taxation and international migration of superstars evidence from the european football market we analyze the effects of top tax rates on international migration of football players in 14 european countries since 1985 both country case studies and multinomial regressions show evidence of strong mobility responses to tax rates with an elasticity of the number of foreign domestic players to the net of tax rate around one around 0 15 we also find evidence of sorting effects low taxes attract highability players who displace low ability players and displacement effects low taxes on foreigners displace domestic players those results can be rationalized in a simple model of migration and taxation with rigid labor demand jel f22 h24 h31 j44 j61 l83

current publication lags in economics journals phe economics profession depends to a large degree upon its scholarly journals to disseminate the results and applications of its recently completed research the journal of economic literature is in fact evidence of that dependence much of the contents of each issue is devoted to an indexing of the current articles to facilitate both access to primary sources and quick cross referencing with related material but how recent are the results reported in the current literature how long does it usually take for a piece of research to evolve from a submitted manuscript to a published article to my knowledge only one study has confronted this question directly and it was published nearly 15 years ago in that study robert coe and irwin weinstock 1967 p 40 reported an average lag between submission and publication of 250 days 8 2 months for articles published in 1966 what has happened since there are no formal surveys to support the suspicion but there is evidence to suggest that the lags have actually increased some journals have begun to charge submission fees ostensibly to reduce the number of manuscripts they must review a plethora of specialized journals have emerged to provide new outlets for specialized papers and to relieve some of the burden from the traditional journals of more general scope one new journal economics letters has been founded completely in response to the lag problem it publishes short papers as quickly as possible in an effort to distribute at least the thrust of current research without a prolonged waiting period all of these responses to long lags lead to one question how severe are the current lags between submission and publication this brief note will report on the results of a survey that can begin to assess the current magnitude of the lag problem the major components of that problem and the success of the various efforts to alleviate it information about the lags involved in the 40 most recently published articles in each journal was solicited from the editors of 66 journals whose contents are routinely recorded in the jel twenty editors responded directly to the request and their reports formed the foundation of this study seven other journals were also in

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

do female gender role attitudes affect labour market participation in egypt abstractwe analyse the inter generational relationship of attitudes towards gender roles and their impact on individuals labour market participations in egypt we find a strong correlation between mothers and daughters perceptions of gender roles unlike the existing literature perceptions are not associated with the labour market status even if we control for endogeneity issues using an instrumental variable regression furthermore higher educated females are more likely to be unemployed in egypt these results imply that perceptions among females are not translated into their labour market behaviour and the supply side policies alone may not be sufficient for improving young women s employment opportunities

implicit contracts and the cyclicality of the skill premium to examine the cyclical behavior of the skill premium this paper introduces implicit labor contracts in a dsge model where production is characterized by capital skill complementarity and the utilization of capital is endogenous it is shown that this model can reproduce the observed cyclical patterns of wages and the skill premium the feature of capital skill complementarity coupled with variable capital utilization rates does not come at odds with the acyclical behavior of the skill premium the paper argues that the skill complementarity of capital is not a quantitatively significant factor at high frequencies the key aspects are the contracts and the capital utilization margin

a theory of self selection in a market with matching frictions an application to delay in refereeing times in economics journals abstract a matching market with imperfect information is studied with imperfect information it is shown that friction in a meeting process can facilitate self selection and thus may improve the matching outcome as an application the effect of delay in refereeing time on publication outcome is analyzed in a publication process in economics journals though the delay causes efficiency loss by postponing the dissemination of new research it will better sort the papers to each journal by their qualities by preventing mediocre papers from being submitted to a prestigious journal and published by luck if an assortative outcome good papers in prestigious journals and mediocre papers in less prestigious journals is efficient the delay may actually improve the publication outcome other matching market examples are also discussed

marriage cohabitation and women s response to changes in the male wage structure using microdata and grouped data that cover the period 1996 to 2006 we assess the extent to which cohabiting women adjust their labour supply to a lesser extent if any than married women in response to changes in male wages both microdata regressions and grouping estimators unambiguously indicate that cohabiting women respond less to variation in male wages than married women however the magnitude of the difference is not sizeable we also assess the magnitude of married men s and cohabiting men s own wage elasticities and find that they do not differ much combined with the fact that male earnings account for roughly two thirds of family earnings these two findings explain why the impact of changes in male wages on family earnings is very similar for married couples and cohabiting couples in both cases a 10 decline in male wages appears to induce roughly a 6 drop in family earnings

labor supply elasticities overcoming nonclassical measurement error using more accurate hours data we measure the impact of measurement error in labor supply elasticities estimated over recalled usual work hours as is ubiquitous in the literature we employ data on hours of work in diaries collected by the american time use survey 2003 2015 along with the same respondents recalled usual work hours estimates using the latter yield elasticities that are positively biased we argue that this bias arises from the salient effects of differences in wage rates on recalled hours abstract from author

skill biased technological change and rising wage inequality some problems and puzzles the recent rise in wage inequality is usually attributed to skill biased technical change sbtc associated with new computer technologies we review the evidence for this hypothesis focusing on the implications of sbtc for overall wage inequality and for changes in wage differentials between groups a key problem for the sbtc hypothesis is that wage inequality stabilized in the 1990s despite continuing advances in computer technology sbtc also fails to explain the evolution of other dimensions of wage inequality including the gender and racial wage gaps and the age gradient in the return to education

positive and normative judgments implicit in u s tax policy and the costs of unequal growth and recessions calculating the welfare implications of changes to economic policy or shocks requires economists to decide on a normative criterion one approach is to elicit the relevant moral criteria from real world policy choices converting a normative decision into a positive inference as in the recent surge of inverse optimum research we find that capitalizing on the potential of this approach is not as straightforward as we might hope we perform the inverse optimum inference on u s tax policy from 1979 through 2010 and argue that the results either undermine the normative relevance of the approach or challenge conventional assumptions upon which economists routinely rely when performing welfare evaluations

