exchange rate changes and inflation in post crisis asian economies vector autoregression analysis of the exchange rate pass through macro economic consequences of large currency depreciations among the crisis hit asian economies varied from one country to another inflation did not soar after the asian currency crisis of 1997 98 in most crisis hit countries except indonesia where high inflation followed a very large nominal depreciation of the rupiah the high inflation meant a loss of price competitive advantage a key for economic recovery from a crisis this paper examines the pass through effects of exchange rate changes on the domestic prices in the east asian economies using a vector autoregression analysis the main results are as follows i the degree of exchange rate pass through to import prices was quite high in the crisis hit economies ii the pass through to consumer price index cpi was generally low with a notable exception of indonesia and iii in indonesia both the impulse response of monetary policy variables to exchange rate shocks and that of cpi to monetary policy shocks were positive large and statistically significant thus indonesia s accommodative monetary policy coupled with the high degree of cpi responsiveness to exchange rate changes was an important factor in the inflation depreciation spiral in the wake of the currency crisis

the economics of iron deficiency abstract this paper examines the evidence for a causal relationship between iron deficiency and a variety of functional consequences with economic implications motor and mental impairment in children and low work productivity in adults to the extent that we can be confident that iron deficiency does cause a consequence with economic implications this effect is quantified in economic terms illustrative calculations for 10 developing countries suggest that the median value of annual physical productivity losses due to iron deficiency is around 2 32 per capita or 0 57 of gdp median total losses physical and cognitive combined are 16 78 per capita 4 05 of gdp using a cost of 1 33 per case of anemia prevented from one of the few effectiveness studies of national fortification allows us to calculate the benefit cost ratio for long term iron fortification programs the median value is 6 1 for the 10 countries examined and rises to 36 1 including the discounted future benefits attributable to cognitive improvements this paper improves on previous work by including a much more thorough survey of the quantitative magnitudes involved and by incorporating effects of iron deficiency on cognition however more research is needed to verify the accuracy of the assumptions needed for this type of analysis

the economics of rising stars this paper analyzes an occupation in which there is substantial uncertainty about individual performance and past performance is correlated with future outcomes in equilibrium only the young enter the occupation and only the successful stay on the young are numerous and earn incomes well below what their current alternative o ffers success is rare and rewarded highly the implied distribution of earnings must have positive skewness copyright 1988 by american economic association

are those paid more really more productive the case of experience this study uses computerized personnel microdata on the white male managerial and professional employees at a major u s corporation to address the following question can the additional earnings which are associated with more labor market experience at a point in time really be explained by higher productivity at the same point in time our answer to this question based on both cross sectional and longitudinal information is that performance plays a substantially smaller role in explaining cross sectional experience earnings differentials and earnings growth than is claimed by those who have adopted the human capital explanation of the experience earnings profile this response depends critically on our assumption that the performance ratings which supervisors give to their white male managerial and professional subordinates adequately reflect the subordinates relative productivity in the year of assessment we present a great deal of evidence which strongly supports this assumption

measuring managerial efficiency the case of baseball in economic analysis the role of the entrepreneur is paramount to the production process the entrepreneur is engaged in a darwinian game of efficiently transforming scarce resource inputs into outputs in the modern business organization this role is delegated to managers despite the conceptual importance of the role of management in the production function very little is known about the actual effect on output of variations in managerial skill in part this is due to the lack of proprietory data in part it is due to difficulties in measuring the outputs and inputs of complex production processes in a meaningful way a number of investigators have employed the concept of the frontier production function as developed by forsund and hjalmarsson 1 and timmer 6 and more recently by schmidt and lovell 3 to measure the effect on technical and price efficiency of various property rights structures or institutional constraints to our knowledge estimates of managerial efficiency have not been obtained with firm specific data except for some regulated industries in this study we estimate managerial efficiency by manager and by firm managerial marginal revenue product the rate of change in managerial efficiency over years of experience and relative factor price efficiency we use major league baseball teams over the period 1961 1980 as our data source what is particularly appealing about the choice of major league baseball teams as the industry for analysis is that outputs win percent and inputs player skills are unambiguously measured and the production function is simply specified as shown by scully 5 our results indicate that managerial skill in baseball contributes very substantially to the production process the paper will evolve as follows first the concept of the frontier production function is briefly outlined then estimates of managerial efficiency by manager and by team are provided and discussed a managerial efficiency learning curve is estimated an estimate of managerial marginal revenue product provided and the managerial efficiency

