of research on inequality has examined wages and fringe benefits separately even though the cross sectional relationship between the two has been emphasized and analyzed in terms of the theory of equalizing differences rosen 1986 states the equalizing difference model is built upon the simple and intuitively compelling idea that it is the combination of wages and job attributes that constitute the relevant price of labor for market analysis of jobs thus inequality analysis based on either wages or fringe benefits alone can overlook the interaction between them and be misleading given equal productivity workers would trade fringe benefits for higher wages and vice versa however across different levels of productivity skilled workers will demand more fringe benefits simply because the benefits are normal goods moreover fringe benefits unlike wages are not taxed and skilled workers who face higher marginal tax rates are likely to demand more fringe benefits overtime one can expect the discrepancy between wages and compensation to grow because wages represent a smaller fraction of compensation 2 a few studies show potential biases in measured inequality when wages are used instead of compensation 3 however the inequality of fringe benefits at the level of the individual workers can be analyzed by focusing on the coverage rate of health insurance and pensions without knowing the monetary value of them due to data availability 4 moreover even though compensation inequality can be analyzed when the monetary values of fringe benefits are available it can be analyzed only at the level of the industry or job not at the level of the individual worker this research is different in that it uses individual level data with imputed monetary values for fringe benefits to analyze inequality in the labor market at a point in time and its growth over time deeper investigation has been conducted within the distribution to ascertain how each group is affected when fringe benefits are accounted for several alternative explanations of the observed discrepancies between wage inequality and compensation inequality are further assessed the remainder of this article is organized as follows section ii describes in detail the data used in this study section iii supplies the empirical results possible explanations for which are explored in section iv section v provides a conclusion ii data the lack of suitable data has precluded analysis of compensation inequality despite widespread interest in the topic until now no data set has contained information on both the demographic characteristics of workers and the monetary value of fringe benefits however such a data set has been created by merging individual level data from the current population survey cps and industry level data from the chamber of commerce s employee benefits survey bbs the march supplement of the cps for 1988 to 1995 supplies information on age gender years of schooling occupation of employment industry of employment wages weeks worked health insurance and pension coverage and imputed monetary value of health insurance for the year preceding the march survey year this annual survey is the largest source of information on fringe benefits and first included questions on health insurance and pension coverage in 1980 although the questionnaire items regarding health insurance were changed twice in survey years 1988 and 1995 i mitigate the problem by restricting the sample to workers ages 25 to 54 the group that the census bureau reports is the least likely to be affected gruber and poterba 1994 and by restricting the survey years to 1988 onward to focus on employer provided own health insurance coverage which is also less likely to be affected by the changes in the cps questionnaire on health insurance coverage

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

dutch sectoral energy intensity developments in international perspective 1987 2005 this paper makes use of a new dataset to investigate energy intensity developments in the netherlands over the period 1987 2005 the dataset allows for a comparison with 18 other oecd countries a key feature of our analysis is that we combine a cross country perspective with a high level of sectoral detail covering 49 sectors particularly innovative is our evaluation of energy intensity developments in a wide range of service sectors we find that across sectors energy intensity levels in the netherlands on average decreased only marginally and increased in services this performance is in general worse than the oecd average especially between 1987 and 1995 changes in the sectoral composition of the economy play an important role in explaining aggregate trends in the manufacturing sector about half of the efficiency improvements were undone by a shift towards a more energy intensive industry structure in contrast in the service sector efficiency decreased which was undone for about one third by a shift towards a less energy intensive sector structure

secular changes in the work and retirement patterns of older men this paper examines trends in the work and retirement patterns of males aged 58 to 63 in 1969 and 1989 respectively the labor force attachments of this group have fallen for reasons unrelated to changes in individual characteristics or occupational attainment especially sharp reductions at age 62 hint at an increasingly important role for the early retirement provisions in social security attachments to longest jobs have also declined substantially beginning at age 55 although pension incentives may be significant the observed correlations between pensions and employment status may also reflect the role of confounding factors such as poorly measured nonpension wealth