a model of labor supply fixed costs and work schedules abstract to analyze labor supply allocations we propose a three dimensional labor supply framework that distinguishes between hours worked per day days worked per week and workweeks individuals make labor supply choices given heterogeneous schedule dependent fixed costs of work the three margins are not perfect substitutes leisure on days not worked in a workweek has the largest weight in preferences leisure on weeks off has the smallest weight we use the model to analyze heterogeneous response to changes in fixed costs schedule flexibility and restrictions on weekly hours fixed costs of work affect response to each policy and determine associated losses

does paying referees expedite reviews results of a natural experiment a natural experiment in an economics field journal afforded time series observations on payments to referees for on time reviews the natural experiment yielded 15 months worth of data with no payments and about two subsequent years of data with payments using refereeand manuscript specific measures as covariates hazard models were used to gauge the effects of payments on individual referee s review times all models indicate statistically significant reductions in review times owing to referee payments reductions in review times translate into significant reductions in first response time frt median frt was reduced from 90 to 70 days a 22 reduction in the presence of payments with payments only 1 of the frts exceeded six months without payments 16 of the frts exceeded six months

the role of the family in immigrants labor market activity an evaluation of alternative explanations comment most research on the labor market outcomes of immigrants has studied the behavior of individuals focusing primarily on the wage assimilation process or the excess returns to experience which immigrants obtain in their destination country s labor market e g barry r chiswick 1978 george j borjas 1985 recently however attention has been directed to analyzing immigrant labor market outcomes in a family context an approach which combines information about an individual s own labor market opportunities and the family context in which labor market decisions take place in a previously published paper in this review michael baker and dwayne benjamin 1997 evaluate alternative explanations for the observed labor supply patterns of canadian immigrants in the 1986 1991 period specifically when immigrant husbands arrive in canada they typically work less than comparable natives however immigrant wives work more than natives other things equal with assimilation the labor supply of immigrant husbands eventually catches up to that of natives while immigrant wives labor supply falls relative to comparable natives and is ultimately overtaken by that of natives the authors take these patterns to be most consistent with a family investment model in this scenario upon arrival husbands invest in their human capital while wives work to provide the family with liquidity during this investment period with increased time in canada husbands labor supply increases rapidly due to their growing skills in the canadian labor market while wives labor supply falls off in part because they originally took dead end jobs upon arrival in order to finance their husbands investments in human capital interestingly while most of the findings reported by baker and benjamin are consistent with the family investment model their estimated wage equations are not although they do not comment on this in discussing the appropriateness of the family investment model specifically they find similar rates of wage assimilation for husbands and wives this finding suggests roughly equal propensities to invest in one s own human capital for both groups this is contrary to the family investment hypothesis and does not match their story of dead end jobs for wives and large human capital investments of their husbands an alternative possible explanation for the patterns observed by baker and benjamin involves a simple price model in which the observed labor supply patterns reflect laborsupply responses to each spouse s wages for example the initially high but eventually falling level of wives labor supply relative to comparable natives could be a response to their husbands initially low but rising wages while this reasoning like the family investment model is broadly consistent with the data the authors conclude that the simple price model cannot be the entire explanation since in order to explain the full labor supply patterns of immigrants it would require unrealistically high labor supply elasticities and further that the assimilation patterns noted above remain even when wages of husband and wife are controlled blau school of industrial and labor relations cornell university 265 ives hall ithaca ny 14853 and nber and cesifo kahn school of industrial and labor relations cornell university 264 ives hall ithaca ny 14853 and cesifo moriarty school of industrial and labor relations cornell university ilr graduate student mailboxes ives hall ithaca ny 14853 souza faculdade de economia administracao e contabilidade university of sao paulo avenida professor luciano gualberto 908 cidade universitaria predio fea 1 sao paulo sp 05508 brazil the authors thank three anonymous referees for helpful comments and suggestions portions of this paper were written while blau and kahn were visiting scholars at the russell sage foundation to which they are grateful for research support

why are u s women decreasing their labor force participation if their wages are rising given the traditional interpretation of women s labor force participation rate lfpr trends as movements along a positively sloped labor supply curve it is surprising that the recent downward trend in u s women s lfpr has occurred over a period when women s real wages were commonly believed to be rising i find that almost two thirds of the decline since 2000 is attributable to aging of the adult female population the remainder due to declining labor force participation for women under 55 becomes less puzzling in light of my evidence that the wage education locus faced by women actually may have worsened since 2000 jel j21 j31 j82

local public works and intergovernmental transfers under asymmetric information abstract this paper studies local public works decisions in a hierarchical setting under bidimensional asymmetric information a local authority plans to undertake a public work and delegates its construction to a firm the federal government decides whether to fund the project without being informed of either the project s benefit or the constructor s efficiency the local authority knows these values to deal with this informational gap the federal government designs a public work contract specifying transfers to the local authority and to the firm we show under which circumstances cost sharing and compensations emerge as incentive devices then we identify which projects are effectively constructed more works with low high benefits are undertaken shut down than under full information

bounds on elasticities with optimization frictions a synthesis of micro and macro evidence on labor supply how can price elasticities be identified when agents face optimization frictions such as adjustment costs or inattention i derive bounds on structural price elasticities that are a function of the observed effect of a price change on demand the size of the price change and the degree of frictions the degree of frictions is measured by the utility losses agents tolerate to deviate from the frictionless optimum the bounds imply that frictions affect intensive margin elasticities much more than extensive margin elasticities i apply these bounds to the literature on labor supply the utility costs of ignoring the tax changes used to identify intensive margin labor supply elasticities are typically less than 1 of earnings as a result small frictions can explain the differences between micro and macro elasticities extensive and intensive margin elasticities and other disparate findings pooling estimates from existing studies i estimate a hicksian labor supply elasticity of 0 33 on the intensive margin and 0 25 on the extensive margin after accounting for frictions

