terrorism and the fate of dictators the authors study the influence of domestic political dissent and violence on incumbent dictators and their regimes they argue that elite with an interest in preserving the regime hold dictators accountable when there is a significant increase in terrorism to pinpoint the accountability of dictators to elite who are strongly invested in the current regime the authors make a novel theoretical distinction between reshuffling coups that change the leader but leave the regime intact and regime change coups that completely change the set of elites atop the regime using a new data set that distinguishes between these two coup types the authors provide robust evidence that terrorism is a consistent predictor of reshuffling coups whereas forms of dissent that require broader public participation and support such as protests and insurgencies are associated with regime change coup attempts this article is the first to show that incumbent dictators are held accountable for terrorist campaigns that occur on their watch

the public private wage differential in a poor urban economy the occupational structure of wages is generally more compressed in high than in low income countries the role of non market forces in determining the structure of wages is of interest for reasons of allocative efficiency as well as for distributional concerns this paper considers how wage differentials may be generated between the public and private sectors of a developing economy data from a 1971 household survey of the tanzanian urban wage labor force are used to determine the pattern of wage differences across employer groups after standardizing by worker characteristics public sector employees are found to have earned a substantial wage premium over workers employed in the private sector the non market character of these differentials is examined in light of a number of hypotheses on public sector wage determination

environmental efficiency measurement and the materials balance condition reconsidered abstract this note takes up a shortcoming of coelli et al s 2007 popular environmental efficiency measure and its extension to economic environmental trade off analysis see van meensel et al 2010 namely that they do not reward emission reductions by pollution control a new environmental efficiency measure that overcomes this issue and similar to coelli et al s efficiency measure is in line with the materials balance principle is proposed and further decomposed into technical environmental efficiency and material and nonmaterial allocative environmental efficiencies the new efficiency measure collapses into coelli et al s efficiency measure if none of the considered decision making units control pollutants a numerical example using data envelopment analysis is provided to further explore the properties of the new efficiency measure

environmental efficiency and abatement efficiency measurements of china s thermal power industry a data envelopment analysis based materials balance approach abstract appropriate measurement of environmental and emission abatement efficiency is crucial for assisting policy making in line with constructing a more sustainable society the majority of traditional approaches for environmental efficiency measures take pollutant emissions as either undesirable outputs or environmentally determined inputs which suffer a limitation of not satisfying the physical laws that regulate the operation of economic and environmental process in this study we propose a dea based approach which is combined with the materials balance principle mbp that accounts for laws of thermodynamics to jointly evaluate environmental and abatement efficiency this approach is along the line of weak g disposability based modelling but is an extension to existing models that in our approach the identification of possible adjustments on polluting mass bound in inputs and outputs and potential adjustments on abatement of pollutants are all included the overall environmental efficiency measured by this approach is decomposed into the measures of technical efficiency polluting inputs allocative efficiency and polluting and non polluting inputs allocative efficiency with the emphasizing of incorporating pollutant abatement activities accordingly new measures of abatement efficiency are proposed which help to identify the pollutant abatement potential that can be achieved from end of pipe abatement technology promotion associated with polluting input quality promotion and input resources reallocation furthermore several global malmquist productivity indices for identifying the changes on environmental and abatement efficiency are proposed this approach is applied to china s thermal power industry and some empirical results verifying the necessity of introducing the mbp are obtained

a switching regression model for wage determinants in the public and private sectors of a developing country governments in less developed countries face severe budgetary constraints given that public sector employment is a large part of modern sector employment the government wage bill h as come under increased scrutiny the central question is how do gove rnment wages compare with those in the private sector in this paper the authors develop and estimate a model to answer this question an important aspect of this model is the endogenous treatment of sector choice the estimation results full information maximum likelihood sound a strong warning against the use of ordinary least squares est imates that are based on sector specific samples data are from the i vory coast copyright 1988 by mit press

comparing frontier methods for economic environmental trade off analysis abstract this paper uses a mechanistic frontier approach as a reference to evaluate the ability of conventional parametric sfa and non parametric dea frontier approaches for analyzing economic environmental trade offs conventional frontier approaches are environmentally adjusted through incorporating the materials balance principle the analysis is worked out for the flemish pig finishing case which is both representative and didactic results show that on average sfa and dea yield adequate economic environmental trade offs both methods are good estimators for technical efficiency cost allocative and environmental allocative efficiency scores are less robust due to the well known methodological advantages and disadvantages of sfa and dea for particular firms sfa dea and the mechanistic approach may yield different economic environmental trade offs one has therefore to be careful when using conventional frontier approaches for firm specific decision support the mechanistic approach allows for optimizing performances per average present finisher which is the production unit in pig finishing conventional frontier methods do not allow for this optimization since the number of average present finishers varies along the production functions since the mechanistic production function is based on underlying growth feed uptake and mortality functions additional firm specific indicators can also be calculated at each point of the production function

