children s welfare exposure and subsequent development abstract we examine the extent to which children are exposed to the welfare system through their mother s receipt of benefits and its impact on several developmental outcomes using data from the matched mother child file from the national longitudinal survey of youth nlsy we find that children s welfare exposure is substantial by age 10 over one third of all children will have lived in a welfare household black non hispanic children face a much higher rate of exposure simple correlations suggest a strong negative relationship between maternal welfare receipt and children s outcomes in this paper we implement three alternative strategies instrumental variables sibling differences and child fixed effects models designed to identify whether this correlation can be attributed to the mother s welfare receipt directly or to other characteristics of mothers who receive welfare regardless of whether or not those characteristics are observable to the researcher based on the results of all three estimation strategies we find little evidence of any causal link between maternal welfare receipt and children s developmental outcomes

a comparative analysis of the rationality of consensus forecasts of u s economic indicators the purpose of this article is to investigate the rationality of two survey forecasts of selective u s macroeconomic performance measures that were widely followed in the financial markets during the 1990 2000 period the research compares the rationality of survey forecast data from money market services inc and thomson financial this article extends prior research that has evaluated the rationality of money market services data for earlier time periods while also evaluating similar consensus forecast data from thomson financial that were widely reported in both barron s and the wall street journal during the 1990s

turnover in the afdc population an event history analysis the control group of families with female heads from the denver income maintenance experiment is utilized in this analysis of afdc turnover this study uses event history techniques a methodology that is more appropriate for exploring welfare dynamics than the logit approach of earlier work increases in age and the wage have significant negative effects on the rate of entering afdc a higher guarantee raises this rate significantly age and the guarantee have significant effects with opposite signs on the exit rate other variables are not systematically related to turnover the estimates are applied to projected changes in lengths of time spent on and off afdc and in afdc caseloads due to changes in the explanatory variables

measuring the default risk of small business loans a survival analysis approach in this paper we report that although medium maturity loans originated under the sba 7 a loan guarantee program are targeted to small firms that fail to obtain credit through conventional channels the default experience is comparable to that of a large percentage of loans held by larger commercial banks we establish that the default behavior of these loans is time sensitive as a loan seasons the likelihood of default increases initially peaks in the second year and declines thereafter using a discrete time hazard framework we show that the likelihood of default is conditional on borrower lender and loan characteristics and changes in economic conditions

correlations of brothers earnings and intergenerational transmission correlations between parent and child earnings reflect intergenerational mobility and more broadly correlations between siblings earnings reflect shared community and family background these earnings relationships capture important aspects of relations in socioeconomic status more generally we estimate intergenerational transmission and sibling correlations of life cycle earnings jointly within a unified framework that nests previous models using data on the danish population of father first son second son triads we find that intergenerational effects account for on average 72 percent of sibling correlations this share is higher than all previous studies because we allow for heterogeneous intergenerational transmission between families sibling correlations exhibit a u shape over the working life consistent with differences in human capital investments between families

does neighborhood income mix affect earnings of adults new evidence from sweden this paper contributes to the literature on obtaining unbiased estimates of neighborhood effects explored in the context of a centralized social welfare state we employ a longitudinal database comprised of all working age adults in metropolitan sweden 1991 1999 to investigate the degree to which neighborhood income mix relates to subsequent labor incomes of adults and how this relationship varies by gender and employment status we control for unobserved time invariant individual characteristics by estimating a first difference equation of changes in average incomes between the 1991 1995 and 1996 1999 periods we further control for unobserved time varying characteristics through an analysis of non movers these methods substantially reduce the magnitude of the apparent effect of neighborhood shares of low middle and high income males nevertheless statistically and substantively significant neighborhood effects persist though relationships are nonlinear and vary by gender and employment status males who are not fully employed appear most sensitive to neighborhood economic mix in all contexts

welfare dependence and recidivism in an era of welfare reform this study examines the dynamics of welfare programme participation during the initial period 1993 1995 of programme reforms at the state level in iowa the programme changes for the state were remarkably similar to the national reforms implemented in the usa in 1996 analysis of the family investment program fip participation over the programme s first two years show that on average recipients stayed fewer months in the second year compared with the first although a relatively large share of participants 36 stayed on for the full two years fixed effect and semiparametric duration models are used to examine welfare dependence and recidivism respectively results indicate that income from wages and child support are significant factors in reducing welfare participation child support and wage income are crucial in determining the chances of exiting and of staying off the programme especially during the early months of the exit

raising children to work hard altruism work norms and social insurance children who can count on support from altruistic parents may not try hard to succeed in the labor market moreover parental altruism makes withdrawal of such support non credible to promote work

optimal welfare to work programs a welfare to work wtw program is a mix of government expenditures on various labour market policies targeted to the unemployed e g unemployment insurance m job search monitoring m social assistance sa wage subsidies this paper provides a dynamic principal agent framework suitable for analysing chief features of an optimal wtw program such as the sequence and duration of the different policies the dynamic pattern of payments along the unemployment spell and the emergence of taxes subsidies upon re employment the optimal program endogenously generates an absorbing policy of last resort social assistance characterized by a constant lifetime payment and no active participation by the agent human capital depreciation is a necessary condition for policy transitions to be part of an optimal wtw program the typical sequence of policies is quite simple the program starts with standard ui then switches into monitored search and finally into sa the optimal benefits are decreasing during unemployment insurance and constant during both jm and sa whereas taxes subsidies can be either increasing or decreasing with duration during ui they must decrease increase during a phase of jm in a calibration exercise we use our model to analyse quantitatively the features of the optimal program for the u s economy with respect to the existing u s system the optimal wtw scheme delivers sizeable welfare gains to unskilled workers because the incentives to search for a job can be retained even while delivering more insurance and using costly monitoring less intensively

