development fertility and childbearing age a unified growth theory during the last two centuries fertility has exhibited in industrialized economies two distinct trends the cohort total fertility rate follows a decreasing pattern while the cohort average age at motherhood exhibits a u shaped pattern this paper proposes a unified growth theory aimed at rationalizing those two demographic stylized facts we develop a three period olg model with two periods of fertility and show how a traditional economy where individuals do not invest in higher education and where income rises push towards advancing births can progressively converge towards a modern economy where individuals invest in higher education and where income rises encourage postponing births our findings are illustrated numerically by replicating the dynamics of the quantum and the tempo of births for swedish cohorts born between 1876 and 1966

price formation in commodity markets this paper develops a theory consistent market model for storable commodities and illustrates its characterization of the data generating process for a set of major traded commodities the dynamics of the system incorporate recent advances in modelling techniques cointegrated variables in the demand functions are represented by the error correction mechanism ecm and expected prices in the stock demand relationship are generated by a rational expectations process the outside sample performance of the model is tested against the pure time series model used to formulate expected prices and is shown to have a smaller mean square error than that of the time series model thus the model provides comparatively efficient forecasts and unlike models constructed in their reduced form permits consideration of key behavioural relationships in commodity markets

segregating genetically modified and nongenetically modified corn in a marketing channel the adoption of gm corn in the united states depends on many factors including segregation costs which have minor impacts on aggregate welfare because the demand for nongm corn is small relative to its supply no premium for nongm corn can be generated in excess of the segregation costs an outward shift in the supply of corn resulting from the adoption of gm varieties has a greater impact on aggregate welfare than do the segregation costs required to satisfy the gm free demand a 10 increase in the aggregate supply of gm corn increases aggregate welfare by more than us 250 million however nonadopters of gm corn lose while adopters can gain or lose depending on the nature of the aggregate demand curve for us corn

linkages between industrialization strategies and industrial relations human resource policies singapore malaysia the philippines and india the case studies of singapore malaysia the philippines and india presented in this paper support the author s contention that a country s industrialization strategy for economic development profoundly influences its industrial relations ir and human resources hr policy goals the author finds that import substitution industrialization was associated with ir hr policy goals of pluralism and stability while a low cost export oriented industrialization strategy was associated with ir hr policy goals of cost containment and union suppression in countries that moved from a low cost export oriented strategy to a higher value added export oriented strategy the focus of ir hr policy goals shifted from cost containment to work force flexibility and skills development the four countries diverged however in the specific institutions and arrangements they adopted to meet national ir hr policy goals due to different political choices made by dominant actors and different institutional industrial relations histories

inventory and equilibrium adjustments in international commodity markets a multi cointegration approach recent advances in cointegration tests and error correction models are applied to the analysis of commodity inventory behaviour multi cointegration was considered in inventory series of seven internationally traded products in contrast to previous works on inventory behaviour which first hypothesize a relationship and then gather empirical evidence to emulate the postulated behaviour an error correction model was used to represent theoretical inventory relationships which are established by multi cointegration tests the results support the use of this approach to determine the optimal stockpiling rules of producers and consumers

human capital and growth abstract this paper describes a growth model with the property that human capital accumulation can account for all observed growth the model is shown to be consistent with evidence on individual productivities as measured by census earnings data the central hypothesis is that we learn more when we interact with more productive people

spanish unions institutional legacy and responsiveness to economic and industrial change using empirical data drawn from multiple sources including interview material the author examines spanish trade unions responses to the reorganization of spain s economy and changes in the struc

investigation of production sales and inventory relationships using multicointegration and non symmetric error correction models the accumulated sum of a stationary series is called integrated if a linear combination of some of the integrated series is stationary it is said to be cointegrated this paper presents empirical results on inventories to consider the possibility of a deeper form of cointegration called multicointegration which is introduced in granger and lee 1989 a vector integrated series is multicointegrated if the accumulated sum of its stationary cointegrated linear combination is again cointegrated with itself inventory which is the accumulated sum of production minus sales is probably cointegrated with production and sales the empirical results generally support the presence of multicointegration of production and sales in many u s industries and industrial aggregates the results also favour the non symmetric error correction model providing evidence that the strength of attraction is different on both sides of the attractor a modified s s rule for inventory control is investigated in the context of a non symmetric error correction model and the results generally do not support the s s rule sufficient evidence is found to conclude that multicointegration is a useful concept in the area of inventory determination

