the impact of divided government on legislative production it seems obvious that divided governments should produce less legislation than unified governments yet studies have consistently failed to find such an effect because almost all existing studies focus on the experience of the u s national government the data have limited analysis to a consideration of executive legislative division and ignore the impact of division between bicameral chambers the state level data set employed in this study is not so limited the results show that divided legislatures decrease the production of laws by almost 30 nonetheless consistent with previous studies using national level data executive legislative divisions have no impact of legislative production the reason for this asymmetry is theoretically motivated additional hypotheses of interest are also tested including whether republican controlled legislative chambers are more conservative than democratic chambers in the sense of producing fewer laws than their democratic counterparts

wage mobility in the united states this paper examines the mobility of individuals through the wage and earnings distributions using 1979 1991 data from the national longitudinal survey of youth lifetime wages will be more equally distributed than wages from any single year if individuals change position in the wage distribution over time the results suggest that mobility is predominantly within group mobility reducing wage inequality by 12 26 over a four year horizon a detailed examination of within group mobility using year to year estimates of transition probabilities among quintiles of the distribution reveals similar general patterns across all skill groups mobility declined significantly over the years especially at the lower end of the wage and earnings distributions

measuring human capital in the labor market the supply of experience in 8 oecd countries abstract to investigate the evolution of the supply side of the labor market i derive a methodology to measure an important component of the human capital level of the workforce the experience of the labor market based on the perpetual inventory method a stock of experience is estimated for eight oecd countries it appears that during the last three decades the oecd labor markets have faced a decline in the supply of experience by the labor market participants with a minimum in the early 1980s for most countries and a recovery in the 1990s some implications regarding relative wages relative unemployment and schooling are discussed

female labour supply and marital status decisions a life cycle model this paper studies the interdependence between and the determinants of life cycle marital status and labour force participation decisions of women a dynamic utility maximization model is presented and estimated using longitudinal data on women from the panel study of income dynamics the mle method employed involves solving a dynamic programming problem further a minimum distance estimator is proposed which allows for the incorporation of wage data in a computationally simple way the estimates are used to predict changes in the life cycle patterns of employment marriage and divorce due to differences in education race the female s earnings and her potential husband s earnings the estimation results indicate that the utility gains to marriage are decreasing in the female s wage rate and increasing in her potential husband s earnings while the opposite is found for gains to working ignoring the endogeneity of marital status decisions is shown to lead to an underestimation of own and husband s wage effects on female labour supply

selection investment and women s relative wages over time in theory growing wage inequality within gender should cause women to invest more in their market productivity and should differentially pull able women into the workforce our paper uses heckman s two step estimator and identification at infinity on repeated current population survey cross sections to calculate relative wage series for women since 1970 that hold constant the composition of skills we find that selection into the female full time full year workforce shifted from negative in the 1970s to positive in the 1990s and that the majority of the apparent narrowing of the gender wage gap reflects changes in female workforce composition we find the same types of composition changes by measuring husbands wages and national longitudinal survey iq data as proxies for unobserved skills our findings help to explain why growing wage equality between genders coincided with growing inequality within gender

does marriage really make men more productive this paper presents new descriptive evidence regarding marital pay premiums earned by white males longitudinal data indicate that wages rise after marriage and that cross sectional marriage premiums appear to result from a steepening of the earnings profile data from a company personnelfile that includes information on job grades and supervisor performance ratings reveal large marital status pay differences within a narrow range of occupations managers and professionals and environments a single firm married workers tend to be located in higher paying job grades there are very small pay differentials within grades married men receive higher performance ratings than single men as a result they are much more likely to be promoted controlling for rated performance however eliminates the promotion differential sanders korenman is an assistant professor of economics and public affairs at princeton university and is a faculty associate of the office of population research at princeton university and a research affiliate of the national bureau of economic research nber david neumark is an assistant professor of economics at the university of pennsylvania and a research affiliate of the nber korenman wishes to acknowledge the hewlett foundation and the harvard university center for population studies for financial support the authors are grateful to james medofffor making available an extract from the company personnelfile questions regarding data availability should be directed to professor james

marriage meets the joneses relative income identity and marital status abstract this paper investigates the effect of relative income on marriage accounting flexibly for absolute income the ratio between a man s income and a local reference group median is a strong predictor of marital status but only for low income men relative income affects marriage even among those living with a partner a 10 percent higher reference group income is associated with a 2 percent reduction in marriage we propose an identity model to explain the results

changes in returns to education in latin america the role of demand and supply of skills using micro data for the urban areas of argentina brazil chile colombia and mexico the authors document trends in men s returns to education during the 1980s and the 1990s and estimate the role of supply and demand factors in explaining the changes in skill premia they propose a model of demand for skills with three production inputs corresponding to workers with primary secondary and university level education further the authors demonstrate that an unprecedented rise in the supply of workers having completed secondary level education depressed their wages relative to workers with primary level education throughout latin america this supply shift was compounded by a generalized shift in the demand for workers with tertiary education

