the great reversal in the demand for skill and cognitive tasks this paper argues that several of the poor labor market outcomes observed in the great recession can be traced back to a change in the demand pattern for skilled workers that started with the tech bust of 2000 in particular we show that around the year 2000 the demand for cognitive tasks underwent a reversal in response high skilled workers moved down the occupational ladder and increasingly displaced lower educated workers in less skill intensive jobs while these effects were present before the financial crisis of 2008 they became more obvious after jobs associated with the housing bubble disappeared

hidden underemployment among irish farm holders 2002 2011 this article examines the scale of hidden underemployment on irish farms from 2002 to 2011 we provide a measure of hidden underemployment that is not captured by the national level statistics hidden underemployment can be attributed to a number of factors relating to inadequate employment situations as described at the 16th international conference of labour statisticians such as low productivity the poor utilization of skills and other factors specific to agriculture we place particular attention upon the potential role of off farm labour supply in solving the underemployment problem we utilize a two stage residual inclusion model and a random effects probit model to examine the forces behind farm underemployment we utilize a fixed effects model to examine the factors driving the severity of farm underemployment our findings suggest that instances of hidden underemployment increased between 2002 and 2011 hidden underemployment appears to be a stubborn problem and is related to the absence of off

unemployment and effort at work we measure the sensitivity of work effort to local labour market conditions using self reported non work at the workplace in the american time use survey atus 2003 12 non work at work is quantitatively significant and varies positively with local unemployment but in opposite directions at the extensive and intensive margins the fraction of workers reporting positive values declines with unemployment while time spent in non work conditional on any such time rises with unemployment the results speak to issues of labour hoarding efficiency wages and the cyclicality of labour productivity we also demonstrate a relationship between the incidence of non work and unemployment benefits in state data linked to the atus there are also pronounced occupational differences in the incidence and intensity of non work

automation and labor force participation in advanced economies macro and micro evidence abstract technological advances raise productivity and growth but are also likely to reshape labor markets we examine the impact of automation on aggregate labor force participation rates and individuals attachment to the workforce in advanced economies cross country analysis which leverages the variation in the routinizability of occupations and occupational composition points to significant negative effects of automation on the participation rates of prime age men and women individual level analysis confirms that workers previously employed in routinizable occupations are more likely to drop out of the labor force encouragingly higher spending on active labor market programs and education are however associated with smaller negative effects of technological change on participation

an equilibrium model of the business cycle with household production and fiscal policy the authors estimate a dynamic general equilibrium model of the u s economy that includes an explicit household production sector and stochastic fiscal variables they use their estimates to investigate two issues first the authors analyze how well the model accounts for aggregate fluctuations they find that household production has a significant impact and reject a nested specification in which changes in the home production technology do not matter for market variables second the authors study the effects of some simple fiscal policy experiments and show that the model generates different predictions for the effects of tax changes than similar models without home production copyright 1997 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

the elasticity of substitution between time and market goods evidence from the great recession we document a change in household shopping behavior during the great recession households purchased more on sale larger sizes and generic products and increased coupon usage and shopping at discount stores we estimate a decline in returns to shopping during the recession therefore the increase in shopping behavior implies a significant decrease in households opportunity cost of time using the estimated cost of time and time use data we estimate a high elasticity of substitution between market expenditure and time spent on nonmarket work we find that households smooth a sizable fraction of consumption by varying their time allocation during recessions

the life cycle profile of time spent on job search using time use survey data we document a hump shaped profile of job search time in the united states across the life cycle the middle aged unemployed spend roughly three times as much time in job search as the youngest group of unemployed the hump shaped profile of job search time is relatively stable across demographic groups however the profile of job search time appears to be declining in non us countries we discuss how standard life cycle models with incomplete markets have difficulty in accounting for the hump shaped profile found in the us data

total work time in spain evidence from time diary data using detailed time use data from 2002 03 and 2009 10 for spain we analyse changes in the time allocation decisions of the spanish population with a focus on the time devoted to total work consistent with prior literature we document that the concept of iso work e g the time devoted to total work by gender is equal does not hold in societies with stringent gender roles such as spain women devote more time to total work than men and this difference has increased throughout the period studied by 2 hours per week the relative increase in total work for women compared to men can be explained by a relative increase in market work of 8 hours per week coupled with a relative decrease in nonmarket work of 6 hours per week which have led spanish women to devote relatively 2 fewer hours to leisure per week in 2009 10 compared to 2002 03 we propose social norms as a potential explanation of these empirical findings by uncovering how individuals allocate their time inside and outside the market ov