labor supply differences between married heterosexual women and partnered lesbians a semi parametric decomposition approach i introduction partnered lesbian women have substantially higher labor supply than married women leppel 2008 tebaldi and elmslie 2006 what might account for the sexual orientation gap in partnered female labor supply everyday conversation and casual empiricism suggests that partnered lesbian women have a stronger attachment to the labor market relative to married women because of their choice to have fewer children than their married counterparts yet this has not been formally analyzed the primary goal of this study is to determine the role observable characteristics particularly children play in explaining the differences in labor supply between partnered lesbian women and married women while empirical research on the determinants of partnered lesbian women s labor supply is limited 1 the determinants of married women s labor supply have been studied in great detail see blundell and macurdy 1999 for a survey of the literature in general married women s labor supply is found to be positively related to own wages negatively related to spouse wages and nonlabor income and negatively related to the presence of children particularly young children in the household 2 importantly the same control variables are not found to have the same effect on married men s labor supply in particular men are not responsive to their wife s earnings and tend to have higher labor supply because of the presence of children these findings are consistent with a traditional division of labor into market and household work which results in married men being viewed as the primary earners and married women being viewed as the secondary earners 3 in particular becker 1981 argues that increasing returns from investments in specific human capital encourages a division of labor in market work and household work among household members the sexual division of labor however arises from intrinsically different comparative advantages of men and women e g in the production of children which would determine the direction of the division of tasks by gender this in turn leads to differences in specific human capital accumulation which reinforces the intrinsically different comparative advantages of men and women even in the face of rising female labor force participation increased divorce rates and lower fertility male and female earnings would not be equalized becker 1985 specifically becker argues that married women with household responsibilities e g child care and food preparation would expend less energy on market work make lower investments in market oriented human capital face lower hourly earnings and choose less demanding jobs occupations than married men even when they work the same number of hours because household responsibilities are time and effort intensive relative to leisure and other nonmarket uses of time by men moreover married women would have lower labor force participation than their husbands because of the lower earnings they would face because of less energy expended on market work and lower investments in market oriented human capital and a full equilibrium could involve complete specialization by married women in household production although married men have increased their time spent on child care production there is strong evidence that married women continue to spend more time on child care production than their spouses bianchi robinson and milkie 2006 drago and lee 2008a 2008b kalenkoski ribar and stratton 2005 2007 lundberg pabilonia and ward batts 2007 in addition the sociology literature argues that married women are more likely to identify themselves in the context of family and market work while married men are more likely to identify themselves in the context of market work alone see e g bielby and bielby 1989 finally there is a large literature that tests the specialization hypothesis bardasi and taylor 2008 daniel 1992 gray 1997 hersch and stratton 2000 kenny 1983 loh 1996 stratton 2002

family labor supply and the timing of cash transfers evidence from the earned income tax credit abstract this paper exploits the unique disbursement timing and benefit rules of the earned income tax credit eitc to provide new evidence on how families adjust their labor supply in response to receiving anticipated cash transfers i find that income seasonality caused by eitc receipt leads to changes in the intra year labor supply patterns of married women on average receiving a 1 000 payment significantly reduces the proportion of married women who work by 1 3 percentage points in the month when the eitc is received additionally this labor supply response is mainly driven by those who are secondary earners or liquidity constrained

the effect of universal child benefits on labour supply using a difference in differences estimator i find the canadian universal child care benefit has significant negative income effects on the labour supply of married individuals the likelihood of lower educated mothers to participate in the labour force is reduced 3 2 percentage points when receiving the benefit median hours worked per week among lower educated mothers is reduced by 1 9 hours the effects on higher educated mothers are substantial with median hours worked among higher educated mothers reduced by nearly one hour per week for men the evidence suggests small but significant income effects on labour supply consistent with the literature on labour supply elasticities

what has been learned about labor supply in the past twenty years the main advance in the study of labor supply in the past 20 years has come in recognizing and interpreting the variety of different labor supply functions that coexist in the empirical literature a crucial theoretical distinction with important empirical payoff is that between labor supply choices at the extensive margin i e labor force participation and employment choices and choices at the intensive margin i e choices about hours of work or weeks of work for workers another important distinction is the one between a descriptive labor supply function and a structural supply function that can be the basis for out of sample policy investigations concerning responses to tax and welfare programs and evaluations of welfare losses a full understanding of the participation hours dichotomy leads to an appreciation of the importance of the problem of selection bias what is the wage to impute to a nonworking person these distinctions are a legacy of the research conducted on labor supply over the past 20 years many important empirical questions have been addressed i how strong are the effects of taxes welfare and transfer programs on labor supply ii how important is intertemporal substitution can life cycle labor supply models explain business cycle labor supply behavior iii has the consensus view of the 1960 s of high labor supply elasticities for married women and low labor supply elasticities for married men held up all of the empirical evidence assembled on labor supply must be called into question in the light of important research on the basic quality of the data conducted by analysts at the university of michigan i discuss this evidence in a concluding section except for my discussion of measurement issues i focus only on the major discoveries about which a general consensus has emerged

estimating labour supply responses using tax reforms the 1980 s tax reforms and the changing dispersion of wages offer one of the best opportunities yet to estimate labor supply effects nevertheless changing sample composition aggregate shocks the changing composition of the tax paying population and discontinuities in the tax system create serious identification and estimation problems we develop grouping estimators that address these issues our results reveal positive and moderately sized wage elasticities we also find negative income effects for women with children

changes in the labor supply behavior of married women 1980 2000 using march current population survey data we investigate married women s labor supply from 1980 to 2000 we find a large rightward shift in their labor supply function for annual hours in the 1980s with little shift in the 1990s these shifts account for most of the slowdown in the growth of labor supply during this period a major development was the dramatic decrease in the responsiveness of married women s labor supply to their own and husbands wages their own wage elasticity fell by 50 56 while their cross wage elasticity fell by 38 47 in absolute value