tests for parameter instability in regressions with i 1 processes this article derives the large sample distributions of lagrange multiplier lm tests for parameter instability against several alternatives of interest in the context of cointegrated regression models the fully modified estimator of phillips and hansen is extended to cover general models with stochastic and deterministic trends the test statistics considered include the supf test of quandt as well as the lm tests of nyblom and of nabeya and tanaka it is found that the asymptotic distributions depend on the nature of the regressor processes that is if the regressors are stochastic or deterministic trends the distributions are noticeably different from the distributions when the data are weakly dependent it is also found that the lack of cointegration is a special case of the alternative hypothesis considered an unstable intercept so the tests proposed here may also be viewed as a test of the null of cointegration against the alternative of no cointegration the tests are applied to three data se

time aggregation and state dependence in welfare receipt dynamic discrete choice models are an important tool in studies of state dependence in benefit receipt a common assumption of such models is that benefit receipt sequences follow a conditional markov process this property has implications for how estimated period to period benefit transition probabilities should relate when receipt processes are aggregated over time this paper assesses whether the conditional markov property holds in welfare benefit receipt dynamics in norway using high quality monthly data from administrative records we find that the standard conditional markov model is seriously misspecified estimated state dependence is affected substantially by the chosen time unit of analysis with the average treatment effect of past benefit receipt increasing with the level of aggregation the model can be improved considerably by permitting richer types of benefit dynamics we find strong evidence for both duration and occurrence dependence in benefit receipt allowing for heterogeneity in the entry and persistence processes we find important disparities in the effects of observed and persistent unobserved characteristics based on our preferred model the month to month persistence probability in benefit receipt for a first time entrant is 37 percentage points higher than the entry rate of an individual without previous benefit receipt over a 12 month period this corresponds to an average treatment effect of 5 percentage points

family welfare cultures strong intergenerational correlations in various types of welfare use have fuelled a long standing debate over whether welfare receipt in one generation causes welfare participation in the next generation some claim a causal relationship in welfare receipt across generations has created a culture in which welfare use reinforces itself through the family others argue the determinants of poverty or poor health are correlated across generations so that children s welfare participation is associated with but not caused by parental welfare receipt however there is little empirical evidence to sort out these claims in this paper we investigate the existence and importance of family welfare cultures in the context of norway s disability insurance di system to overcome the challenge of correlated unobservables across generations we take advantage of random assignment of judges to di applicants whose cases are initially denied some appeal judges are systematically more lenient which leads to random variation in the probability a parent will be allowed di using this exogenous variation we find strong evidence that welfare receipt in one generation causes welfare participation in the next generation when a parent is allowed di their adult child s participation over the next five years increases by 6 percentage points this effect grows over time rising to 12 percentage points after ten years while these findings are specific to our setting they serve to highlight that welfare reforms can have long lasting effects on program participation since any original effect on the current generation could be reinforced by changing the participation behavior of their children as well the detailed nature of our data allows us to compare the intergenerational transmission with spillover effects in other networks and to explore mechanisms our findings point to a special link between parents and their children with little impact due to close neighbors di participation we find suggestive evidence that what may change as a result of a parent being allowed di is their children s beliefs about the efficacy of trying to get on to the di program or their attitudes about di participation and its stigma

participatory environmental education and willingness to pay for river basin management empirical evidence from nigeria this paper examines the role of participation as a tool for improving individuals perceptions and environmental values using a test retest experiment conducted in south eastern nigeria two identical contingent valuation experiments were interspersed by participatory workshops designed to involve respondents in framing and forming the valuation scenario econometric analyses found that participatory education significantly developed individuals perceptions of pollution problems and increased the magnitude and precision of their wtp for a river basin management scheme the extent of changes in perceptions declined with increasing levels of formal education suggesting that less educated respondents are more likely to hold weakly formed preferences

biophysical causality and environmental preference elicitation evaluating the validity of welfare analysis over intermediate outcomes stated preference scenarios often describe outcomes to be valued in terms of intermediate biophysical processes or ecosystem services with indirect utility effects rather than in terms of final directly welfare relevant consequences this article evaluates whether valid welfare estimates can emerge from this practice we begin with a theoretical model demonstrating conditions under which stated preference scenarios that include intermediate outcomes will elicit welfare estimates identical to those from parallel scenarios that include associated final outcomes i e convergent validity will hold the model demonstrates that a necessary condition for convergent validity is the ability of respondents to correctly predict biophysical production functions linking intermediate to final outcomes hypotheses from the theoretical model are then evaluated empirically using an application of choice experiments to migratory fish restoration in the u s state of rhode island empirical results are mixed but generally reject convergent validity welfare estimates are not robust to the use of an intermediate outcome in lieu of a related final outcome in stated preference scenarios as predicted by theory results of the analysis suggest that greater attention should be given to the reliability of welfare estimation when final outcomes cannot be quantified

local political business cycles evidence from philippine municipalities abstract this paper establishes the existence of short term political business cycles in the philippines over the period 2003 2009 examining a balanced panel of 1143 municipalities shows that employment levels increase in the two pre electoral quarters and drop sharply in the two quarters following elections further results are consistent with the cycles being generated by incumbents attempts to increase their chances of re election cycles are stronger in sectors that incumbents are more able to influence and when they expect stronger electoral competition evidence suggests that these cycles are detrimental to development

a test of the equality of closed ended and open ended contingent valuations a test is developed to find whether open ended and closed ended contingent valuation mechanisms lead to significantly different results the test is based on joint estimation of willingness to pay responses to open and closed ended questions asked of the same sample of individuals in a public good example individuals do respond differently depending on question format possible explanations include different incentives for strategic behavior and respondents lack of familiarity with the open ended question type no differences in willingness to pay were found in a private good example

information effects in contingent markets information bias in contingent markets is poorly understood in this paper testable hypotheses concerning beneficial contingent market information effects are developed conceptually perspective information and relative expenditure information were expected to increase comprehension and increase bids provision cost information was expected to counteract free riding behavior and also increase bids hypothesis tests using experimental markets suggested that each information type induced small statistically insignificant bid increases however the combined effect of the three information types induced a desirable statistically significant increase in bids this result supports the contention that not all contingent market information effects are biases

