sons daughters and parental behaviour the prevalence of son preference and its implications for family behaviour in developing countries have received a great deal of scholarly attention but child gender bias is believed to be empirically unimportant in wealthy non traditional societies studies by sociologists and psychologists during the past 30 years however have documented consistent discrepancies between the behaviour of parents of sons and parents of daughters boys tend to increase marital stability and marital satisfaction relative to girls and fathers spend more time with and are more involved with sons than daughters in recent years economists have begun to contribute to the child gender literature re examining the effects of sons and daughters on family structure and parental involvement with larger samples and greater concern for possible sources of selection bias other economic outcomes such as market work and earnings have also been studied and some investigators have exploited the randomness of child gender as a source of exogenous variation in parental behaviour in general recent results suggest that child gender does affect family stability and the time allocation of parents but it is not clear whether these responses reflect parental preferences for boys rather than girls or differences in the constraints parents face copyright 2005 oxford university press

implications of agricultural trade liberalization for the developing countries abstract the developing countries as a group could expect to experience only small welfare gains if they chose not to actively participate in agricultural trade liberalization and relied solely on the benefits of partial liberalization in the oecd countries participation along the lines of the dunkel package with the developing countries reducing positive assistance by less than the developed countries would yield gains of the order of us 20 billion more comprehensive participation in trade liberalization involving reductions of both positive and negative protection would almost triple these welfare gains while some developing countries do not gain from trade liberalization even with full participation the number of such countries and the magnitude of their losses are greatly reduced

when does it take a nixon to go to china substantial policy changes like market oriented reforms by populist parties and steps towards peace by hawks are sometimes implemented by unlikely parties to account for such episodes this paper develops a framework in which incumbent politicians have better information about the state of the world than voters the incumbent is unable to credibly transmit all this information since voters are also imperfectly informed about his ideology the paper identifies conditions under which an incumbent party s electoral prospects increase the more atypical the policy it proposes popular support for a policy or its credibility depends on the policymaker policy pair copyright 1998 by american economic association

the effect of child gender on parents labor supply an examination of natives immigrants and their children previous research has shown that child gender has significant effects on household behavior in developing countries more recently research on parents in developed countries has shown that child gender affects many aspects of parents behavior including parents labor supply shelly lundberg and elaina rose 2002 lundberg 2005 marital stability gordon b dahl and enrico moretti 2004 lundberg and rose 2003 and time spent with children lundberg sabrina wulff pabilonia and wardbatts 2006 one hypothesis as to why parents behave differently depending on child gender is that there is a gender preference i e fathers prefer sons this appears to be a reasonable explanation for the difference in parental behavior by child gender in some developing countries where the eldest male son and his wife traditionally provide old age security for his parents it is less clear why preference for a son would be a significant explanation for the difference in parental behavior by child gender in an industrialized country such as the united states where social security and private pensions are used as support in old age and there is greater gender equality in the workplace using the march current population survey cps supplement we examine us parents to determine whether having a son rather than a daughter has a significant effect on parents labor supply and whether the cultural preferences of immigrants play a role in generating the effects of child gender on us parents labor supply if preference for a son is the only explanation then we would expect to find that immigrant status increases the effect of having a son on parents the effect of child gender on parents labor supply an examination of natives immigrants and their children

the effects of sons and daughters on men s labor supply and wages in this paper we estimate the effects of children and the differential effects of sons and daughters on men s labor supply and hourly wage rates the responses to fatherhood of two cohorts of men from the psid sample are examined separately and we use fixed effects estimation to control for unobserved heterogeneity we find that fatherhood significantly increases the hourly wage rates and annual hours of work for men from both cohorts most notably men s labor supply and wage rates increase more in response to the births of sons than to the births of daughters

bargaining and distribution in marriage the standard economic model of the family is a common preference model that assumes that a family maximizes a single utility function and implies that family behavior is independent of which individuals receive income or control resources in recent years this model has been challenged by game theoretic models of marriage that do not impose pooling and are therefore consistent with empirical evidence that income controlled by husbands and wives does have different effects on family behavior in this paper the authors review a number of simple bargaining models and relevant empirical evidence and discuss their implications for distribution within marriage