the quiet revolution that transformed women s employment education and family the modern economic role of women emerged in four phases the first three were evolutionary the last was revolutionary phase i occurred from the late nineteenth century to the 1920s phase ii was from 1930 to 1950 phase iii extended from 1950 to the late 1970s and phase iv the quiet revolution began in the late 1970s and is still ongoing three aspects of women s choices distinguish the evolutionary from the revolutionary phases horizon identity and decision making the evolutionary phases are apparent in time series data on labor force participation the revolutionary phase is discernible using time series evidence on women s more predictable attachment to the workplace greater identity with career and better ability to make joint decisions with their spouses each of these series has a sharp break or inflection point signifying social and economic change these changes moreover coincide by birth cohort or period the relationship between the development of modern labor economics and the reality of women s changing economic role is explored the paper concludes by assessing whether the revolution has stalled or is being reversed women who graduated college in the early 1980s did not opt out but recent cohorts are too young to evaluate this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

investment over the business cycle insights from college major choice this paper examines the relationship between individuals personal exposure to economic conditions and their investment choices in the context of human capital focusing on bachelor s degree recipients we find that birth cohorts exposed to higher unemployment rates during typical schooling years select majors that earn higher wages that have better employment prospects and that more often lead to work in a related field much of this switching behavior can be considered a rational response to di erences in particular majors labor market prospects during a recession however higher unemployment leads to other meaningful changes in the distribution of majors conditional on changes in lifetime expected earnings recessions encourage women to enter male dominated fields and students of both genders pursue more dicult majors such as stem fields these findings imply that the economic environment changes how students select majors possibly by encouraging them to consider a broader range of possible degree fields finally in the absence of this compensating behavior we estimate that the average estimated costs of graduating in a recession would be roughly ten percent larger jel e32 i23 j22 j24

the slowdown in first response times of economics journals can it be beneficial the first response time henceforth frt of economics journals has increased over the last four decades from 1 2 months to 3 6 months the optimal frt however is not zero because the frt deters submission of mediocre papers to good journals and consequently saves valuable time of referees and editors the change in the actual frt is in the same direction as the change in the optimal frt which has increased because of the availability of research on the internet prior to publication and because the costs of refereeing a paper have increased

the market work behavior and wages of women 1975 94 changes in the labor market participation and wages of women in the united states are analyzed over the period 1975 1994 using data from the current population survey women are organized into nine birth cohorts five schooling groups and each year of age from 25 to 60 years and their weekly and annual work hours their annual work weeks their employment population ratio and their real average hourly earnings tabulated schooling differences in work behavior have become wider in recent cohorts as have their wages the relationship between work and wages is estimated for women of different ages cohorts and marital status the gap between the work of unmarried and married women has narrowed and the role of wages both the wages of women and those of husbands is examined to determine the extent to which changes in wages account for these movements excerpt

the paradox of diversity initiatives when organizational needs differ from employee preferences women are underrepresented in the upper echelons of management in most countries despite the effectiveness of identity conscious initiatives for increasing the proportion of women many organizations have been reluctant to implement such initiatives because potential employees may perceive them negatively given the increasing competition for labor attracting talent is relevant for the long term success of organizations in this study we used an experimental design n 693 to examine the effects of identity blind and identity conscious gender diversity initiatives on people s pursuit intentions toward organizations using them we used counterfactual thinking derived from fairness theory as a guiding framework for our hypothesis development and investigated the moderating influence of a forthcoming government mandated gender quota as well as individual characteristics e g gender participants reviewed statements regarding workplace diversity initiatives and rated either the initiatives effectiveness or indicated their intentions to pursue employment with organizations using them of those rating pursuit intentions half were informed that the country in which they were conducting their job search was about to implement gender quotas results indicated a diversity management paradox such that initiatives perceived as more effective made organizations using them less attractive as employers however these negative perceptions were mitigated by a government mandated quota and also lower among women implications for the study and practice of diversity are discussed

whose preferences are revealed in hours of work it has become orthodox in economics research to interpret the association between hourly earnings and working hours as the expression of the preferences of workers this convention originated in h gregg lewis explanation for the decline in hours of work since the nineteenth century his explanation rested on an explicit resolution of the identification problem inherent in any quantity hours price wage relation for over 40 years researchers have neglected this identification problem with the result that the findings in the purported labor supply literature are of questionable value jel j22 j23 c13

assortative mating and female labor supply this paper investigates married women s hours worked disaggregated by the husband s wage decile in the united states this pattern has changed from downward sloping to hump shaped we show that this development can be explained within a standard household model of labor supply when taking into account trends in assortative mating a quantitative analysis of our model shows that female wage growth and decreasing fertility are primarily responsible for the overall increase in wives hours since the 1970s the fact that the most pronounced increases are observed for wives married to high wage men is a result of trends in assortative mating

the myth of immigrant women as secondary workers evidence from canada the existing literature on the employment choices and trajectories of women in immigrant families is divided some researchers argue that immigrant women are secondary workers that is they join the labor market mostly as a response to family income shocks and become employed mainly in unskilled jobs to support their husbands investment in local skills long 1980 baker and benjamin 1997 worswick 1999 as men assimilate and financial constraints ease their spouses participation in the labor market is expected to drop to levels similar to those of native born women this view is however at odds with findings in blau et al 2003 among others where married immigrant women make labor supply decisions guided by their own opportunities in the labor market as natives do rather than conditional on the needs of their partners blau and khan 2007 1 to determine the patterns of labor participation and earnings of female immigrants in this paper we exploit a sample of over 800 000 women taken from the canadian census for the period from 1991 to 2006 combining it with information on the skill requirements of the jobs women hold besides employing a large data set this paper is the first one to assess the labor market advancement of immigrant women through the changes in the task content of their occupations in line with recent work in the labor field acemoglu and autor 2011 our findings reveal that labor behavior of female immigrants in canada seems to follow a path of assimilation similar to that of men and that at best only relatively uneducated immigrant women in jobs requiring very basic skills may fit the profile of secondary workers as in kim and varasani 2011 more specifically we find first that the participation rate of immigrant women at arrival is much lower than that of similar natives but that it rises steadily over time second immigrant women participate in unskilled occupations at a much higher rate than canadian women do at first glance this seems consistent with the view that immigrant women are secondary workers however immigrant women in low skill occupations have a significantly higher level of education than canadian women in the same occupations third the patterns of skill assimilation of educated immigrant women indicate their increasing integration into the labor force over time a reduction in the need for physical strength and a gradual increase in the relative amount of analytical skills required in their jobs