school supply constraints and children s educational outcomes in rural ghana abstract studies of school attainment often fail to acknowledge the possibility that prices for all schooling levels affect the decision to attend any one schooling level in developing countries the assumption that schooling costs are constant throughout the education cycle is manifestly untrue this paper concentrates on the empirical implications of introducing schooling costs that increase with schooling level the results suggest that the cost of advanced levels of education influences decisions at the primary school level the relative magnitude of the cross price elasticities suggests that cross price effects should not be ignored when designing educational user fees

non linear production abatement pollution and materials balance reconsidered abstract in the environmental economics literature the standard approach of modeling non linear production and abatement processes is to treat waste emissions simply as another factor of production cropper and oates j econ lit 30 1992 675 740 that approach does not map the materials flow involved completely and hides moreover the exact links between production residuals generation and abatement this paper shows that production functions with emissions treated as inputs can be reconstructed as a subsystem of a comprehensive production cum abatement technology that is in line with the materials balance principle in a simple economy with full regard of the materials flow it also explores the consequences for allocative efficiency and efficiency restoring taxation of multiple and interdependent residuals generated in the transformation processes of production abatement and consumption finally the paper demonstrates that efficiency may require setting the emissions tax rate above or below conventionally defined marginal abatement cost if the residual subject to abatement is not the only residual causing pollution

optimal public sector wages i build a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with search and matching frictions to determine the optimal public sector wage policy public sector wages are crucial in achieving efficient allocation of jobs high wages induce too many unemployed to queue for public sector jobs in turn raising unemployment the optimal wage depends on the frictions in the two sectors following technology shocks public sector wages should be pro cyclical and deviations from the optimal policy significantly increase the volatility of unemployment

racial differences in the employment policy of state and local governments the case of male workers although increased political participation of minorities has been an important aspect of the civil rights movement few studies have examined the effect of race based political participation on employment discrimination a number of studies provide evidence that minorities earn significantly less than comparably skilled whites in the federal government and that less wage discrimination exists in the federal sector 3 11 15 borjas argues and provides empirical support that this results from a vote maximizing government that uses its hiring decisions to mollify an electorate with a taste for discrimination 6 7 while borjas provides a valuable framework to analyze government employment policy he overlooks the interaction between public and private sector hiring decisions and excludes state and local government employees slgs that account for four fifths of public sector employment in this paper i extend the analysis by not only incorporating state and local government but also by modeling public and private sector interactions rather than adopting a taste for discrimination to explain racial patterns in public wages and employment i develop a public choice model where racial constituencies compete for economic rents from the provision of local public goods estimates of the black white wage differential for male workers in each state are found to be consistently smaller for state and local government than the private sector i show that this finding is consistent with the hypothesis of a vote maximizing government responding to the political clout of rent seeking racial interest groups in particular this paper provides the first evidence that racial groups may raise their relative wage in the public sector by increasing their voter participation relative to other racial groups i also argue that the apparent joint effect of segregation and relative political participation on the relative wage distinguishes the hypothesis of competition for local public goods from its alternatives in addition the incorporation of a publicprivate sector interaction suggests that the private sector wage differentials are not simply passed forward to the public sector in the theoretical model i hypothesize that two racial interest groups black and white compete for government employment as a means of determining the allocation of local public goods

sheltered labor markets public sector employment and socioeconomic returns to education of arabs in israel this study expands the theoretical discussion of ethnic economies by focusing on public sector employment and the role the state plays in affecting the socioeconomic fortunes of ethnic minorities the authors argue that under certain circumstances public sector employment helps ethnic minorities attain higher socioeconomic rewards the findings of the study indicate that arab employees in israel receive higher returns to education in the ethnic labor market compared with the dominant market and in the public sector rather than the private sector the latter result also holds true when arab workers are compared to jews revealing the benefits derived from the sheltered labor market

