intertemporal borrowing to sustain exogenous consumption standards under uncertainty abstract consider an agent who is attempting to maintain a given consumption level over time in the face of a stochastic technology he is permitted to borrow and lend at given rates of interest the main results are i if the borrowing rate of interest exceeds the lending rate the expected net indebtedness of the agent must grow unboundedly large unless the consumption target is attainable with at most one loan and ii the probabilities of the two events becoming increasingly indebted and accumulating unbounded wealth sum to unity

environmental regulation and u s economic growth in this article we quantify the costs of pollution controls by reporting the results of simulations of the growth of the u s economy with and without regulation for this purpose we have constructed a detailed model of the economy that includes the determinants of long term growth we have also analyzed the interaction between industries in order to capture the full repercussions of environmental regulations however we have not attempted to assess the benefits resulting from a cleaner environment we find that pollution abatement has emerged as a major claimant on the resources of the u s economy the cost of emission controls is more than 10 of the total cost of government purchases of goods and services

reconciling the old and new census bureau education questions recommendations for researchers beginning with the 1990 census and the january 1992 current population survey cps the bureau of the census changed the emphasis of its educational attainment question from years of education to degree receipt using a matched sample from the 1991 and 1992 march cps this article addresses how to reconcile the old and new questions the effects of those methods on the estimated return s to education are then examined both the estimated linear return and the estimated college high school wage differential are slightly larger using information from the new question

evaluating welfare reform in the united states this paper reviews the economic literature on welfare reform over the 1990s a brief summary of the policy changes is followed by a discussion of the methodological techniques that analyze the effects of these changes on outcomes the paper then critically reviews the econometric and experimental literature on caseload changes labor force changes poverty and income changes and family formation changes a growing body of evidence suggests that recent policy changes have influenced economic behavior and well being one particular set of new style welfare programs seems to show especially promising results with significantly increased work and earnings and reduced poverty

can foreign aid reduce income inequality and poverty this paper s goal is to examine the effect of foreign aid on income inequality and poverty reduction for the period 1971 2002 since simple cross country regressions cannot be taken as true time series findings we focus on dynamic panel data techniques which allow accounting for potential simultaneity and heterogeneity problems we find some weak evidence that foreign aid is conducive to the improvement of the distribution of income when the quality of institutions is taken into account however this result is not robust this finding is consistent with recent empirical research on aid ineffectiveness in achieving economic growth or promoting democratic institutions

tax policy asset prices and growth a general equilibrium analysis abstract this paper presents a computable general equilibrium tax policy model that combines a consideration of disaggregate industry effects with an integrated treatment of short and long run adjustments to policy initiatives the model s explicit consideration of forward looking investment decisions and adjustment dynamics permits assessments of short run effects of tax policy on asset values as well as long term impacts on capital accumulation simulations reveal that effects on asset values and investment depend critically on whether policies are oriented toward new or old capital investment tax credits yield significant increases in investment without conferring windfall gains to corporate shareholders corporate tax cuts with the same revenue cost on the other hand yield large windfalls to shareholders while providing only a modest investment stimulus incidence and growth effects differ considerably across sectors particularly between business and housing

input orientated data envelopment analysis framework for measuring and decomposing economic environmental and ecological efficiency an application to oecd agriculture this paper presents an input orientated data envelopment analysis dea framework which allows the measurement and decomposition of economic environmental and ecological efficiency levels in agricultural production across different countries economic environmental and ecological optimisations search for optimal input combinations that minimise total costs total amount of nutrients and total amount of cumulative exergy contained in inputs respectively the application of the framework to an agricultural dataset of 30 oecd countries revealed that i there was significant scope to make their agricultural production systems more environmentally and ecologically sustainable ii the improvement in the environmental and ecological sustainability could be achieved by being more technically efficient and even more significantly by changing the input combinations iii the rankings of sustainability varied significantly across oecd countries within frontier based environmental and ecological efficiency measures and between frontier based measures and indicators

