labor market effects of hawaii s mandatory employer provided health insurance the author analyzes how mandatory employer provision of health insurance in hawaii which became law in 1974 affected workers wages employment and insurance coverage between 1970 and 1990 the

nonmonetary effects of the financial crisis in propagation of the great depression this paper examines the effects of the financial crisis of the 1930s onthe path of aggregate output during that period our approach is complementary to that of friedman and schwartz who emphasized the monetary impact of the bank failures we focus on non monetary primarily credit related aspects of the financial sector output link and consider the problems of debtors as well as those of the banking system we argue that the financial disruptions of 1930 33 reduced the efficiency of the credit allocation process and that the resulting higher cost and reduced availability of credit acted to depress aggregate demand evidence suggests that effects of this type can help explain the unusual length and depth of the great depression this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

the effect of social security contributions on coverage and wages a gender perspective using a natural experiment from colombia author affiliation andres j vargas andres vargas ttu edu acknowledgment i would like to thank steve trejo dan hamermesh gerald oettinger jacqueline angel dan slesnick adriana kugler stefano farne two anonymous referees and seminar participants at the university of texas at austin the second conference on aging in the americas and texas tech university for their insightful and valuable comments i am also grateful to cesar caballero and alejandra corchuelo from the colombian national department of statistics dane for providing me with the data all remaining errors are mine 1 introductiontheoretically social security contributions are considered a benefit linked payroll tax because of the connection between the taxes paid by or on behalf of each worker and that individual s expected benefits hence with the presence of tax benefits linkages workers receive a higher compensation and the contributions are analogous to a price paid for a privately supplied commodity summers 1989 a general payroll tax on the other hand has no linkage to benefits for the individual taxpayer and therefore carries efficiency costs the benefit linkages of social security contributions depend on the extent to which workers perceive that they are getting the contributions back as benefits and on how much the individual values those benefits this depends in turn on the quality of the services offered by the entities financed by the tax if they are perceived as good employees will consider the contributions as a deferred compensation or insurance program and will accept a reduction in the net wage with no employment effects if they are perceived as bad the contributions will be considered as a pure tax with the corresponding effects on employment kesselman 1997 the objective of this article is to investigate from a gender and marital status perspective the effects of pension and health care contributions on the employment and wages of workers covered by social security regulations it is interesting to study colombia because the country implemented a large social security reform in 1993 that allows the identification the labor market effects of these contributions furthermore payments for pension and health care provisions amount to a quarter of the wage bill there this in conjunction with an 11 average contribution for other payroll taxes positions colombia as the country with the highest payroll tax rate in latin america the end of the 1980s and early 1990s was a period of deep structural transformations in latin america these reforms were part of efforts to liberalize economies and increase the participation of the market in the production and allocation of goods and services and were the product of the collapse most economies in the region experienced during the 1980s due to their mounting fiscal and monetary imbalances heckman and pages 2004 these large exogenous shifts in policy regimes offer very good case studies of the interaction between institutions and labor market outcomes the main reforms in colombia during this period included the approval of a new constitution key reforms to the labor market a major trade reform and liberalization in direct foreign investment more than two years after these reforms were put in place colombia implemented a social security reorganization that transformed the institutional framework for pension funds and health care provision law 100 of december 1993 regarding the health care regime the social security reform replaced the existing discretionary affiliation system that covered only the worker with a mandatory one that features a stricter prepayment system and covers also the family of the worker on the subject of pensions the reform introduced a fully funded social security system and gave the workers the choice between this new scheme of individual capitalization of public funds and the existing pay as you go system

mandate based health reform and the labor market evidence from the massachusetts reform we model the labor market impact of the key provisions of the national and massachusetts mandate based health reforms individual mandates employer mandates and subsidies we characterize the compensating differential for employer sponsored health insurance eshi and the welfare impact of reform in terms of sufficient statistics we compare welfare under mandate based reform to welfare in a counterfactual world where individuals do not value eshi relying on the massachusetts reform we find that jobs with eshi pay 2812 less annually somewhat less than the cost of eshi to employers accordingly the deadweight loss of mandate based health reform was approximately 8 percent of its potential size

