nonparametric bounds on the returns to language skills this paper applies the theoretical literature on nonparametric bounds on treatment effects to the estimation of how limited english proficiency lep affects wages and employment opportunities for hispanic workers in the united states i analyse the identifying power of several weak assumptions on treatment response and selection and stress the interactions between lep and education occupation and immigration status i show that the combination of two weak but credible assumptions provides informative upper bounds on the returns to language skills for certain subgroups of the population adding age at arrival as a monotone instrumental variable also provides informative lower bounds copyright 2005 john wiley sons ltd

are worker managed firms more likely to fail than conventional enterprises evidence from uruguay various theories suggest that worker managed firms wmfs are prone to failure in competitive environments using a long panel of uruguayan firms the author presents new evidence on firm survival by comparing wmfs with conventional firms after excluding microenterprises and controlling for differences in the effective tax burden faced by the two types of firms the hazard of dissolution is 29 lower for wmfs than for conventional firms this result is robust to alternative estimation strategies based on semiparametric and parametric frailty duration models that take into account unobserved firm level heterogeneity and impose a range of distributional assumptions about the shape of the baseline hazard the higher survival rates of worker managed firms seem to be associated with their greater employment stability this evidence suggests that the marginal presence of wmfs in actual market economies cannot be explained by the fact that these firms are less likely to survive than conventional firms

voting in firms the role of agenda control size and voter homogeneity voting is a common feature of most firms unrestricted voting however can lead to unstable decision making the authors find that firms make trade offs among collective decision making production scale firm structure and voter characteristics that are consistent with efforts to economize on the costs of voting firm responses include agenda control restrictions to obtain a homogeneous voting population and limits on firm size the authors consider three long surviving producer cooperatives representing extreme cases of collective decision making and find that their organization is sensitive to the costs of voting and to the employment of mechanisms to constrain those costs copyright 1991 by oxford university press

racial disparities in job finding and offered wages abstractthe extent to which discrimination can explain racial wage gaps is one of the most divisive issues in the social sciences using a newly available data set this paper develops a simple empirical test that under plausible but not innocuous conditions provides a lower bound on the extent of discrimination in the labor market taken at face value our estimates imply that differential treatment accounts for at least one third of the black white wage gap we argue that the patterns in our data are most naturally rationalized through a search matching model in which employers statistically discriminate on the basis of race when hiring unemployed workers but learn about their marginal product over time

gender wage differentials and discrimination in the new south africa research into discrimination within south africa sa has focused on racial issues with gender issues being largely ignored this study aims to estimate gender wage differentials and through decomposition analysis understand the different problems faced by white black coloured and indian asian in 1995 it is found that white and asian females suffer greater gender discrimination than their black and coloured counterparts which could be a signal to future problems black and coloured females may encounter the largest gender wage differential is faced by white females whilst the lowest is encountered by coloured and black females a possible explanation for this finding is the low subsistence wages that the black and coloured population groups command relative to other population groups

african economic development in a comparative perspective conventional explanations of poor african economic performance generally fail to pay adequate attention to causal mechanisms of growth decline and stagnation many african countries experienced investment booms after independence but in contrast to east asian newly industrialising economies these were not sustained owing to failure to establish a virtuous growth circle involving complementary increases in savings and exports structural adjustment programmes dismantled stat mediated mechanisms of accumulation without putting viable alternatives in place and failed to tackle the structural constraints which impede productivity growth in agriculture a new policy approach drawing on the experience of both post colonial and adjustment periods is necessary copyright 2001 by oxford university press

welfare payments and other economic determinants of female migration this article investigates the effects of welfare payments wages and unemployment on women s probability of interstate migration in the united states it also investigates if the income attraction of locations varies with recency of labor market experience welfare gains increase the probability of interstate migration welfare effects are largest for single mothers with small children and stronger among women with no recent labor market experience the welfare effects albeit small are larger than the wage effects the wage effects are weaker among women with no recent work experience ethnic specific analyses suggest differences in migration behavior among anglos african americans and puerto ricans

incentives in principal agent relationships this article identifies some of the major issues that have been examined in the literature on incentives the article begins by discussing the frictions that lie at the heart of incentive problems next the principal s optimal response to these frictions is explored taking as given the characteristics of the agents with whom the principal interacts in a nonrepeated setting the design of individualized contracts contests and tournaments is analyzed then the principal s task of selecting the best agent is addressed and repeated agency relationships are considered

occupational segregation and selectivity bias in occupational wage equations an empirical analysis using irish data the gender wage effects of occupational segregation are assessed within the framework of occupational attachment and wage equations this paper exploits the modified index number approach suggested by brown et al 1980 and used recently by miller 1987 however neither of these papers allowed for the potential effects of selectivity bias in occupational wage equations in this study selectivity bias is corrected for using the method outlined in lee 1983 this allows for the effects of occupational selectivity buas on the gender wage gap to be assessed the findings for this sample of young lrish workers suggest that the greater part of the female wage disadvantage lies in intraoccupational wage differences furthermore selectivity bias is found to be important for a number of occupational categories

labour market discrimination are there significant differences between the various decomposition procedures economists have usually called the proportion of the average wage gap between two groups which could not be explained by individual characteristics discrimination recently several theories have suggested that labour market discrimination on the one hand lowers the wages of the minority group and on the other leads to higher pay for the majority group in a recent survey of the various methods used to decompose the overall wage differential between two groups oaxaca and ransom compared five approaches in the contexts of race and gender discrimination this paper checks whether there are significant differences between the various decomposition procedures which have appeared in the literature the tests are based on bootstrap techniques