eco thermodynamics economics and the second law the laws of physics especially the first and second laws of thermodynamics have significant implications for economic theory the major implications of the first law conservation of mass energy are straightforward and have been discussed at length elsewhere in brief raw material inputs to economic processes are not consumed having been extracted from the environment in the first place they eventually return to the environment as wastes the economic implications of the second law entropy law are far more subtle there is considerable literature initiated by the work of georgescu roegen on the supposed constraints on economic growth imposed by the fact that economic processes utilize low entropy raw materials fossil fuels and high grade metal ores and discard high entropy wastes however as a practical matter the flux of available low entropy energy exergy from the sun is extremely large and certainly adequate to sustain economic activity in the solar system indefinitely even though fossil fuel and metal ore stocks may eventually be exhausted it is argued in this paper that the real economic significance of the second law lies in the fact that exergy is i not conserved and ii is a useful common measure of resource quality as well as quantity applicable to both materials and energy thus exergy can be used to measure and compare resource inputs and outputs including wastes and losses this is potentially important in itself moreover since exergy is not conserved it is truly consumed i e used up in economic processes hence exergy is no less a factor of production than labor or capital this fact has strong implications for economic growth theory especially with regard to assessing the role of technical progress

the employment dynamics of different population groups over the business cycle abstractwe examine differences in employment dynamics across population groups using bayesian vector autoregressions we document that groups who are particularly strongly affected by business cycle fluctuations males young people non whites the less educated and workers in blue collar occupations also tend to be affected early in the build up of a boom or bust we further identify the drivers of the different cyclicalities across population groups supply shocks seem to be most important for the heterogeneous employment fluctuations and particularly for the early effects of recessions and booms on the most affected groups dynamics in sectoral activity and in hiring rates can help to understand our findings

quantitative versus qualitative growth with recyclable resource we reassess the issue of limits to growth in an endogenous growth model of a decentralized economy where final productions require a recyclable essential material input the model follows a material balance approach and relies on technological assumptions consistent with the material balance principle and on explicit distinction between the material content and the quality of produced goods growth follows from research activities that allow firms to improve the quality of their output and to reduce the material resource intensiveness of their production process even though recycling is assumed perfect we show that 1 the material balance constraint affect the whole transitory dynamics of the growth process 2 quantitative growth i e positive growth of material output can only be a transitory phenomenon long term economic growth taking exclusively the form of perpetual improvements in the quality of final goods a long term growth path is characterized by constant values of material variables or in a less favorable scenario by a constant negative growth rate of those variables we establish the existence conditions of a growth path based on quality improvements and constant material variables it may fail to exist in a decentralized framework even though it is quite feasible from a purely physical point of view

entropy limits to growth and the prospects for weak sustainability in this paper we analyze the consequences of mass and energy conservation and the second law of thermodynamics for economic activity in contrast to former studies we deduce our results formally from a general model of production and consumption we show that in a static setting for economies containing irreversible processes a non zero resource input as well as non zero emissions are necessary to sustain a positive level of consumption we generalize this result to a dynamic setting and apply it to the growth discussion and the sustainability discourse thereby we show that limits to growth of production and consumption are likely to exist and that the concept of weak sustainability is either morally unattractive or physically infeasible d 2005 elsevier b v all rights reserved

poverty volatility and macroeconomic quiescence a consistent finding in the poverty literature is the diminution of the impact of the macroeconomy on official poverty rates in the united states since the early 1980s up until then measures of aggregate economic activity real gdp growth or the unemployment rate had a more substantial influence on the poverty rate most recently this fact has been documented by hilary w hoynes marianne e page and ann huff stevens 2006 hps hereafter kevin lang 2007 notes that much has changed since the early 1980s with respect to antipoverty policy and labor market factors that affect poverty status important changes include the transition from cash to in kind transfers the stagnation in real median earnings rising earnings inequality and the increase in female headed households nevertheless after considering several factors that influence poverty including wage growth inequality and female employment hps conclude their analysis of poverty trends with the view that explanation of the change in the response of poverty to macroeconomic indicators remains an open issue this paper examines whether traction may be gained on this issue by enhancing our understanding of the volatility of poverty rates specifically we examine the volatility of poverty rates over time and across demographic groups to the extent that poverty rate variability is associated with the risk of poverty incidence it is shown that certain eras have exposed members of particular demographic groups to more poverty risk than others then we contrast the volatility of poverty rates to that of aggregate economic activity margaret m mcconnell and gabriel perez quiros 2000 among others present evidence that the volatility of real gdp has been significantly poverty volatility and macroeconomic quiescence

incentive effects of the u s welfare system a review the author would like to acknowledge support for prior work on this topic from the u s department of health and human services and helpful comments from three anonymous referees rebecca blank howard chernick john fitzgerald irwin garfinkel peter gottschalk edward gramlich david greenberg judith gueron james heckman v joseph hotz robert hutchens michael keane frank levy larry mead michael murray robert plotnick anuradha rangarajan philip robins howard rolston jeffrey smith and daniel weinberg all opinions and errors are those of the author alone