the consequences of the growth of health insurance premiums in the united states two thirds of the nonelderly population is covered by employerprovided health insurance ehi according to a kaiser family foundation national survey 2003 the cost of ehi has increased by over 59 percent since 2000 with no accompanying increase in the scale or scope of benefits these increases in health insurance premiums may have significant effects on labor markets including changes in the number of jobs hours worked per employee wages and compensation packages indeed it is possible that a significant portion of the increase in the uninsured population may be a consequence of employers shedding this benefit as health insurance premiums rise understanding how labor market characteristics affect adjustments to increased health insurance costs is of vital policy importance some proposals to cover the uninsured rely on employer mandates requiring employers to cover eligible workers other proposals provide tax credits for the purchase of non employer health insurance the effects of these proposals on employment wages and health insurance coverage will be driven by the elasticities of labor supply and demand institutional constraints on wages and compensation packages and how much workers value the increase in health insurance costs since employers provide such coverage voluntarily if workers fully value these benefits and are able to sort between firms based on their preferences then in the absence of other institutional constraints they will bear the cost of the increase via reduced wages with no accompanying change in employment employment costs or employee utility there are many reasons to believe however that firms are limited in their ability to offset increases in the price of health insurance premiums through lower compensation so that increases in the cost of providing health insurance may affect both employment and the structure of work identifying the magnitude of these effects empirically is difficult both because of data availability and because of multiple avenues for causality in this paper we uncover the causal effect of increases in the cost of benefits on labor market outcomes by exploiting an exogenous source of variation in the cost of providing health insurance the recent medical malpractice crisis in which malpractice costs for physicians grew dramatically in some states but not in others the growth in malpractice payments affects malpractice insurance premiums and health insurance premiums but it should not affect other aspects of employment see baicker and chandra 2005b using this source of variation we examine the effect of increases in health insurance premiums on employment patterns earnings and health insurance coverage we find that the cost of increases in health insurance premiums is borne in large part by workers through increased unemployment and also through decreased hours for those workers moved from full time jobs with benefits to parttime jobs without these results have strong implications for the distributional impact of health care reforms both authors economics department dartmouth college 6106 rockefeller hall hanover nh 03755 dartmouth medical school and national bureau of economic research e mails kbaicker dartmouth edu achandra dartmouth edu we thank alan garber seth seabury jonathan skinner and douglas staiger for helpful conversations that have influenced this research program and derek neal aaron yelowitz and conference participants at the berger conference for very insightful comments we are grateful for funding from nia p01 ag19783 02 the opinions in this paper are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the nia or nber 1 based on tabulations of population under age 65 from the march current population survey for 1988 2003 2 there is a wide literature estimating the wage fringe trade off a 1 increase in the value of fringes may be offset by a 1 reduction in wages or a 1 1 tax rate reduction for tax favored benefits for example jonathan gruber 1994 demonstrates that the passage of the pregnancy discrimination act in 1978 resulted in employers shifting the entire cost of the mandate onto employees

alcohol availability prenatal conditions and long term economic outcomes this study examines how a policy that sharply increased alcohol availability during 8 5 months affected the labor productivity of those exposed to it in utero compared to the surrounding cohorts the prenatally exposed children have substantially worse labor market and educational outcomes and lower cognitive and noncognitive ability effects on earnings are found throughout the distribution but are largest below the median males are more affected than females consistent with growing evidence that boys are less resilient to early environmental insults the long term effects seem primarily driven by changes in prenatal health rather than changes in the childhood environment

the housing market impact of state level anti discrimination laws 1960 1970 abstract this paper measures the housing market impact of state level anti discrimination laws in the 1960s using household level and census tract data state fair housing laws were the direct antecedents of the federal fair housing act of 1968 and policy variation across states facilitates estimates of the laws impact during the 1960s blacks housing market outcomes improved relative to whites and the proportion of exclusively white census tracts declined markedly but there is little evidence that the fair housing laws contributed to those changes there is some evidence that black renters may have benefited from the laws but the bulk of the evidence suggests insignificant effects on blacks housing market outcomes the level of residential segregation and the value of property in predominantly black neighborhoods

the effects of the unemployment insurance payroll tax on wages employment claims and denials abstract following a 13 year period when all employers in washington paid the same unemployment insurance ui tax rate washington was forced to adopt an experience rated tax system in 1985 we use this natural experiment to explore both tax incidence and the effects of experience rating we find that industry average tax rates are largely passed on to workers through lower earnings however our estimates imply that a firm can shift much less of the difference between its tax rate and the industry average rate our results also indicate that experience rating reduces turnover and ui claims and increases claim denials