emissions trading and abatement cost savings an estimation of china s thermal power industry this study evaluates the efficiency advantage of a market based emission permit trading policy instrument over a command and control policy instrument in the case of china s thermal power industry we estimate the unrealized gains achievable through emission permit trading with an optimization frontier analysis these unrealized gains include potential recoveries of electricity generation through eliminating spatial and temporal regulatory rigidity on emission permit trading the results of an ex post estimation during 2006 and 2010 indicate a potential gain of 8 48 increase in electricity generation if both the intra and inter period regulatory rigidities on co2 emission permits trading had been eliminated in addition if the permit trading systems for three air pollutions co2 so2 and nox had been completely integrated a positive net synergy effect of 1 43 increase in electricity generation could have been secured the unrealized gains identified in this study provide supports for establishing a nationwide emission permit trading system in china

efficiency evaluation and dynamic evolution of china s regional green economy a method based on the super pebm model and dea window analysis abstract given the current circumstances of increasingly serious resource consumption and environmental pollution the development of china s green economy will profoundly impact the nation s future economic prosperity and even global economic development based on panel data from 2008 to 2017 this paper measures the green economic efficiency gee of chinese regions and analyzes its dynamic evolution using time series based on a novel data envelopment analysis dea model using environmental dea techniques this paper introduces the super pebm ebm based on pearson correlation coefficient model which is developed from the epsilon based measure ebm model and combines super pebm with the window analysis method firstly environmental dea technology is used to analyze gee at the regional level in china secondly based on panel data the window analysis method is used to analyze the regional differences of china s regional gee finally the development trend of china s regional gee in different time windows is obtained by combining the super pebm model and window analysis the empirical analysis results using panel data for regions in china from 2008 to 2017 show that 1 the overall gee of china is slowly increasing and the regional differences are still significant and 2 the improvement of gee can help to reduce regional differences

schooling and economic well being the role of nonmarket effects standard estimates of the economic value of additional schooling based on earnings differences associated with differences in the level of schooling attained cover only a portion of the total effects of education that are valued by citizens we first identify a catalog of nonmarketed effects many of which have been recently studied by economists and then propose a procedure for estimating a willingness to pay value for these effects using empirical estimates of the magnitude of a selection of these effects found in the literature we calculate willingness to pay values using our proposed procedure these illustrative calculations suggest that standard estimates of the benefit of incremental schooling substantially understate the full value of such investments

returns to education a further international update and implications this paper updates evidence on the returns to investment in education by adding estimates for new countries and refining existing estimates to bring the total number of country cases to over 60 the new cross country evidence confirms and reinforces earlier patterns namely that returns are highest for primary education the general curricula the education of women and countries with the lowest per capita income the findings have important implications for directing future investment in education which for efficiency and equity purposes should concentrate on these priority areas

multilateral productivity comparisons when some outputs are undesirable a nonparametric approach multilateral productivity comparisons of firms producing multiple outputs some of which are undesirable are obtained by making two modifications to the standard farrell approach to efficiency measurement the restriction that production technology satisfy strong disposability of outputs is relaxed to allow for the fact that undesirable outputs may be freely disposable and the efficiency measures are modified to allow for an asymmetric treatment of desirable and undesirable outputs performance measures that satisfy these requirements are calculated as solutions to programming problems the methodology is applied to a sample of mills producing paper and pollutants

earnings determination and labour markets gran santiago chile 1978 abstract the purpose of this study is twofold first to ascertain whether or not there are statistical differences in the structure of earnings functions among workers in various sectors of economic activity second to provide a test of the human capital approach in the explanation of earning differentials among wage earners using individual characteristics of full time wage earners in santiago the results show that the structures of earnings functions are not statistically different across sectors of economic activity also the application of a human capital model shows that about 50 percent of the relative dispersion of earnings may be attributed to differences in schooling and experience

intergenerational transfers of public sector jobs a shred of evidence on nepotism the attractiveness of public sector jobs in italy may induce parents working in this sector to use their positions and the network of relationships to favor their sons daughters in gaining access to public sector jobs we verify whether children of public employees effectively enjoy an advantage estimating a model of the probability of working in the public sector controlling for individual characteristics and labor market conditions we show that if the father is a public employee the probability of his child working in the same sector is increased by a huge 44 this advantage is larger for low ability individuals stayers and southern italian residents we interpret these findings as evidence of nepotism in public employment

pollution abatement activities and traditional productivity abstract this study models the joint production of good and bad output production and calculates traditional productivity when bad output production is regulated and when it is unregulated we apply this model to data for u s coal fired electric power plants for 1985 1995 and compare rates of productivity and technical change to gain an understanding of the association between pollution abatement activities and traditional rates of productivity and technical change while traditional productivity and technical change associated with abatement activities decline we conclude they are not statistically significant