motherhood delay and the human capital of the next generation this paper uses biological fertility shocks as instrumental variables to estimate the causal effect of motherhood delay on the cognitive ability of first children maternal age at first birth represents a potential determinant of early human capital formation that reflects choices that respond to financial incentives cultural norms and policy environment the key measures of cognitive ability are peabody individual achievement test piat scores test scores have long been predictors of individual educational attainment and earn ings and their importance has only increased richard murnane john willet and frank levy 1995 at the national level test perfor mance in mathematics and science is strongly related to economic growth and may matter more than years of completed schooling eric hanushek and dennis kimko 2000 using data on first born children age 5 to 14 in the national longitudinal survey of youth 1979 nlsy79 children survey this paper finds delayed moth erhood leads to significant increases in piat test scores the relationship is robust to the inclusion of various controls for observable ele

international trade constraints and commodity market models an application to the cotton market this paper presents a model that accounts explicitly for quantitative controls on international trade countries are classified into two groups depending upon whether or not their imports and exports are responsive to world prices with the result that all adjustment burdens are borne by a subset of the world market participants the model is tested with pooled time series cross section data for the cotton market m s odels of world commodity markets differentiate among market participants in a variety of ways single equation approaches make strong implicit assumptions about cross country similarities in consumer preferences and producer responsiveness while in other approaches world markets are disaggregated on the basis of time period income group or type of economic system the present paper develops a model that groups countries in terms of the presence or absence of controls on international trade as johnson and others have noted 1 quantitative controls on trade are prominent in the trade of many primary products with such restrictions domestic prices bear no necessary relationship to international prices and movements in world prices may be of limited relevance to explaining global consumer and producer behavior in the model in this paper countries are classified into two groups depending upon whether their consumers and producers are responsive to international prices the international market is then seen as one in which the burden of adjustment falls on the producers consumers and holders of stocks in the price responsive countries the estimation procedure uses a cross section time series data set in which country specific dummy variables allow for differential behavior among the various trade participants cotton is the focus of the paper as the cotton market is an especially good example of a market with quantitative restrictions cotton production is dominated by less developed countries ldcs and centrally planned economies cpes and exports are largely determined by the decisions of state trading monopolies i a trade constrained model the point of departure in developing the model is to group countries a priori according to whether their consumers producers and inventory holders are world price responsive r or non responsive n if x countries are fully insulated from world prices and z countries are responsive to world prices the global production utilization identity can be written as

the decentralization of collective bargaining a literature review and comparative analysis the author reviews evidence that the bargaining structure is becoming more decentralized in sweden australia the former west germany italy the united kingdom and the united states although in

children and their parents a review of fertility and causality childbearing decisions are not made in isolation they are taken in concert with decisions regarding work marriage health investments and stocks as well as many other observable and non observable considerations drawing causal inferences regarding the effect of additional children on family outcomes is complicated by these endogenous factors this paper lays out the issues involved in estimating the effect of additional child births on family outcomes and the assumptions underlying the range of estimators and methodologies proposed in the economic literature the common pitfalls of these estimators are discussed as well as their potential to bias our interpretation of the effect additional births have on children and parents both in the existing literature and in future work in the face of changing patterns of childbearing and child rearing