money for nothing universal child care and maternal employment abstract the strong correlation between child care and maternal employment rates has led previous research to conclude that affordable and readily available child care is a driving force both of cross country differences in maternal employment and of its rapid growth over the last decades we analyze a staged expansion of subsidized child care in norway our precise and robust difference in differences estimates reveal that there is little if any causal effect of subsidized child care on maternal employment despite a strong correlation instead of increasing mothers labor supply the new subsidized child care mostly crowds out informal child care arrangements suggesting a significant net cost of the child care subsidies

should economists be kicked upstairs academic folklore has it that faculty of the same discipline seldom meet together even for merriment and diversion but that the conversation turns to a conspiracy inevitably being wrought upon them by their university s administration 1 economists are not immune from such suspicions about the competence of academic administrators if economists were running academe they tend to believe a good dose of competition incentives marginal analysis and a realistic appreciation for opportunity costs would surely boost efficiency some economists do get to reallocate inputs on the basis of marginal revenue products and some have actually met a payroll a handful have worked their way into executive offices of fortune 500 firms others manage smaller consulting businesses the largest concentration of economists in complex leadership and management positions however is in academe itself these economists are the subject of this article the belief of colleagues in the humanities and natural sciences that economists would make better administrators than incumbents seems widespread the only exception to this faith in economists occurs it seems at institutions where an incumbent is already an economist the esteem in which economists are held as prospective university administrators by noneconomists however seems frequently based on false premises consider this quotation from a conversation in the faculty lunchroom economists know all about money and balancing and cutting a budget they can read a balance sheet and an income statement and know how to reconcile a checkbook these proponents of economists as good administrators have apparently never conducted empirical research to check for example the accuracy of their premises with a few economists spouses who have struggled to untangle a checkbook bordering on chaos or who have tried in vain to convince their economist partners that personal expenditures are also subject to a budget constraint seldom do the champions of economists as academic administrators argue that an understanding of economics provides an edge in recognizing trade offs tracing indirect effects of policy changes being alert to alternatives focusing on incremental benefits and costs ignoring past mis

child care choices and children s cognitive achievement the case of single mothers we evaluate the effect of child care versus maternal time inputs on child cognitive development using single mothers from the nlsy79 to deal with nonrandom selection of children into child care we exploit the exogenous variation in welfare policy rules facing single mothers in particular the 1996 welfare reform and earlier state level policy changes generated substantial increases in their work child care use we construct a comprehensive set of welfare policy variables and use them as instruments to estimate child cognitive ability production functions in our baseline specification we estimate that a year of child care reduces child test scores by 2 1

international trade and agricultural development in developing countries significance of the uruguay round of gatt negotiations abstract liberalization of world trade in agricultural products ranks high on the agenda of the uruguay round after a period of more than six years however the negotiations have not been concluded nevertheless an outcome seems to be in sight the agreement will most likely not result in a move to freer trade it seems that domestic policies will become even more regulative than in the past in an attempt to cut exportable surpluses and to ease trade tensions among the main exporting nations this paper explores possible impacts of the gatt round on agricultural development in developing countries agricultural development is more than only growth in agricultural production or productivity however it is argued in the paper that other variables which also indicate agricultural development are often closely correlated with growth in production and productivity trade in agricultural products is not always an engine for agricultural development if internal divergences are not accounted for by appropriate domestic policies trade may be even harmful to agricultural development hence empirical research based on cross country analysis does not provide a clear answer about the role of trade for development past policies in industrialized countries have most likely had a negative effect on developing countries as a group however the effects differ widely across countries liberalization policies in industrialized countries would not just reverse these negative effects for developing countries price reduction in industrialized countries may not result in the often cited production decline in the short term present x inefficiency in agriculture will be reduced by liberalization leading to an outward shift of the supply curve hence liberalization may not lead to higher world market prices for temperate zone products in the short and medium term apart from this empirical models differ widely in the price effects they predict the expected outcome of the uruguay round increased regulation of domestic policies is likely both more negative for developing countries than past protectionist policies and worse than an overall liberalization world market prices will increase uncertainty and instability can be expected to grow and food aid may become less available there will be a need to react to these challenges with measures on the international and national level initiatives to deal with food crises in developing countries and to stimulate liberalization in developing countries should be considered finally developing countries should be made aware that their own domestic policies have a much greater economic impact than policies in other countries even if the latter are as protectionist as current agricultural policies in the industrialized world

female labor supply why is the united states falling behind abstract in 1990 the us had the sixth highest female labor participation rate among 22 oecd countries by 2010 its rank had fallen to seventeenth we find that the expansion of family friendly p