constitutional selection of collective choice rules in a cooperative enterprise abstract constitutional choice in a cooperative enterprise as embodied in its articles of incorporation is viewed as a problem of selecting an efficient long term contract economizing on transaction costs dictates recourse to collective choice rules each of which defines a game among cooperative members multiple game solutions along with individual members ignorance as to their future socio economic position create uncertainty with respect to members payoff at the operating phase constitutional selection of collective choice rules and their assignment to collective choice problem areas seeks to minimize the sum of bargaining costs and the members risk premia

on some recent explanations of why capital hires labor conventional microeconomics contains no explanation of why capital hires labor and not the reverse in view of some surprisingly positive results in the theoretical analysis of worker run enterprise systems recent contributions to the theory of the firm have attempted to explain the dominance of capitalist production relations in efficiency terms the present paper critically reviews works in this area by alchian and demsetz 1972 williamson 1975 1980 and jensen and meckling 1979 and contends that a convincing efficiency argument for the general superiority of capital owners over workers control of enterprises still is lacking

a decomposition method on employment and wage discrimination and its application in urban china 2002 2013 abstract labor market discrimination is an important issue in developing countries where path dependent institutions have been dominant while effective institutional arrangements and policies have been hidden by local customs and culture however the existing applications of classical blinder oaxaca decomposition face criticism for their imprecise understanding of the factors affecting institutional discrimination in labor markets as well as for their lack of power in formulating well targeted anti discrimination policies following oaxaca 1973 we propose a new method to decompose the total discrimination index tdi to analyze employment and wage discrimination in the labor markets of developing countries the tdi is decomposed into the employment discrimination index edi and the wage discrimination index wdi then into the underpayment index to majorities upi and the overpayment index to minorities opi we apply this method to the institutional discrimination against rural migrants in china s urban areas using national representative data from 2002 to 2013 we have found that 1 the tdi increased quickly after china entered the wto then dropped after anti discrimination policies were implemented 2 the tdi is mainly determined by the upi while the tdi s fluctuation is mainly determined by the wdi our method provides insights into the changing composition of employment and wage discrimination and their respective labor market outcomes in developing countries as a result appropriate policy measures may be developed accordingly

racial disparities in life insurance coverage we evaluate the extent to which there are racial disparities in life insurance coverage using multiple years of the survey of income and program participation between 2001 and 2010 we find that african americans hold significantly more life insurance after controlling for other factors especially employer sponsored and whole life insurance we demonstrate that our findings diverge from prior work because we examine all households instead of focusing exclusively on married and cohabitating households the findings on life insurance coverage and composition imply that earnings shocks due to mortality are not a contributing factor to racial disparities in wealth

native immigrant wage differentials and occupational segregation in the greek labour market this article explores native immigrant wage differentials in the greek labour market data from the most recent greek household budget survey 2004 05 were employed four alternative occupational categories were considered and occupational choice was explicitly modelled controlling for occupational selectivity occupation specific wage regressions for representative samples of employed native and immigrant workers were estimated and an augmented decomposition technique was utilized to analyse inter and intra occupation wage differentials the obtained results demonstrate that roughly 48 of the average wage differential cannot be explained by differences in observed characteristics and that the larger component of this unexplained part is due to asymmetrical occupational access by native and immigrant workers

why capital suppliers usually hire workers what we know and what we need to know abstract a fundamental question for economics is why large firms in market economies usually assign control rights to capital suppliers rather than labor suppliers a diverse collection of answers can be found in the literature but unfortunately little theoretical consensus has emerged and few attempts have been made to resolve this issue through systematic empirical investigation this paper reviews a number of different hypotheses clustering around work incentives the financing of firms and collective choice we identify the strengths and weaknesses of each approach filling in theoretical gaps where necessary and conclude with some suggestions for empirical research

cross national price differences for pharmaceuticals how large and why bilateral drug price and quantity indexes based on comprehensive data for seven countries us canada france germany italy japan and the uk refute the conventional wisdom that us drug prices are much higher than elsewhere for laspeyres us weighted indexes previous drug price comparisons are biased by unrepresentative samples and unweighted indexes quasi hedonic regression shows that cross national price differences reflect differences in product characteristics and in their implicit prices which reflect the regulatory regime strict price regulation systematically lowers prices for older molecules and globally diffused molecules generic competition lowers prices in less regulated regimes which also have more price elastic demand

africa s export structure in a comparative perspective cross country econometric analysis informed by heckscher ohlin trade theory suggests that the concentration of africa s exports on unprocessed primary products is caused largely by the region s combination of low levels of education and abundant natural resources in some african countries the share of manufactures in exports could be raised by improving infrastructure and policies for most of africa however the highest priority is to raise the absolute level of exports in all sectors and particularly in sectors based on natural resources following a development path more like that of land abundant america than that of land scarce asia