noncooperative bargaining models of marriage in this paper we discuss some simple noncooperative models of distribution within marriage in which the equilibria are not necessarily pareto optimal in which history and culture can affect which equilibrium is realized and in which distribution may depend on whether resources are controlled by the husband or by the wife recent moves away from single decision maker models of the family have permitted economists to address distribution within marriage and cooperative bargaining models have played the central role in these moves the next step is to permit strategic interaction between family members by modeling distribution within marriage as a noncooperative game noncooperative game theory allows great flexibility in specifying the rules of the game and unlike cooperative game theory imposes few a priori restrictions on the nature of equilibrium outcomes in particular noncooperative models neither assume nor imply that all equilibria are pareto optimal

work environment and opt out rates at motherhood across high education career paths observing a sample of harvard alumnae in their late thirties the authors study the relationship between workplace flexibility and the labor force participation of mothers they first document a large variation in labor force participation rates across higher education fields mindful of the possibility of systematic patterns in the types of women who complete various graduate degrees they use the rich information available for the sample supplemented by the longitudinal nature of a subset of these data to assess the extent to which these labor supply patterns may reflect variation in the difficulty of combining work with family although ruling out systematic sorting entirely is not possible their evidence suggests that inflexible work environments push women out of the labor force at motherhood

structural estimation of family labor supply with taxes estimating a continuous hours model using a direct utility specification this paper proposes a new method for estimating family labor supply in the presence of taxes this method accounts for continuous hours choices measurement error unobserved heterogeneity in tastes for work the nonlinear form of the tax code and fixed costs of work in one comprehensive specification estimated on data from the 2001 psid the resulting elasticities for married males are consistent with those found elsewhere in the literature but female wage elasticities are substantially smaller than those found in most of the literature simulations of recent tax acts predict small effects on the labor supply of married couples

taxation and the earnings of husbands and wives evidence from sweden i examine the response of husbands and wives earnings to a tax reform in which husbands and wives tax rates changed independently allowing me to examine the effect of both spouses incentives on each spouse s behavior i analyze the large swedish tax reform of 1990 1991 and find that in response to a compensated fall in one spouse s tax rate each spouse s earnings rise i compare these results to those of simplified econometric models used in the typical setting in which independent variation in each spouse s tax rate is unavailable i find that standard econometric specifications may produce substantially biased estimates

differences in citation patterns across journal tiers the case of economics we study how citation patterns differ between journal tiers in economics concretely we analyze citations patterns of more than 6 000 economics research articles published in top five second tier and top field economics journals between 1992 and 1996 in line with previous literature we find that top five journals articles generally receive more citations and that the life cycles of those citations are longer however their influence in term of citations is overestimated in its first twenty five years since publication the median top five article accumulates 4 25 around 3 as many citations when compared to the second tier and top field median article we show that this ratio is strongly associated with the field of economics research e g this ratio is the lowest for econometric methods papers and with articles impact e g in all fields of economics research except for theory this ratio decreases sharply as one moves toward high impact articles in term of citations

why have the labor force participation rates of older men increased since the mid 1990s this article seeks to explain the substantial increases in older men s labor force participation rates observed since the mid 1990s using data from the united states canada and the united kingdom i exploit the cohort effects driving recent increases in older women s participation rates to identify the effect of a wife s participation decision on her husband s participation decision i then decompose the changes in older married men s participation rates demonstrating that husbands responses to increases in wives participation in the labor force can explain one fourth one half and one third of the increase in the united states canada and the united kingdom respectively

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

an analysis of publication lags in econometrics this note describes the lengthening in publication lags for econometric papers in seven journals since 1986 and briefly considers ways of shortening them

the sensitivity of an empirical model of married women s hours of work to economic and statistical assumptions this study undertakes a systematic analysis of several theoretic and statistical assumption s used in many empirical models of female labor supply using a singl e data set psid 1975 labor supply data the author is able to replic ate most of the range of estimated income and substitution effects fo und in previous studies in this field he undertakes extensive specif ication tests and finds that most of this range should be rejected du e to statistical and model misspecifications the two most important assumptions appear to be the tobit assumption used to control for sel f selection into the labor force and exogeneity assumptions on the wi fe s wage rate and her labor market experience copyright 1987 by the econometric society

does the labour supply of wives respond to husbands wages canadian evidence from micro data and grouped data using micro data and grouped data we assess the extent to which canadian wives adjusted their labour supply in response to changes in husbands wages during the period 1980 2000 grouped data parameters based on weighted least squares and the unbiased error in variables estimator developed by devereux 2004 2007a b yield cross wage elasticities that are substantially higher in absolute value than those derived from ols regressions run on micro data both grouping estimators indicate that the labour supply of canadian wives responded strongly to changes in husbands wages during the 1980s for the 1990s our estimates of wives cross wage elasticity display greater dispersion a l aide de micro donnees et de donnees groupees on etablit jusqu a quel point les epouses canadiennes ont ajuste leur offre de travail en reponse aux changements dans les salaires de leurs epoux au cours de la periode 1980 2000 les parametres pour les donnees groupees derives par la methode des moindres carres ponderes et de l estimateur developpe par devereux 2004 2007a b engendrent des elasticites croisees qui sont substantiellement plus grandes en termes absolus que ceux derives par la methode des moindres carres ordinaires en utilisant des micro donnees les deux estimations montrent que l offre de travail des epouses canadiennes a repondu fortement aux changements dans les salaires des epoux au cours des annees 80 pour les annees 90 les evaluations des elasticites croisees des salaires montrent une plus grande dispersion