testing the rational expectations hypothesis in an agricultural market a recent survey on models of agricultural supply equations listed over 500 studies in which variants of nerlove s adaptive expectations model were employed one might naively assume that the scientific evidence overwhelmingly favored the adaptive expectations hypothesis but this inference would not be warranted in particular there have been very few studies which have even attempted to estimate a rational expectations version of the traditional agricultural supply models and none that have explicitly tested the rational expectations hypothesis 2 in this paper we estimate a model of agricultural supply and demand for the chicken broiler industry under the maintained assumption of rational expectations in the sense of muth 1961 and provide a series of tests of the model specification we find that in this case the hypothesis of muth rationality receives strong support in recent years there has been increasing interest in models in which economic actors are assumed to form expectations of variables rationally for the most part empirical applications of the rational expectations hypothesis have employed single equation econometric methods these methods have permitted consistent estimation of equations under the assumption of the rational expectations hypothesis but do not allow for any explicit testing of the maintained hypothesis of rationality this paper presents estimates of a simultaneous equation model of the chicken broiler industry using maximum likelihood methods and provides a joint test of the rational expectations hypothesis and the model specification our econometric procedure is related to the recent theoretical work of wallis 1980 and combines time series analysis with traditional econometric estimation techniques under the assumption of rational expectations the model can be solved for the expected price as a function of the expected values of the exogenous variables this function can then be substituted into the model leading to a specification which contains the original endogenous and exogenous variables plus the expected values of the exogenous variables in general following this substitution the model will contain overidentifying restrictions time series analysis is utilized to generate the necessary forecasts of the exogenous variables the complete system of equations is estimated by full information maximum likelihood and the constraints are tested by a log likelihood ratio test the overidentifying constraints arise in the model because the suppliers are assumed to act as if they know both the underlying structure of the model and the stochastic processes governing the exogenous variables the two requirements of rational expectations while the expected price enters only the supply equation of our model it is necessary in the econometric formulation to specify the demand equation the instrumental variable procedures of mccallum 1976 and nelson 1975b are single equation methods and do not permit a test of the rational expectations hypothesis by specifying the complete model the additional structure imposed on the problem allows us to estimate the coefficients and test the implied restrictions there has not been universal agreement that the rational expectations hypothesis is the best theoretical device to model rational behavior according to muth s original formulation economic actors forecast endogenous variables according to the true reduced form equations of the model decanio 1979 and friedman 1979 have argued that the economic actors actually received for publication august 24 1981 revision accepted for publication march 2 1982 university of new mexico and university of california davis respectively we wish to thank g king r l huntzinger r pope and l wegge for advice on this project a nelson and e shaw contributed useful research assistance i the paper by askari and cummings 1977 provides references for these studies 2 huntzinger s 1979 paper is one of the first attempts at estimatitng a rational expectations model of agricultural supply

beneath the miracle labor subordination in the new asian industrialism this important study examines the dynamics of the remarkable economic transformation of south korea singapore taiwan and hong kong which has been based in large measure on the production of manufactured goods for export the competitive edge of these countries has in turn been rooted in the mobilization of a low cost disciplined and productive workforce this study seeks therefore to explain how east asian governments and employers have attempted to manage this workforce it also explores the extent to which workers are able to challenge management decisions and insert working class agendas into public policy beneath the miracle moves beyond current explanations for the weakness of east asian labor movements which emphasize confucianist culture material welfare gains and political repression it shows that the organizational capacity of workers has been more fundamentally undercut first by the nature of emergent east asian employment systems and second by the sequencing of developmental change with political controls preceding rapid industrialization and preempting political and union organization of the growing industrial workforce deyo undertakes an incisive cross national comparison of employment systems and explores anomalous situations such as that in hong kong where labor is politically weak even under minimal state controls and that in south korea where labor is in a stronger position despite far stricter regulation beneath the miracle offers a fresh and compelling comparative analysis of asian labor movements which could lead to a reassessment of many other developmental issues in east asia in his probing examination deyo provides an important and exciting contribution to the literature in this field

organized labor s images of multinational enterprise divergent foreign investment ideologies in argentina south korea and spain this paper conceptualizes how organized labor in newly industrialized countries both responds to and shapes the presence of foreign multinationals four images of multinationals as villains nec