symmetric pass through of tariffs and exchange rates under imperfect competition an empirical test abstract this paper examines the effect of tariffs and exchange rates on u s prices of japanese cars trucks and motorcycles in particular we test whether the long run pass through of tariffs and exchange rates are identical the symmetry hypothesis we find that this hypothesis is easily accepted in our sample we also find that the pass through relation varies across products ranging from about 0 6 for trucks to unity for motorcycles these coefficients have very different implications for trade policy we explain the results based on demand cost and institutional conditions in each industry

price discrimination by u s and german exporters the insensitivity of the u s trade balance to the sharp depreciation of the dollar in the past three years has revived interest in the relationship between exchange rates and the trade balance a central issue in most analyses of the relation between the current account and the exchange rate concerns the price adjustment process the simple integrated competitive market model predicts that local currency prices should change in proportion to the nominal exchange rate for a country too small to influence world prices the relationship between local currency import prices and exchange rates has been referred to as the pass through relationship in the empirical literature in international economics if the proportional relationship between import prices and exchange rates holds pass through is said to be complete accounts of recent u s experience cite the failure of dollar prices of imported goods to rise in proportion to exchange rates i e incomplete pass through as an important factor in explaining the persistence of the trade deficit unfortunately observations on pass through alone provide limited insight into the behavior of markets since incomplete pass through is consistent with at least two fundamentally different paradigms one is the standard competitive model of trade in which the law of one price holds but exchange rate fluctuations are associated with large changes in import demand due to other factors for example if dollar appreciation is correlated with increases in world demand and industry marginal cost is increasing then pass through will be less than complete the other is an imperfectly competitive model in which exporters are capable of price discriminating across destination markets a phenomenon paul krugman 1987 has labeled pricing to market in this model incomplete pass through is typically associated with fluctuations in the markup of price over marginal cost on exports 2 these fluctuations in markups are believed to be countryspecific they do not reflect the behavior of prices to other export destinations both models are plausible explanations of recent u s experience unfortunately it is impossible to distinguish between these competing models using only information on import prices and exchange rates for a single country in order to distinguish between the competing models an empirical analysis of goods prices and exchange rates must be capable of measuring either marginal cost or the markup over marginal cost either of these tasks poses formidable empirical problems much of the empirical literature in industrial organization has been concerned with precisely these issues since markups are an important measure of the competitiveness of industries

an algorithm for identifying fair and optimal allocations the concept of a fair and optimal allocation was recently introduced by sun and yang sun n yang z 2003 a general strategy proof fair allocation mechanism economics letters 81 73 79 this note states some basic properties of fair and optimal allocations and provides a simple algorithm for identifying them c 2007 elsevier b v all fights reserved

gender differences in first jobs for economists over the last several decades women have made substantial progress into traditionally maledominated professions reflecting this trend much recent research has focused on explaining the choice of profession and the gender composition of the workforce 5 23 16 however a focus on occupation choice may conceal interesting patterns within professions because a profession can include a number of different job types with a distinct mix of professional activities the dual labor market phenomenon of primary and secondary jobs may also be present although perhaps to a lesser extent within a particular profession 17 gender differences in composition of employment among the various jobs within a profession could thus affect the status pay and advancement of women in the occupation if women primarily place in secondary type jobs the advantages of entering a profession will be lower for women relatively little is known about career choice within a profession 15 in this paper we model the first job choice of economists among several careers and use data on new ph d economists over the last thirty years to examine whether career choices differ by gender over a period of low but increasing representation of women an advantage of our single profession analysis is that it contains a relatively homogeneous set of workers with quantitative human capital measures that other studies of job choice suggest are important 7 there is significant variation in career choices available within economics that permits possible market segmentation 2 there are research and teaching academic jobs and the government and private sectors employ large numbers of economists we find significant structural differences in the placements of male and female economists indicating that the choices of female economists differ from those of their male counterparts both within academia and between this and other sectors the economics profession provides a useful background to examine gender differences in the career choices of professionals in a male dominated occupation over the last 30 years the average number of ph d s conferred annually in the u s has increased from approximately 300 to over 800 reflecting increased opportunities for economists within economics departments and expansion of other academic government and private sector jobs at the same time the proportion