changing the price of marriage evidence from blood test requirements abstract we use state repeals of blood test requirements btrs for a marriage license that occurred between 1980 and 2008 to examine the impact of changes in the price of marriage on the marriage decision using a within group estimator that holds constant state and year effects and exploits variation in the repeal dates of btrs across states we find that btrs are associated with a 6 1 percent decrease in marriage licenses issued by a state this main finding is supported with results from individual level marriage license and current population survey data the largest effects are found for lower socioeconomic groups

the relative economic performance of foreign subsidiaries in uk manufacturing there is now considerable evidence to show that domestically owned firms does have lower levels of labour productivity than foreign owned subsidiaries foss in uk manufacturing industry in explaining these productivity differences most studies refer to the firm specific advantages which multinationals possess allowing them to succeed in foreign environments in fact as barrell and pain 1997 point out if foreign owned assets are no more productive than those that are locally owned the rational for fdi particularly among developed countries disappears superior foreign owned assets are also important from a policy viewpoint in that there is a perception that host countries can benefit from the potential for spillover effects to domestic firms given the importance of firm specific advantages to fdi theory it is surprising that there has been little attempt to directly measure these assets in studies of relative productivity performance

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

changes in male labor supply and wages in the 1980s both wages and labor supply of poorly educated men fell substantially relative to those of educated men some observers have interpreted this positive association between changes in w

migration theories and evidence an assessment abstract this paper presents a critical survey of theories of migration their welfare and policy implications and their empirical relevance we also develop some extensions to the theory beginning with the harris and todaro ht model in particular the ht model is extended to examine risk averse behaviour within families where the migration of members of families serves to diversify risk the welfare implications of the individual migration decision and government intervention in the form of employment subsidies are examined recent evidence on international migration is presented it is shown that migration does not flow automatically in response to wage differentials characteristics of migrants and the process of self selection are found to be important determinants of the rate of migration

cultural influences on managerial choice an empirical study of employee benefit plans in the united states the objective of this study is to determine the effect of culture on the provision of employee benefits cultural influences have been investigated from a variety of perspectives but not in the context of pension and welfare benefits using unique data this study analyzes the level of coverage of employee benefits in the united states results indicate that culture does have an effect on the provision of these benefits

technology and the us labor market evidence from the sectoral and regional decomposition of the change in the us workforce skill mix abstract researchers have found indirect evidence supporting the role of technology in changing the workforce skill mix in the us by decomposing the change in the skill mix into within between industry components this paper provides additional support for the role of technology by extending the decomposition analysis into both the sectoral and the regional dimensions

valuation of the operating flexibility of multinational corporations the returns to multinationality are estimated as the value of operating flexibility empirical measures of the return of multinationality require a precise specification of the extensiveness of the mnc s transnational network to measure the degree of multinationality this precise empirically grounded definition of multinationality has been absent from the academic literature to date we address this omission and we find that two characteristics of the transnational network its breadth number of foreign countries in which the mnc has operations and depth the concentration of foreign subsidiaries in a few countries are significant in explaining the value of operating flexibility in particular we find that the returns to multinationality are maximized for firms with networks that have breadth but not depth the role of market intangibles such as r d and advertising on mnc market valuation is shown to depend on the flexibility regime

are women s wage gains men s losses a distributional test department of economics university of british columbia vancouver bc v6t 1z1 and department of economics crde cirano universite de montreal montreal pq h3c 3j7 lemieux is also affiliated with the nber we thank paul beaudry richard blundell richard freeman and robert haveman for helpful comments and discussions we gratefully acknowledge financial support from the social sciences and humanities council of canada and from fcar quebec 1 the gender wage ratio and the 90 50 wage ratio for men are calculated from the current population survey cps data provided by epi http www epinet org the 1980 s trends in the gender gap emerged from average real increases of 0 5 percent per year in women s median wages and average real declines of 1 percent per year in men s median wages

regional labor markets and the determinants of wage inequality from 1972 to 1990 the united states experienced the largest increase in wage inequality of any developed country the spread in log wages between the 90th and 10th percentiles of the male wage distribution increased by about 60 points and inequality increased within virtually every demographic or skill category of the labor force see chinhui juhn et al 1993 various explanations have been offered including changes in the relative demand for skill intensive goods international trade immigration of less skilled workers and increased labor force participation of women yet attempts to quantify the relative importance of these factors have not met with much success this leaves skill biased technical change as the residual claimant that rationalizes the data this paper uses regional differences in the evolution of wage inequality to provide new evidence on the determinants of relative wages using a model of factor demand in geographic markets i isolate contributions of i changing skill ratios in the labor force ii increased participation of women iii technical change and iv changes in the industrial composition of labor demand the data indicate that changing skill ratios and women s labor supply have affected the wages of low skilled men in the west the data indicate that increased immigration of less skilled hispanic and asian workers has adversely affected the wages of natives causing a greater increase in inequality there than in any other region of the country i modeling wage inequality in regional markets