union wage differentials in the public and private sectors a simultaneous equations specification the paper attempts to integrate new approaches to estimating union wage effects with the analysis of public private sector wage differentials estimates of the union differential in both public and private sectors allowing for the endogeneity of union status are presented the hypothesis that the recently measured rents to public sector employment primarily reflect the recent increase in unionization in that sector is examined and receives considerable empirical support there was evidence of positive selection into the union sector especially for private sector workers union status appears to be strongly influenced by the expected wage gain from joining the union sector

male female supply to state government jobs and comparable worth the proportion of women in state government jobs and applicant pools is well explained by a model emphasizing supply side factors relative to men women s supply is least sensitive to wages in predominantly male jobs and most sensitive to wages in predominantly female jobs these results suggest that comparable worth policies that shift relative pay toward traditionally female jobs and away from traditionally male jobs will increase the proportion of females in male dominated female dominated and total state government jobs the implication is that supply side responses need not prevent comparable worth pay adjustments from raising total female compensation

the effects of public sector hiring and compensation policies on the egyptian labor market this article examines the combined impact of the employment guarantee for graduates and public sector compensation policies on the egyptian labor market besides contributing to an unsustainable rate of growth in the government labor force these policies have encouraged queuing for government jobs contributed to high graduate unemployment rates and reduced the employment of graduates in the private sector despite substantial wage erosion in the public sector in recent years government wages when appropriately corrected for observed heterogeneity and sample selection are on a par with or higher than private sector wages especially for graduates when combined with the more desirable nonwage aspects of government jobs these compensation levels explain the attractiveness of public sector employment to graduates government pay scales are especially advantageous to female secondary school graduates who appear to face considerable discrimination in the private sector

regime and leader instability under two forms of military rule the finding that military regimes are more fragile than other authoritarian regimes represents one of the few stylized facts in comparative politics however the existing literature contains subst

issue in pollution control interplant cost differences and economies of scale debate on interplant pollution control cost differences focuses on the question of whether a system of taxes or transferable discharge permits should require those plants with low treatment costs to control a higher share of effluents another issue under debate is whether those industries with a large minimum size may be effectively barred by pollution control requirements evidence of the inefficiency of present institutional arrangements is shown by studying production function estimations of 30 pulp and paper mills in wisconsin and michigan a more efficient reallocation of pollution control resources could be effected with more market oriented regimes 58 references 6 tables dck

transmission of risk averse behavior in small firms small sized firms are typically more entrepreneurial and engage in more innovation and risk taking behavior for that reason they are considered the engines of future economic growth one policy for stimulating such activity is to provide government contracts for small firms however such contracts as typically written result in increased risk averse behavior on the part of small firms out of a desire by government officials to shift the risk to the firms this in turn results in a reduced level of innovative and entrepreneurial activity to eliminate the disincentive to engage in innovation and entrepreneurial activity government needs to bear the risk associated with such contracts one possible solution given the natural risk aversion of elected officials is to engage in a portfolio approach to small firm contracts by which the government can diversify away some of the risk

a switching regression model of public private sector wage differentials in peru 1985 86 this article examines the combined impact of the employment guarantee for graduates and public sector compensation policies on the egyptian labor market besides contributing to an unsustainable rate of growth in the government labor force these

why are wages cyclical in the 1970 s this article investigates cyclicality in real wages between 1969 and 1982 using panel study of income dynamics data there is little evidence that movements in and out of the labor market induced aggregate wage cyclicality during these years however cyclicality in the movement of workers between heterogeneous labor market sectors affected aggregate wage cyclicality while sector location is important sector selectivity is not correlated with wages yet even within sectors cyclicality is present in real wages over this time period and is the result of cyclicality in overall wage levels as well as in the coefficients associated with particular worker characteristics

an analysis of workers choice between employment in the public and private sectors this paper estimates the extent to which workers with different personal characteristics are likely to be employed in the public versus the private sector the author develops a reduced form two wa

government wage differentials a sample selection approach this paper uses the econometrics of sample selection to estimate the net wage differential between workers in the public and private sectors of the united states the results indicate workers self select by systematically locating in the sector which offers them the higher expected wage as a consequence previous research based on the assumption of random allocation between sectors is subject to serious specification bias the present estimation indicates government workers are slightly underpaid taking into account their observed characteristics and the selection process