can social security explain trends in labor force participation of older men in the united states after a long decline the labor force participation rate lfpr of older men in the united states leveled off in the 1980s and began to increase in the late 1990s we examine how changes in social security rules affected these trends we attribute only a small portion of the decline from the 1960s 80s to the increasing generosity of social security over this period increases in the full retirement age and the delayed retirement credit explain one quarter to one half of the recent increase in the lfpr increasing educational attainment and increasing lfpr of married women also contributed to the recent rise

the slowdown of the economics publishing process over the last three decades there has been a dramatic slowdown of the publication process at top economics journals a substantial part is due to journals requiring more extensive revisions various explanations are considered democratization of the review process increases in the complexity of papers growth of the profession and cost and benefit arguments changes in the profession are examined using time series data connections between these changes and the slowdown are examined using paper level data there is evidence for some explanations but most of the slowdown remains unexplained changes may reflect evolving social norms

wages and participation during the last 25 years annual hours worked by prime aged men fell by the equivalent of six 40 hour workweeks the reduction was more pronounced among those younger than among mid age workers among black men than among white men and among those with less schooling thus hours worked not only fell but showed increased dispersion increases that paralleled the growth in wage dispersion that has become so familiar to students of trends in wages the argument advanced here is that the correspondence is not coincidental the changes in hours worked are simply the labor supply responses that follow the changes in the structure of wages

the macroeconomic implications of rising wage inequality in the united states in recent decades american workers have faced a rising college premium a narrowing gender gap and increasing wage volatility this paper explores the quantitative and welfare implications of these changes the framework is an incomplete markets life cycle model in which individuals choose education intrafamily time allocation and savings given the observed history of the u s wage structure the model replicates key trends in cross sectional inequality in hours worked earnings and consumption recent cohorts enjoy welfare gains on average as higher relative wages for college graduates and for women translate into higher educational attainment and a more even division of labor within the household

the aggregate implications of changes in the labour force composition abstract labour composition by gender age and education has undergone dramatic changes over the last half century in the united states furthermore the volatility of total market hours differs systematically between genders age and education groups i develop a large scale business cycle model where these demographic patterns and their transitional dynamics are taken into account and find that demographic change accounts for 30 of the observed changes in aggregate volatility over this period of time additionally these demographic changes are responsible for a significant fraction of the gdp growth observed in the considered period of time

family proximity childcare and women s labor force attachment we show that close geographical proximity to mothers or mothers in law has a substantial positive effect on the labor supply of married women with young children we argue that the mechanism through which proximity increases labor supply is the availability of childcare we interpret availability broadly enough to include not only regular scheduled childcare during work hours but also an insurance aspect of proximity e g a mother or mother in law who can to provide irregular or unanticipated childcare using two large datasets the national survey of families and households and the public use files of the u s census we find that the predicted probability of employment and labor force participation is 4 10 percentage points higher for married women with young children living in close proximity to their mothers or their mothers in law compared with those living further away

taxes and time allocation evidence from single women and men the classic model of becker 1965 suggests that labor supply decisions should be analyzed within the broader context of time allocation and market good consumption choices but most empirical work on policy has focused exclusively on measuring impacts on market work this paper examines how income taxes affect time allocation during the entire day and how these time allocation decisions interact with expenditure patterns using the panel study of income dynamics from 1975 to 2004 we analyze the response of single women s housework labor supply and other time to variation in tax and transfer schedules across income levels number of children states and time we find that when the economic reward to participating in the labor force increases market work increases and housework decreases with the decrease in housework accounting for approximately two thirds of the increase in market work analysis of repeated cross sections of time diary data from 1975 to 2004 shows that home production decreases substantially when market hours of work increase in response to policy changes data on expenditures from the consumer expenditure survey from 1980 to 2003 show some evidence that expenditures on market goods likely to substitute for housework increase in response to a greater incentive to join the labor force the baseline estimates imply that the elasticity of substitution between consumption of home and market goods is 2 61 the results are consistent with the becker model meanwhile single men show little response to changes in tax policy and we are able to rule out an elasticity of substitution between home and market goods for this group of more than 1 52

labour supply and commuting abstract we examine the effect of commuting distance on workers labour supply patterns distinguishing between weekly labour supply number of workdays per week and daily labour supply we account for endogeneity of distance by using employer induced changes in distance in germany distance has a slight positive effect on daily and weekly labour supply but no effect on the number of workdays the effect of distance on labour supply patterns is stronger for female workers but it is still small

the lasting effects of leaving school in an economic downturn on alcohol use the author tests whether leaving school in an economic downturn persistently affects alcohol use she models alcohol use in middle age as a function of the state unemployment rate at school leaving in the national longitudinal survey of youth 1979 cohort the results suggest that men but not women who leave school in an economic downturn consume more drinks and are more likely to report heavy and binge drinking than otherwise similar men findings are robust to addressing the endogeneity of the time and location of school leaving and contribute to the literature on the lasting consequences of leaving school in an economic downturn