when it rains it pours under what circumstances does job loss lead to divorce much of the previous research that has examined the effect of job loss on the probability of divorce either rely on data from the 1970s 80s data from european countries or focus on aggregate divorce rates this study uses u s micro data from 2000 to 2012 thus including effects of the great recession to examine how displacement i e exogenous job loss affects the probability of divorce the author finds displacement significantly increases the probability of divorce but only if the husband is the spouse that is displaced and his earnings represented approximately half or less of the household s earnings prior to displacement similarly results show that the probability of divorce increases if the wife is employed and as her earnings increase while the mechanism behind these asymmetric results remains unclear these results are consistent with recent research that finds a destabilizing effect on marriages when a wife earns more than her husband

job search and unemployment insurance new evidence from time use data article i nfo this paper provides new evidence on job search intensity of the unemployed in the u s modeling job search intensity as time allocated to job search activities the major findings are 1 the average u s unemployed worker devotes about 41 min to job search on weekdays which is substantially more than their european counterparts 2 workers who expect to be recalled by their previous employer search substantially less than the average unemployed worker 3 across the 50 states and d c job search is inversely related to the generosity of unemployment benefits with an elasticity between 1 6 and 2 2 4 job search intensity for those eligible for unemployment insurance ui increases prior to benefit exhaustion and 5 time devoted to job search is fairly constant regardless of unemployment duration for those who are ineligible for ui

heterogeneity in price sensitivity and retail price discrimination the nature of heterogeneity in price sensitivity has considerable implications for research in the study of retail price formation new data collection technologies have become available that allow firms to gather detailed information on household demographics and purchase histories using these new methods it is increasingly feasible for a firm to perform demand estimation at the demographic group or even the household level with household demand estimates in hand a firm can offer individualized discounts engaging in nearperfect price discrimination the nature of heterogeneity in household price response has implications for how firms might be able to extract surplus from consumers through individualized pricing price discrimination has long held the interest of economists interested in the pricing of retail food products the types of price discrimination traditionally discussed in food retailing are secondand third degree price discrimination second degree price discrimination involves self selection on the part of consumers where sellers offer price quantity or price quality bundles designed to attract different consumer types well known examples of second degree price discrimination are quantity discounts or coupons issued in newspaper supplements magazines or mass mailings third degree price discrimination arises when retailers charge different prices to different market segments according to the demand elasticity of each segment for example retailers might charge different prices at different retail outlets or offer discounts to identifiable groups such as students or senior citizens

macroeconomic conditions and well being do social interactions matter abstractwe investigate the role played by social interactions in the transmission of the effects of macroeconomic conditions on well being using survey data for a representative sample of italian individuals we find that social interactions play a dual role on the one hand the well being of people who spend more time with their friends or go out more often is less sensitive to macroeconomic fluctuations on the other hand social interactions are negatively affected by worsening macroeconomic conditions thus playing a relevant role in the transmission of macroeconomic shocks to subjective well being more specifically the negative impact of downturns on the frequency of going out and active participation in associations significantly contributes to the adverse effects of recessions on satisfaction with life and with individual life domains

green commuting and gasoline taxes in the united states abstract this paper analyzes how gasoline tax rates are related to the time workers in the united states spend commuting by private car public transport or with other physical modes of transport our identification strategy relies on both inter state differences and time variations in gasoline taxes using the american time use surveys for the years 2003 2015 we find that higher gasoline tax rates are related to less time spent in commuting furthermore higher gasoline taxes are related to less commuting by private car and more commuting by public transport and or a physical mode of transport walking or cycling our results highlight the importance of gasoline taxes in the consumption of energy for personal transport as higher gasoline taxes are related to a greater use of green modes of transport showing that fuel taxes are important for good environmental management

economic and technical challenges of flexible operations under large scale variable renewable deployment abstract fundamental characteristics of solar and wind power have generated controversy about their economic competitiveness and appropriate techniques for assessing their value this research presents an approach to quantify the economic value of variable renewable capacity and demonstrates its dependence on renewable deployment levels regional resource endowments fleet flexibility and trade assumptions it assesses economic and technical impacts of large scale renewable penetration by linking two models representing electric sector investments and detailed operations model results for california and texas suggest that operational constraints and costs of dispatchable generators e g minimum load levels ramping limits startup costs can impact renewable integration costs but the temporal and spatial variability of solar and wind are larger determinants of their value restrictions on transmission and regional coordination in capacity planning and dispatch decrease the economic value of variable renewable energy highlighting the potential roles of market design and trade energy storage is shown to be a valuable balancing asset at higher solar and wind penetration levels but potential revenues diminish with increased storage deployment