slipping into and out of poverty the dynamics of spells this paper examines the dynamics of poverty previous analyses have examined either fluctuations in the male heads earnings or the frequency of poverty periods over a fixed time frame our approach depends on a definition of spells of poverty using this methodology we find that the majority of poor persons at any time are in the midst of a rather long spell of poverty the methodology also allows us to estimate that less than 40 percent of poverty spells begin because of a drop in the heads earnings while 60 percent of the spells end when the heads earnings increase thus researchers must focus on household formation decisions and on the behavior of secondary family members there has been a dramatic resurgence recently of discussion of the underclass the discussion is reminiscent of debates about poverty during the 1960s when the notions of a culture of poverty particularly as popularized by michael harrington s other america 1962 dominated both intellectual and policy thinking the idea of an underclass seems inconsistent however with much of the research on the dynamics of poverty during the 1970s that research using new longitudinal data seemed to show that the bulk of the poor were poor for only a few years the research also showed that the poor were a very heterogeneous group including a small minority of persistently poor the persistence of poverty is of interest both for understanding the phenomenon and for developing policy claims about dependency and separate life styles among the poor rest on assumptions about the long term nature of poverty questions

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

poverty alleviation as an economic problem economists distinguish between technological problems in which variable means confront a given end and economic problems in which given means are allocated across competing ends james buchanan and f a hayek each offer constructive criticisms of the standard definition of an economic problem arguing that economists too easily slide into mechanistic and teleological thinking building on these accounts we argue that there are three key dimensions to the economic problem exchange coordination and governance we then make a case that poverty alleviation is more like an economic problem than a technological one an economic problem with a small e we survey empirical evidence from economics anthropology and sociology indicating that poverty is not a simple lack of objectively identifiable resources but rather a multidimensional and socially embedded phenomenon understanding what poverty alleviation would even look like requires thinking through problems of exchange coordination and governance

thermodynamics and process analysis for future economic scenarios economists are increasingly interested in forecasting future costs and benefits of policies for dealing with materials energy fluxes polluting emissions and environmental impacts on various scales from sectoral to global computable general equilibrium cge models are currently popular because they project demand and industrial structure into the future along an equilibrium path but they are applicable only to the extent that structural changes occur in or near equilibrium independent of radical technological or social change the alternative tool for analyzing economic implications of scenario assumptions is to use leontief type input output i o models i o models are unable to endogenize structural shifts changing i o coefficients however this can be a virtue when considering radical rather than incremental shifts postulated i o tables can be used independently to check the internal consistency of scenarios or i o models can be used to generate scenarios by linking them to econometric macro drivers which can in principle be cge models explicit process analysis can be integrated in principle with i o models this hybrid scheme provides a natural means of satisfying physical constraints especially the first and second laws of thermodynamics this is important to avoid constructing scenarios based on physically impossible processes process analysis is really the only available tool for constructing physically plausible alternative future i o tables and generating materials energy and waste emissions coefficients explicit process analysis also helps avoid several problems characteristic of pure cge or i o models viz 1 aggregation errors 2 inability to handle arbitrary combinations of co product and co input relationships and 3 inability to reflect certain non linearities such as internal feedback loops

the spillover effects of state spending abstract this paper estimates the extent to which state spending is influenced by the spending of neighboring states examining several different metrics of neighborliness in order to better identify the channels for interstate spillovers it improves on previous studies by taking advantage of exogenous shocks to state medical spending to abstract from correlated local conditions and by allowing for spatial autocorrelation focusing on mandated increases in medical spending the analysis shows that each dollar of state spending causes spending in neighboring states to increase by almost 90 cents the most predictive measure of neighborliness is the degree of population mobility between states suggesting that rational concerns about adverse migration may drive the interdependence of state spending policy

the extraction of natural resources the role of thermodynamic efficiency abstract the modelling of production in microeconomics has been the subject of heated debate the controversial issues include the substitutability between production inputs the role of time and the economic consequences of irreversibility in the production process a case in point is the use of cobb douglas type production functions which completely ignore the physical process underlying the production of a good we examine these issues in the context of the production of a basic commodity such as copper or aluminium we model the extraction and the refinement of a valuable substance which is mixed with waste material in a way which is fully consistent with the physical constraints of the process the resulting analytical description of production unambiguously reveals that perfect substitutability between production inputs fails if a corrected thermodynamic approach is used we analyze the equilibrium pricing of a commodity extracted in an irreversible way we force consumers to purchase goods using energy as the means of payment and force the firm to account in terms of energy the resulting market provides the firm with a form of reversibility of its use of energy under an energy numeraire energy resources will naturally be used in a more parsimonious way