elicitation of honest preferences for the assignment of individuals to positions the problem of eliciting honest preferences from individuals who must be assigned to a set of positions is considered individuals know that they will be charged for the positions to which they are assigned a set of prices that provide no incentive for the individual to misrepresent his preferences is suggested it is shown that these prices constitute an element of the optimal solution to the dual of a linear programming assignment problem both the optimal allocation and the prices to be charged can be derived by solving two linear programming problems once preferences have been elicited the procedure can usefully be viewed as a simulation of a competitive market under conditions where such a market cannot be expected to function well it results in an efficient allocation where all resources are valued at their opportunity costs and consumer surplus is maximized its outcome thus has the desirable properties of competitive market equilibria

large indivisibles an analysis with respect to price equilibrium and fairness an exchange economy is considered in which there are a finite number of individuals the same number of indivisibles and a fixed amount of a divisible good each individual consumes exactly one of the indivisibles and a certain quantity of the divisible good the existence of prices corresponding to pareto efficient allocations is proved it is also shown that this economy possesses fair allocations income fair allocations coalition fair allocations and pareto efficient egalitarian equivalent allocations in this study the effect of including large indivisibles in an exchange economy will be analyzed the analysis will be carried out with respect to the existence of price equilibrium and with respect to the existence of different forms of fairness the economy consists of a finite number of individuals the same number of indivisibles and a fixed amount of a divisible good it is assumed that each individual consumes exactly one of the indivisibles and some quantity of the divisible good we may interpret the indivisibles as being professions or houses the relationship between price equilibrium and a pareto efficient allocation is well known and proved in a number of cases under different assumptions about preferences and commodities for a standard economy see e g debreu 5 in case of nonconvexities which may also describe a certain type of indivisibility we may have an exact relationship in economies with a continuum of individuals see e g hildenbrand 11 but otherwise an approximate relationship obtains the degree of approximation depends on the degree of nonconvexities in preferences and not on the number of individuals see e g arrow and hahn 1 we will prove the existence of prices characterizing a pareto efficient allocation in a case where the indivisibles play an essential role and where approximate results would be too approximate the indivisibles may be considered large for the individual compared to his total consumption the theory of fairness has developed considerably during the seventies different kinds of concepts of fairness have been introduced and analyzed see daniel 41 foley 81 pazner and schmeidler 121 and schmeidler and vind 141 among others normally these authors have considered models with divisible goods or an infinite number of individuals for exchange economies the existence of fair allocations an envy free and pareto efficient allocation has been proved in

life after debt postgraduation consequences of federal student loans we estimate the causal effect of student loans on postgraduation labor market outcomes exploiting a kink in the formula determining eligibility for need based student loans using a representative sample of students graduating with a bachelor s degree in 1993 we find that student debt has nonnegative effects on earnings this result holds with differing levels of statistical significance across a battery of different empirical designs 1 ordinary least squares 2 partially linear and 3 regression kink we find similar results for the 2008 graduating cohort jel i22 i26 j32 j33

transferring ownership of public housing to existing tenants a market design approach this paper explores a housing market with an existing tenant in each house and where the existing tenants initially rent their houses the idea is to identify equilibrium prices for the housing market given the prerequisite that a tenant can buy any house on the housing market including the one that he is currently possessing or continue renting the house he is currently occupying the main contribution is the identification of an individually rational equilibrium selecting and group non manipulable price mechanism in a restricted preference domain that contains almost all preference profiles in this restricted domain the identified mechanism is the minimum price equilibrium selecting mechanism that transfers the maximum number of ownerships to the existing tenants we also relate the theoretical model and the main findings to the u k housing act 1980 whose main objective is to transfer ownerships of houses to existing tenants