the wage elasticity of informal care supply evidence from the health and retirement study author affiliation olena nizalova nizalova kse org ua acknowledgment i gratefully acknowledge steven haider jeff biddle john strauss and john goddeeris for their helpful comments throughout the process of working on the project and important comments from the anonymous referees i am also greatly indebted to michael nolte and his colleagues from the isr data enclave for making possible the revision of this article 1 introductionfor the past two decades the policy debate on issues related to the aging population has been growing at unprecedented rates throughout the world on one hand policy measures suggested in the debate include removal of the disincentives for labor force participation for the near elderly u s dhhs 1997 apfel 2004 cbo 2004 this would have effectively raised the wage rate faced by the targeted group as in the case of the elimination of the social security earnings test for those older than 65 in the united states friedberg 2000 on the other hand the role of informal caregiving is emphasized as a means to keep many individuals at home who would otherwise require expensive institutional care u s dhhs 1997 p 6 policies targeting these two objectives may turn out to conflict with each other higher wages may decrease hours devoted to informal care for elderly parents while policies encouraging informal care may lead to fewer working hours research on the effects of the social security earnings test mostly focuses on labor supply and claiming behavior of the affected group burtless and moffitt 1984 baker and benjamin 1999 gruber and orszag 1999 friedberg 2000 haider and loughran 2008 with little attention being paid to the potential interaction between incentives for paid employment and caregiving choices this interaction may have adverse implications for the well being of the oldest old given that the prevalence of caregiving is highest among individuals in their late midlife central to the analysis of this interaction is the concept of the wage elasticity the labor supply literature suggests a positive wage elasticity of labor supply smaller for males larger for females therefore if the wage elasticity of informal care supply is close to zero as has been found in earlier studies higher wages would lead to more labor supplied with negligible effects on the provision of informal care in this case one might hope that benefits from increased labor supply will not be offset along other dimensions if on the contrary the wage elasticity of informal care supply is relatively large and negative one should be more cautious when evaluating the effects of fiscal policies on labor supply among individuals in their late midlife a substantial negative wage elasticity of informal care supply would mean that along with increasing labor supply the near elderly would cut back on the hours of informal care they provide to their elderly parents this may potentially lead to more people turning to the government in their quest for help with covering formal long term care costs the goal of this article is to study the wage elasticity of informal care supply and contribute to the literature by directly addressing the issue of omitted variables in the time allocation and monetary transfer equations informal care supply is defined as annual time spent helping elderly parents with basic personal needs as well as household chores errands and transportation this article uses a unique opportunity of access to the restricted geographic identifiers for the health and retirement study hrs respondents to instrument hourly wages with the industry structure in the state of residence allowing for differential impact by education 1the primary finding of the article suggests that the wage elasticity of informal care supply is negative and substantially larger in magnitude than previously estimated due to the weakness of the instruments there is still a significant remaining bias in the estimates of the wage elasticity

the inside scoop acceptance and rejection at the journal of international economics abstract there is little work on the inner workings of journals what factors seem to affect the ability to publish in a journal could simple rules which are already used by some journals like the desk rejection of a significant minority of papers help to streamline the process at what cost how well do journals seem to do in choosing papers what can we say about the extent of type 1 and type 2 errors do editors seem to have uniform standards or are some harsher than others we use data on submissions to the journal of international economics to help answer these questions

the socioeconomic consequences of in work benefit reform for british lone mothers in october 1999 the british government enacted the working families tax credit which aimed at encouraging work among low income families with children this paper uses panel data collected between 1991 and 2001 to evaluate the effect of this reform on single mothers we find that the reform led to a substantial increase in their employment rate of about five percentage points which was driven by both a higher rate at which lone mothers remained in the labor force and a higher rate at which they entered it women s responses were highly heterogeneous with effects double this size for mothers with one preschool aged child and virtually no effect for mothers with multiple older children the employment increase was accompanied by significant increases in paid childcare utilization and our analysis in fact suggests that the generous childcare credit component of the reform played a key role in explaining the estimated employment and childcare usage responses we also find that the increase in labor market participation was accompanied by reductions in single mothers subsequent fertility and in the rate at which they married behavioral responses which in turn are likely to influence the reform s overall impact on child poverty and welfare

is there value added from the review process in economics preliminary evidence from authors do referees employed by journals merely screen acceptable from unacceptable manuscripts or are they charged with an additional value adding responsibility vis a vis the papers they review drawing from editorial correspondence provided by survey respondents i address this question by examining the relationship between citations of published papers and comments provided by reviewers and editors referees comments demonstrate a positive impact on subsequent citation of papers while comments made by editors show no such impact value adding by editors appears to derive principally from efficient matching of papers with reviewers

wage inequality and family labor supply using the march current population surveys and the 1960 census this article describes earnings and employment changes for married couples in different types of households stratified by the husband s hourly wage while declines in male employment and earnings have been greatest for low wage men employment and earnings gains have been largest for wives of middle and high wage men these findings cast doubt on the notion that married women have increased their labor supply in the recent decades to compensate for the disappointing earnings growth of their husbands

children and their parents labor supply evidence from exogenous variation in family size although theoretical models of labor supply and the family are well developed there are few credible estimates of key empirical relationships in the work family nexus this study uses a new instrumental variable the sex composition of the first two births in families with at least two children to estimate the effect of additional children on parents labor supply in the united states instrumental variables estimates using the sex mix are substantial but smaller than the corresponding ordinary least squares ols estimates moreover unlike the ols estimates the female labor supply effects estimated using sex mix instruments appear to be absent among more educated women and women with high wage husbands we also find that married women who have a third child reduce their labor supply by as much as women in the full sample while there is no relationship between wives child bearing and husbands labor supply excerpt

wages youth employment and school enrollment recent evidence from increases in world oil prices we exploit variation in wage growth induced by increases in world oil prices to estimate the elasticity of young men s labor market participation and school enrollment with respect to after tax wages our main finding is that in the aggregate increased wages have a dual impact they tend to reduce at least temporarily young men s full time university enrollment rates but bring back into the labor market some young men who were neither enrolled in school nor employed contrary to previous research we find little evidence that young men with no high school diploma now leave school in response to increased wages

collective decisions household production and labor force participation in this paper we generalize the collective model of household labor supply with domestic production to allow for the possibility of nonparticipation in the labor market we also relax the marketability assumption according to which domestic goods and market goods are perfectly substitutable our results are twofold first we show that the main structural components of the decision process can be retrieved from observed behavior second we estimate a system of market and domestic labor supply using the panel study of income dynamics and apply the theoretical results to recover the intra household sharing of resources