heterogeneity in the impact of economic cycles and the great recession effects within and across the income distribution abstract in this paper we examine the effects of economic cycles on low to moderate income families we use variation across states and over time to estimate the effects of cycles on the distribution of income using fine gradations of the household income to poverty ratio we also explore how the effects of cycles affect the risk of falling into poverty across demographic groups focusing on age race ethnicity and family type we conclude by testing to see whether these relationships have changed in the great recession we discuss the results in light of the changes in the social safety net in recent decades

the polarization of the u s labor market this paper analyzes a marked change in the evolution of the u s wage structure over the past fifteen years divergent trends in upper tail 90 50 and lower tail 50 10 wage inequality we document that wage inequality in the top half of distribution has displayed an unchecked and rather smooth secular rise for the last 25 years since 1980 wage inequality in the bottom half of the distribution also grew rapidly from 1979 to 1987 but it has ceased growing and for some measures actually narrowed since the late 1980s furthermore we find that occupational employment growth shifted from monotonically increasing in wages education in the 1980s to a pattern of more rapid growth in jobs at the top and bottom relative to the middles of the wage education distribution in the 1990s we characterize these patterns as the u201cpolarization u201d of the u s labor market with employment polarizing into high wage and low wage jobs at the expense of middle wage work we show how a model of computerization in which computers most strongly complement the non routine abstract cognitive tasks of high wage jobs directly substitute for the routine tasks found in many traditional middle wage jobs and may have little direct impact on non routine manual tasks in relatively low wage jobs can help explain the observed polarization of the u s labor market this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

environmental emissions and production economics implications of the materials balance in modeling emissions the literature has usually specified an explicit emission function or treated emissions as a production input we examine the validity of these approaches taking into account the materials balance principle we show that a technology can equivalently be described by i a production function with material and nonmaterial inputs and bounded marginal product of the material input ii a well behaved production function with emissions as an input and iii a well behaved emission function if the materials balance is accounted for as an additional condition we offer a forma derivation of common but not rigorously established modeling approaches

an economic model of welfare stigma perhaps the most basic assumption of the economic theory of consumer demand is that more is better than less virtually all of the major propositions of consumer theory can in a certain sense be derived from the assumption that goods are good interestingly however this tenet seems to be violated by the behavior of many individuals in the low income population for many turn out to be eligible for a positive welfare benefit but do not in fact join the welfare rolls for example it has been estimated that in 1970 only about 69 percent of the families eligible for afdc aid to families with dependent children participated in the program see richard michel 1980 the corresponding percentage for afdc u the program for which families with an unemployed male are eligible was only 43 percent and the participation rate in the food stamp program was only 38 percent see maurice mcdonald 1977 this phenomenon has puzzled many investigators because such individuals do not locate on the boundaries of their budget sets consequently most investigators ignore the problem when studying the effects of welfare programs on behavior in this paper this seemingly irrational rejection of an increase in income is modeled as resulting from welfare stigma that is from disutility arising from participation in a welfare program per se 1 the existence of stigma has been amply documented in the sociological literature patrick horan and patricia austin 1974 lee rainwater 1979 where interviews of recipients have often uncovered feelings of lack of self respect and negative self characterizations from participation in welfare nevertheless this phenomenon has not been modeled and many questions consequently remain when is the disutility of participation strong enough to prevent participation shouldn t we expect individuals to weigh the disutility of participation against the potential benefit in their decisions what is the elasticity of participation with respect to the potential benefit also in a slightly different vein how are the work disincentives of welfare affected by stigma these questions have been given scant attention by economists yet they are crucial for our ability to predict the impact of various welfare programs on the lowincome population here these questions are addressed by modeling nonparticipation as a utility maximizing decision the model is developed and estimated for the afdc program 2 the model posits an individual utility function containing not just disposable income but