valuing environmental commodities some recent experiments a general model of consumer behavior is proposed to assess six recent experiments that have attempted to reveal preferences for environmental goals each experiment used a mix of both the techniques and the theory of demand for non market commodities and each was designed to estimate a non market attitude associated with the environment and to analyze potential biases in the techniques the six cases show some consistency in results the linkage within the contingent market between the environmental attribute institutional setting and the bidding instrument must be realistic and accepted by the respondent to avoid biased results possibly the most important result is the replication of results using a traditional property value study and a contingent bidding approach all evidence obtained to date suggests that hedonic studies of property values or wages travel costs and survey techniques all yield values well one order of magnitude in accuracy 41 references 2 tables

welfare reform when recipients are forward looking in 1996 the aid to families with dependent children program was replaced with the temporary assistance for needy families tanf program this paper considers the effects of two specific components of tanf time limits and work requirements on employment marriage and welfare participation a discrete choice dynamic programming model is used and parameter estimates are obtained using data from the panel study of income dynamics policy simulations show that a five year lifetime time limit results in a 60 percent reduction in welfare use and that a substantial part of this reduction occurs because recipients are forward looking

is the correlation in welfare participation across generations spurious abstract this paper asks whether the observed correlation in welfare participation across generations reflects causal links or unobservables that are correlated across generations if the correlation is spurious then reducing one generations welfare participations will have no effect on the next generation the panel study of income dynamics is used to estimate two types of models that explicitly take account of correlated unobservables these models indicate that correlated unobservables are important in explaining the intergenerational correlation in welfare participation among blacks but not non blacks however the correlation across generations continues to be significant for blacks even after taking account of the correlated unobservables

individualized geocoding in stated preference questionnaires implications for survey design and welfare estimation this paper evaluates the common practice of generic mapping in stated preference valuation in which identical policy area maps are shown to all respondents this is compared to a more information intensive alternative in which individualized maps identify the location of each respondent s home relative to policy effects the evaluation is grounded in a theoretical model clarifying the impact of individualized spatial information on preferences for non market outcomes the model is illustrated using an application of choice experiments to riparian restoration in coastal maine results characterize valuation contexts for which valid preference elicitation likely requires the provision of individualized spatial information

a satisfactory benefit cost indicator from contingent valuation abstract standard economic concepts are used to develop a model of individual behavior when subject to the constraints of the contingent valuation choice context the model yields refutable consequences that are consistent with previously reported empirical findings including some that have been thought to be anomalous the model is used to show that different contingent valuation formats have predictably different performance characteristics notably the hicksian compensating measures are satisfactory benefit cost indicators when elicited using any one of several formats identified in the text of the formats examined one form of a policy referendum appears to have the most satisfactory characteristics overall we conclude that contingent valuation is a progressing research program

who is affected by neighbourhood income mix gender age family employment and income differences this paper analyses the degree to which the mixture of low middle and high income males in the neighbourhood affects the subsequent earnings of individuals and aims to test explicitly the degre

data watch the panel study of income dynamics by collecting annual economic and demographic information from a large and representative sample of u s households for over a quarter century the panel study of income dynamics has compiled a remarkably useful set of microdata this article describes the psid and how its unique longitudinal and in some cases intergenerational features have been used for studies of intertemporal models of labor supply wages employment and job tenure consumption poverty dynamics extended family behavior and the intergenerational transmission of economic status

the role of uncertainty in the relationship between fairness evaluations and willingness to pay participants in contingent valuation studies may be uncertain about a number of aspects of the policy and survey context the uncertainty management model of fairness judgments states that individuals will evaluate a policy in terms of its fairness when they do not know whether they can trust the relevant managing authority or experience uncertainty due to insufficient knowledge of the general issues surrounding the environmental policy similarly some researchers have suggested that not knowing how to answer wtp questions participants convey their general attitudes toward the public good rather than report well defined economic preferences these contentions were investigated in a sample of 840 residents in four urban catchments across australia who were interviewed about their wtp for stormwater pollution abatement four sources of uncertainty were measured amount of prior issue related thought trustworthiness of the water authority insufficient scenario information and wtp response uncertainty a logistic regression model was estimated in each subsample to test the main effects of the uncertainty sources on wtp as well as their interaction with fairness and proenvironmental attitudes results indicated support for the uncertainty management model in only one of the four samples similarly proenvironmental attitudes interacted rarely with uncertainty to a significant level and in ways that were more complex than hypothesised it was concluded that uncertain individuals were generally not more likely than other participants to draw on either fairness evaluations or proenvironmental attitudes when making decisions about paying for stormwater pollution abatement

local labor markets and welfare spells do demand conditions matter this paper examines the impact of changes in labor market conditions on participation in the aid to families with dependent children afdc program in california transitions off welfare and transi

the impact of state economic differentials on household welfare and labor force behavior abstract this paper calculates state specific income expectations for low income households using a simultaneous model of household labor force and welfare participation decisions a variety of simulations indicate the interlocking effects of existing state differences in welfare wages and taxes on work welfare choices and income significant differences among similar households in different states occur equalization of welfare benefits eliminates some but not all of these differences but generates potentially serious policy problems for the states

validation of empirical measures of welfare change a comparison of nonmarket techniques since the passing of the flood control act of 1936 the attention of many resource economists has been directed towards measuring the benefits and costs of alternative uses of natural resources increasingly it has been recognized that the value of some of these uses is not explicitly determined through market transactions this has led to the focus of much attention upon the development of nonmarket methods to estimate the value of these uses in the 1940s the groundwork for the travel cost method was established by hotelling prewitt 1949 following this in the 1960s davis initiated the basic foundation for bidding methods davis 1963 which were later to be subsumed under the heading of contingent valuation methods brookshire randall and stoll 1980 schulze d arge and brookshire 1981 thayer 1981 both of these methods will be further discussed below in addition to these two methods a third approach the unit day value method has been recognized as acceptable but not preferred for the valuation of recreational uses of water and related land resources dwyer kelley and bowes 1977 u s water resources council 1979 given the existence of alternative methods of estimating the value of resource uses several obvious questions arise one of the first of these is under what circumstances is each method most appropriate existing literature has focussed sufficiently on this question and pointed out limitations of each especially the travel cost method and unit day value methods brookshire ives and schulze 1976 dwyer kelly and bowes 1977 freeman 1979 mcconnell 1975 randall ives and eastman 1977 schulze d arge and brook