data watch the american time use survey we discuss the new american time use survey atus an on going household survey of roughly 1 200 americans per month 1 800 per month in the first year 2003 that collects time diaries as well as demographic interview information from respondents who had recently been in the current population survey the characteristics of the data are presented as are caveats and concerns that one might have about them a number of novel uses of the atus in economic research including in the areas of macroeconomics national income accounting labor economics and others are proposed to illustrate the magnitude of this new survey s possible applications

household production and the excess sensitivity of consumption to current income empirical research on the permanent income hypothesis pih has found that consumption growth is excessively sensitive to predictable changes in income this finding is interpreted as strong evidence against the pih we propose an explanation for apparent excess sensitivity that is based on a quantitative equilibrium model of household production in which permanent income consumers respond to shifts in sectoral wages and prices by substituting work effort and consumption across home and market sectors although the pih is true this mechanism generates apparent excess sensitivity because market consumption responds to predictable income growth

political machinery did robots swing the 2016 us presidential election technological progress has created prosperity for mankind at large yet it has always created winners and losers in the labour market during the days of the british industrial revolution a sizeable share of the workforce was left worse off by almost any measure as it lost its jobs to technology the result was a series of riots against machines in similar fashion robots have recently reduced employment and wages in us labour markets building on the intuition that voters who have lost out to technology are more likely to opt for radical political change we examine if robots shaped the outcome of the 2016 us presidential election pitching technology against a host of alternative explanations including offshoring and trade exposure we document that the support for donald trump was significantly higher in local labour markets more exposed to the adoption of robots a counterfactual analysis based on our estimates shows that michigan pennsylvania and wisconsin would have swung in favour of hillary clinton if the exposure to robots had not increased in the immediate years leading up to the election leaving the democrats with a majority in the electoral college less

gluttony and sloth calories labour market activity and the rise of obesity the rise in obesity has largely been attributed to an increase in calorie consumption we show that official government household survey data indicate that levels of calorie consumption have declined in england between 1980 and 2013 while there has been an increase in calories from food eaten out at restaurants fast food soft drinks and confectionery overall there has been a decrease in total calories purchased households have shifted towards more expensive calories both by substituting away from home production towards market production and substituting towards higher quality foods we show that the decline in calories can be partially but not entirely rationalized with weight gain by a decline in the strenuousness of work and daily life jel d12 i12 i18

modeling hourly electricity dynamics for policy making in long term scenarios abstract energy policies are often related to the global effort in reducing greenhouse gas emissions through increased use of renewable energies in electricity production the impact of these policies is usually calculated by energy planning tools however the modeling methodologies most currently used are not adequate to simulate long term scenarios while considering the hourly dynamics of supply and demand this paper presents an extension of the times energy planning tool for investment decisions in electricity production that considers seasonal daily and hourly supply and demand dynamics the inclusion of these dynamics enables the model to produce more accurate results in what concerns the impact of introducing energy efficiency policies and the increased use of renewable energies the model was validated in sao miguel azores portugal for the years 2006 2009 where a comparison with real data showed that the model can simulate the supply and demand dynamics further the long term analysis shows that the inclusion of these dynamics contributes to a better assessment of the renewable energy potential suggests the postponement of investments in new generation capacity and demonstrates that using fine time resolution modeling is very valuable for the design of effective policy measures under high renewable penetration energy systems

life cycle prices and production we use scanner data and time diaries to document how households substitute time for money through shopping and home production we document substantial heterogeneity in prices paid for identical goods for the same area and time with older households shopping the most and paying the lowest prices doubling shopping frequency lowers a good s price by 7 to 10 percent we estimate the shopper s price of time and use this series to estimate an elasticity of substitution between time and goods in home production of roughly 1 8 the observed life cycle time allocation implies a consumption series that differs markedly from expenditures

habit prisoner s dilemma and americans welfare cost of working much more than europeans europeans work much less than americans some studies claim this is due to high taxes in europe which would benefit by adopting us tax rates and work time others find that taxes have little or no impact on work time i examine the hypothesis that americans would benefit by reducing work time to europe s level empirical and experimental studies show utility falls as other people s income rises due to its historical experience europe is able to internalize this and other negative externalities by restricting work time through minimum vacation time and maximum weekly work hours while the us is not resulting in a prisoner s dilemma overworking trap equilibrium a simple model and work time data are used to derive the us welfare gain from reducing work time to europe s level findings are i parameter values are consistent with experimental results on the relative impact of own and other people s income ii the welfare gain s present value is about 120 percent of annual welfare and iii even if europe s policy reduces work time excessively it does remain beneficial as long as the reduction is less than twice the optimal one