inequality income growth and mobility the basic facts during the 1950s and 1960s mean wages in the united states grew rapidly and the dispersion around this growing mean changed very litde starting in the 1970s and continuing into the 1980s and 1990s these patterns were reversed mean wages grew slowly and inequality increased rapidly these changes in labor markets were reflected in changes in the distribution of family income the mean of the distribution of family income did increase after 1973 in spite of the near constancy of mean real wages as family members increased the number of hours they worked however the increase in inequality of wages was mirrored by an increase in the dispersion of family income a large descriptive literature has documented the rise in inequality while a smaller behavioral literature has sought to delineate the causes of this rise these changes in the distribution of family income a fected rates of poverty directly during the 1950s and 1960s temporary increases in poverty during recessions were more than offset by declines in poverty during economic expansions as long as the poor gained along with everyone else fi om the secular growth in the mean one could be confident that poverty rates would ratchet down this is exactly what happened as poverty rates fell from 22 4 percent in 1959 to 11 1 percent in 1973

government decision making and the incidence of federal mandates abstract this paper analyzes the effects of federally mandated program changes on state spending and revenues incorporating and evaluating the predictive value of several common theories of the state decision making process using several sources of exogenous increases in public medical spending i estimate that the entire state portion of the burden of mandated spending is borne by decreases in other public welfare spending while federal mandates may influence the composition of benefits at the state level it is much more difficult for them to change the total level of state transfers comparison of state reactions to different shocks suggests that these reductions are due in part to the substitutability of programs in the voter utility function but also in part to the stickiness of spending within budget categories states with greater racial differences between recipients and voters and states with less generous neighbors reduce other public welfare spending by even more alleviating the burden the medical expansions imposed on their taxpayers mandates may thus serve only to increase inequality across states

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

conservation of mass and instability in a dynamic economy environment system abstract this paper considers a variant of the neumann leontief sraffa general equilibrium models in the context of a jointly determined economy environment system subject to a conversation of mass condition it shows that the conservation of mass contradicts the free disposal free gifts and non innovation assumptions of such models that an expanding economy will be associated with continuous disequilibrating change in the material transformations of both economy and environment and that this change is uncontrollable through the price system

general equilibrium effects of environmental policy a cge modeling approach estimation of emission control cost functions is often carried out in a partial equilibrium framework i e under the assumption that emission control measures have negligible effects on input and output prices in this paper a computable general equilibrium model is used for simulation of the impact on factor prices and resource allocation of reductions of so infx sup no infx su and co2 emissions thus the model includes markets for tradable emission permits and the equilibrium prices of permits reflect the marginal costs of emission control the results suggest that major emission reductions are likely to have general equilibrium effects and thus that emission control cost functions that fail to take these effects into account may give a distorted picture of the economic impact of emission control

taxes and the labor market participation of married couples the earned income tax credit a distinguishing feature of recent changes to the us system of public assistance is its increasing focus on working families and reliance on the tax system to transfer dollars to needy families after a decade in near total obscurity the earned income tax credit eitc was expanded to become the largest cash transfer program for lower income families with children advocates of the eitc argue that unlike traditional welfare the credit helps promote both the values of family and work indeed empirical evidence consistent with economic theory suggests that the eitc promotes employment among eligible unmarried women with children to target benefits to lower income families however the eitc is based on family income leading to traditional welfare type disincentives for most eligible secondary earners in fact the eitc is likely to reduce overall family labor supply among married couples this paper examines the labor force participation response of married couples to eitc expansions between 1984 and 1996 the effect of the credit is estimated using both quasiexperimental and traditional reduced form labor supply models results from both models show the same qualitative conclusion that the eitc expansions reduced total family labor supply of married couples in all cases we find a decline in labor force participation by married women that more than offsets any rise in participation by their spouses while the labor force participation rate of married men increased by about 0 2 percentage points that of married women decreased by just over a full percentage point these aggregate effects mask substantial heterogeneity in the population women facing the strongest disincentives were more than 2 percentage points less likely to work after the expansions these findings imply that the eitc is effectively subsidizing married mothers to stay home and therefore have implications for the design of the program d 2003 elsevier b v all rights reserved