schooling search and spouse selection testing economic theories of marriage and household behavior the implications of the economic theories of marriage and of household fertility behavior are tested in a framework in which educational investment marital search and marital matches are responsive to marriage market conditions and the personal traits of individual agents some of which are unobserved by the econometrician implications are also derived and tested for the effects of longevity attractiveness preferences and labor and marriage market conditions on schooling marriage age and spouse choice the empirical results indicate that inattention to heterogeneity and martial selection leads to a false rejection of the economic theory of marriage but to a false acceptance of the value of time fertility hypothesis

accounting for racial differences in marriage and employment what can account for the differences in marriage and employment decisions across blacks and whites to answer this question i develop a dynamic equilibrium model of marriage two explanations for the racial differences in behavior are considered differences in population supplies and wages black white differences in population supplies explain one fifth of the difference in marriage rates and between one fifth and one third of the differences in employment rates across race removing the racial gap in wages eliminates the differences in employment but increases the differences in marriage rates

german income taxation and the timing of marriage i investigate how the german income tax code affects the timing of marriages the german income tax code allows married couples to benefit from full income splitting relative to unmarried couples

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

lowering standards to wed spouse quality marriage and labor market responses to the gender wage gap this paper examines the effect of the female to male wage ratio relative wage on women s spouse quality marriage and labor supply over three decades exploiting task based demand shifts as a

fdi theories and the performance of foreign multinationals operating in the u s based on firm specific financial data performance of foreign multinationals operating in the u s is evaluated to determine if they enjoy advantages over u s firms results of this study indicate that foreign firms operating in the u s are less profitable than randomly selected u s firms that they spend more in research and development but less in advertising and that they have higher debt levels combined with higher liquidity in addition the findings also demonstrate that the determinants of excess market value as measured by tobin s q differ between foreign owned firms and american owned firms and that the performance of foreign multinationals differ by country of origin this suggests that foreign owned firms may have different reasons for investing in the u s and that foreign multinationals present investment opportunities to the u s investors distinct from american firms

from dark to light skin color and wages among african americans this paper develops and tests a theory referred to as preference for whiteness which predicts that the interracial white black and intraracial wage gap widens as the skin shade of the black worker darkens using data drawn from the multi city study of urban inequality and the national survey of black americans we report evidence largely consistent with the theory moreover we decompose the estimated interracial and intraracial wage gaps and find that favorable treatment of lighter skinned workers is a major source of interracial and intraracial wage differences as predicted by the theory

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

obstacles in energy security an analysis of congressional and presidential framing in the united states despite decades of policymaking the u s has only recently made significant strides in becoming a more energy secure nation with a focus on the executive and legislative branches this paper investigates two possible political obstacles to achieve this policy goal the first question it asks is whether or not the two branches have been defining energy security in the same way as the concept itself has no universal definition it is possible that the branches have been focusing on different aspects of the term results from a content analysis of presidential speeches and congressional hearings suggest that no such division has occurred the subsequent question asks whether or not the two branches in tandem are providing the foundation for sound policy results suggest that congress and presidents have defined and discussed energy security in a generally balanced comprehensive and internally non conflictual way what policy emerges from these discussions should be the subject of future research

misspecification of capital asset pricing this study documents empirical anomalies which suggest that either the simple one period capital asset pricing model capm is misspecified or that capital markets are inefficient in particular portfolios based on firm size or earnings price e p ratios experience average returns systematically different from those predicted by the capm furthermore the abnormal returns persist for at least two years this persistence reduces the likelihood that these results are being generated by a market inefficiency rather the evidence seems to indicate that the equilibrium pricing model is misspecified however the data also reveals that an e p effect does not emerge after returns are controlled for the firm size effect the firm size effect largely subsumes the e p effect thus while the e p anomaly and value anomaly exist when each variable is considered separately the two anomalies seem to be related to the same set of missing factors and these factors appear to be more closely associated with firm size than e p ratios

understanding young women s marriage decisions the role of labor and marriage market conditions using the 1970 1980 1990 censuses the authors investigate the impact of labor and marriage market conditions on the incidence of marriage of young women age 16 24 they first estimate the effects on marriage of personal characteristics and metropolitan statistical area msa indicators separately by race and education group they then regress the first stage msa effects on msa level labor and marriage market conditions and welfare benefits taking account of fixed effects and time trends specific to each msa better female labor markets worse female marriage markets worse male labor markets are found to lower marriage rates fr whites in all education groups results for these variables for blacks are sensitive to estimation technique although stronger results are obtained for an older age group 25 34 while welfare benefits have a negative effect in cross sectional analyses the association becomes considerably weaker in fixed effects specifications