the economics of planning electricity transmission to accommodate renewables using two stage optimisation to evaluate flexibility and the cost of disregarding uncertainty abstract aggressive development of renewable electricity sources will require significant expansions in transmission infrastructure we present a stochastic two stage optimisation model that captures the multistage nature of transmission planning under uncertainty and use it to evaluate interregional grid reinforcements in great britain gb in our model a proactive transmission planner makes investment decisions in two time periods each time followed by a market response uncertainty is represented by economic technology and regulatory scenarios and first stage investments must be made before it is known which scenario will occur the model allows us to identify expected cost minimising first stage investments as well as estimate the value of information the cost of ignoring uncertainty and the value of flexibility our results show that ignoring risk in planning transmission for renewables has quantifiable economic consequences and that considering uncertainty can yield decisions that have lower expected costs than traditional deterministic planning methods in the gb case the value of information and cost of disregarding uncertainty in transmission planning were of the same order of magnitude approximately 100 m in present worth terms further the best plan under a risk neutral decision criterion can differ from the best under risk aversion finally a traditional sensitivity analysis based robustness analysis also yields different results than the stochastic model although the former s expected cost is not much higher

the elasticity of substitution between time and market goods evidence from the great recession the elasticity of substitution between time and market goods we document a change in household shopping behavior during the great recession households purchased more on sale larger sizes and generic products increased coupon usage and shopping at discount stores we estimate that the returns to these shopping activities declined during the recession and therefore this behavior implies a significant decrease in households opportunity cost of time using the estimated cost of time and time use data we estimate a high elasticity of substitution between market expenditure and time spent on non market work we find that households smooth a sizable fraction of consumption by varying their time allocation during recessions institutional subscribers to the nber working paper series and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www nber org

time use and labor productivity the returns to sleep abstract we investigate how the largest use of time sleep affects productivity time use data from the united states allow us to test a model in which sleep improves productivity consistent with t

consumption heterogeneity employment dynamics and macroeconomic co movement abstract real business cycle models rely on total factor productivity tfp shocks to explain the observed co movement among consumption investment and hours however an emerging body of evidence identifies investment shocks as important drivers of business cycles this paper shows that a neoclassical model consistent with observed heterogeneity in labor supply and consumption across employed and non employed can generate co movement in response non tfp shocks estimation reveals fluctuations in the marginal efficiency of investment that explain the bulk of business cycle variance in consumption investment and hours a corollary of the model s empirical success is the labor wedge that is not important at business cycle frequencies

sunset time and the economic effects of social jetlag evidence from us time zone borders abstract the rapid evolution into a 24 h society challenges individuals ability to conciliate work schedules and biological needs epidemiological research suggests that social and biological time are increasingly drifting apart social jetlag this study uses a spatial regression discontinuity design to estimate the economic cost of the misalignment between social and biological rhythms arising at the border of a time zone in the presence of relatively rigid social schedules e g work and school schedules exploiting the discontinuity in the timing of natural light at a time zone boundary we find that an extra hour of natural light in the evening reduces sleep duration by an average of 19 minutes and increases the likelihood of reporting insufficient sleep using data drawn from the centers for disease control and prevention and the us census we find that the discontinuity in the timing of natural light has significant effects on health outcomes typically associated with circadian rhythms disruptions e g obesity diabetes cardiovascular diseases and breast cancer and economic performance per capita income we provide a lower bound estimate of the health care costs and productivity losses associated with these effects

international business cycles financial markets and household production abstract this paper investigates the properties of an international real business cycle model with household production we show that a model with disturbances to both market and household technologies reproduces the main regularities of the data and improves existing models in matching international consumption investment and output correlations without irrealistic assumptions on the structure of international financial markets sensitivity analysis shows the robustness of the results to alternative specifications of the stochastic processes for the disturbances and to variations of unmeasured parameters within a reasonable range

retirement home production and labor supply elasticities a standard life cycle model with home production implies a tight relationship between key preference parameters and the changes in time allocated to home production and leisure at retirement we derive this relationship and use data from the atus to explore its quantitative implications the key finding is that the intertemporal elasticity of substitution for leisure and the elasticity of substitution between time and goods in home production are approximately equal in contrast to what is commonly assumed

on the economics of renewable energy sources abstract with the global expansion of renewable energy re technologies the provision of optimal re policy packages becomes an important task we review pivotal aspects regarding the economics of renewables that are relevant to the design of an optimal re policy many of which are to date unresolved we do so from three interrelated perspectives that a meaningful public policy framework for inquiry must take into account first we explore different social objectives justifying the deployment of re technologies and review model based estimates of the economic potential of re technologies i e their socially optimal deployment level second we address pivotal market failures that arise in the course of implementing the economic potential of re sources in decentralized markets third we discuss multiple policy instruments curing these market failures our framework reveals the requirements for an assessment of the relevant options for real world decision makers in the field of re policies this review makes it clear that there are remaining white areas on the knowledge map concerning consistent and socially optimal re policies