does monetary policy affect relative educational unemployment rates this paper examines the empirical relationship between relative educational unemployment rates and monetary policy such an examination is warranted because policymakers attempts to understand the distributional effects of monetary policy may be confounded by vintages of the theoretical literature that offer contrasting views of how skill based relative unemployment with unemployment of the less skilled in the numerator might behave over the business cycle a traditional view emphasizes characteristics of labor markets that could induce countercyclical movements in skill based relative unemployment for example arthur okun 1973 argues that an important benefit of high levels of aggregate economic activity is that opportunities for employment in the high quality jobs sector open up to the relatively unskilled a mechanism for the relative improvement of the employment prospects of the unskilled is changes in hiring standards of high quality job providers that occur over the cycle changes that occur during expansion and boom periods mentioned by okun include accepting younger and less experienced workers or workers without diplomas and more intensive screening of applicants a forceful statement of this highpressure economy view is contained in rebecca blank 2000 a more recent view of the impact of technological adoption could have quite different implications for movements in skill based relative unemployment over the cycle for example dale mortensen and christopher pissarides 1999 show that in their equilibrium search and matching framework the relationship between skill and unemployment is convex in the presence of labor market policies such as unemployment compensation in this environment skill biased technology shocks increase overall unemployment rates with a disproportionate share of the unemployment falling on the unskilled in his popular account of the matter krueger 2002 ties cyclical investment in new technologies to the conduct of monetary policy thereby linking relative educational unemployment to monetary policy my answer to the title question emerges from quantitative results designed to assess the dynamic effect on relative educational unemployment of a monetary policy surprise controlling for supply shocks and the introduction of new technical ideas these findings appear to resolve some of the tension between alternative views on relative unemployment dynamics in favor of the high pressure economy hypothesis discussants seth b carpenter federal reserve board jonah b gelbach university of maryland bridget terry long harvard university

production consumption and general equilibrium with physical constraints abstract this paper analyzes the consequences of integrating the conservation laws of mass and energy into the microeconomic models of production consumption and general equilibrium we show that abstract models and especially general equilibrium theory are consistent with these physical constraints but most applied and environmental economic models are not we analyze the consequences of physical conservation laws for substitution possibilities and show that these constraints limit the number of independent substitution processes but not the value of the substitution elasticities finally we propose a method for integrating physical constraints into static microeconomic models with a minimum of changes

cross constrained measuring the cost environment efficiency in material balance based frontier models frontier models based on the material balance principle mbp constitute a major group of environmentally adjusted efficiency methods that produce environmental and economic outcomes but fail to integrate them with measures of allocative efficiency in order to perform a joint cost environmental efficiency analysis drawing insight from the literature on multi criteria analysis the objective of this paper is to extend the mbp framework to new measures of cross constrained cost and environmental allocative efficiency using data envelopment analysis dea cross constrained measures seek for efficiency improvement in one of the two relevant criteria cost and environment consistent with given levels of both production and the outcome of the other criteria the incorporation of these measures into the mbp framework provides an extra decomposition of allocative efficiency in efficiency gains that involve an economic environmental trade off and those that do not the proposed approach is illustrated with an application geared to assessing the efficiency of a sample of greenhouse horticultural production units in almeria spain the results for this case show that it is possible to increase environmental allocative efficiency by up to 34 on average without incurring additional costs

measurement of agricultural total factor productivity growth incorporating environmental factors a nutrients balance approach this article proposes to use nutrient orientated environmental efficiency ee measures to construct a nutrient total factor productivity index ntfp since nutrient orientated ee measures are consistent with the materials balance principle ntfp index is superior to other existing tfp indexes an empirical study on the environmental performance of an agricultural sector in 30 oecd countries from 1990 to 2003 yielded several important findings first these countries should be able to produce current outputs with at least 50 less aggregate eutrophying power implying that they should have been able to substantially reduce the potential for eutrophication second traditional tfp has grown by 1 6 per annum due to technical progress however there are lags in the responses of several countries to this technical progress third environmental tfp has grown at a slower rate than traditional tfp growth due to reductions in nutrient orientated allocative efficiency finally changes in input combinations could have significantly improved environmental efficiency and productivity these findings favor policy interventions and faster technological transfer to improve environmental performance

why have aggregate skilled hours become so cyclical since the mid 1980 s this paper documents and discusses a dramatic change in the cyclical behavior of aggregate hours worked by individuals with a college degree skilled workers since the mid 1980 s using the cps outgoing rotation data set for the period 1979 1 2003 4 we find that the volatility of aggregate skilled hours relative to the volatility of gdp has nearly tripled since 1984 in contrast the cyclical properties of unskilled hours have remained essentially unchanged we evaluate the extent to which a simple supply demand model for skilled and unskilled labor with capital skill complementarity in production can help explain this stylized fact within this framework we identify three effects which would lead to an increase in the relative volatility of skilled hours i a reduction in the degree of capital skill complementarity ii a reduction in the absolute volatility of gdp and unskilled hours and iii an increase in the level of capital equipment relative to skilled labor we provide empirical evidence in support of each of these effects our conclusion is that these three mechanisms can jointly explain about sixty percent of the observed increase in the relative volatility of skilled labor the reduction in the degree of capital skill complementarity contributes the most to this result