motives of non american firms investing in the united states non american firms have recently begun investing larger sums of money in the u s such increased activity has created a great deal of interest and concern the growth in foreign direct investment and findings of a mailed questionnaire will be reviewed in this article factor analysis was utilized to help isolate the salient motives for these investment activities although the size of the u s market and the attractiveness of a new market or the desire to preserve the existing u s market were the most frequently cited reasons for new investment in the u s factor analysis reveals that these reasons merely reinforce the primary motive namely the desire to benefit from a higher level of u s technology and innovation

on the misuse of the profits sales ratio to infer monopoly power the common use of the profits sales ratio as a measure of the lerner index of monopoly power is flawed even with the assumption of constant returns because of problems connected with the valuation of capital the size of the error is related to the cost of capital the growth rate of the firm the depreciation method used and most important the shape of the stream of benefits resulting from an investment examples show that the error can be quite large further the error is likely to be systematically related to the variables used in regression studies

indicators of energy security in industrialised countries energy security has become a popular catch phrase both in the scientific arena as well as in the political discussion yet in general the applied concepts of energy security are rather vague this paper sheds some light on concepts and indicators of energy security first we conceptually discuss the issue of energy supply security and explain why it is not to handle by one science alone and what economics may contribute in order to structure the topic after providing a brief survey of existing attempts to define or measure energy security we suggest an additional dimension along which indicators of energy security may be classified ex post and ex ante indicators finally we illustrate our concept on the basis of several simplified indicators while ex post indicators are mostly based on price developments ex ante indicators are to a greater extent aimed at illustrating potential problems our illustration suggests that it is worthwhile to take into account the market structure along with the political stability of exporting countries

international corporate diversification market valuation and size adjusted evidence errunza and senbet es 7 analyze the effects of international operations on the market value of the firm both at theoretical and empirical levels the theoretical model which is largely heuristic exploits the costly supply adjustment of multinational firms mncs in providing international portfolio diversification services to investors who face differential cost barriers to direct holdings of assets across national boundaries mncs compete as financial intermediaries to undo the barriers so that in equilibrium profits are driven out mncs and pure domestic firms sell at an equivalent risk adjusted return however costly financial intermediation and the associated relative efficiency leads to a positive valuation effect for mncs relative to purely domestic firms further the equilibrium analysis implies that demand side investor barriers to international capital flows alone are inconsequential to the valuation of mncs in their pure financial role but that the interaction with the supply side costs are necessary to produce a valuation effect at the corporate level es subject the theory to an empirical analysis in a value based approach by employing a variant of tobin s 17 qratio the analysis controlling for industrial market power suggests that the relationship between the excess valuation and the degree of international involvement doi has magnified over periods characterized by severe u s government controls vis a vis the more recent periods in this paper we formalize the theoretical argument by viewing indirect portfolio diversification by mncs as a means of completing the international capital market we employ a paradigm in the unanimity literature and formally characterize the equilibrium in which there is a rationale for mnc financial intermediation we then perform an expanded empirical study by employing generalized least squares and maximum likelihood procedures since the positive relationship between excess valuation and doi as suggested in es 7 might be attributed to the so called small firm or size and the p e effects the test methodology controls for such effects also the traditional literature has relied upon foreign sales percentage as a proxy for doi in view of the well recognized limitations of this proxy we employ four different measures of international

marriage and class here we consider a matching model where agents are heterogeneous and utilities nontransferable we utilize this framework to study how equilibrium sorting takes place in marriage markets we impose conditions that guarantee the existence of a steady state equilibrium and then characterize it several examples are developed to illustrate the richness of equilibria the model reveals an interesting sorting externality that can support multiple steady state equilibria even with constant returns to matching excerpt

the effects of international operations on the market value of the firm theory and evidence this paper investigates the existence of monopoly rents associated with international operations in a market value theoretic framework the benefits of international operations evolve from such factors as 1 imperfections in the product and factor markets 2 differential international taxation and 3 imperfections in the financial markets in this paper these factors are subject to an equilibrium analysis in the context of recent advances in financial theory in particular imperfections in the financial sector arising from corporate international diversification are examined in a framework which allows a supply adjustments by multinational firms and b the interaction of barriers to international capital flows faced by both firms and investors taking the u s capital market and investors as a base we then specify the conditions under which the foregoing imperfections get priced out in an equilibrium these pricing effects cannot be detected empirically through the methodologies employed by the existing studies which examine the effects of corporate international diversification indeed it was an attempt to rescue the limitations of these studies which initially motivated our paper the existing empirical inquiries into this area rely on traditional risk adjusted performance measures e g 7 or international analogs of return generating processes e g 1 8 instead at the empirical level we employ a value based method which is in the same vein of the thomadakis 17 approach developed to identify the monopoly benefits of industrial market structure we conduct the tests over subperiods characterized by differential government controls in an attempt a to separate the pure financial motives for multinationality from other motives and b to detect if the benefits of international operations carry through recent periods