time allocation decisions associated with job market preparation undergraduate perceptions versus market realities a survey of agribusiness firms identifies characteristics associated with above average starting salary offers in the allied fields of agribusiness agricultural economics business and economics a complementary survey is made of students at texas a m university and university of georgia results show that firms value work experience and leadership experience more than students do whereas students value raising grade point average and interview preparation more than do firms students seeking a firm s maximum starting salary offer will need to enhance academic performance with substantial work experience and leadership experience copyright 2002 oxford university press

markup adjustment and exchange rate fluctuations evidence from panel data on automobile exports abstract this paper uses data on bilateral automobile export prices from the usa germany and japan to gauge the importance of markup adjustment driven by exchange rate movements across several destination markets we find that japanese exports are characterized by a high degree of markup adjustment designed to stabilize the price measured in the buyer s currency there is weak evidence for such behavior on the part of german exporters and no evidence of markup adjustment by us exporters where it exists markup adjustment tends to be highly persistent the dynamic pattern of markup adjustment is consistent with invoicing in the exporter s currency except for exports to the usa and canada

the design of optimal education policies this paper studies the education policy chosen by a utilitarian government in the model households differ in their income and in their children s ability income is observed by the government but ability is private information households can use private education but cannot borrow to finance it the government can finance education with income tax but at the cost of blunting the individuals incentive to exert labour market effort the optimal education policy we derive is elitist it increases the spread between the educational achievement of the bright and the less bright individuals compared to private provision it is also such that the education received by less bright individuals depends positively on their parental income finally the optimal education policy is input regressive in the sense of arrow 1971 quarterly journal of economics 38 175 208 households with higher income and brighter children contribute less in tuition fees towards the cost of the education system than households with lower income and less bright children

the importance of bundling in a gorman lancaster model of earnings the idea that the labor market of individuals can be decomposed into payments to separate productive attributes has an enduring appeal in economics assuming that demographic groups differ only in their endowments of productive characteristics it is possible to rationalize observed demographic earnings differentials without invoking the arguments that characteristics specific to a particular demographic group are direct objects of employer demand by aggregating skills over all demographic groups it is possible to produce a theory of the market determination of the prices of skills held in different amounts by different demographic groups this paper considers conditions under which characteristics are uniformly priced across sectors of a multisector economy the paper presents empirical evidence that rejects uniform pricing of characteristics as a description of the us labor market bundling may account for this evudence but other hypotheses do as well authors

test scores educational opportunities and individual choice abstract a model combining student preferences for college with university admissions decisions is estimated to provide information on the role of test scores in the determination of post secondary educational opportunities in the u s in contrast to implications of much of the recent criticism of tests and their use we find that scholastic aptitude test scores are more strongly related to student application and choice of college quality than to college admissions decisions in addition although there is a substantial correlation between test scores and high school performance we find that both post secondary school preferences and ultimate opportunities are related as much to performance in high school as to test scores themselves although sat scores certainly exclude some persons from schools our findings indicate that they do not represent an overriding constraint on the college opportunities of high school graduates

is a monetary union feasible for east asia the empirical suitability of the east asian economies for potential monetary integration is assessed the structural vector autoregression var method is employed to identify the underlying shocks using a three variable var model across the east asian economies the estimates of the eec are used as a benchmark to compare the size of the underlying shocks and the speed of adjustment to shocks in both regions to determine the feasibility of forming an optimum currency area oca in east asia the empirical results do not display strong support for forming an oca in the east asian region the results do imply however that some small subregions are potential candidates for ocas since their disturbances are correlated and small and these economies adjust rapidly to shocks

does it pay to attend an elite private college cross cohort evidence on the effects of college type on earnings although a substantial and rising labor market premium is associated with college attendance in general little is known about how this premium varies across institutions of different types and across time in this paper we explicitly model high school students choice of college type characterized by selectivity and control based on individual and family characteristics including ability and parental economic status and an estimate of the net costs of attendance we estimate selectivity corrected outcome equations using data from both the national longitudinal study of the high school class of 1972 and high school and beyond which permit us to determine the effects of college quality on wages and earnings and how this effect varies across time even after controlling for selection effects strong evidence emerges of a significant economic return to attending an elite private institution and some evidence suggests this premium has increased over time