engines of liberation electricity was born at the dawn of the last century households were inundated with a flood of new consumer durables what was the impact of this consumer durable goods revolution it is argued here that the consumer goods revolution was conducive to liberating women from the home to analyse this hypothesis a beckerian model of household production is developed households must decide whether or not to adopt the new technologies and whether a married woman should work can such a model help to explain the rise in married female labour force participation that occurred in the last century yes the housewife of the future will be neither a slave to servants nor herself a drudge she will give less attention to the home because the home will need less she will be rather a domestic engineer than a domestic labourer with the greatest of all handmaidens electricity at her service this and other mechanical forces will so revolutionize the woman s world that a large portion of the aggregate of woman s energy will be conserved for use in broader more constructive fields thomas alva edison as interviewed in good housekeeping magazine lv no 4 october 1912 p 436

measuring market power in the ready to eat cereal industry the ready to eat cereal industry is characterized by high concentration high price cost margins large advertising to sales ratios and numerous introductions of new products previous researchers have concluded that the ready to eat cereal industry is a classic example of an industry with nearly collusive pricing behavior and intense nonprice competition this paper empirically examines this conclusion in particular i estimate price cost margins but more importantly i am able empirically to separate these margins into three sources i that which is due to product differentiation ii that which is due to multi product firm pricing and iii that due to potential price collusion the results suggest that given the demand for different brands of cereal the first two effects explain most of the observed price cost margins i conclude that prices in the industry are consistent with noncollusive pricing behavior despite the high price cost margins leading firms are able to maintain a portfolio of differentiated products and influence the perceived product quality it is these two factors that lead to high price cost margins

higher wages less gym time the effects of minimum wages on time use this study examines the effects of minimum wages on time use analyzing data from the american time use survey from 2003 to 2017 i investigate the role of time allocated towards exercise and other health enhancing activities as a potential mechanism underlying the link between minimum wages and health the study finds that a 1 increase in minimum wages is associated with reductions in exercising and total personal health time by 13 and 20 minutes during the week respectively this decline in health time is fully reallocated toward additional leisure time the results are largely driven by males and employed individuals

on representation of temporal variability in electricity capacity planning models abstract this paper systematically investigates how to represent intra annual temporal variability in models of optimum electricity capacity investment inappropriate aggregation of temporal resolution can introduce substantial error into model outputs and associated economic insight the mechanisms underlying the introduction of this error are shown how many representative periods are needed to fully capture the variability is then investigated for a sample dataset a scenario robust aggregation of hourly 8760 resolution is possible in the order of 10 representative hours when electricity demand is the only source of variability the inclusion of wind and solar supply variability increases the resolution of the robust aggregation to the order of 1000 a similar scale of expansion is shown for representative days and weeks these concepts can be applied to any such temporal dataset providing at the least a benchmark that any other aggregation method can aim to emulate how prior information about peak pricing hours can potentially reduce resolution further is also discussed

trading down and the business cycle abstract we document two facts first during the great recession consumers traded down in the quality of the goods and services they consumed second the production of low quality goods is less labor intensive than that of high quality goods when households traded down labor demand fell increasing the recession s severity we find that the trading down phenomenon accounts for a substantial fraction of the decline in u s employment in the recent recession we show that embedding quality choice in a business cycle model improves the model s amplification and comovement properties

time use during the great recession using data from the american time use survey between 2003 and 2010 we document that home production absorbs roughly 30 percent of foregone market work hours at business cycle frequencies leisure absorbs roughly 50 percent of foregone market work hours with sleeping and television watching accounting for most of this increase we document significant increases in time spent on shopping child care education and health job search absorbs between 2 and 6 percent of foregone market work hours we discuss the implications of our results for business cycle models with home production and non separable preferences jel codes d13 e32 j22

the cyclicality of sales regular and effective prices business cycle and policy implications author s coibion olivier gorodnichenko yuriy hong gee hee abstract we study the cyclical properties of sales regular price changes and average prices paid by consumers effective prices using data on prices and quantities sold for numerous retailers across many us metropolitan areas inflation in the effective prices paid by consumers declines significantly with higher unemployment while little change occurs in the inflation rate of prices posted by retailers this difference reflects the reallocation of household expenditures across retailers a feature of the data which we document and quantify rather than sales we propose a simple model with household store switching and assess its implications for business cycles and policymakers jel d12 e31 e32 l25 l81