male wage inequality and marital dissolution is there a link after almost a century long pattern of rising marital instability divorce rates leveled off in 1980 and have been declining ever since the timing of deceleration and decline in the rates of marital disruption interestingly coincides with a period of substantial growth in wage inequality this paper establishes a connection between the two phenomena and explores potential explanations for the underlying link using individual data on female marital histories in a duration analysis framework combined with regional and temporal variation in the pattern of male wage dispersion i show that inequality has a significant stabilizing effect on the marital relationship quantitatively increases in male wage dispersion can roughly explain up to 30 of the fall in the mean separation probability between 1979 and 1990 several plausible explanations for this relationship are assessed changes in spousal labor supplies female wage inequality income uncertainty social capital as well as a hypothesis of on the marriage search the results are most supportive of the search interpretation no strong quantitative support was found for the remaining mechanisms

an analysis of out of wedlock childbearing in the united states this paper relates the erosion of the custom of shotgun marriage to the legalization of abortion and the increased availability of contraception to unmarried women in the united states the decline in shotgun marriage accounts for a significant fraction of the increase in out of wedlock first births several models illustrate the analogy between women who do not adopt either birth control or abortion and the hand loom weavers both victims of changing technology mechanisms causing female immiseration are modeled and historically described this technology shock hypothesis is an alternative to welfare and job shortage theories of the feminization of poverty excerpt

the effect of income taxes on household income research on the distribution of income during the 1980s has identified a trend towards increasing inequality which may be the continuation and acceleration of trends spanning several decades this paper explores to what extent behavioral responses to the tax changes during the 1980s may also explain the rising inequality the 1986 tax reform act is used as a natural experiment to explore the roles played by both taxes and a variety of nontax factors our principal finding is that both tax rates and nontax factors appear to have had significant effects on relative income growth during the late 1980s

why have divorce rates fallen the role of women s age at marriage american divorce rates rose from the 1950s to the 1970s peaked around 1980 and have fallen ever since the mean age at marriage also substantially increased after 1970 i explore the extent to which the rise in age at marriage can explain the decrease in divorce rates for cohorts marrying after 1980 using data from the survey of income and program participation 1979 national longitudinal survey of youth and national survey of family growth three different empirical approaches suggest that the increase in women s age at marriage is the main proximate cause of the fall in divorce rates

a comparison of international income inequality an ordered probit model analysis in this study the ordered probit model with marginal effect was applied to examine the key elements that influence changes in the gini levels the empirical results indicated that export incentives and poverty have a positive impact on the gini levels moreover the marginal effect revealed that export incentives increase income inequality for countries with higher inequality and reduce inequality for those countries with a relatively even income distribution likewise the study found that the asian pacific economic cooperation apec and the eu countries move from inequality to equality more efficiently than countries in the latin american integration association laia

gender and the new inequality explaining the college non college wage gap the new inequality is often characterized by the increasing wage gap between workers with a college education and those without yet although the gap in hourly wages between college educated and non college educated women is high and rising the topic has been overshadowed by research on gender inequality and wage inequality among men using the 1990 5 percent public use microdata samples independent sources of macro data and controls for individual human capital characteristics i examine the association between the college non college wage gap and key aspects of local economic conditions for women and men while the college non college wage gap among women is comparable in size to the gap among men significant gender differences emerge in the underlying sources of high wage gaps in over 500 labor markets across the united states compared with men flexible and insecure employment conditions e g joblessness casualization and immigration are more important in fostering high wage gaps among women than are technology trade and industrial composition the prevailing explanations of rising wage inequality over time based on these gender differences i reconsider the debate on labor market restructuring and inequality and discuss a new analytical focus on differences in within gender inequality

waiting for mr right rising inequality and declining marriage rates abstract this paper demonstrates that women search longer for their first or second husband in cities with higher male wage inequality and examines several alternative explanations a causal link is established by controlling for city fixed effects and city specific time trends and by using inequality in the woman s state of birth as a proxy for local male inequality increasing inequality explains about 25 of the marriage rate decline over the last few decades and this is not due to the endogenous moving or labor force decisions of women nor to the marital decisions of men in reaction to changes in their own wages