the effect of family planning programs on the fertility of welfare recipients evidence from medicaid claims this paper explores the effectiveness of family planning fp services subsidized by the medicaid program in lowering the fertility of female welfare recipients previous studies used single equation estimates and produced conflicting and sometimes confounding results thus this study employed a bivariate probit model to estimate the effect of contraceptive acceptance on the individuals probability of giving birth without the bias that may result from single equation estimates a unique data set created from maryland medicaid claims records was also used results suggest that medicaid fp programs are much more effective at lowering fertility than indicated by previous studies using single equation estimates

intergenerational income mobility in the united states social scientists and policy analysts have long expressed concern about the extent of intergenerational income mobility in the united states but remarkably little empirical evidence is available the few existing estimates of the intergenerational correlation in income have been biased downward by measurement error unrepresentative samples or both new estimates based on intergenerational data from the panel study of income dynamics imply that the intergenerational correlation in long run income is at least 0 4 indicating dramatically less mobility than suggested by earlier research copyright 1992 by american economic association

an economic model of welfare stigma perhaps the most basic assumption of the economic theory of consumer demand is that more is better than less virtually all of the major propositions of consumer theory can in a certain sense be derived from the assumption that goods are good interestingly however this tenet seems to be violated by the behavior of many individuals in the low income population for many turn out to be eligible for a positive welfare benefit but do not in fact join the welfare rolls for example it has been estimated that in 1970 only about 69 percent of the families eligible for afdc aid to families with dependent children participated in the program see richard michel 1980 the corresponding percentage for afdc u the program for which families with an unemployed male are eligible was only 43 percent and the participation rate in the food stamp program was only 38 percent see maurice mcdonald 1977 this phenomenon has puzzled many investigators because such individuals do not locate on the boundaries of their budget sets consequently most investigators ignore the problem when studying the effects of welfare programs on behavior in this paper this seemingly irrational rejection of an increase in income is modeled as resulting from welfare stigma that is from disutility arising from participation in a welfare program per se 1 the existence of stigma has been amply documented in the sociological literature patrick horan and patricia austin 1974 lee rainwater 1979 where interviews of recipients have often uncovered feelings of lack of self respect and negative self characterizations from participation in welfare nevertheless this phenomenon has not been modeled and many questions consequently remain when is the disutility of participation strong enough to prevent participation shouldn t we expect individuals to weigh the disutility of participation against the potential benefit in their decisions what is the elasticity of participation with respect to the potential benefit also in a slightly different vein how are the work disincentives of welfare affected by stigma these questions have been given scant attention by economists yet they are crucial for our ability to predict the impact of various welfare programs on the lowincome population here these questions are addressed by modeling nonparticipation as a utility maximizing decision the model is developed and estimated for the afdc program 2 the model posits an individual utility function containing not just disposable income but

estimating the effects of earnings uncertainty on families saving and insurance decisions this paper investigates whether families save partially to self insure against uncertain future earnings and estimates the extent to which pooled insurance substitutes for saving as a precaution against earnings risk an econometric model is estimated using unique household survey data from the nineteenth century to examine families joint saving and insurance decisions the historical microdata are of interest because they predate widespread social insurance programs which may stunt self insurance through private saving among contemporary families the econometric results imply that two independent measures of idiosyncratic earnings risk matter for families saving decisions additionally families whose primary wage earners belong to labor unions significantly save less frequently than others all else being equal but this tendency is not apparent among members of private benevolent societies

equity and efficiency effects of redistributive policies abstract how do various forms of redistribution affect the distributions of earnings and consumption and their intergenerational mobility do redistributive policies enhance efficiency by mitigating market imperfections or do they create a trade off between equity and efficiency to address these issues a dynamic general equilibrium model is constructed and solved numerically the effects of the degrees of targeting of money transfers and educational transfers and the relative performance of the two types of transfers are examined

economic interpretations of intergenerational correlations science itself for example see galton s 1869 study of the eminence of relatives or his 1889 analysis of the heights of parents and children but extensive use of economic theory to interpret these correlations is much more recent using basic economic concepts such as supply demand investment incentives missing markets and so on theorists hope to explain how and why status is correlated across generations economic theory might provide a unified treatment of a variety of socioeconomic indicators such as earnings income occupation or wealth or it might predict how taxes subsidies and economic regulation affect intergenerational mobility and the operation of markets however while the subject matter earnings consumption wealth occupa tion is clearly interesting to economists it could nonetheless be the case that beyond basic questions of measurement economic theory has not improved our understanding of intergenerational mobility goldberger 1989 is quite explicit in this contention by emphasizing the distinction between genes and environment and by using statistical theory as its main analytical tool the paper by samuel bowles and herbert gintis in this issue implicitly concurs with goldberger we take this challenge very seriously what characterizes an economic approach to mobility while biologists and bowles and gintis distinguish endowments and investments by their source genetic versus environmental factors one focus of economic theorists is motiva

the application of laboratory experimental economics to the contingent valuation of public goods we have implicitly argued in the last section that a dynamic iterative survey mechanism may well need to be employed in the design of contingent valuation survey instruments in order to improve the accuracy of responses furthermore due to the current inaccuracy of hedonic and travel cost approaches for valuing public goods the least cost method in our view for establishing anchor or true individual values for testing alternative survey instruments is to use laboratory experiments the objective of these experiments should be the development of the most simple survey design which gives accurate responses subject to the budget of the investigator is a complex iterative voting procedure required how fast will such a procedure converge to true values what is the effect on incentives of relaxing the unanimity voting feature for large groups all of these operational questions can at least qualitatively be answered in an experimental laboratory setting