aggregate impacts of a gift of time lee jungmin kawaguchi daiji hamermesh daniel s december 2011 aggregate impacts of a gift of time reports cambridgenational bureau of economic research nber working paper series 17649 33

technology and the labour market the assessment this article reviews the evidence on how technology will affect labour markets in advanced democracies over the next 10 15 years in addition to assessing evidence on the impact of technology on the aggregate number of jobs we take a wider view to consider how the digital revolution will affect the quality and composition of jobs how and where we work and whether labour is supplied as part of a larger firm or as a self employed micro entrepreneur this assessment further aims to situate the papers covered in this issue of the oxford review of policy within the broader literature

the history of technological anxiety and the future of economic growth is this time different technology is widely considered the main source of economic progress but it has also generated cultural anxiety throughout history the developed world is now suffering from another bout of such angst anxieties over technology can take on several forms and we focus on three of the most prominent concerns first there is the concern that technological progress will cause widespread substitution of machines for labor which in turn could lead to technological unemployment and a further increase in inequality in the short run even if the long run effects are beneficial second there has been anxiety over the moral implications of technological process for human welfare broadly defined while during the industrial revolution the worry was about the dehumanizing effects of work in modern times perhaps the greater fear is a world where the elimination of work itself is the source of dehumanization a third concern cuts in the opposite direction suggesting that the epoch of major technological progress is behind us understanding the history of technological anxiety provides perspective on whether this time is truly different we consider the role of these three anxieties among economists primarily focusing on the historical period from the late 18th to the early 20th century and then compare the historical and current manifestations of these three concerns

research and development and labour productivity do high tech firms exhibit labour or capital saving technical change abstractemployment and output in the advanced technology sectors have generally exhibited above average growth for more than two decades while this industry accounts for a relatively small share o

potential dietary outcomes of changing relative prices of healthy and less healthy foods the case of ready to eat breakfast cereals abstract many prevalent and costly health disorders in the u s can be attributed in part to poor diets overconsumption of calories and physical inactivity taxing less healthy foods and subsidizing healthy foods as a strategy to improve diet and health has attracted growing interest among policy makers and researchers we test this strategy by using national household purchase data to estimate a censored price and expenditure endogenous demand system for 12 food groups that are commonly consumed at breakfast low and high nutrition ready to eat breakfast cereals eggs breads hot cereals breakfast bars juice whole and reduced fat milk yogurt meats and coffee the estimated demand elasticities are applied to nationally representative food intake data to simulate under the assumption of perfectly price elastic supply the potential dietary improvement from taxing low nutrition and subsidizing high nutrition ready to eat breakfast cereals we find that the demand for both types of cereals is own price inelastic suggesting that consumers are not likely to make large shifts in consumption of cereals if the price changes thus only limited dietary improvement can be expected from taxes and subsidies furthermore when the healthfulness of breakfast foods is evaluated using a comprehensive list of nutrients and food components a price intervention strategy may result in unintended adverse impacts our simulation results suggest that the hypothetical price intervention actually increases the calorie content of foods consumed at breakfast

people and machines a look at the evolving relationship between capital and skill in manufacturing 1860 1930 using immigration shocks abstract this paper estimates the elasticity of substitution between capital and skill in manufacturing using immigration induced variation in skill mix across u s counties between 1860 and 1930

shopping externalities and self fulfilling unemployment fluctuations we propose a novel theory of self fulfilling fluctuations in the labor market a firm employing an additional worker generates positive externalities on other firms because employed workers have more income to spend and have less time to shop for low prices than unemployed workers we quantify these shopping externalities and show that they are sufficiently strong to create s complementarities in the employment decisions of different firms and to generate multiple rational expectations equilibria equilibria differ with respect to agents rational expectations about future unemployment we show that negative shocks to agents expectations lead to fluctuations in vacancies unemployment labor productivity and the stock market that closely resemble those observed in the us during the great recession

the market value of variable renewables the effect of solar wind power variability on their relative price this paper provides a comprehensive discussion of the market value of variable renewable energy vre the inherent variability of wind speeds and solar radiation affects the price that vre generators receive on the market market value during windy and sunny times the additional electricity supply reduces the prices because the drop is larger with more installed capacity the market value of vre falls with higher penetration rate this study aims to develop a better understanding on how the market value with penetration and how policies and prices affect the market value quantitative evidence is derived from a review of published studies regression analysis of market data and the calibrated model of the european electricity market emma we find the value of wind power to fall from 110 of the average power price to 50 80 as wind penetration increases from zero to 30 of total electricity consumption for solar power similarly low value levels are reached already at 15 penetration hence competitive large scale renewable deployment will be more difficult to accomplish than as many anticipate