easing the constraints of motherhood the effects of all day schools on mothers labor supply low rates of female labor force participation lfp have been linked to the absence of childcare policies this article examines the degree to which extending the school day by 3 5 hours in elementary schools a large implicit childcare subsidy affects lfp the number of weekly hours worked and the monthly earnings of females with elementary school age children to do so we exploit within individual variation in access to full time schools and a rotating panel of households that contains 12 years of individual level data on labor outcomes and sociodemographic characteristics results from long difference models show that extending the school day increases mothers labor supply increasing lfp by 5 5 percentage points and the number of weekly hours worked by 1 8 moreover these increases are accompanied by a raise in monthly earnings jel i25 j13 j22

does raiding explain the negative returns to faculty seniority i introduction economists have studied various aspects of faculty mobility research shows that turnover is greater among nonunion faculty rees 1994 female faculty average slightly more employers than male faculty barbezat and hughes 2001 ginther and kahn 2004 1 the responsiveness of turnover to relative pay diminishes with rank ehrenberg kasper and rees 1991 and research productivity enhances prospects for upward mobility ault rutman and stevenson 1979 1982 coupe smeets and warzynski 2005 still questions remain unanswered where do faculty go when they leave a university how does faculty turnover vary with time at a university what percentage of faculty move upward and what percentage move downward because of tenure denials or the prospect of being turned down for tenure the present article contributes to our understanding of these issues but its primary objective was to use data on faculty mobility to provide insights on another issue returns to academic seniority the negative returns to seniority that many studies find are commonly attributed to one of two factors 2 the first view is that negative returns reflect monopsony power on the part of universities faculty with high mobility costs acquire high seniority and because they are unlikely to move they are paid less than equally productive faculty that employers view as more likely to leave a competing explanation is that highly productive faculty are raided according to this story returns to seniority are biased negatively because faculty with high seniority tend to have low unmeasured productivity the best faculty are bid away moving on to better jobs those who remain are the faculty without outside offers and the negative returns estimated for senior faculty actually reflect a penalty for low unmeasured productivity rather than a true penalty for seniority the raiding story has several implications first estimated returns to seniority should become less negative the more fully the productivity is measured second estimated returns should be less negative once we control for faculty who are bid away finally and of particular importance estimated returns to seniority should not be negative for faculty who are bid away the faculty for whom unmeasured productivity is presumably high with the right data set these hypotheses can be tested rejection of the raiding hypothesis would provide tacit evidence of monoposony in academic markets 3 this article contributes to the literature in several ways it is the first research to directly test the raiding hypothesis it provides a detailed look at faculty mobility in one segment of the academic labor market it extends and improves bratsberg ragan and warren 2003 in the following ways it expands the sample to cover three decades of faculty pay records it includes additional controls for productivity number and types of books recent and prospective articles and so forth resulting in the most complete specification of research productivity to date and it allows for heterogeneity in the seniority penalty via phd pedigree and direction of move finally it tests for the possibility that the academic job market does a better job of matching faculty and universities in recent years as might be expected because of the information revolution the sample consists of five public phd granting universities in the midwest we track all tenure track economics faculty employed in these universities over a 30 yr period we measure their productivity their pay and their mobility as such the study provides a rich and detailed investigation of one subset of economics programs it is possible that mobility may be greater in urban areas where faculty can more readily obtain alternative employment without relocating and prior research indicates that pay structures depend on the university s stature and its relative emphasis on research and teaching

distributional consequences of the russian price liberalization the russian price liberalization was implemented in january 1992 amid great controversy and debates have continued with undiminished intensity despite the controversy the russian government had little choice but to go ahead the attempt to retain fixed prices in an inflationary environment had brought the food economy nearly to a halt in autumn 1991 marketing fell sharply inventories expanded and barter increased this created severe problems for an economy as dependent on internal trade in food as was the case in the ussr there was a high likelihood of full scale collapse both of marketing and production in spring and summer 1992 had prices not been liberalized ideally price liberalization would have been implemented in an environment with economic infrastructure conducive to competition for example private ownership clear channels for the flow of information on markets and well developed transportation for new interregional flows but none of this was in place in january 1992 because necessary measures were not taken immediately after the august coup nor had they been taken by prior governments the severity of pending collapse in the food sector however meant that the liberalization could not be postponed foremost among many areas of concern regarding food price liberalization was the impact on the welfare and nutrition of the poor this article focuses on the short term distributional impact of liberalization