foreign direct investment by japanese electronics firms in the united states and canada modelling the timing of entry this paper examines the relationship between attributes of japanese electronics firms and the sequence of their investments in the u s and canada it is argued that a useful way to model foreign direct investment fdi decisions is to recognize explicitly the uncertainties involved in them a probabilistic model of fdi is specified the following hypotheses are incorporated in the model 1 the higher the risk adjusted expected net benefits from foreign direct investment ceteris paribus the higher the probability of making an investment at any particular moment and thus the probability of investing earlier 2 risk adjusted expected net benefits from fdi by a firm are a function of its possession of certain types of intangible transportable assets 3 the uncertainties involved with fdi may be reduced with the passage of time and with increased experience with foreign operations 4 parent company attributes that facilitate market intelligence capabilities permit early recognition of investment opportunities and 5 timing of entry may reflect strategic considerations such as responding to growing foreign market opportunities the need to ensure market access and the presence of opportunities to obtain abnormal profits due to market concentration the models are estimated using cox s proportional hazards regression model results generally confirm the hypotheses that size and financial capabilities as well as possession of some knowledge based firm specific strategic assets are significantly related to early fdi they also confirm that timing of entry is affected by market opportunities and in some cases by the need to ensure market access we did not find evidence in this sector that differences in market concentration significantly affected the timing of fdi analyses are also provided of inter period changes in the importance of different types of intangible assets in explaining earlier fdi as well as changes that reflect differences in host country environments

accounting for age in marital search decisions spouse quality measured by educational attainment varies significantly with the age at which an individual marries peaking in the mid twenties then declining through the early forties interestingly this decline is much sharper for women than men meaning women increasingly marry less educated men as they age moreover quality has worsened for educated women over several decades while it has improved for men using a non stationary sequential search model we identify and quantify the search frictions that generate these age dependent marriage outcomes we find that single life utility is typically the dominant friction though college women in the 1950 and 1970 cohorts are affected even more by deteriorating suitor quality regardless of educational status individual choice as opposed to pure luck is pivotal in explaining marriage market outcomes earlier in life

labor earnings in one company towns theory and evidence from kazakhstan one company towns characterized by the presence of a large employer in a local labor market are a frequent legacy of state led development strategies how will downsizing or closing unprofitable state owned enterprises affect these towns this article develops a simple model combining monopsony power in the labor market with a keynesian closure of the product market and uses it to interpret the findings of previous studies the article evaluates the impact of the company s employment level on the town s labor earnings in kazakhstan where one company towns are still prevalent the evaluation is based on data from the 1996 living standards measurement survey the results show that labor earnings in the town decrease roughly 1 5 percent when the share of its population working for the company decreases 1 percent the results are robust to changes in the definition of labor earnings and to the inclusion of a variety of other community characteristics in the analysis these results and the theoretical model are combined to evaluate the welfare impact of company downsizing and consequently to derive the optimal extent of labor retrenchment

male incarceration the marriage market and female outcomes abstract this paper studies how rising male incarceration has affected women through its effect on the marriage market variation in marriage market shocks arising from incarceration is isolated using two facts the tendency of people to marry within marriage markets defined by the interaction of race location and age and the fact that increases in incarceration have been very different across these three characteristics using a variety of estimation strategies including difference and fixed effects models and tsls models in which we use policy parameters to instrument for within marriage market changes in incarceration we find evidence that is on the whole consistent with the implications of the standard marriage market model in particular higher male imprisonment appears to have lowered the likelihood that women marry modestly reduced the quality of their spouses when they do marry and shifted the gains from marriage away from women and toward men the evidence suggests that women in affected

the decline of welfare benefits in the u s the role of wage inequality welfare benefits in the u s have experienced a much studied secular decline since the mid 1970s we explore a new hypothesis for this decline related to the increase in wage inequality in the labor market and the decline of real wages at the bottom of the distribution we posit that voters prefer benefits which are tied to low skilled wages we test the hypothesis using a 1969 1992 panel of state level data an additional contribution of our analysis is the use of general social survey data on voter preferences for welfare which we combine with current population survey data to determine the voter in each state who has the median preferred welfare benefit level our analysis reveals considerable evidence in support of a role for declining real wages in the decline of welfare benefits

trade liberalization and the inter industry wage premia the missingf role of productivity the literature concerning the effect of tariffs on the inter industry wage premium has not addressed the role of total factor productivity tfp in determining both the wage premium and tariffs this omission not only overlooks an important determinant of wage premium but also invalidates the use of the pre reform tariff level as an instrument for the change in tariffs based on an analysis of colombian data i find that including tfp in the estimated model of the effects of tariffs on the wage premium leads to a 41 decrease in the effect of tariffs on the inter industry wage premium relative to the model that omits tfp more specifically a 10 percentage point decrease in tariffs reduces the wage premium by 1 01 whereas a 10 increase in tfp raise wage premium by 1 6 this finding suggests the importance of using policies that boost productivity to offset the effect of tariffs on the wage premium