information cost and consumer choices of healthy foods this article examines whether or not a reduction in consumer search cost for nutritional information increases the probability that heterogeneous consumers will choose healthier food products empirical results from the ready to eat breakfast cereal rtec market confirm the conceptual analysis that lowering information cost via simplified nutritional labeling increases the healthfulness of consumer choices the healthfulness attribute weighs 28 44 more heavily in consumers decision making with simpler labeling systems on average introducing front of package labeling increased the probability of a consumer choosing a healthy rtec by 3 49 and reduced the probability of choosing an unhealthy rtec by 3 81 calories sugar saturated fat and sodium consumption decrease by 0 31 2 63 6 94 and 1 97 respectively fiber intake increases by 3 24 further results show that less educated and smaller households with less frequent purchases benefit the most from a reduction in information cost overall this article shows the potentially positive role that voluntary more convenient labeling could play in improving market and public health outcomes

brand supermarket demand for breakfast cereals and retail competition the berry levinsohn and pakes 1995 market equilibrium model is extended to the supermarket chain level to examine consumer choices and retail competition for thirty seven brands of breakfast cereals in boston estimated taste parameters for product characteristics vary significantly across consumers although consumers are price sensitive with respect to their chosen cereals they exhibit strong brand and supermarket loyalty retail markups increase and marginal costs decrease with grocery market shares attesting to oligopoly power with efficiencies markups decrease with the own price elasticity of demand with corn flakes having the highest markups a detailed picture of consumer response and supermarket competition is provided

building sectoral job search indices for the united states abstract this study investigates job search activity in the united states by constructing a set of sectoral job search activity indices based on internet search volumes the indices are positively associated with countercyclical labour market measures including unemployment and layoff rates but are negatively associated with procyclical measures overall our evidence supports previous empirical findings job search intensity is countercyclical which contradicts the theoretical model s prediction

should unemployment insurance vary with the unemployment rate theory and evidence we study how the marginal welfare gain from increasing the unemployment insurance ui bene t level varies over the business cycle we do this by estimating how the moral hazard cost and the consumption smoothing bene t of ui vary with labor market conditions which we identify using variation in the interaction of ui bene t levels with the unemployment rate within u s states over time we nd that the moral hazard cost is procyclical greater when the unemployment rate is relatively low by contrast we do not nd evidence that the consumption smoothing bene t varies with the unemployment rate we use these empirical results to estimate the marginal welfare gain and we nd that it is modest on average but varies positively with the unemployment rate jel h5 j64 j65

a model of sleep leisure and work over the business cycle abstract this paper uses a single sector dynamic stochastic general equilibrium dsge model to analyze time use patterns over the business cycle using data from the american time use survey we solve and simulate a model of a utility maximizing consumer subject to a penalty function based on a biological model for sleep we find that sleep is countercyclical with the business cycle sleep increases as economic activity declines we also show that our model provides a reasonable estimate of observed sleep behavior over the period from 2003 through 2016 our results suggest that separating sleep from other non work activities is a useful and productive exercise for these types of models

labor market trends and the changing value of time abstract during the past two decades households experienced increases in their average wages and expenditures alongside with divergent trends in their wages expenditures and time allocation we develop a model with incomplete asset markets and household heterogeneity in market and home technologies and preferences to account for these labor market trends and assess their welfare consequences using micro data on expenditures and time use we identify the sources of heterogeneity across households document how these sources have changed over time and perform counterfactual analyses given the observed increase in leisure expenditures relative to leisure time and the complementarity of these inputs in leisure technology we infer a significant increase in the average productivity of time spent on leisure the increasing productivity of leisure time generates significant welfare gains for the average household and moderates negative welfare effects from the rising dispersion of expenditures and time allocation across households

baby steps the gender division of childcare during the covid 19 pandemic the nature and scale of the shocks to the demand for and the supply of home childcare during the covid 19 pandemic provide a unique opportunity to increase our understanding of the division of home labour and the determinants of specialization within the household we collected real time data on daily lives to document the impact of measures to control covid 19 on uk families with children under the age of 12 we document that these families have been doing the equivalent of a working week in childcare with mothers bearing most of the burden the additional hours of childcare done by women are less sensitive to their employment than they are for men leaving many women juggling work and a lot more childcare with likely adverse effects on their mental health and future careers however some households those in which men have not been working have taken greater steps towards an equal allocation offering the prospect of sharing the burden of childcare more equally in the future

unemployment market work and household production time diary data from four countries suggest that differences in market time between the unemployed and employed represent additional leisure not increased household production in areas where unemployment is cyclically high however reduced market work is offset by additional home production