gender specific starting point bias in choice experiments evidence from an empirical study abstract in this paper we test whether preferences and willingness to pay estimates obtained in a choice experiment study are susceptible to starting point bias as is often the case in dichotomous choice contingent valuation studies on the basis of a multinomial probit model we find that preferences are indeed susceptible to starting point bias in a split sample design our results suggest that varying the price levels displayed in a so called instructional choice set presented prior to the actual preference eliciting choice sets significantly impacts respondents preferences and willingness to pay for protecting danish nature areas from new motorway development in particular our results show that the bias is gender specific only female respondents are significantly affected results further reveal that the impact of the starting point bias decays as respondents evaluate more and more choice sets this supports the discovered preference hypothesis and on the basis of this we suggest a number of ways to potentially mitigate the starting point bias

the united kingdom demand for renewable electricity in a liberalised market abstract this paper analyses how the liberalisation of the uk electricity market in 1998 may encourage demand for renewable electricity through pricing and informational incentives the analysis argues that prices and beliefs will be crucial for influencing customers willingness to pay for environmental costs associated with electricity generation as well as their decision to not just buy the cheapest electricity in 1998 when uk electricity markets are liberated a small price differential between renewable and standard electricity certainly less than 20 and clear credible and captivating information about the external costs of electricity generation could create a considerable demand for renewable electricity but because renewable generating capacity will initially be small and slow to adjust to incentives initially high demand may drive up prices discouraging customers from wanting to buy renewable electricity low demand on the other hand will not provide the incentives to invest new capacity which probably means that renewable technology will not be able to reduce its unit costs of electricity generation and compete in a liberalised market without continued financial support to avoid either scenario this paper recommends that government should extend the non fossil fuel obligation nffo to promote investment in renewable technology provide tax incentives to minimise the price differential between renewable and standard electricity encouarge non governmental organisations to develop schemes for providing customers with clear consistent and reliable information about sources of renewable electricity and stagger the introduction of electricity liberalisation while the analysis is of a speculative nature such policies may create incentives for markets to reduce environmental damage associated with electricity generation

breaking the cycle the effect of education on welfare receipt among children of welfare recipients abstract we examine the impact of high school graduation on the probability individuals from welfare backgrounds use welfare themselves our data consist of administrative educational records for grade 12 students in a canadian province linked with their own and their parents welfare records we address potential endogeneity problems by 1 controlling for ability using past test scores 2 using an instrument for graduation based on school principal fixed effects and 3 using a heckman singer type unobserved heterogeneity estimator graduation would reduce the probability of welfare receipt of drop outs by 1 2 to 3 4 effects are larger for individuals from troubled family backgrounds and low income neighbourhoods

cointegration and structural change an application to the u s demand for money wankeun oh i perform the cointegration tests for the trivariate model of real monetary aggregates real personal income and short term interest rate i find the existence of a long run relationship among these three variables to check the stability of a long run money demand relationship i implement a rank constancy test and cusum test the test results show that real mi is relatively more stable than other aggregates but structural change occurred during the 1970s and early 1980s this is consistent with prior research on money demand jel e41 i introduction incorporating structural change when performing tests on the properties of stochastic processes is important because structural breaks may cause misspecification problems most tests of structural change consider the stability of the parameters over time tests for structural breaks and parameter stability have been studied extensively a partial list includes chow 1966 brown et al 1975 harvey and collier 1977 king 1987 ploberger et al 1989 in the context of unit root processes perron 1989 showed that the presence of a one time change in the level or slope of the trend function can severely distort the results of unit root tests and it is natural to ask how structural change can distort the results of cointegration tests 1 traditional tests of parameter stability ask if the parameters of the model are constant in contrast quintos 1993 proposed a test for stability of the long run relationship s in a cointegrating regression the test is based on johansen s 1988 framework and the test statistic is simply the weighted sum of the likelihood ratio test as given in johansen 1988 quintos s rank test is very different from the traditional cusum and chow tests for parameter stability because her rank test checks for stability of the cointegrating relationship between variables in other words the rank test checks whether cointegration holds for the full period the traditional cusum and chow tests assume that cointegration holds for the full period or does not hold for the full period and tests simply whether the cointegration vector changes for example if there is cointegration from 1960 1990 between revenues and expenditures with cointegrating vector 1 1 then the cusum and chow tests check whether the cointegra ting vector 1 1 is stable throughout the period the rank constancy test checks whether the cointegration rank is stable throughout the period not whether the cointegrating vector is stable at 1 1 in other words the rank test will check whether for example there is cointegration from 1960 1980 and no cointegration from 1980 onward the chow and cusum tests are not designed to check for this the structural stability of money demand relationships has been the issue of a substantial number of empirical studies 2 in general structural stability means stability of the underlying behavioral equations 3 this term includes parameter stability and stability of functional form friedman s 1990 research on the money demand function assumes that a long run equilibrium relationship exists between real money balances real income or real wealth and the opportunity cost of holding real money balances recently there has been strong evidence of cointegration between real income real money balances and a nominal interest rate for instance engle and granger 1987 dickey et al 1991 hafer and jansen 1991 hoffman and rasche 1991 mehra 1993 miller 1991 fischer and nicoletti 1993 and baba et al 1992 report on cointegration among variables in u s aggregate money demand jain and moon 1994 report on cointegration in u s sectoral money demand yashiv 1994 and engsted 1993 on money demand in a high inflation country and hoffman et al 1995 report on international money demand comparison this article asks if long run money demand relationship is stable and if so for which measure of money is it stable over time

understanding welfare stigma taxpayer resentment and statistical discrimination abstract welfare stigma is widely regarded to be of central importance in understanding the impact of welfare programs in their goal of alleviating poverty it affects both the decision to take up benefits and the well being of those who actually do this paper develops alternative models of the determinants of welfare stigma we identify two views a statistical discrimination approach and a taxpayer resentment view we discuss how each may be formalized and derive their implications we then examine what they imply about the relationship between stigma and program design

fortunate sons new estimates of intergenerational mobility in the united states using social security earnings data previous studies relying on short term averages of fathers earnings have estimated the intergenerational elasticity ige in earnings to be approximately 0 4 due to persistent transitory fluctuations these estimates have been biased down by approximately 30 or more using administrative data containing the earnings histories of parents and children the ige is estimated to be around 0 6 this suggests that the united states is substantially less mobile than previous research indicated estimates of intergenerational mobility are significantly lower for families with little or no wealth offering empirical support for theoretical models that predict differences due to borrowing constraints