marriage markets and assortative mating with household public goods theoretical results and empirical implications this paper analyzes marriage market equilibria when the gains from marriage result from joint consumption of household public goods assuming transferable utility within marriage the paper proves that marriage markets will be characterized by positive assortative mating on wealth when spouses differ only in endowments and the gains to marriage result only from public goods when spouses differ in wages and household public goods are produced at home the results imply offsetting effects with public good economies creating an incentive for positive assortative mating on wages and gains from specialization creating an incentive for negative assortative mating on wages the results help explain the persistent lack of empirical support for becker s prediction of negative assortative mating on wages and have implications for empirical analysis of all joint living arrangement decisions

indicators for energy security the concept of energy security is widely used yet there is no consensus on its precise interpretation in this research we have provided an overview of available indicators for long term security of supply sos we distinguished four dimensions of energy security that relate to the availability accessibility affordability and acceptability of energy and classified indicators for energy security according to this taxonomy there is no one ideal indicator as the notion of energy security is highly context dependent rather applying multiple indicators leads to a broader understanding incorporating these indicators in model based scenario analysis showed accelerated depletion of currently known fossil resources due to increasing global demand coupled with increasing spatial discrepancy between consumption and production international trade in energy carriers is projected to have increased by 142 in 2050 compared to 2008 oil production is projected to become increasingly concentrated in a few countries up to 2030 after which production from other regions diversifies the market under stringent climate policies this diversification may not occur due to reduced demand for oil possible benefits of climate policy include increased fuel diversity and slower depletion of fossil resources

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

nonmarital first births marriage and income inequality many aggregate level studies suggest a relationship between economic inequality and socio demographic outcomes such as family formation health and mortality but individual level evidence is lacking nor is there satisfactory evidence on the mechanisms by which inequality may have an effect we study the determinants of transitions to a nonmarital first birth as a single parent or as a cohabiting parent compared to transitions to marriage prior to a first birth among unmarried childless young adults in the national longitudinal survey of youth 1997 cohort from 1997 to 2011 we include measures of county group level household income inequality and of the availability of jobs typically held by high school graduates and which pay above poverty wages we find that greater income inequality is associated with a reduced likelihood of transitioning to marriage prior to a first birth for both women and men the association between levels of inequality and transitions to marriage can be partially accounted for by the availability of jobs of the type we measured some models also suggest that greater income inequality is associated with a reduced likelihood of transitioning to a first birth while cohabiting

aggregation bias in elasticities of substitution and the minimum wage paradox while the employment effects of minimum wages are usually reported to be small suggesting low substitutability between skill types direct estimates suggest a much larger degree of substitutability this article argues that this paradox is largely due to a bias induced by the aggregation of skill types into broad categories an assignment model is applied where skilled workers have a comparative advantage in complex jobs the implied pattern of substitutability reveals the sources of the bias estimation results for the united states show elasticities of complementarity to be underestimated by up to a factor 2 5 the methods laid out likewise can be applied to other markets where different quality types are close substitutes such as the housing market

gender identity and relative income within households band s income we argue that this pattern is best explained by gender identity norms which induce an aversion to a situation where the wife earns more than her husband we present evidence that this aversion also impacts marriage formation the wife s labor force participation the wife s income conditional on working marriage satisfaction likelihood of divorce and the division of home production within marriage markets when a randomly chosen woman becomes more likely to earn more than a randomly chosen man marriage rates decline in couples where the wife s potential income is likely to exceed the husband s the wife is less likely to be in the labor force and earns less than her potential if she does work in couples where the wife earns more than the husband the wife spends more time on household chores moreover those couples are less satisfied with their marriage and are more likely to divorce these patterns hold both cross sectionally and within couples over time

are college graduates more responsive to distant labor market opportunities abstract are highly educated workers better at locating in areas with high labor demand to answer this question i use three decades of u s census data to estimate a mcfadden style model of residential location choice i test for education differentials in the likelihood that young workers reside in states experiencing positive labor demand shocks at the time these workers entered the labor market i find effects of changes in state labor demand on college graduate location choice that are several times greater than for high school graduates nevertheless medium run wage effects of entry labor market conditions for college graduates equal or exceed those of less educated workers

differences in metropolitan and nonmetropolitan u s family income inequality a cross county comparison abstract u s family income inequality is examined using 1990 cenus of population data for the 3109 counties and independent cities in the 48 contiguous states use of counties as the unit of analysis extends previous research on u s income inequality that relied on national state or metropolitan level data in addition including both metropolitan and nonmetropolitan counties allows us to determine whether income inequality differs between them after controlling for a variety of labor market demographic and regional characteristics as another innovation we also consider whether counties that experienced recent structural changes in industry composition have higher income inequality