labor market consequences of internal migration in turkey abstractduring the past 30 years turkey has undergone profound economic and social transformations including fundamental shifts from a state oriented economy to a market oriented economy large scale modernization investments in telecommunication and transportation services and low intensity ongoing armed conflict concentrated in the country s southeastern region for such a period using the 1990 and 2000 turkish censuses i evaluated the labor market consequences of internal migration that might have been sparked by such significant economic and social changes overall the results suggest that provinces with a higher share of recent migrants may observe decreases in their native population s labor market opportunities while this adverse impact of the recent migrant inflows remains robust it exhibits heterogeneity with respect to the skill level of natives as well as for the labor market outcomes of different native and migrant groups

an evaluation of the federal legal services program evidence from crime rates and property values abstract this paper uses the city level roll out of legal service grants to evaluate their effects on crime using uniform crime reports from 1960 to 1985 the results show that there is a short run increase of 7 in crimes reported and a 16 increase in crimes cleared by arrest results show an increase in the staffing of police officers in cities that received legal services these cities are also associated with having higher median property values 10 years later this supports the narrative that legal services changed police behavior through litigation or threats of litigation

on the structure of us unemployment disaggregated by race ethnicity and gender abstract we present empirical evidence regarding the structure of unemployment in the us disaggregated by race ethnicity and gender popp s 2008 unit root test reveals that the dynamics of unemployment for all groups is characterized by the hysteresis hypothesis except for hispanic males

adjustment with imf lending abstract adjustment programs supported by the imf are frequently criticized by creditor countries as involving conditions which are too lax or once violated too easily modified or pushed aside at least as frequently these same conditions are criticized by international debtors or those adopting their interests for being too harsh and rigid neither side has explained very well 1 how exactly the fund impinges on the path of adjustment a country would choose unaided and what that path is 2 why the fund must be expected to accelerate adjustment to safeguard its objectives and 3 what limits the fund s ability to do so this paper attempts a theoretical deduction showing how this two sided conflict arises from the fund s obligation to adjudicate benefits and costs in negotiating programs acceptable not only to its debtor but also to its creditor countries

man cessions fiscal policy and the gender composition of employment recessions are man cessions as men are disproportionately exposed to cyclical employment fluctuations we provide evidence that fiscal expansions stimulate predominantly female employment implying a further destabilization of the gender composition of employment in recessions our findings can be understood as a consequence of differences in the industry occupation mix of employment by gender

measuring and decomposing sustainable efficiency in agricultural production a cumulative exergy balance approach environmental efficiency measures constructed using the materials balance principle have two important shortcomings 1 the ambiguity in the treatment of immaterial inputs and the various types of energy and 2 the lack of universally accepted weights for various material inputs these two limitations are primarily caused by the fact that the materials balance condition is strictly regulated by the law of mass energy conservation and that mass energy content cannot be a good physical common unit of various inputs the use of cumulative exergy content overcomes these problems the use of cumulative exergy content allows the inclusion of life cycle assessment hence facilitates the analysis of the cumulative pollution and total affects on natural resources the present study uses cumulative exergy content to construct new efficiency sustainable measures and decomposes them into technical efficiency and cumulative exergy allocative efficiency in agricultural production empirical applications on oecd agriculture yielded a number of important findings 1 oecd has the potential to save 72 3 of cumulative exergy consumption and improvements can be achieved by being more technically efficient and choosing a better combination of inputs 2 the sustainable efficiency varied enormously across countries and 3 the efficiency levels in 2003 was lower than in 1990 copyright 2010 elsevier b v all rights reserved