analyzing the length of welfare spells abstract this paper studies the determinants of the length of individual spells of welfare focusing on how the length of a spell affects the probability of its termination the analysis utilizes six years of monthly data on time spent in the afdc program among female household heads a variety of duration dependence models are estimated monthly afdc participation does not show strong evidence of duration dependence two distinct groups appear to utilize welfare one with a very low and constant probability of leaving welfare and a second group which is more affected by time on the program

contingent valuation techniques for assessing environmental impacts further evidence abstract this paper provides further evidence on the development and application of the iterative bidding technique used to assess environmental impacts three specific issues the hypothetical nature of the survey technique the questionnaire information structure and the bidding procedure starting point are examined theoretically and empirically to determine their effect on individual bid behavior the empirical results indicate that the importance of these influences may have been overstated in earlier studies

family background and income during the rise of the welfare state brother correlations in income for swedish men born 1932 1968 we investigate if the association between family background and income in sweden has changed for men born between 1932 and 1968 our main finding is that the share of the variance in long run income that is attributable to family background the so called brother correlation in income has fallen by some 17 from 0 49 for the cohorts of brothers born in the early 1930s to below 0 32 for the cohorts born around 1950 from then on the correlations have inched back up to around 0 37 we report suggestive evidence that the decline is driven by changes in education

contingent valuation a new perspective after several decades of academic research on the contingent valuation cv method a consistent behavioral explanation of hypothetical bias is still lacking based on evidence from economics economic psychology and the political sciences i propose an explanation that is based on two simple working hypotheses about respondent behaviour in contingent valuation surveys the first hypothesis is that survey respondents are unable to form consistent preferences about unfamiliar goods unless the choice context offers reliable informative cues that can be rationally exploited in simplified heuristics the second hypothesis is that the probability and impact of strategic responses in dichotomous choice questions about public goods depends on the extent to which the presented hypothetical costs differ from the actual costs the literature on hypothetical bias is revisited in the light of these behavioral hypotheses i find that the hypotheses are generally supported by the empirical data moreover the hypotheses are able to explain several important empirical phenomena that previous research has not been able to explain in particular they solve the puzzle that pre election polls but not cv surveys are able to predict actual referendum outcomes and they explain why income effects on willingness to pay are lower in cv responses than in actual votes if confirmed by further studies the hypotheses will have important implications for future research and practice first the hypothetical costs presented in the dichotomous choice question should to be close enough to the actual costs to be credible to all respondents this can be achieved by specifying the costs as a percentage rather than absolute change in taxes second the respondents should be given the option to answer based on information about the positions of large parties and interest groups with known political orientation rather than based on the raw policy information theory and evidence suggest that this new survey paradigm largely eliminates the fundamental problems of the conventional stated preference methods

nonparametric estimates of the duration of welfare spells abstract nonparametric estimates of survival distributions are presented from a set of afdc spells which includes all spells in progress at the beginning of the sampling window in addition to all spells originating within the window the estimated median survival time is significantly longer than previously reported the results suggest that long term afdc spells may have been under represented in prior research

the informational content of surnames the evolution of intergenerational mobility and assortative mating we propose a new methodology for measuring intergenerational mobility in economic well being our method is based on the joint distribution of surnames and economic outcomes it circumvents the need for intergenerational panel data a long standing stumbling block for understanding mobility it does so by using cross sectional data alongside a calibrated structural model to recover the traditional intergenerational elasticity measures our main idea is simple if inheritance is important for economic outcomes then rare surnames should predict economic outcomes in the cross section this is because rare surnames are indicative of familial linkages if the number of rare surnames is small this approach will not work however rare surnames are abundant in the highly skewed nature of surname distributions from most western societies we develop a model that articulates this idea and shows that the more important is inheritance the more informative will be surnames this result is robust to a variety of different assumptions about fertility and mating we apply our method using the 2001 census from catalonia a large region of spain we use educational attainment as a proxy for overall economic well being a calibration exercise results in an estimate of the intergenerational correlation of educational attainment of 0 60 we also find evidence suggesting that mobility has decreased among the different generations of the 20th century a complementary analysis based on sibling correlations confirms our results and provides a robustness check on our method our model and our data allow us to examine one possible explanation for the observed decrease in mobility we find that the degree of assortative mating has increased over time overall we argue that our method has promise because it can tap the vast mines of census data that are available in a heretofore unexploited manner

an analysis of the impact of sample attrition on the second generation of respondents in the michigan panel study of income dynamics only a few studies have tried to estimate the trend in the elasticity of children s economic status with respect to parents economic status and these studies produce conflicting results in an attempt to reconcile these findings we use the panel study

unobservable family and individual contributions to the distributions of income and wealth this paper uses combinations of full brothers half brothers and fathers and sons to measure the effect of common family background on a household s income and wealth while the data are drawn from a nineteenth century population the intraclass correlation for income ranges from 13 to 18 which is similar to that found in modern samples intraclass correlations for wealth are significantly higher 18 35 than are those for income intraclass correlations of half brothers compared to those for full brothers suggest that fathers play a dominant role in the transmission of the common family effect when unobserved background is decomposed into individual and family effects the individual effect dominates the family effect for income while the family effect dominates the individual effect for wealth

the intergenerational transmission of welfare receipt a nonparametric bounds analysis using a nonparametric bounding method and data from the panel study of income dynamics i examine the effect that growing up in a household that receives aid to families with dependent children af

premarital childbearing and welfare receipt the role of mothers receipt this study uses the 1968 91 panel study of income dynamics psid to examine the relationship between mothers receipt of aid to families with dependent children afdc welfare benefits and their d

a longitudinal analysis of sibling correlations in economic status numerous previous studies have used sibling correlations to measure the importance of family background as a determinant of economic status the sibling correlations estimated in these studies however have been depressed by a failure to distinguish transitory and permanent income variation and in some cases by overly homogeneous samples this paper presents a methodology to address these problems and applies it to longitudinal data from the panel study of income dynamics our main conclusion is that family background exerts greater influence on economic status than has been indicated by most earlier research