greater wage inequality reduces average hours of work i argue that rising inequality in offered wages lowers average working hours if labour supply is concave in wages a decrease in the working hours of low paid workers is greater than an increase in working hours of high paid workers furthermore due to low market opportunities some low paid workers may leave the labour force using cps morg data for prime age men i find evidence in support of this explanation i establish empirically the concavity of the labour supply and find evidence that after controlling for the average wage wage inequality has a negative effect on labour supply

single women s labor supply elasticities trends and policy implications this paper uses cps data to examine changes in single women s labor supply elas ticities in recent decades specifically the authors investigate trends in how single women s hours of work and labor force participation rates responded to both wages and income over the years 1979 2003 results from the base specification suggest that over the observation period hours wage elasticities decreased by 82 participation wage elasticities by 36 and participation income elasticities by 57 these results imply that changes in tax policy had a much larger effect on the labor supply and labor force participation behavior of women in this subpopulation in the early 1980s than in recent years i t is well documented that over the past few decades female labor force behavior has undergone substantial changes women s labor force participation rates have increased markedly as have their annual hours of work at the same time the marital composition of women has undergone a substantial change as well with the proportion of married women falling steadily over time as a result single women comprise a greater share of the labor force than in earlier years and hence their behavioral responses to changes in wages and incomes carry even greater importance for the effects of changes in tax and transfer policies despite the large increase in the number of single women over the past decades single women s labor supply behavior has received

changes in relative wages and family labor supply the large changes in relative wages that occurred during the 1980s provide fertile ground for studying the behavioral responses of married couples to the wage changes of husbands and wives i find estimates of own wage and cross wage elasticities for men that are very small the own wage elasticity for women is positive and the cross wage elasticity for women suggests a strong negative response of female labor supply to changes in their husband s wages family labor supply behavior determines how changes in individual wage rates translate into family earnings changes the responses of women to changes in their husband s wages attenuated somewhat the increases in individual wage inequality at the family level the results suggest that the earnings of the wives of low income men would actually have fallen over the decade if women s labor supply did not respond to changes in their husbands wages however assortative mating implies that wage changes of husbands and wives are correlated and so family earnings inequality still grew during the decade of the 1980s

viewpoint empirical evidence and tax policy design lessons from the mirrlees review this paper examines the role of evidence in drawing up the recommendations for tax reform in the mirrlees review the arguments are organised loosely under five related headings i key margins of adjustment ii measurement of effective tax rates iii the importance of information and complexity iv evidence on the size of responses v implications from theory for tax design although the mirrlees review focuses on all aspects of tax reform the focus is this paper is on the taxation of earnings with some examples drawn from the taxation of consumption and savings ce memoire examine le role des resultats dans la confection des recommandations pour la reforme fiscale dans l enquete mirrlees les arguments sont regroupes sous cinq rubriques i les importantes marges d ajustement ii la mesure des taux d imposition effective iii l importance de l information et de la complexite iv constat sur la taille des reponses et v les implications pour la theorie du design des politiques d imposition meme si l enquete mirrlees a examine tous les aspects de la reforme fiscale ce texte met l accent sur l impot sur les remunerations avec quelques exemples portant sur l impot sur la consommation et l epargne

is low priced primary care bad for quality evidence from australian general practice we examine whether patients perceptions of general practitioner gp care varies by the price paid for consultations australian consumer survey data from 2275 individuals were used to analyse the relationship between price and patient experience of gp care using both standard models for count data and a latent class model that distinguishes between patients with high and low quality experiences we find no evidence that lower prices have a negative impact on patients perceptions of gp quality nevertheless some patient characteristics such as age gender and health status play a significant role in quality of care perceptions the results show that australian patients have not had to compromise gp quality as expressed in terms of patient experience when seeking low priced care this supports the view that there are sufficient checks and balances on the gp sector in australia to ensure positive patient experiences even for low cost gp consultations

the transition in east germany when is a ten point fall in the gender wage gap bad news the gender wage gap in east germany has narrowed by 10 percentage points in transition but women have experienced much more severe employment difficulties than men using the german socio economic panel for 1990 94 i show that on balance women have lost relative to men almost half the relative wage gain is due to exits from employment of the low skilled who are disproportionately women the female employment decline is not primarily voluntary more than half the gender gap in the hazard rate from employment reflects a general fall in demand for low skilled workers reduced child care plays no role

new estimates of labour supply elasticities for married women in canada 1996 2005 in this article we estimate income and substitution labour supply and participation elasticities for canadian married women using data from the survey of labour and income dynamics 1996 2005 we use the canadian tax and credit simulator ctacs and detailed information on the structure of income at the household level to compute the marginal tax rates faced by each individual we then use these marginal tax rates to compute net own wage spouse wage and nonlabour income we show how the magnitude of the estimated elasticities varies depending on whether net or gross wages and income are used in the estimation procedure and quantify biases caused by using average tax rates instead of marginal tax rates finally because marginal tax rates vary significantly over the sample we use quantile regressions to compare elasticities at different points of the hours distribution overall our results show that public policies now have on average less scope for influencing hours of work than 10 years ago howev

gender source country characteristics and labor market assimilation among immigrants abstract using 1980 2000 census data to study the impact of source country characteristics on married adult immigrants labor supply assimilation profiles we find that immigrant women from countries with high female labor supply persistently work more than those from low female supply countries while both groups of women work less than comparable natives on arrival women from high female participation countries eventually close the gap with natives entirely and women from low female labor supply countries eliminate most of it men s labor supply is unaffected by source country female participation suggesting that the findings on women reflect notions of gender roles

revising our thinking about the relationship between maternal labor supply and preschool many argue that childcare costs limit the labor supply of mothers though existing evidence has been mixed using a child s eligibility for public kindergarten in a regression discontinuity instrumental variables framework i estimate how use of a particular subsidy public school affects maternal labor supply i find public school enrollment increases only the employment of single mothers without additional young children i compare this result to previous work focusing on striking increases in a similar setting but earlier period gelabch 2002 differences in the population of mothers labor supply and patterns of lifecycle events likely drive the discrepancy in results