fair allocation of indivisible goods and criteria of justice a set of n objects and an amount m of money is to be distributed among m people example the objects are tasks and the money is compensation from a fixed budget an elementary argument via constrained optimization shows that for m sufficiently large the set of efficient envy free allocations is nonempty and has a nice structure in particular various criteria of justice lead to unique best fair allocations that are well behaved with respect to changes of m this is in sharp contrast to the usual fair division theory with divisible goods

options using a collective lottery to ration vaccines during an influenza pandemic for many countries the best way to counter an influenza pandemic is to provide citizens with a pandemic vaccine however since the global supply of the vaccines is far smaller than the quantity demanded how to allocate the limited vaccines can be a very challenging task for them in this study we introduce a collective lottery mechanism that allocates vaccines as fairly as the traditional lottery while also offering more options for family members or those who are close so that they can choose the joint probability of successes that can maximize their welfare this mechanism thus gives rise to a pareto improvement over the traditional lottery our empirical study uses the us and the uk as examples in sequential collective lotteries that are simulated to prove that such an improvement while maintaining fairness in fact exists

price discrimination and markups in export markets abstract imperfect competition in international markets is one of the key explanations for why prices of similar goods might differ among destination countries this paper develops an empirical model to examine the presence of price discrimination stemming from imperfect competition in the international market for a country s exports the model is used to examine the export behavior of taiwanese exporters of footwear the generalized supply relation allows identification of deviations from competitive pricing in each export market in addition the model provides insights into the extent of exchange rate pass through finally the model is modified in order to estimate the effect of the voluntary export restraint imposed in the u s on footwear imports from taiwan

individual attributes and self selection of higher education college attendance versus college completion abstract we have estimated a joint discrete continuous utility maximization model of college attendance and college completion special attention is given to the possibility that test scores and other individual attributes are poor predictors of who will succeed in college and thus may not promote optimal investment decisions and may indeed unjustly limit the educational opportunities of some youth we find that 1 college attendance decisions are strongly commensurate with college completion persons who are unlikely to attend college would be very likely to drop out of even their first choice colleges were they to attend college human capital investment decisions are strongly mirrored by the likelihood that they will pay off 2 contrary to much of the recent criticism of the predictive validity of test scores we find that their informational content is substantial after controlling for high school class rank for example the probability of dropping out of the first choice college varies greatly with sat scores 3 individual self selection related to both measured and unmeasured attributes is the dominant determinant of college attendance

a stochastic model of superstardom an application of the yule distribution this study employs a stochastic model developed by g udny yule and herbert a simon as the probability mechanism underlying the consumer s choice of artistic products and predicts that artistic outputs will be concentrated among a few lucky individuals we find that the probability distribution implied by the stochastic model provides an excellent description of the empirical data in the popular music industry suggesting that the stochastic model may represent the process generating the superstar phenomenon because the stochastic model does not require differential talents among individuals our empirical results support the notion that the superstar phenomenon could exist among individuals with equal talent copyright 1994 by mit press

goods prices and exchange rates what have we learned import prices typically change by a smaller proportion than the exchange rate between the exporting and importing country recent research indicates that common currency relative prices for similar goods exported to different markets are highly correlated with exchange rates between those markets this evidence suggests that incomplete pass through is a consequence of third degree price discrimination while distance matters for market segmentation borders have independent effects the source of the border effect has not been clearly identified furthermore there is little evidence yet to suggest substantial market power is implied by the observed price discrimination

a competitive partnership formation process a group of heterogeneous agents may form partnerships in pairs all single agents as well as all partnerships generate values if two agents choose to cooperate they need to specify how to split their joint value among one another in equilibrium which may or may not exist no agents have incentives to break up any existing partnerships or form new partnerships this paper proposes a dynamic competitive adjustment process that always either finds an equilibrium or exclusively disproves the existence of any equilibrium in finitely many steps when an equilibrium exists partnership and revenue distribution will be automatically and endogenously determined by the process moreover several fundamental properties of the equilibrium solution and the model are derived