a comparison of the effect of welfare programme features on welfare participation one and two parent families the effect of welfare programme characteristics on the decision to enter the welfare system is modelled as a binary discrete choice latent variable model dependent upon an underlying index function the two chief classes of welfare beneficiaries in the us welfare system are analysed two parent families and single female headed families the data set is a large recent non experimental multiyear cross sectional pooled data set derived from the us census bureaus current population survey behavioural impacts from a range of economic variables are consistent in sign with predictions made by economic theory newly estimated comprehensive descriptive statistics of the entire welfare system for both single female household heads and married couples with children are employed to characterize the welfare system statistically significant estimates of substantial magnitude are obtained for the impacts on welfare participation for the welfare guarantee level the effective tax rate on earned income and the effec

the intergenerational transfer of welfare dependency some statistical evidence does a mother s welfare receipt increase the future dependency of her children does the welfare system thus stimulate the dependency of future generations parameter estimates reported here suggest such intergenerational effects the sample comprises young girls and their mothers after control for observed and unobserved heterogeneity a mother s welfare participation is found to increase her daughter s later welfare dependency copyright 1992 by mit press

estimates of effective guarantees and tax rates in the afdc program for the post obra period we employ the model used by fraker moffitt and wolf 1985 to estimate effective tax rates and guarantees in the aid to families with dependent children afdc program for the years 1967 82 to produce comparable estimates for 1983 91 we compare this method of benefit prediction with other methods in the literature and clarify the interpretation of estimates generated using the fraker moffitt and wolf model we use our estimates for the period from 1983 to 1991 to examine how effective afdc tax rates and guarantee levels have changed over time and relative to nominal or official program parameters

tightening a welfare system the effects of benefit denial on future welfare receipt abstract we derive local average treatment effect estimates of the impact of welfare benefit denial on future receipt using a unique experiment involving reassessment of some applicants who were originally slated to receive benefits we find evidence of considerable heterogeneity among applicants our results support a model with a peripheral group who exhibit scarring effects from being granted benefits and a core group who do not the core group moves quickly back onto welfare when they are denied benefits even for the peripheral group benefit denial has intermediate term but not permanent impacts

information and effort in contingent valuation surveys application to global climate change using national internet samples this contingent valuation study investigates the issues of information access and respondent effort and is based on a series of national internet samples the focus is on a split sample treatment basic information bi versus enhanced information ei in the latter significantly expanded information is provided about global climate change and the kyoto protocol using a referendum format we compare the treatment effect bi versus ei on willingness to pay wtp we develop measures of respondent effort in accessing optional information through the technology of web based surveys and jointly model effort and wtp using a simultaneous estimation approach results support the use of the joint modeling approach for objective measures of respondent effort and wtp respondent effort is shown to be positively and significantly related to wtp however use of the optional menu is rather modest counts of pages and time spent and is highly variable both across pages and respondents

auctions experiments and contingent valuation laboratory experiments are a welcome development that promise to make a significant contribution to the study of economic behavior heiner 1985 plott 1982 smith 1982 1985 while relatively new to economics controlled laboratory studies of human behavior have long constituted the core of experimental psychology where there is a wealth of methodological experience from which experimental economists might profitably draw in particular current attempts to apply laboratory auction methods to valuing nonmarket environmental goods would be improved by more rigorous experimental design and data analysis procedures

the panel study of income dynamics after fourteen years an evaluation this article considers the representativeness of the panel study of income dynamics psid over its 14 year history from 1968 to 1981 given the dynamics of entry and exit from the panel by 1981 40 of the original members had left the sample and were replaced by new entrants who joined either existing households or new households being formed by members of the original sample we consider the distribution of demographic characteristics and earnings equations over time and we compare the psid with the current population survey cps by either approach we find little evidence that the psid has become unrepresentative

college choice and subsequent earnings results using swedish sibling data college choice and subsequent earnings results using swedish sibling data this paper investigates the relationship between college choice and annual earnings using within family variation in college choice the results show that earnings vary significantly between students who graduated from different types of colleges and the earnings premium is larger for those who graduated at an old university do birth order and family size matter for intergenerational income mobility evidence from sweden previous studies of intergenerational income mobility have not considered potential birth order or family size effects in the estimated income elasticity this paper estimates the intergenerational income elasticity by birth order position and family size the main finding of this paper is that the elasticity tends to decrease with birth order for a given family size especially for fathers and sons a comparison of family and neighborhood effects on grades test scores educational attainment and income evidence from sweden this paper compares sibling and neighborhood correlations in school performance educational attainment and income as a way to learn whether the neighborhood where a child grows up in might explain parts of the sibling similarities found in previous sibling correlation studies the results show that living in the same neighborhood does not seem to add much to the sibling similarity what more than parental income an exploration of what swedish siblings get from their parents in this paper we explore what factors other that parental income can explain why siblings tend to have such similar outcomes as previous correlation studies show our results show that parental involvement and attitudes especially propensity to plan ahead and willingness to postpone benefits to the future are particularly important for the sibling similarity

nudging acceptability for wood ash recycling in forests a choice experiment abstract in this paper our objective is to assess the general french population s acceptability of application of wood ash in forests a measure currently not allowed but under consideration by the government the main originality of our approach is that we test how a nudge can be used as an instrument to increase social acceptability conveying objective information regarding ash recycling furthermore although we do not consider it as a welfare measure we show how the estimation of the willingness to pay can be considered as a complement to the more traditional social acceptability measure three nudges were introduced as three treatments in a discrete choice experiment in the first treatment the options with wood ash application were highlighted to indicate to the respondents that they corresponded to pro environmental measures positive framing in the second treatment we changed the wording of the two non status quo options to highlight the recycling aspect of wood ash application in the last treatment we adopted a productive wording to highlight the fact that wood ash application increases wood production treatments in particular positive framing and productive wording influence the willingness to pay but depend on the attitudes of the respondents