georgescu roegen versus solow stiglitz daly is right to be concerned about our society s use of resources environmental degradation and the wasteful use of natural resources or any resources for that matter are of concern daly s tirade concerning our work seems motivated by two concerns a lack of consistency with basic laws of physics and the alleged implication that growth can continue unabated without eventually facing constraints imposed by the limited supply of natural resources part of the problem arises from a lack of understanding of the role of the kind of analytic models that we and others have formulated they are intended to help us answer questions like for the intermediate run for the next 50 60 years is it possible that growth can be sustained what does this possibility entail we write down models as if they extend out to infinity but no one takes these limits seriously for one thing an exponential increase in the population presents almost unimaginable problems of congestion on our limited planet in this intermediate run capital can substitute for natural resources and this is true even though capital itself uses resources more precise machines made out of resources that are relatively abundant can reduce wastage of resources that are relatively scarce technical change some of which is the result of investments in rd and increased efficiency in production may imply less wastage of bauxite and less coal or oil to produce the energy used to make a pound of aluminum or consider the resources that were required to run a regression only a half century ago pounds and pounds of heavy calculating machines replaced by mere ounces of a modern calculator changes in technology also allow us to recycle resources more efficiently so that the amount that is not recaptured for future production may be reduced perhaps the most important question is where does all of this lead us resources are scarce and markets when they function well reflect that scarcity economizing on the use of resources there are important instances especially where the environment and natural resources are concerned where markets do not work well there are for instance the classic problems posed by pollution externalities when markets do not

poverty in america trends and explanations despite robust growth in real gdp per capita in the last three decades u s poverty rates have changed very little we summarize some basic facts about poverty in the united states relying on a combination of previously published data from the census bureau and our own tabulations based on current population survey data we then discuss and evaluate four determinants of changes in the poverty rate that have been advanced in the literature the impact of labor market opportunities the role of changes in family structure the role played by government antipoverty programs and the role of immigration

do in work tax credits serve as a safety net we test the eitc s response to economic need using irs data we exploit differences in timing and severity of economic cycles across states because the eitc requires earned income there is a theoretical ambiguity in the credit s cyclicality we find higher unemployment leads to increased likelihood of eitc recipiency and in credit amounts received for married couples but has insignificant effects for single individuals the eitc s protective effects are concentrated among skilled workers the eitc mitigates income shocks for married couples with children and groups likely to have moderate earnings but does not for most recipients single parents with children

optimal environmental taxes and standards implications of the materials balance abstract this paper investigates the implications of the materials balance for optimal environmental policy we find that neglecting the materials emissions relationship as is common in models of optimal environmental regulation implies biases whose sign depends on the regulatory instrument chosen when emissions are regulated through an emission tax the seemingly optimal tax is too high when regulation proceeds through the use of an emission standard the seemingly optimal standard is too lax

educational attainment and the cyclical sensitivity of employment this article examines whether there are educational premiums on the quantity side of the labor market we document four findings 1 trend employment patterns shifted for most educational levels post 1977 2 the lower the level of educational attainment the more volatile the employment ratio 3 the volatility of employment for female high school dropouts increased over time even as the economy became less volatile and 4 since 1984 the responses of skilled and unskilled employment to the business cycle have become more alike this latter finding is consistent with a reduced degree of capital skill complementarity during this period

climbing out of poverty falling back in measuring the persistence of poverty over multiple spells this paper investigates the persistence of poverty over individuals life times using a hazard rate approach that accounts for multiple spells of poverty and incorporates spell duration individual and household characteristics and unobserved heterogeneity the findings highlight the importance of considering multiple spells in an analysis of poverty persistence with half of those who end poverty spells returning to poverty within four years accounting for multiple spells shows that approximately 50 percent of blacks and 30 percent of whites falling into poverty in some year will have family income below the poverty line in five or more of the next ten years

the more things change the more they stay the same the safety net and poverty in the great recession much attention has been given to the large increases in safety net spending during the great recession we examine the relationship between poverty the safety net and business cycles historically and test whether there has been a significant change in this relationship we find that post welfare reform temporary assistance for needy families did not respond during the great recession and extreme poverty is more cyclical than in prior recessions food stamps and unemployment insurance are providing more protection or no less protection in the great recession and there is some evidence of less cyclicality for 100 poverty

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

welfare the earned income tax credit and the labor supply of single mothers during 1984 1996 welfare and tax policy were changed to encourage work by single mothers the earned income tax credit was expanded welfare benets were cut welfare time limits were added and welfare cases were terminated medicaid for the working poor was expanded as were training programs and child care during this same time period there were unprecedented increases in the employment and hours of single mothers we show that a large share of the increase in work by single mothers can be attributed to the eitc and other tax changes with smaller shares for welfare benet cuts welfare waivers training programs and child care programs