skill accumulation in the market and at home abstract an evolving outside option is introduced into a stochastic directed search model with skill loss during non employment using multi spell data from the sipp i show that average reemployment wages are only mildly sensitive to unemployment duration while the job finding probability is highly sensitive to duration with evidence of true duration dependence in both variables though untargeted the model produces a quantitatively accurate decline in the job finding probability and starting wage improving over a model with a fixed outside option the addition of aggregate shocks leads to an nonlinear response of the unemployment and participation rates during and after recessions with more severe recessions resulting in stronger hysteresis

worker search effort as an amplification mechanism abstract it is well known that the diamond mortensen pissarides model exhibits a strong trade off between cyclical unemployment fluctuations and the size of rents to employment introducing endogenous job search effort reduces the strength of the trade off while bringing the model closer to the data ignoring worker search effort leads to a large upward bias in the elasticity of matches with respect to vacancies merging the american time use survey and the current population survey new evidence in support of procyclical search effort is presented average search effort of the unemployed is subject to cyclical composition biases

energy milk price transmission at the product brand level this article estimates the pass through rates between diesel fuel and retail milk prices at the product brand level using a random coefficient logit demand model and taking the direct and indirect impacts of energy prices this research identifies changes in pass through rates before and after the great recession in 2008 empirical results show that diesel prices significantly impacted the retail prices of milk products and are an important determinant of food price inflation pass through rates are estimated to range from 0 16 to approximately 0 60 through 2008 with an average of 0 22 for the whole period statistical tests indicate that pass through rates before june 2008 were significantly higher than after june 2008 when they dropped significantly to 0 04 to 0 17 interestingly private label brands have the lowest pass through rates implying that compared to manufacturer brands private label prices are more insulated from diesel price shocks

children time allocation and consumption insurance we study choices of households deciding on consumption and allocation of spouses time to work leisure and child care with uncertainty the allocation of goods and time over the life cycle also

the social imagination needed for an innovation led recovery in response to critical comments by bengt ake lundvall and edward steinmueller i argue that we need to understand why the economic crisis has been so long so deep and so wide even though it originated in the financial sector a recovery has not yet materialised because existing and potential technological opportunities have not been exploited an innovation based recovery will need to take advantage of these opportunities and will also require a favourable institutional environment pro active public intervention in science and technology will additionally be required combined with new social imagination

inequality in the joint distribution of consumption and time use abstract this paper examines inequality in both leisure and consumption over the past four decades using time use surveys stretching from 1975 to 2016 we estimate the distribution of leisure time conditional on hours worked and other individual level and family level characteristics we show that these characteristics especially when including work hours explain most of the long run variation in leisure we then use these estimates to predict the distribution of leisure using work hours and other characteristics in the consumer expenditure survey a survey that also provides detailed information on consumption the advantage of this approach is that it gives us measures of consumption and leisure at the family level within a single data source combining consumption and leisure allows us to characterize more accurately changes in the distribution of well being we find that leisure time is highest for families at the bottom of the consumption distribution and typically declines monotonically as consumption rises however the consumption leisure gradient is small we find noticeable differences across family types with the gradient being largest for single parent families and single individuals and smallest for families with a head age 65 or older the negative relationship between consumption and leisure appears strongest during the period around the great recession we find that including both leisure and consumption as opposed to just consumption in a measure of economic well being results in less inequality the negative association between leisure and consumption is a sufficient condition for this result however the degree to which leisure inequality offsets consumption inequality depends on the valuation of leisure

comparing the costs of intermittent and dispatchable electricity generating technologies economic evaluations of alternative electric generating technologies typically rely on comparisons between their expected life cycle production costs per unit of electricity supplied the standard life cycle cost metric utilized is the levelized cost per mwh supplied this paper demonstrates that this metric is inappropriate for comparing intermittent generating technologies like wind and solar with dispatchable generating technologies like nuclear gas combined cycle and coal levelized cost comparisons are a misleading metric for comparing intermittent and dispatchable generating technologies because they fail to take into account differences in the production profiles of intermittent and dispatchable generating technologies and the associated large variations in the market value of the electricity they supply levelized cost comparisons overvalue intermittent generating technologies compared to dispatchable base load generating technologies they also overvalue wind generating technologies compared to solar generating technologies integrating differences in production profiles the associated variations in the market value of the electricity supplied and life cycle costs associated with different generating technologies is necessary to provide meaningful comparisons between them this market based framework also has implications for the appropriate design of procurement auctions created to implement renewable energy procurement mandates the efficient structure of production tax credits for renewable energy and the evaluation of the additional costs of integrating intermittent generation into electric power networks