the duration of welfare spells probability distributions for the duration of welfare spells are estimated the principle guiding the work is that a recipient will not exit from welfare if the expected utility on welfare exceeds the expected utility of welfare the analysis indicates that while the majority of welfare spells are of short duration a nontrivial minority of spells are quite long those recipients with long spells are found to differ in predictable ways from those experiencing brief spells this suggests that strategies to move women off welfare are unnecessary in many cases and should be targeted on those most likely to be long term recipients copyright 1987 by mit press

effective tax rates and guarantees in the afdc program 1967 1982 estimates of effective tax rates on earned and unearned income and estimates of effective guarantees in the afdc program by state are provided for the period 1967 1982 the results indicate that effective real guarantees fell every year from 1967 to 1981 but stabilized in 1982 effective tax rates on unearned income rose steadily from 1967 to 1981 and took a particularly large additional jump in 1982 effective tax rates on earned income fell after 1967 but then gradually rose throughout the 1970s until 1982 when they took a much larger jump thus guarantees fell and tax rates rose over the 1970s as tight budgets forced states to restrict benefits and in the early 1980s tax rates were pushed even higher by federal legislation

entry and exit transitions in a government transfer program the case of aid to families with dependent children this study analyzes determinants of entry and exit transitions in the aid to families with dependent children program using data from the panel study of income dynamics the principal findings are that state controlled policy parameters such as the afdc guarantee the payment received when earnings are zero and the entry income limit the income level at which families become eligible for afdc payments have a significant but asymmetric impact on these transitions in addition evidence on the relationship between wages and such transitions tends to support efforts at reducing welfare dependency through programs which raise wages

the effect of educational attainment on welfare dependence evidence from canada abstract the impact of educational attainment on the duration of welfare spells is analysed using a unique data set derived from the administration of the social assistance program in canada over the period 1986 1993 the empirical analysis includes controls for demographic characteristics program parameters labour market conditions and unobserved individual characteristics it is found that that educational attainment has a much greater impact on the welfare exit rate for women than for men additionally the welfare exit rate for women is more sensitive to family status and program benefits but less sensitive to the unemployment rate relative to that for men

services sector and economic growth in india this study examines the long run equilibrium and short run dynamic relationship between services sector and gross domestic product gdp and between services and nonservices sectors in india the model is estimated using the optimal single equation and the maximum likelihood system estimators all the estimators consistently suggest the cointegrating relationship between services sector and gdp as well as between services and nonservices sectors the estimates of long run elasticity parameters are statistically significant and dimensionally consistent across the estimators the conventional cumulative sum cusum and the new cusum and moving sum mosum tests suggest the stability of the equilibrium residuals and reinforce the cointegrating relationship between the model series the error correction model provides some support for unidirectional granger causality from services sector to gdp the impulse response and variance decomposition analyses instead suggest the bidirectional causality between servic

analysis of transition data by the minimum chi square method an application to welfare spells in belgium in this paper we analyze transition data by means of the minimum chi square mcs method instead of the more commonly used maximum likelihood ml method the analysis includes exits to multiple destinations and unmeasured heterogeneity in the empirical application turnover in the welfare system in belgium is found to be very high median duration is 4 5 months for men and 7 months for women although these figures overstate turnover in that exits out of welfare include those occurring as a consequence of recipients moving to another municipality while remaining on welfare

households willingness to pay for reliable electricity services in ghana abstract access to reliable electricity is important in increasing the living standards of households and promoting sustainable development however ghanaian households have had to grapple with frequent power outages and poor quality electricity services in recent times this study examines the factors influencing households willingness to pay for reliable electricity services in ghana using data collected from 950 households in the cape coast metropolitan area and the tobit regression technique it was revealed that monthly income prior notice on power outages business ownership separate meter ownership household size and education significantly affect willingness to pay for reliable electricity services on the average households were prepared to pay 44 percent gh 6 80 us 3 42 more relative to the mean monthly electricity bill in the sample to improve electricity services it is envisaged that the findings would be used by policy makers and utility companies to make electricity generation and distribution more sustainable and efficient

intergenerational health mobility an empirical approach based on the echp despite the importance of the study of health mobility few attempts have been made to measure intergenerational mobility not only in the european union but also in other countries such as united states this article is focused on the study of intergenerational health mobility using data from the european community household panel echp in particular the relationships between self assessed health of parents and their sons are analysed the evidence obtained suggests that in spain sons reported health depends significantly on the self assessed health of their fathers

diagnostic test for structural change in cointegrated regression models abstract we derive the asymptotic distribution of the ols based cusum test in the context of cointegrated regression models and tabulate its critical values it is also found that the test has non trivial local power irrespective of the particular type of structure change

welfare benefits and the duration of welfare spells evidence from a natural experiment in canada abstract this paper uses a major reform of the welfare program implemented in the province of quebec canada in 1989 to analyze the impact of benefits on the length of welfare spells an important feature of this reform was the abolishment of discrimination based on age that applied to benefits as a result the monthly benefits of single individuals aged less than 30 increased from 173 to 425 1986 an increase of over 145 to assess the impact of the reform we estimate a series of semi parametric hazard models analogous to the regression approach to difference in differences estimation the estimated duration elasticities with respect to benefits for single men and women aged 22 29 are 0 25 and 0 28 respectively

estimation of time varying price elasticity in 1970 1997 japanese raw milk supply by structural time series model the price elasticity of raw milk supply in japan is estimated over time by a structural time series model in state space form and the changes in elasticity are tested by the diagnosing test of de john and penzer in 1998 the supply function is modeled with a local linear trend and a strictly exogenous autoregressive distributed lag price the seasonality in the data is adjusted by a structural time series model in the 1970 1997 period there were major dairy policy changes in japan a production adjustment related penalties and two tier pricing hokkaido is the region that mainly provides the supply of raw milk for milk products while tofuken is the region that mainly produces drinking milk the estimated price elasticity in hokkaido became stable after imposition of the production adjustment on the other hand price elasticity in tofuken became stable after the inflation of the mid 1970s price elasticity is estimated to be more inelastic as well as more likely to converge in inelasticity in hokkaido than in tofuken we discuss the relationship between changes in dairy policy and changes in price elasticity