the trend in the male female wage gap in the united states despite the rise in the feminist movement the enactment of equal opportunity legislation and the rapid increase in women s labor force participation a substantial sex differential in wages has persisted in the united states for at least 4 decades measured by hourly earnings of year round workers this wage gap was 31 in 1955 widened to a 35 37 range by the 1960s and early 1970s and then narrowed to 33 by 1982 this paper examines the extent to which changes in the characteristics of men and women in the labor force and other factors can account for the observed pattern the main finding is that increases in women s labor force participation were initially associated with a declining skill level of employed women relative to employed men where skill is measured by years of schooling and job tenure more recently the work experience of employed women has been increasing which helps account for the recent narrowing trend in the wage gap during the 1970s the wage gap probably woul have narrowed m

a meta analysis of the international gender wage gap abstract since the early 1970s a number of authors have calculated gender wage differentials between women and men of equal productivity this meta study provides a new quantitative review of this vast amount of empirical literature on gender wage differentials as it concerns not only differences in methodology data and time periods but also different countries we place particular emphasis on a proper consideration of the quality of the underlying study which is done by a weighting with quality indicators the results show that data restrictions i e the limitation of the analysis to new entrants never marrieds or one narrow occupation only have the biggest impact on the resulting gender wage gap moreover we are able to show what effect a misspecification of the underlying wage equation like the frequent use of potential experience has on the calculated gender wage gap over time raw wage differentials worldwide have fallen substantially however most of this decrease is due to better labor market endowments of females

wage discrimination occupational segregation and visible minorities in canada the earnings gap between each of whites asians and blacks is decomposed into the effects on earnings of productivity related characteristics wage discrimination and occupational segregation unlike previous canadian studies this paper analyses the relative economic position of both immigrant and native born visible minorities and explicitly incorporates the effect of discrimination in occupational attainment on the earnings gap the results indicate that policies aimed at increasing the ethnic representation across occupational categories would be effective only for black men anti discrimination legislation aimed at decreasing the earnings gap between visible minority and white women should have a dual focus they should aim at reducing the inter occupational wage discrimination they should provide training programs to extend the career ladders confronting ethnic minority women

an analysis of short run response of export and domestic agriculture in sub saharan africa abstract short run responses of export and domestic shares of total agricultural output to changes in stocks of domestic savings sav development assistance oda private foreign commercial capital pfx and other variables is investigated a profit function approach is used time series data for 19 sub saharan african countries are pooled into three panels using similarities in changes in economic policy regime statistical evidence suggests that for the panel of countries that were undertaking liberalized economic reforms the slope coefficients of some of the variables in the models have changed significantly between 1970 1980 and 1981 1993 for the 1981 1993 period the impacts of oda pfx and sav on export and domestic shares were different for this panel the effect of increases in agricultural labor was different across the three panels there is also evidence that productivity growth in the export agriculture sub sector is negative in all the groups it is recommended that to halt the decline in export share of agricultural output in the group of countries that have undertaken substantial improvements in economic policy environment efforts must be made to reduce the negative impact of domestic savings and agricultural labor while at the same time working to reduce the bias of development assistance against food security

wage discrimination against handicapped men and women the extent of discrimination against handicapped men and women is estimated in this paper observed wage differentials are corrected for selectivity bias the results indicate that almost one third of the wage differential for men and close to one half for women can be attributed to discrimination interestingly handicapped women are also subjected to sex discrimination

on the in accuracy of economic observations an assessment of trends in the reliability of international trade statistics abstract previous investigations which evaluated the accuracy of trade statistics were generally based on the partner country approach i e a given country s reported exports imports were compared with a partner s reported imports exports with the objective of identifying major value differences and the reasons for these discrepancies the present study employs a new methodology that focuses on the internal consistency of trade statistics four key questions are addressed 1 are the data reported under different classification schemes like sitc revision 1 and 2 consistent at points where there are perfect correspondences between product groups 2 are trade totals consistent with the sum of values reported for lower level products 3 is total trade consistent with the sum of trade reported with individual partner countries and 4 are trade values compiled by one reporting organization united nations consistent with those of an alternative imf agency by performing these consistency tests annually from the early 1960s this study is able to assess trends in the reliability of trade data the tests results should be extremely disquieting for data users differences of 100 percent or more are observed in some countries supposedly directly comparable sitc revision 1 and 2 trade totals with the average discrepancy for all developing countries exports exceeding 60 percent in the early 1980s second total trade figures are frequently found to be inconsistent with trade data for component products i e the sum of trade in say three or four digit sitc products is often considerably more or less than a country s reported trade and such discrepancies persist in some country s data for more than 20 years third there has been a clear deterioration in reporting the origin or destination of trade since 1980 as over 30 percent of developing countries imports or exports are not properly allocated fourth different international agencies sometimes report trade values for specific countries that differ by 100 percent or more such discrepancies appear especially important for the least developed countries but there is evidence that the differences for all countries widened over the last decade

panel estimates of the earnings gap in norway do female immigrants experience a double earnings penalty this study explores the possibility that being both a female and an immigrant will impose an earnings disadvantage on immigrant women in norway well known techniques are used to decompose the earnings gap between norwegian men and immigrant women into portions attributable to productivity differentials portions attributable to a gender effect and portions attributable to an ethnic effect the analysis supports the following conclusions first there is evidence of a double negative effect on female immigrant earnings second gender effect is more important than ethnic effect finally the discrimination estimates are robust to the alternative methods used in decomposing norwegian men immigrant women earnings gap