does education raise productivity or just reflect it education has an important effect on wages but it not clear whether this is because education raises productivity or because education is simply a signal of ability we implement a number of existing tests for discriminating between these two explanations and find that they do not support the signalling hypothesis however we have severe reservations about these results and we propose an alternative test based on changes in education incentives caused by changes in the minimum school leaving age in the 1970s using this idea we find that uk data appear to strongly support the human capital explanation an important issue in the economics of education is that an individual s education has an effect on wages paid in the labour market for example blundell et al 2003 uses detailed education and subsequent earnings information for a cohort of male individuals born in 1958 to estimate that the returns to a uk degree typically of 3 year duration relative to graduating from high school at 18 with 2 a level qualifications a necessary but not sufficient condition for admission to university is a 24 wage premium human capital explanations pioneered by becker 1962 and schultz 1963 suggest that the correlation between education and wages is due to education enhancing productivity however earnings may rise in response to education not because of any effect on productivity but simply because education may act as a signal of productivity employers believing that education is correlated with productivity will screen workers for their education and pay higher wages to the more educated the employers beliefs will be confirmed by their experience if it is the case that high productivity individuals signal this by choosing high levels of education it will be optimal for individuals to behave in this way if the cost of acquiring education is less for high productivity individuals than it is for low productivity individuals thus under reasonable conditions the market will be characterised by a separating equilibrium where higher productivity individuals choose higher levels of education than lower productivity workers and earn correspondingly higher wages the theory is largely due to spence 1973 1979 and the subsequent empirical literature was reviewed by groot and oosterbeek 1994 riley 2001 provides an excellent modern survey chevalier harmon and walker are fellows of iza in bonn and are affiliated with the institute for the study of social change issc in dublin this paper is part of the issc policy evaluation programme chevalier and walker are also affiliated with the centre for the economics of education at the london school of economics lse the support of all of these bodies for facilitating our collaboration is acknowledged harmon is grateful to university college london for their hospitality during his nuffield foundation new career development fellowship in the social sciences comments from steve machin and three anonymous referees greatly improved the exposition of this paper we are also grateful to richard blundell and to seminar participants at the lse and the tinbergen institute in amsterdam for their comments and to vincent o sullivan for excellent research assistance the usual disclaimer applies

a general strategy proof fair allocation mechanism abstract this paper studies a general problem of efficiently and fairly allocating n indivisible objects like jobs or houses with a certain amount of money to n persons with a requirement that each person be assigned with one object the precise preferences of individuals over both the objects and money are unknown and manipulable but assumed to follow some general patterns to ensure the existence of a fair allocation a mechanism is developed that elicits honest preferences over both the objects and money and that assigns the objects with some money to individuals efficiently and fairly

no envy and consistency in economies with indivisible goods we consider the problem of fair allocation in economies with indivisible goods our main objective is to identify appealing subsolutions of the no envy solution we formulate desirable properties of solutions and look for solutions satisfying them given an allocation chosen by a solution for some economy and given a subgroup of the agents consider the problem of fairly distributing among its members the resources that this group has collectively received the solution is consistent if it recommends that the same bundle be attributed to each of these agents as initially we show that there is no proper subsolution of the no envy solution that satisfies consistency however many subsolutions satisfy bilateral consistency or the converse of consistency but again there is no proper subsolution satisfying these two properties together

international comparisons of pricing to market behavior this paper measures the degree of price discrimination across export destinations that is associated with exchange rate changes using u s u k german and japanese industry level data given the industries sampled more price discrimination across destinations is observed in the u k german and japanese data for industries that match across source countries however behavior is very similar across source countries furthermore destination specific price adjustment on exports to the united states from germany and japan is similar to price adjustment observed on shipments to other destinations most variation in the data appears to be related to industry copyright 1993 by american economic association

commitment and satisfaction in the classroom and on the field evidence from a division i liberal arts college within higher education there has been a persistent concern that student athlete commitments to their athletic activities are detrimental to their academic studies we collect data on student athl