environmental regulation and industry location in europe this paper estimates the effect of environmental regulation on industry location and compares it with other determinants of location such as agricultural education and r d country characteristics the analysis is based on a general empirical trade model that captures the interaction between country and industry characteristics in determining industry location the johnson neyman technique is used to fully explicate the nature of the conditional interactions the model is applied to data on 16 manufacturing industries from 13 european countries the empirical results indicate that the pollution haven effect is present and that the relative strength of such an effect is of about the same magnitude as other determinants of industry location a significant negative effect on industry location is observed only at relatively high levels of industry pollution intensity

growth in women s relative wages and in inequality among men one phenomenon or two although increased wage inequality among men during the past three decades has received more attention the growth in women s wages has been equally remarkable in fact by one measure of inequality the ninth decile median ratio the proportional growth in inequality has moved in exact proportion with the female male wage ratio it is suggested that both result from expansion in the value of brains relative to brawn there is no way of knowing the full story of growth in women s relative wages and it is important not to dismiss the import of changing career patterns as is evident in the panel data increasing labor market participation must be important so too are the implications that follow the movement of women from the home to the job

labor market dropouts and trends in the wages of black and white men there is continuing debate over whether and to what degree estimations of black white wage convergence are biased because they leave labor market dropouts out of the picture if a high proportion of blacks become discouraged and cease searching for jobs and if those dropouts have on average poor job prospects the average wage of black workers who remain in the labor market will be an upwardly biased estimate of the average wage across the population this paper introduces a simple method of imputing wages to non workers when non workers are accounted for in the calculations real wage growth for prime age black men over the 1969 98 period is reduced approximately 40 and black white wage convergence is reduced by approximately one third the author finds that a source of bias as important as falling employment rates is the growing gap between wages of workers and potential wages of non workers

greater wage inequality reduces average hours of work i argue that rising inequality in offered wages lowers average working hours if labour supply is concave in wages a decrease in the working hours of low paid workers is greater than an increase in working hours of high paid workers furthermore due to low market opportunities some low paid workers may leave the labour force using cps morg data for prime age men i find evidence in support of this explanation i establish empirically the concavity of the labour supply and find evidence that after controlling for the average wage wage inequality has a negative effect on labour supply

changes in relative wages and family labor supply the large changes in relative wages that occurred during the 1980s provide fertile ground for studying the behavioral responses of married couples to the wage changes of husbands and wives i find estimates of own wage and cross wage elasticities for men that are very small the own wage elasticity for women is positive and the cross wage elasticity for women suggests a strong negative response of female labor supply to changes in their husband s wages family labor supply behavior determines how changes in individual wage rates translate into family earnings changes the responses of women to changes in their husband s wages attenuated somewhat the increases in individual wage inequality at the family level the results suggest that the earnings of the wives of low income men would actually have fallen over the decade if women s labor supply did not respond to changes in their husbands wages however assortative mating implies that wage changes of husbands and wives are correlated and so family earnings inequality still grew during the decade of the 1980s

social security and households saving this paper provides new evidence on the substitutability between private and pension wealth by exploiting the italian pension reform of 1992 we use a difference in difference estimator that exploits the differential effects of the reform on individuals belonging to several yea of birth cohorts and different occupational groups we find convincing evidence that saving rates increase as a result of a reduction in pension wealth by allowing for the possibility that substitutability changes with age we find that substitutability is particularly high and precisely estimated for workers between 35 and 45

do changes in demographic characteristics explain declining male employment rates examination of the australian case using a propensity score re weighting decomposition approach using australian data spanning the period from 1981 to 2001 we apply a propensity score re weighting decomposition approach to investigate the extent to which the large decline in the male employment population rate over this period can be attributed to changes in socio demographic characteristics we find that changes in observed characteristics account for little of the aggregate decline however changes in characteristics are found to be important for population sub groups in particular changes in partner status and partner employment status have acted to decrease employment rates of younger males but increase employment rates of older males a further finding is that holding observed characteristics constant there has been a very large decline in the employment rate of 55 64 year olds with bachelor degree qualifications in the course of applying the decomposition method we illustrate that validity of inferences depends on appropriate specification of the reweighting function