bounding causal effects using data from a contaminated natural experiment analysing the effects of teenage childbearing in this paper we consider what can be learned about causal effects when one uses a contaminated instrumental variable in particular we consider what inferences can be made about the causal effect of teenage childbearing on a teen mother s subsequent outcomes when we use the natural experiment of miscarriages to form an instrumental variable for teen births miscarriages might not meet all of the conditions required for an instrumental variable to identify such causal effects for all of the observations in our sample however it is an appropriate instrumental variable for some women namely those pregnant women who experience a random miscarriage although information from typical data sources does not allow one to identify these women we show that one can adapt results from horowitz and manski 1995 on identification with data from contaminated samples to construct informative bounds on the causal effect of teenage childbearing we use these bounds to re examine the effects of early chilbearing on the teen mother s subsequent educational and labour market attainment as considered in hotz mcelroy and sanders 1995a 1995b consistent with their study these bounds indicate that women who have births as teens have higher labour market earnings and hours worked compared to what they would have attained if their childbearing had been delayed

the more the merrier the effect of family size and birth order on children s education there is an extensive theoretical literature that postulates a tradeoff between child quantity and quality within a family however there is little causal evidence that speaks to this theory using a rich dataset on the entire population of norway over an extended period of time we examine the effects of family size and birth order on the educational attainment of children while we find a negative correlation between family size and children s education when we include indicators for birth order and or use twin births as an instrument family size effects become negligible in addition birth order has a significant and large negative effect on children s education we also study adult earnings employment and teenage childbearing and find strong evidence for birth order effects with these outcomes particularly among women these findings suggest the need to revisit economic models of fertility and child production focusing not only on differences across families but differences within families as well

the political economy of performance standards automotive industrial policy in comparative historical perspective abstracta substantial body of literature holds that industrial policies work best when their beneficiaries are subject to demanding performance standards by conditioning access to their low cost loans and lucrative markets on foreign sales and local content for example east asian officials forced their manufacturers to improve quality cut costs and develop linkages to allied industries that generated jobs and foreign exchange revenues of their own in the so called miracle years but the politics of performance standards are themselves unclear why are they more common in some countries than others are they more likely to be imposed by autocratic than democratic regimes and if so why i address these questions by examining cross national data on export and local content requirements in the auto industry in 1980 find that they all but presupposed autocracy in labour surplus but not labour scarce countries explore the interactions of political regimes productive assets and performance st

a conceptual framework for analysis of primary commodity markets abstract the paper begins with a critique of the traditional neoclassical theory as a tool for analysing commodity markets and suggests that a viable theory needs to be developed from the concept of market power as expressed in the relative bargaining strengths of transnational corporations active in the commodity production and trade of developing countries and of the governments and business interests of host countries a discussion of the principal elements comprising relative bargaining strength divided into commodity specific country specific and international is followed by a brief consideration of alternative policy options for developing countries aimed at improving their share of the benefits from their commodity exports to developed countries

workers of the less developed world unite a multilevel analysis of unionization in less developed countries past scholars of unionization have offered exemplary cross national studies of affluent democracies and case studies of less developed countries ldcs what has been lacking is cross national research on unionization across ldcs we conduct a multilevel analysis of the likelihood that a worker is unionized with the late 1990s world values surveys of 39 ldcs we propose that unionization in ldcs can be explained by the individual characteristics of workers as well as the country level factors of institutions industrialization and globalization our analyses yield several conclusions first owing to the legacy of state socialism ex communist countries have much higher unionization second our analyses show that class very effectively explains union membership across ldcs although skilled manual workers are more unionized than most educated professionals stand out for their distinctively high unionization third the debt crisis significantly undermined unionization through the institutional influence of international monetary fund imf agreements and the globalization pressure of debt service despite being the focus of much research industrialization democratization the size of the state international labour organization conventions and international trade and investment are surprisingly insignificant decomposing the sample by communist legacy signing an imf agreement is significant in ex communist countries and debt service is significant in countries without a communist legacy overall we conclude that the debt crisis has undermined unionization and class remains a powerful basis of mobilization across ldcs