why wait the effect of marriage and childbearing on the wages of men and women we use data from the earlier and later cohorts of the nlsy to estimate the effect of marriage and childbearing on wages our estimates imply that marriage lowers female wages 2 4 percent in the year of marriage marriage also lowers the wage growth of men and women by about two and four percentage points respectively a first birth lowers female wages 2 3 percent but has no effect on wage growth male wages are unaffected by childbearing these findings suggest that early marriage and childbearing can lead to substantial decreases in lifetime earnings

labor market institutions and wage inequality the authors investigate how labor market institutions such as unemployment insurance unions firing regulations and minimum wages have affected the evolution of wage inequality among male workers results of estimations using data on institutions in eleven oecd countries indicate that changes in labor market institutions can account for much of the change in wage inequality between 1973 and 1998 factors found to have been negatively associated with male wage inequality are union density the strictness of employment protection law unemployment benefit duration unemployment benefit generosity and the size of the minimum wage over the 26 year period institutional changes were associated with a 23 reduction in male wage inequality in france where minimum wages increased and employment protection became stricter but with an increase of up to 11 in the united states and united kingdom where unions became less powerful and in the united states minimum wages fell

income inequality and early nonmarital childbearing using individual level data from the united states we empirically investigate the role of lower tail income inequality in determining rates of early nonmarital childbearing among low socioeconomic status ses women we present robust evidence that young low ses women are more likely to have a nonmarital birth when they live in places with larger lower tail income inequality all else held constant we calculate that differences in the level of inequality are able to explain a sizeable share of the geographic variation in teen fertility rates we propose a model of adolescent decision making that facilitates the interpretation of our results

the effect of male wage inequality on female age at first marriage a model in which women search for husbands characterized by their wages predicts increasing within group male wage inequality raises the expected value of continued marital search and so lowers female marriage propensities using 1970 1980 and 1990 census data i test this hypothesis within geographically racially and educationally defined marriage markets the estimates suggest rising male wage inequality accounted for 7 to 18 of the decline in the propensity to marry between 1970 and 1990 for white women and more educated black women growing wage inequality appears to have had little effect on the marriage behavior of less educated black women

mobility barriers and tobin s q the cross sectional relation of tobin s q to structural features of firms depends on market conditions features such as industry concentration advertising and research and development intensity firm specialization and proxies for the use of specialized resources can operate as barriers to entry or to exit depending on the direction of expectations regressions of q on structural features over periods when the state of the economy was clearly different strongly confirm this view for example concentration was positively related to q in the mid 1960s but negatively related in the mid 1970s coefficients for all structural variables also changed significantly this implies that structural features must be interpreted as indexes of resources flexibility rather than as sources of stable positive rents copyright 1987 by the university of chicago

multinational enterprise internal governance and industrial organization abstractthe following sections are included monopoly vs efficiency interpretations of the multinational enterprisehost country controlsdynamic considerationsconclusionreferences this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

excess market value the multinational corporation and tobin s q ratio the results of this study show that there is a positive and significant relationship between excess market value of multinational corporations and the degree of international involvement as measured by foreign sales percentage however the excess market value is not determined by the number of foreign subsidiaries nor the interaction between foreign sales and the number of foreign subsidiaries the relationship between excess market value and the two frequently used measures of monopoly power concentration ratio and the lerner index was also examined this study found that the lerner index contributes significantly in explaining excess market value but concentration ratio does not furthermore the positive and significant coefficients of advertising and r d intensity serve as evidence that product market imperfections appear to play a bigger role in explaining the excess market value experienced by mncs during our sample period

factor proportions and relative wages the supply side determinants of wage inequality supply side factors may contribute to rising wage inequality first certain changes in the supply of skills allegedly exacerbate wage inequality women s increased labor force participation and increased immigration are the leading candidates both allegedly reduce the wages of less skilled men however immigration s impact on wage inequality has been minor and the effects of women s participation is inconclusive second in evaluating the likelihood that human capital investment will mitigate future inequality evidence suggests that rising returns to education have increased the proportion of young people attending college limiting the growth of inequality among high wage workers

on the political economy of immigration and income redistribution in this article we analyze an economy in which agents vote over immigration policy and redistributive tax policy we show that natives preferences over immigration are influenced by the prospect that immigrants will be voting over future tax policy we also show that changes in the degree of international capital mobility the distribution of initial capital among natives the wealth or poverty of the immigrant pool and the future voting rights and entitlements of immigrants can have dramatic effects on equilibrium immigration and tax policies finally we provide some empirical support for the model s predictions