recent trends in white black earnings differentials abstract this paper tracks white black earnings differentials between 1967 and 1986 using panel data separate estimates are computed for males and females corrections for selectivity bias have been made and neumark s modified version of the oaxaca procedure is used to derive estimates of the earnings gap the finding of secular decline in the white black earnings gap is re established

immigrants minorities and labor market competition this paper investigates the extent of labor market competition among immigrants minorities and the native population an analysis of 1980 u s census data reveals that immigrants tend to be substitutes for some labor market groups and complements for others the effects of shifts in immigrant supply on the earnings of native born men are however very small on the other hand increases in the supply of immigrants do have a sizable impact on the earnings of immigrants themselves an increase of 10 percent in the supply of immigrants for example reduces the immigrant wage by about 10 percent

trade and agroindustrialization in developing countries trends and policy impacts there have been important changes in the international trade of processed and high value added food products from developing countries over the past several decades one of them has been the emergence of oilseeds and fruits and vegetables replacing traditional products such as sugar coffee and cocoa as the main exports from developing countries another trend has been the collapse of african agroindustrial exports and the increase of exports from asia the paper highlights key trends and explores possible reasons for the trends focusing on trade policies in less developed countries ldcs and developed countries dcs the paper argues that national trade policies and other economic policies appear to have been relatively supportive of agroindustrial production and exports in asia in contrast policies have had more mixed effects in latin america and the caribbean lac and seem to have been just one component in a larger array of forces inhibiting economic development in africa the performance of agroindustrial production and exports from ldcs may be now more dependent than ever on the completion of reforms in the agricultural trade policies of dcs for africa however a more supportive international environment and better macroeconomic and trade policies will not be enough to ensure a thriving agroindustrial sector within a broader process of economic development until military confrontations stop

male white black wage gaps 1979 1994 a distributional analysis 1 introductionnumerous studies show that during the 1980s the mean white black wage gap among new entrant 0 10 years of potential experience males expanded 1 juhn murphy and pierce 1991 jmp attribute the mean gap s expansion to a widening of the overall u s wage distribution caused by a host of economy wide race neutral changes that led to labor demand shifts toward better educated and better skilled workers regardless of race because african americans tend to be at lower levels of the overall skill distribution the shifts adversely impacted african american men more than white men leading to an expansion in the mean wage gap to arrive at this conclusion jmp decompose the expansion in the mean new entrant wage gap into four components the first two components measure the wage gap s increase because of a widening in observable racial differences in measured characteristics and their prices for example educational attainment and the returns to education the third component captures the contribution of growing racial discrimination and widening differences in unmeasured skills to the wage gap s expansion this term s contribution is measured by the drop in the mean percentile rank of blacks in the white residual wage distribution the fourth component identifies the role of increases in the prices of unmeasured skills and is measured by the increase in the variance of the white residual wage distribution when applied to the march annual demographic files of the current population survey jmp find that from 1979 to 1987 increases in the price of unmeasured skills explain all of the new entrant mean wage gap s expansion indicating that factors that adversely impacted less skilled workers regardless of race are the primary cause of the wage gap s expansion in related work reardon 1997 uses a national sample of white and african american men from the 1980 and 1990 decennial censuses and shows that the mean racial wage gap s expansion is caused by increased variance in the distribution of residual wages generated by labor demand shifts toward high skilled whites and away from medium skilled whites and high skilled african american men the wage gap expands because high skilled african american men earn wages that are similar to those of whites in the middle and upper third of their wage distribution the labor demand shifts led to a stretching or increased variance in the wage distribution that favored high skilled whites relative to high skilled african americans and medium skilled whites this paper makes several contributions to the literature on racial wage gaps and the technical literature on wage decompositions first i examine whether jmp s 1991 results hold up when the analysis is disaggregated by experience and educational attainment this is an important extension for two reasons bound and freeman 1992 rodgers 1997a and others have found that the racial wage gap among high school graduates and particularly among college graduates expanded significantly after the late 1970s over the same time period the variance of wages within these educational categories increased second it is important to determine the extent to which racial inequality that was generated while a cohort was a new entrant persists as it ages the paper s technical innovation is the development of a distribution or skill specific decomposition that identifies whether the stretching of the white wage distribution uniformly contributes to an expansion in racial inequality at all skill levels or quantiles of the wage distribution or whether the contribution of the wage distribution s stretching is specific to a skill level for example does the increase in the price of unmeasured skills explain a greater portion of the increase in the racial wage gap between high skilled african americans and whites than it does between medium skilled african americans and whites

human capital discrimination and the gender wage gap in bangladesh summary this paper investigates changes in the gender wage gap in bangladesh over the period 1999 2009 the gap in average wages between men and women decreased by 31 over this period this paper shows that a key driver of this change was an improvement in female educational qualifications it also demonstrates that the gender wage gap across the wage distribution narrowed much more at the lower end of the wage distribution than at the upper end it attributes this mainly to a decline in discrimination against women implications for policies aimed at more equal access to education and enforcement of equal pay legislation in bangladesh are also identified

the gap between male and female pay in the spanish tourism industry abstract this paper analyzes wage differentials between male and female workers in the spanish tourism industry using a large administratively matched employer employee data set obtained from a representative sample of companies this allows us to control for unobserved firm specific factors likely to affect the magnitude of the gender wage gap our findings indicate that male workers earn on average 6 7 higher monthly wages than their socially comparable female counterparts in particular the type of contract held the qualifications required for the job and the specific sub sector of employment are very important variables in explaining this gender wage difference we also find that only around 12 of the mean wage difference in the tourism industry cannot be explained by differences in observable characteristics which is well below the average for the rest of the industries in spain 87 our interpretation is that minimum wage legislation provides a particularly effective protection to women in the tourism industry which is characterized by a large number of low wage earners