the trend in retirement a model with leisure production and endogenous retirement is used to explain declining labor force participation rates of elderly males the model is calibrated to cross sectional data on labor force participation rates of u s males by age their drop in consumption and leisure good expenditure share in 2000 running the calibrated model for the period 1850 2000 a prediction of the evolution of the cross section is obtained the model accounts for more than 87 of the increase in retirement of men over 65 the increase in retirement is driven by rising wages and falling prices of leisure goods

decomposition of us manufacturing energy intensity and elasticities of components with respect to energy prices this paper proposes an analysis of changes in the us manufacturing energy intensity between 1974 and 1998 the starting point is a three term decomposition of an intensity index which evaluates annually the respective contributions of changes in industrial structure efficiency gains at the sectoral level and substitution between energy resources to aggregate productivity improvements then we study the time paths followed by each of these three components using spectral analysis techniques we show that they behave very differently as the structural influence plays a part mainly in the short run substitution between energy resources acts principally in the long run and the changes in sectoral intensity cause both trend variations and cyclical ones finally we focus on the effect of energy price evolution on each of the three components allowing energy price rises and decreases to have asymmetric effects we estimate both the long run impacts and the short run adjustments

manufacturing energy use in eight oecd countries decomposing the impacts of changes in output industry structure and energy intensity this paper examines trends in manufacturing energy use in eight oecd countries decomposing the changes that occured between 1973 and 1987 into the effects of changes in aggregate manufacturing activity industry structure and energy intensities measured at the industry group level while manufacturing production grew in every country except the uk the rate of growth was variable from nation to nation structural change led to modest reductions in energy use in most countries although in norway structural change led to substantial growth in energy use the reduction in energy intensities was strikingly uniform across all nations ranging from 20 norway to 36 japan over the period of the analysis while other studies have used divisia decomposition techniques we use an alternative method based on laspeyres indices a comparison of the two techniques shows that they yield closely similar empirical results although the laspeyres approach is more easily interpreted while the interactions between changes in structure and intensity are arbitrarily assigned to the two factors by the divisia approach the lapeyres method yields interaction terms that explicitly account for such effects

social security unanticipated benefit increases and the timing of retirement between 1969 and 1972 real u s social security retirement benefits rose by 20 the rise was unanticipated and followed over 15 years of relatively constant real benefits this paper proposes a model of retirement behaviour in which workers respond differently although in a theoretically consistent manner to the anticipated and unanticipated components of the social security benefit they can receive upon retirement the retirement age decision in the presence of unanticipated benefit changes is shown to be a special case of utility maximization under a nonlinear budget constraint the model is estimated using the longitudinal retirement history survey between 1969 and 1973 real social security benefits for u s workers with fixed earnings histories were raised by more than 20 these increases were the first significant increases in social security since the early 1950 s at the same time that retirement benefits were rising the trend toward early retirement among older american men accelerated in the period from 1965 to 1970 the labour force participation rate of men aged 55 to 64 fell 1 6 percentage points from 84x6 to 83 0 but in the five years after 1970 the rate fell an additional 7 4 points to 75 6 the participation rate of men over 65 fell by 1 1 points in the five years after 1965 but by 5 2 points during the mid 1970 s 1 not surprisingly a large share of this labour force decline has been attributed to the effects of the social security increases enacted in 1969 and 1972 the purpose of this paper is to determine the precise effect of the unanticipated benefit increases on the timing of retirement the effect of social security on the age at retirement has been the subject of lively debate in recent years the literature has been reviewed in two recent papers by mitchell and fields 1982 and hurd 1983 who reach nearly opposite conclusions about the lessons that can be drawn from past empirical research mitchell and fields find that no definite judgment can be reached about the effects of social security on retirement while hurd argues that more careful studies have all found a significant and meaningful effect of social security on early retirement certainly the earlier studies by boskin 1977 and boskin and hurd 1978 found very large social security effects with boskin concluding that the social security system has been the major factor in the explosion in earlier retirement boskin 1977 p 1 very recent studies by burkhauser and quinn 1983 burtless and moffitt 1984 diamond and hausman 1984 fields and mitchell 1984 and hausman and wise 1985 have found smaller social security effects however none of them dealt explicitly with the rapid rise in real benefits during the early 1970 s the approach taken in this paper differs significantly from that in the earlier research just cited the proposed econometric model takes full account of the nonlinear relationship between goods consumption and the age at retirement introduced by social security