the response of employees to severance incentives the university of california s faculty 1991 94 in response to huge budgetary shortfalls in the early 1990s the university of california offered its older and longer service employees financial inducements to leave this paper analyzes the responses of uc s faculty to three waves of buyout incentives it is estimated that an individual presented with 10 percent higher severance benefits has a 7 8 percent higher probability of quitting however quit probabilities are very difficult to forecast with accuracy this casts doubt on arguments that maintain that buyouts are superior to employer initiated layoffs as a mechanism to effect large employment changes

optimal financial aid policies for a selective university our paper provides a model of optimal financial aid policies for a selective university the model implies that the financial aid package to be offered to each category of admitted applicants depends on the elasticity of the fraction who accept offers of admission with respect to the financial aid package offered them the propensity of the category to enroll the elasticity of the category s average quality with respect to the number admitted and the relative weight the university assigns them in the utility function while the latter must be determined subjectively the former parameters are subject to empirical estimation we conclude with a study of one institution s data and illustrate how they may be estimated these estimates are then applied to illustrate what the optimal financial aid policy would be for the university

challenges of trade and agricultural development for east central europe and states of the former ussr abstract the agricultural transition in central and eastern europe and the former ussr reflects a fundamental change in development strategy and will have a profound impact on agricultural trade the greatest impact will be indirect through agriculture s contribution to general economic reform and acceleration of regional and global growth the direct impact on trade in food and fiber will in aggregate consist of a fall in net imports most of the decline in net imports will derive from reduction in demand and improved utilization potential for productivity increase is substantial but not all of the increased productivity will be reflected in the traditional supply response of increased production instead marginal resources will shift out of farming and producers will restructure and adopt new technologies in pursuit of lower costs shifts in the commodity composition of trade will occur and the changes in grain and livestock markets will be greatest if the reform is successful the former soviet union could become a modest net grain exporter instead of a large importer wheat would be the leading export grain and levels of wheat exports and corn imports could become quite sensitive to relative prices on world markets

the empirical content of nash bargained household behavior in households whose allocation decisions can be represented as nash bargained household decisions extrahousehold environmental parameters eeps serve as pure shifters of the threat points the comparative statics of changes in demands due to changes in these eeps are given these are incorporated into a comprehensive statement of the empirical content of nash bargained household behavior including a nash generalization of barten s 1966 fundamental matrix equation of the theory of consumer demand estimation and data requirements are discussed along with nested testing of the following structure the neoclassical model is nested in the nash bargained model which in turn is nested in an unrestricted model of household demands emphasized throughout is the enriched menu of explanatory variables for demand analysis provided by the nash model as well as the model s ability to jointly analyze i household formation and ii intrahousehold allocation decisions

old school ties financial aid coordination and the governance of higher education abstract this paper analyzes the role of financial aid coordination among the group of top northeastern colleges and universities known as the overlap group members of the overlap group met annually to tailor financial aid packages so that the out of the pocket contribution of parents to their children s education was the same regardless of the school the students chose to attend i argue that the practices and stability of the overlap group are difficult to reconcile with traditional cartel theory and that financial aid coordination was a solution to organizational problems encountered in the education industry particularly to matching and externality problems arising in the allocation of elite students among educational institutions

adam smith goes to college an economist becomes an academic administrator the author asks whether it is useful to view universities in a utility maximizing framework and shows that university organizing virtually guarantees that the utility maximizing model is the incorrect approach he then discusses resource allocation issues at cornell and reflects upon how concepts that are obvious to economists helped or hindered decision making at cornell the author hopes to convey not that economic concepts are irrelevant in operating a university but rather that it takes a long time to explain to all the actors in the system why these concepts should matter and even longer to actually make them matter

tenure issues in higher education the system of tenure that dominates american higher education has long been a source of controversy the institution of tenure has been attacked for entrenching a lazy professoriate more interested in attending faraway conferences and producing unreadable research than in teaching or developing practical insights while on the other hand it has long been defended as an absolute necessity for the defense of open intellectual inquiry the tenure controversy has been sharpened in recent years by several events the end of mandatory retirement which was abolished by federal law effective january 1 1994 has heightened concerns about the productivity and commitment of professors who received tenure long ago and who no longer have the same incentives to invest in long term reputation there is also ongoing concern over the steadily rising cost of higher education which raises the question of what students as well as the taxpayers who support public institutions of higher education are getting for their money 1 the idea that tenure is a wasteful institution for universities runs up against the puzzling fact that the commitment to tenure is one that academic institutions impose on themselves although the american association of university professors aaup provides a powerful lobby in favor of tenure generally colleges and universities most notably private ones are under no legal requirement to observe tenure constraints although as administrators we certainly feel the weight of those constraints our view is that a tenure system in fact provides important benefits to society and to colleges and universities we argue here that the role of tenure is