the behavior of worker cooperatives the plywood companies of the pacific northwest using data collected by the authors on the largest and most durable of worker owned firms in u s manufacturing this paper is addressed to two questions first are the responses of cooperatives to changes in their economic environment different from those of conventional firms it appears that cooperatives are more inclined to adjust pay than employment second how profitable has membership in the cooperatives been using information on share prices the authors find membership to have been extremely profitable and in this sense the prices of co ops shares have been underpriced the riskiness of cooperative memberships is discussed copyright 1992 by american economic association

the employer size wage gap evidence for britain university of edinburgh and university of sussexfinal version received 5 may 1992 this paper presents estimates for the employer plant size wage gap for britain using anordered probit model selectivity corrected wage equations are estimated for three plant sizecategories in a comparison between plants with more than 500 workers and those with lessthan 100 a wage gap estimate of over 17 per cent is detected the wage effects of unionizationin plants with more than 500 workers is reported as insignificant in contrast to evidenceprovided by idson and feaster 1990 for the united states no evidence of non randomsorting of workers across plant size is detected

measuring the gender wage gap a methodological note we propose to estimate the blinder oaxaca decomposition by a single equation model augmented with interactions between the group membership and other predictors the relative importance of predicto

wage determination of registered nurses in proprietary and nonprofit nursing homes this study explores why registered nurses employed in nonprofit nursing homes earn higher wages than those employed in proprietary facilities previous studies have explained this finding in a property rights context where higher wages were posited to result from the weaker incentives for cost minimization accompanying nonprofit status this paper tests an alternative explanation of sectoral wage differences which is predicated on the reason for the coexistence offor profit and nonprofit firms in a given industry informational constraints concerning the quality of care are posited to cause the long term health care market to fail to provide care at the upper levels of a quality of care continuum nonprofits are viewed as a response to this form of market failure acting to fulfill customers demand for higher quality and higher cost long term care with attendant demand for higher quality nurses than in for profit homes both the observed sectoral pattern in selectivity and wage decompositions based on selectivity corrected wage regressions call into question the property right explanation yet are consistent with an asymmetric information explanation

the effects of competition and equal treatment laws on gender wage differentials discrimination if it is inefficient can be eliminated by competition in most countries it is also forbidden by law this paper evaluates the influence of economic and legal factors on the portion of male female wage differentials that is not explained by other worker characteristics and may be due to discrimination we use a new international data set of suitable gender wage gap measures constructed from the results of existing studies meta analysis of the data shows that increased competition and adoption of international conventions concerning equal treatment laws both reduce gender wage gaps while legislation that prevents women from performing strenuous or dangerous jobs tends to increase it doris weichselbaumer and rudolf winter ebmer

open economies work better did africa s protectionist policies cause its marginalization in world trade in the mid 1950s sub saharan africa accounted for 3 1 percent of global exports by 1990 this share had fallen to 1 2 percent the authors of this report find that africa s extensive loss of competitiveness played a key role in its decline in world trade if africa had merely retained its 1962 64 oecd organization for economic cooperation and development market shares its exports now would be 75 percent higher africa s problem was two pronged 1 it experienced declining market shares for its major export products which in turn were of declining relative importance in world trade and 2 it was unable to diversify its export base empirical evidence developed by the authors shows that external protection has not played a major role in this decline in fact oecd trade preferences gave africa an advantage over many exporters trade restrictions and domestic policy interventions often create a bias against tradables especially exports that prevents the achievement of otherwise attainable growth rates import barriers in africa are far higher than in developing countries with faster export growth and appear to work against potential export products if the region is to reverse its unfavorable export trends it must adopt trade and structural adjustment policies that help make it competitive and help african exporters capitalize on foreign trade opportunities

asymmetric labor market reforms effects on wage growth and conversion probability of fixed term contracts the authors investigate the impact of a change in employment protection laws in portugal that increased the maximum legal duration of fixed term contracts they find that this reform led to a reduction in the probability that a worker on a fixed term contract would be converted to a permanent contract in addition those workers who had their contracts converted experienced a significantly higher hourly wage growth at the time of conversion and faced a lower reduction in wage growth during the years in which the changed legislation was in force consequently the implementation of this law led to a 27 increase in the wage growth differential between the two contracts the findings are based on an endogenous regime switching model using rich administrative linked employer employee data

cooperative firms in hard times this paper develops a simple principal agent model to determine the occupational choice of some individuals between entering the labor market as workers and setting up a labor managed firm the start up requires external credit which is provided by a monopolistic lender we show that the occupational choice depends on both the reservation utility of workers and the loan profitability of the bank

why is labour managed firm entry so rare an analysis of uk manufacturing data abstract why are there so few labour managed entrants in market economies we address this question by analysing a panel of labour managed entrants into uk manufacturing industries using poisson and negative binomial random effects models our main finding is a significant negative relationship between entry counts and both the capital labour ratio and the variance of profits this is consistent with long standing theoretical arguments that labour managed firms face problems in raising capital and spreading risk