the fourth wave of democracy and dictatorship noncooperative transitions in the postcommunist world the transition from communism in europe and the former soviet union has only sometimes produced a transition to democracy since the crumbling of the berlin wall in 1989 and the collapse of the soviet union in 1991 most of the twenty eight new states have abandoned communism but only nine of these have entered the ranks of liberal democracies the remaining majority of new postcommunist states are various shades of dictatorships or unconsolidated transitional regimes this article seeks to explain why some states abandoned communism for democracy while others turned to authoritarian rule in endorsing actorcentric approaches that have dominated analyses of the third wave of democratization this argument nonetheless offers an alternative set of causal paths from ancien regime to new regime that can account for both democracy and dictatorship as outcomes situations of unequal distributions of power produced the quickest and most stable transitions from communist rule in countries with asymmetrical balances of power the regime to emerge depends almost entirely on the ideological orientation of the most powerful in countries where democrats enjoyed a decisive power advantage democracy emerged conversely in countries in which dictators maintained a decisive power advantage dictatorship emerged in between these two extremes were countries in which the distribution of power between the old regime and its challengers was relatively equal rather than producing stalemate compromise and parted transitions to democracy however such situations in the postcommunist world resulted in protracted confrontation between relatively balanced powers the regimes that emerged from these modes of transitions are not the most successful democracies but rather are unconsolidated unstable partial democracies

an analysis of public and private sector wages allowing for endogenous choices of both government and union status a general selection model is estimated in which workers select across four labor markets private nonunion private union public nonunion and public union evidence is found of positive selection bias in the private nonunion sector and of negative selection bias in the public union sector union wage differentials in the public and private sectors as well as public private wage differentials are then calculated two different types of wage differentials are contrasted we discuss when it is appropriate to use each type of differential

transition to entrepreneurship from the public sector predispositional and contextual effects studies of career dynamics implicitly claim that government employees are not entrepreneurial utilizing longitudinal data from the u s panel study for income dynamics we investigate the reasons for the low rate of entrepreneurship from the public sector we conjecture that it is due to labor market matching processes and the bureaucratic nature of public organizations and bureaucratization of individuals our life course analysis identifies labor market matching as a major determinant nonentrepreneurial types choose public sector employment we also uncover tenure and context effects which decrease and increase the hazard rate of entrepreneurial exit respectively whereas the former effect points toward adaptation and internal labor market sorting the latter draws attention to exits due to frustration

public private wage differentials in haiti do public servants earn a rent abstract this study uses a newly collected data set on haiti where data are very limited to assess how individuals are selected into the public vs private sectors and to estimate public private sector wage differentials the central question is whether or not public servants are earning a rent the estimation procedure is an extension of heckman s 1979 sample selection technique to the case where two selection rules generate the sample the procedure first estimates by bivariate probit analysis the probability of employment in the public or private sector and then for those in the public sector the probability of employment in the state owned enterprises soes vs public administration wage functions are then estimated for all three sectors using the inverse mills ratios from reduced form probits selectivity bias is found to exist in one sector soes correction for this bias in the wage equations lowers the wage differentials between the soe and the private sector and the soe and public administration as is clearly demonstrated by the oaxaca decomposition of these estimated mean differentials nevertheless the corrected findings still indicate that the public sector especially the soes earn a sizable rent

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

capturing the least costly way of reducing pollution a shadow price approach abstract the production analysis literature is increasingly concerned with estimating marginal abatement costs yet most studies do not emphasize the ways in which pollutants may be reduced and their costs which makes them unable to identify the least costly compliance strategy this paper utilizes the materials balance principle to relate pollution to the employment of material inputs a production model which allows input and output substitution downscaling of operations pollution control and emission permits purchases as compliance strategies is proposed and the implications of joint and non joint pollution controls for the trade off between pollutants and desirable outputs are considered marginal abatement costs reflecting the least costly way of compliance are derived by exploiting the duality between the directional distance function and the profit function

justifying the incorporation of the materials balance principle into frontier based eco efficiency models frontier based models are an alternative to traditional eco efficiency ratio indicators this paper considers two different types environmentally adjusted production efficiency models and frontier eco efficiency models and tries to find justification for incorporating the materials balance principle mbp in them similar importance is attached to the economic and environmental outcomes of a production process like economic outcomes can be derived from inputs and outputs and respective prices some cases allow for deriving environmental outcomes from the production function with the mbp after an overview of attempts to incorporate environmental issues in production efficiency models and some reflections why mbp has been neglected in environmental economics and production efficiency analysis the paper gives basic principles to incorporate the mbp in conventional production efficiency methods and shows how this adjustment leads to a more diversified diagnosis of eco efficiency finally potentialities and bottlenecks are discussed exploiting the mbp in production efficiency and eco efficiency analysis will facilitate more pro active eco efficiency research