public schooling for young children and maternal labor supply as policy makers have sought to reduce the welfare rolls by increasing labor supply among single mothers much attention has been given to the possible role of expanded child care subsidies including direct provision of public preschool at the same time public interest in child care subsidies for two parent households is high for example former vice president gore not long ago proposed to make high quality pre school fully available to every family for every child in every community in america albert gore 1999 in this paper i use 1980 census data to estimate the effect of public school enrollment for a woman s five year old on measures of labor supply and public assistance receipt this approach has two advantages first i am able to estimate the effect of a large implicit child care subsidy 1 second because public kindergarten is universally available to all age eligible children where it is provided selection problems related to means testing do not arise a difficulty with public school enrollment arises because parents may choose to hold their children back a year or enroll them in private school i deal with this issue by using five yearold s quarter of birth qob variables as instruments for public school enrollment status this strategy works because parents ability to enroll a child in public kindergarten in the academic year when the child turns five typically depends on the calendar date of the child s birth 2 in most states children born in the second quarter april 1 june 30 of 1974 will have been eligible to start kindergarten in the fall of 1979 while children born in the first quarter january 1march 31 of 1975 generally will not eligibility for children born between july 1 and december 31 1974 depends on the rules where they live 3

informal labor markets and on the job training evidence from wage data i introduction this study explores the role of informal jobs in the formation of human capital among young less educated workers an informal job is a job that fails to comply with some or all of the labor regulations 1 the set of all informal jobs constitute what is typically known as the informal sector due to the lack of compliance with the labor laws informal jobs are not registered with the authorities 2 however it is often argued that compliance with these laws is of great significance in developing countries to ensure social justice for workers berg and kucera 2008 and to protect them against the forces of reallocation in the labor market inter american development bank 2003 in spite of these arguments the lack of compliance with these mandates in developing countries is common practice leading to the existence of sizable informal labor markets especially among the youth and the less educated 3 hence the importance of understanding what role the informal sector is playing in the lives of young less educated workers the traditional views of the informal sector in the literature are that of a sector that is the last resort for many workers who are rationed out of the protected and better paid jobs in the formal sector e g ozorio de almeida et al 1995 or that it is the disadvantaged sector in a segmented labor market e g fields 1975 harris and todaro 1970 4 the support for these views of the informal sector is mixed in the literature the work of maloney 1999 amaral and quintin 2006 and galiani and weinschelbaum 2012 suggests that the existence of informal labor markets is not necessarily evidence of segmentation and that could be an equilibrium outcome in a competitive labor market however the work of arias and khamis 2008 presents some evidence that is consistent with the rationing of formal salaried jobs and with segmentation in the labor market 5 despite the ongoing debate informal jobs play an important role in the work lives of less educated workers maloney 1999 argues that informal salaried jobs serve as the main point of entry for young poorly educated workers into paid employment the current study further explores this idea focusing on the group of young less educated workers in mexico the study explores the extent to which less educated workers in the informal sector experience wage growth and how wage growth in the informal sector compares with wage growth in the formal sector the basic question is whether informal jobs offer wage growth and skill accumulation to less educated workers and how it compares with formal jobs the empirical analysis uses a household survey from mexico the enoe acronym in spanish for encuesta nacional de ocupacion y empleo the panel structure of the survey allows the construction of measures of wage growth and continuing sector participation the results indicate that young less educated workers in the informal sector experience faster wage growth than their peers in the formal sector based on existing models of on the job training acemoglu and pischke 1999a 1999b becker 1993 stevens 1994 this result suggests that informal jobs offer valuable general training opportunities to young less educated workers the literature provides little evidence on wage growth in the informal sector or on how it compares with wage growth in the formal sector there is some evidence on the wage gain or loss from informality for example maloney 1999 and alcaraz et al 2011 provide estimates of the wage change associated with transitions between the formal and informal sectors in mexico the results in both studies indicate that informal to formal transitions are associated with positive wage changes while transitions in the opposite direction are associated with negative wage changes however none of these two studies provide evidence on wage growth experienced by workers in the informal sector or how it compares to wage growth in the formal sector