earnings schooling ability and cognitive skills conventional estimates now available for a large number of countries generally indicate that the social returns to education are positive large and competitive with returns to investment in physical capital that such estimates are good guides for public resource allocation has however been questioned the heart of the problem lies in the interpretation of the positive relationship between the education and the earnings of workers whether as the conventional estimates assume the coefficient of the education variable in the earnings function measures the effect on the productivity of workers of human capital acquired in school it has been hypothesized that education in part or instead represents screening for native ability and motivation or credentialism and that as a consequence conventional measures of the social benefit of education are substantially upward biased 2 in this paper we attempt to distinguish the influence on earnings of cognitive achievement native ability and years of education as a means of adjudicating the human capital screening and credentialist hypotheses our econometric analysis is based on two rigorously comparable micro data sets from kenya and tanzania generated by surveys of the urban wage labor force specifically for this study these data sets contain the usual variables found in earnings function estimates of the benefits of schooling individual earnings years of education and years of employment experience in addition they contain two variables measures of the worker s cognitive skills and of his or her reasoning ability not previously found in studies of developing countries and only rarely found in studies of the education earnings relationship in developed countries 3 with these variables we can estimate the direct effects on earnings of cognitive skills ability and years of schooling by using them to estimate educational production functions and educational attainment functions and linking these functions with the earnings function in a recursive framework we can also assess the various indirect effects on earnings of ability and years of schooling having data sets from two countries very similar with respect to size resource endowments structure of production and employment and level of development means that not only can we subject our results to the usual statistical tests but we can also assess their replicability both kenya and tanzania have nearly achieved the objective of universal primary education while university enrollments remain at less than 1 percent of the relevant age group the important policy issues re boissiere development research department the world bank 1818 h street washington d c 20433 knight institute of economics and statistics oxford university sabot williams college williamstown ma 01267 we are grateful to the educational testing service of princeton for the design of tests used in this study and to j armitage j behrman j hausman d hendry d jamison and an anonymous referee for their insights and advice helpful comments were also received from participants in seminars at oxford and yale universities the views presented here are our own they should not be interpreted as reflecting those of the world bank george psacharopoulos 1973 1981 contains a listing of 44 countries in which rate of return studies had been conducted and of the estimates obtained 2for instance kenneth arrow 1973 mark blaug 1976 samuel bowles and herbert gintis 1976 john riley 1979 michael spence 1976 and lester thurow 1975 3for attempts to control for ability and or for cognitive achievement in studies for the united states see jere behrman et al 1980 gary chamberlain and zvi griliches 1977 griliches and william mason 1972 michael olneck 1977 paul taubman and terence wales 1974 taubman 1975 and david wise 1975 see also the survey articles by griliches 1977 1979 in most instances the data refer to special subgroups in the population and clear distinction cannot be made between natural ability and cognitive skills acquired in school

baseball specific human capital why good but not great players are more likely to coach in the major leagues the career choice of retiring athletes provides an interesting example of a midcareer transition conditioned on specific human capital previous research examines the determination of earnings in professional sports 3 5 14 but does not consider how skills developed during an athlete s playing years affect subsequent opportunities in this paper i test the hypothesis that skills specific to baseball increase the probability a player will choose to coach the empirical work confirms the importance of baseball specific human capital in the decision to coach and provides some of the first formal evidence that the opportunities of star players differ distinctly from players that are marginally less talented in the theoretical section i develop a random utility model in which a retiring player chooses between coaching and non coaching careers on the basis of potential earnings and a random taste component earnings in either career are determined by a vector of career attributes that embody the player s productivity in each if the random taste component is normally distributed the probability a player chooses a coaching career can be estimated using probit the empirical results support the predictions of the model that baseball specific human capital is positively correlated with the probability of a player coaching and that star players are unlikely to coach because their marginal skill advantage is not baseball specific in particular the findings imply that players with long but unexceptional careers are more likely to coach in the major leagues an extension of the empirical model is applied to the issue of discrimination the insignificance of a black dummy variable suggests that black players have the same probability of coaching as comparably skilled white players however a more complex interactive specification suggests that relatively poor opportunities for black stars outside the game leads to their crowding out those black players who if they were white would most likely coach

exchange rate pass through and currency invoicing implications for monetary integration in east asia exporter s price setting behaviour and currency invoicing play a key role in the literature on the new open economy macroeconom ics this paper estimates exchange rate pass through coefficients for the exports of four asean

college selectivity and earnings this article shows that college performance and selectivity have significant effects on earnings it suggests that work that does not include college performance overstates the effect of college se