on economics a review of why nations fail by d acemoglu and j robinson and pillars of prosperity by t besley and t persson the purpose of this essay is to review the books why nations fail by daron acemoglu and james robinson and pillars of prosperity by timothy besley and torsten persson the essay briefly discusses the main contributions of the books and the role of politics for economic performance the review then discusses these contributions in the light of recent research on organizational economics particularly the modern theory of the firm jel d23 d72 o10 o47 o57

on the accuracy of economic observations do sub saharan trade statistics mean anything matching exporters freight on board fob trade statistics with the corresponding importers cost inventory and freight cif data this paper studies the quality of official information on trade between 36 african countries the author found the disparities in data so great as to make the official trade statistics almost useless for most empirical and policy studies he concluded that a statistics on matching exports and imports vary so much that the data cannot be used to assess the level of trade between african countries b the data are probably equally useless for assessing the direction of trade since the countries that exporters report as the destination of trade often fail to report corresponding imports c the data are inadequate for determining the composition of trade because countries report on different levels of detail and d large persistent apparent differences in trends in intra african trade may simply reflect different degrees of accuracy in country trade data finally the fact that reported fob exports often exceed the corresponding reported imports suggests either that smuggling is widespread or that importers are intentionally underinvoicing because of high african tariffs or quotas

a distributional analysis of the gender wage gap in bangladesh this article empirically investigates the gender wage gap in bangladesh during the period 2005 2009 applying unconditional quantile regression models the article demonstrates that women are paid less than men throughout the wage distribution and the gap is higher at the lower end of the distribution discrimination against women is the primary determinant of the wage gap the article also demonstrates that the observed gender wage gap is likely to be underestimated if we ignore selection in full time employment a number of policy implications are discussed

labor market discrimination against men with disabilities in the year of the ada the americans with disabilities act ada provides civil rights protections to persons with disabilities but the debate that preceded passage of the act was not based on empirical estimates that could be used to measure its performance this article estimates the extent of wage discrimination against men with disabilities in 1990 providing a reference that can be used to evaluate the impact of the ada the results show large productivity standardized wage differentials between disabled and nondisabled men that are weakly correlated with the strength of prejudice against different impairments physical limitations explain part but not all of the wage differentials the results also show that low employment rates are a more serious problem than wage discrimination for workers with disabilities provide civil rights protections to persons with disabilities the act s supporters promised that it would increase the employment and wages of persons with disabilities and reduce their dependency on public programs the promises were not based on empirical estimates of discrimination and there is no empirical base against which to compare the promises to the performance of the ada this article estimates the extent of wage discrimination against men with disabilities in 1990 providing a reference that can be used to evaluate the impact of the act the ada does not grant a right to employment to all persons with disabilities it requires that persons with disabilities be able to perform the jobs they seek subject to reasonable accommodations by employers this article therefore considers men who are able to work even though their health limits the amount or kind of work they can perform the ada s provisions assume that low wages and low employment rates for persons with disabilities are the result of discrimination caused by prejudice prejudice against persons with disabilities is well documented but so are the limiting effects of physical impairments on workplace productivity hahn 1987 margolis and shapiro 1987 clogston 1990 the core of the debate concerning the value of the ada is whether the poor labor market outcomes of persons with disabilities are the result of discrimination or the limiting effects of health con

the moral hazard of budget breaking it has recently been suggested in the agency literature that moral hazard in teams can be dealt with by introducing a third party who breaks the budget balancing constraint and that this facilitates the design of contracts that can sustain the pareto optimum as a perfect nash equilibrium this note offers an explanation for why the use of budget breaking schemes is not so widespread as that of active monitoring despite the fact that such schemes would save the resources expended on supervision the note demonstrates that allowing the budget to be broken introduces the potential for moral hazard on the part of the third party which could render the proposed equilibrium incredible

gender differences in observed and offered wages in canada 1980 according to the 1981 census of canada the female rate of pay is 30 percent less than the male rate the average female wage offer however is only around one half of that received by males other things being equal slightly more than one half of the difference in observed wages can be explained by diffe rences in wage related characteristics between males and females two fifths of the disparity between wage offers can be explained by the same set of factors analysis of the distribution of wage offers indicates greater wage inequality in the canadian labor market than suggested by study of observed wages

the effectiveness of private versus public schools the case of indonesia abstract in most developing countries education is largely publicly provided however the scarcity of public funds and recent evidence of public school inefficiency calls for an examination of the dominant role of the state in this paper we use data from indonesia to examine the effectiveness of public versus private schools we use labor market earnings as our measure of effectiveness controlling for observable personal characteristics and school selection we find that graduates of private secondary schools perform better in the labor market this is contrary to the widely held belief in indonesia that public secondary schools are superior our findings coupled with the existing literature on private school cognitive and cost advantages suggest the need for greater private participation in the education sector

the endogeneity of union status an empirical test an unsettled issue in the literature relating to the relative wage effect of unions is the appropriate treatment of union status in a wage determination model in the context of a three equation model determining union membership and union and nonunion sector wage rates this paper presents an instrumental variables iv procedure for estimating the parameters of the wage equations and a test of the exogeneity of union status using the hausman specification test an advantage of our iv procedure in comparison to the widely used inverse mill s ratio procedure is that our procedure is a distribution free estimator whereas the inverse mill s ratio estimator hinges in the assumption that the error term of the choice equation is normally distributed using data for a sample of middle aged white workers we estimate the parameters of the union and nonunion wage equations with both procedures on the key question of the endogeneity of union status the hausman test decisively rejects the null hypothesis of exo

labor market discrimination against hispanic and black men h ispanic american men have lower average wage rates than white non hispanics in 1975 the average white non hispanic male wage earner in the united states earned 5 97 an hour mexican men earned 4 31 72 as much as white non hispanics puerto rican men earned 4 52 76 as much and cuban men earned 5 33 89 as much as white non hispanics by way of comparison black men s average wages in 1975 were 4 65 78 of the white male wage several possible reasons for the hispanics lower wages come to mind among them are age and education geographic location immigration language difficulties and discrimination for example as shown in table 1 mexicans and puerto ricans are younger on average than the white non hispanic population and earnings tend to rise with age hispanics have lower average levels of education than white non hispanics and wages are positively associated with education many mexican americans live in the southwest where prices are relatively low moreover hispanics are more likely to be recent immigrants and to lack fluency in english than white non hispanics and so to be at a disadvantage in the labor market in addition there is a widespread belief that hispanics suffer from employment discrimination and cannot obtain the wages that their human capital would command if they were non hispanic whites how much of the wage differentials described above are due to each of these factors and to other inter group differences in wage related characteristics in particular how much impact does labor market discrimination have on the average hispanic man s wage and how does this compare with discrimination against blacks this paper provides answers to these questions a few other efforts have been made to analyze the relative earnings of hispanic and white nonhispanic men using 1960 and 1970 census data fogel 1966 poston and alvirez 1973 poston alvirez and tienda 1976 long 1977 and gwartney and long 1978 we use more recent data from the 1976 survey of income and education this data set enables us to measure wage rates more accurately and to specify the wage function more completely than does the census unlike previous analysts in estimating the wage function we take account of possible selectivity bias due to the distinction between average wage offers and average observed wages thus we hope to obtain a more accurate and up to date measure of labor market discrimination against hispanic men section ii explains the method used to separate the minority white non hispanic wage differential into the portions due to differences in average characteristics and the portion due to differences in unobserved factors and discrimination taking into account the possibility of selectivity bias in the observed wage sample section iii describes the data used in the study and the specification of the wage equation the breakdown of the observed wage differentials into components due to differences in participation in the wage and salary sector local price levels average characteristics and discrimination are presented in section iv section v summarizes our findings and discusses their implications for efforts to improve the economic situation of hispanics in the united states

the effect of unions on the employment of blacks hispanics and women to investigate whether unions have helped or hindered the employment prospects of minorities and women the author analyzes data on 1 273 california manufacturing plants for the period 1974 80 the

entrepreneurial women and men two different species the ability of the self employed to create additional job opportunities is a fundamental concern given the huge increases in public resources targeted at new venture creation in the u k and other countries since 1979 this study initially concentrates on identifying differences in the personal and demographic characteristics of women and men in four potential labour market states namely unemployment waged employment single self employment and job creating self employment it then goes on to consider labour market transitions over a four year period between 1991 and 1995 the key findings are firstly that women entrepreneurs are better educated than their male counterparts and secondly that flows into self employment were considerably higher for men than women furthermore proportionately three times as many male self employed in 1991 had gone on to become job creating self employed by 1995

the definition of part time employment a switching regression model with unknown sample selection rejecting the standard less than thirty five hours per week categorization of part time workers this paper offers an empirically justified definition of the part time employed the definition is based on the distinction through wage payments that employers make between a high hours full time and a low hours part time group of workers a switching regression model of wage equations with deterministic but unknown sample selection is estimated resulting in a significant split between high hours and low hours workers that is higher than the standard definition wage differentials are calculated and decomposed and estimates from the structural choice model are presented copyright 1991 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

why capital hires labor a bargaining perspective organizational forms often serve as vehicles for the appropriation of quasi rent capitalist firms typically emerge when production requires noncontractible investments in specific physical assets because worker control would divert quasi rents away from ass et owners ex post conversely labor managed firms tend to emerge in niches requiring specialized human capital but general purpose physi cal assets a key result is that capitalist firms can persist in competitive markets even when labor managed firms would yield a larg er total surplus copyright 1993 by american economic association

the ontology of economic power in capitalism mainstream economics and marx mainstream economics conceives power to be incompatible with perfect competition this conception i argue derives from its deductivist method and the empirical realist ontology that it presupposes following marx i show that capitalism constantly reproduces asymmetrical constraints on classes of individuals independent of the market form my ontological argument is rooted in the philosophy of critical realism my conclusion is that the dichotomy power competition is ontologically untenable if capitalist relations necessarily involve power it is not simply because neoclassical competition does not exist in reality as radical mainstream economists suggest but rather because capitalism altogether is a system of power

gender wage differences in malaysia parametric and semiparametric estimation this paper is an empirical study on the labor force in peninsular malaysia parametric and semiparametric estimated wage equations which correct for sample selection bias are used to assess the returns to education and extent of gender discrimination to estimate in the semiparametric case the wage equation intercept which is needed for the oaxaca wage decomposition consistently we apply the newly developed andrews schafgans andrews d w k schafgans m m a 1998 semiparametric estimation of the intercept of a sample selection model review of economic studies 65 497 518 estimator the results suggest that discrimination favoring men in malaysia is still quite prevalent while for malays the sons of the soil the strong level of discrimination favoring malay men is negated by the semiparametric estimation results

the economics of immigration this literature review concerns the impact of immigration on the economy of the host country focusing on the experience of the united states the emphasis is on the period from the 1970s to the 1990s the author shows that research earlier in this period generally concluded that the economic effects of immigration were positive but that more recent research on later migrations have generally concluded that immigration may be having an adverse effect on the earnings of native unskilled workers and be placing an increased burden on welfare programs the importance of such economic analysis for the formulation of appropriate migration policies is stressed

equality under threat by the talented evidence from worker managed firms does workplace democracy engender greater pay equality are high ability individuals more likely to quit egalitarian organisational regimes the article revisits this long standing issue by analysing the interplay between compensation structure and quit behaviour in the distinct yet underexplored institutional setting of worker managed firms the analysis is based on novel administrative data sources which allow constructing a simple ordinal measure of the workers ability type the article s key findings are that worker managed firms have a more compressed compensation structure than conventional firms and high ability members are more likely than other members to exit

job search and immigrant assimilation an earnings frontier approach this study examines labor market assimilation by measuring the information utilized by immigrants during job search assimilation is assumed to occur whenever such information increases with length of residence in the united states and repeated job searches the authors assert that information utilized during job search reduces differentials between actual and potential maximum attainable earnings coauthors are henry w herzog jr richard a hofler and alan m schlottmann copyright 1992 by mit press

firm size and industry structure under human capital intensity insights from the evolution of the global advertising industry although existing literature assumes that the human capital intensity of professional services leads to small and flimsy firms several professional services feature large long lived firms to develop insights about firm size and industry structure in human capital intensive industries i analyze the structure and evolution of the advertising industry drawing on a range of quantitative and qualitative evidence i develop two hypotheses regarding the industry s structure and consolidation 1 size differentiation in which firm size and industry structure are connected to the size distribution of clients projects and 2 financial intermediation in which the industry s consolidation is ascribed to organizational innovations that mitigate transaction costs between external investors and ad agency owners i then discuss the applicability of these two hypotheses to other professional services the analysis suggests several new insights about the value of capital the nature of demand and the nature of assets in human capital intensive industries

incorporating the causes of occupational differences in studies of racial wage differentials this study provides a basic framework for incorporating the causes of occupational differences into analyses of racial wage differentials separating the influences of personal characteristics occupational choice and hiring discrimination on occupational attainment provides measures of the contributions of each to the racial pay gap the paper also considers the potential for bias in the wage equation estimates arising from self selection into occupations there are two generalfindings first correcting for self selection increases the importance of occupational distribution in explaining racial wage differentials second a proper accounting of the causes of these occupational differences yields discrimination measures that are higher than those that arise when occupational dummy variables are included in the wage equations and all the difference in occupational distribution is treated as nondiscriminatory

racial wage gaps and differences in human capital this paper uses the cotton neumark decomposition methodology and 1990 cps data to investigate the relative importance of labour market structure and human capital in explaining the white male asian white male black white male hispanic wage gaps we find that labour market structure is more important than human capital in explaining the white minority wage gaps moreover most of the labour market structural effects are due to differential returns to white structural characteristics our result is robust to the specification of human capital our results contradict the results of research that indicate that the white minority wage gaps can be explained solely by differences in the endowment of human capital our results have implications for narrowing the wage gaps between whites and racial minorities

the productivity effects of employee stock ownership plans and bonuses evidence from japanese panel data the authors report the first results for japanese firms on the effects of employee stock ownership plans esops and bonuses by estimating production functions using new panel data they find that the introduction of an esop will lead to a 4 5 percent increase in productivity this productivity payoff takes three to four years there is a modest productivity gain from the bonus system the authors also find evidence that the productivity effect of bonuses is enhanced by the existence of esops suggesting that esops may create a climate conducive to profit sharing by enhancing long term commitment and peer monitoring copyright 1995 by american economic association

the effects of profit sharing on employment wages stock returns and productivity evidence from uk micro data this paper provides evidence based on u k firm level data that 1 the authors cannot reject the view that profit sharing firms view the total level of remuneration as the marginal cost of labor which is contrary to much of weitzman s analysis 2 there is some support for the popular view that profit sharing raises total remuneration and can therefore be inflationary and 3 the introduction of profit sharing does lead to higher productivity but this combined with the employment reducing consequences of 2 leads the authors to conclude that the net employment effect is small and uncertain copyright 1990 by royal economic society

gender wage discrimination in the thai labor market in thai this paper investigates the presence of gender wage differentials in the thai labor market a two step approach heckman 1979 was applied in estimating wage equations to avoid sample selection bias the wage differential decomposition methods oaxaca 1973 cotton 1988 oaxaca and ransom 1994 were used the data used were obtained from the labor force survey july september 2008 conducted by the national statistical office of thailand the findings indicate that female workers received lower wages than male workers because of their gender not because they are less productive on the contrary the female workers were shown to be more productive than the men the analysis indicates they would have earned higher wages than men this is especially true in the age groups 15 24 and 25 54 years old although the wage gap was partly explained by a lower productivity of workers 55 60 years old wage discrimination played a substantial role wage discrimination was worse in the younger than the older worker groups

does drug use lower wages this study using microdata from the 1980 and 1984 waves of the national longitudinal survey of youth examines the effects of drug use on wages and employment contrary to most previous researcher