informality and the expansion of social protection programs evidence from mexico many countries are moving from employer based to universal health coverage which can generate crowd out in mexico seguro popular provides public health coverage to the uninsured using the gradual roll out of the system at the municipality level we estimate that seguro popular had no effect on informality in the overall population informality did increase by 1 7 for less educated workers but the wage gains for workers who switch between the formal and the informal sector were not significantly affected this suggests that marginal workers do not choose between formal and informal jobs on the basis of health insurance coverage

dynamic inefficiencies in an employment based health insurance system theory and evidence we investigate the effects of the institutional settings of the us health care system on individuals life cycle medical expenditures health is a form of general human capital labor turnover and labor market frictions prevent an employer employee pair from capturing the entire surplus from investment in an employee s health thus the pair underinvests in health during working years thereby increasing medical expenditures during retirement we provide empirical evidence consistent with the comparative statics predictions of our model using the medical expenditure panel survey meps and the health and retirement study hrs our estimates suggest significant inefficiencies in health investment in the united states

the feasibility costs and environmental implications of large scale biomass energy abstract what are the feasibility costs and environmental implications of large scale bioenegry we investigate this question by developing a detailed representation of bioenergy in a global economy wide model we develop a scenario with a global carbon dioxide price applied to all anthropogenic emissions except those from land use change that rises from 25 per metric ton in 2015 to 99 in 2050 this creates market conditions favorable to biomass energy resulting in global non traditional bioenergy production of 150 exajoules ej in 2050 by comparison in 2010 global energy production was primarily from coal 138 ej oil 171 ej and gas 106 ej with this policy 2050 emissions are 42 less in our base policy case than our reference case although extending the scope of the carbon price to include emissions from land use change would reduce 2050 emissions by 52 relative to the same baseline our results from various policy scenarios show that lignocellulosic lc ethanol may become the major form of bioenergy if its production costs fall by amounts predicted in a recent survey and ethanol blending constraints disappear by 2030 however if its costs remain higher than expected or the ethanol blend wall continues to bind bioelectricity and bioheat may prevail higher lc ethanol costs may also result in the expanded production of first generation biofuels ethanol from sugarcane and corn so that they remain in the fuel mix through 2050 deforestation occurs if emissions from land use change are not priced although the availability of biomass residues and improvements in crop yields and conversion efficiencies mitigate pressure on land markets as regions are linked via international agricultural markets irrespective of the location of bioenergy production natural forest decreases are largest in regions with the lowest barriers to deforestation in 2050 the combination of carbon price and bioenergy production increases food prices by 3 2 5 2 with bioenergy accounting for 1 3 3 5

limited trading of emissions permits as a climate cooperation mechanism us china and eu china examples abstract recent multilateral climate negotiations have underlined the importance of international cooperation and the need for support from developed to developing countries to address climate change this raises the question of whether carbon market linkages could be used as a cooperation mechanism policy discussions surrounding such linkages have indicated that should they operate a limit would be set on the amount of carbon permits that could be imported by developed regions from developing countries this paper analyzes the impact of limited carbon trading between an ets in the eu or the us and a carbon market covering chinese electricity and energy intensive sectors using a global economy wide model we find that the limit results in different carbon prices between china and europe or the us although the impact on low carbon technologies in china is moderate global emission reductions are deeper than in the absence of international trading due to reduced carbon leakage if china captures the rents associated with limited permit trading we show that it is possible to find a limit threshold that makes both regions better off relative to carbon markets operating in isolation

the incidence of mandated maternity benefits i consider the labor market effects of mandates which raise the costs of employing a demographically identifiable group the efficiency of these policies will be largely dependent on the extent to which their costs are shifted to group specific wages i study several state and federal mandates which stipulated that childbirth be covered comprehensively in health insurance plans raising the relative cost of insuring women of childbearing age i find substantial shifting of the costs of these mandates to the wages of the targeted group correspondingly i find little effect on total labor input for that group jel 118 j32 h51 in an era of tight fiscal budget constraints mandating employer provision of workplace benefits to employees is an attractive means for a government to finance its policy agenda consequently in recent years there has been a growth of interest in mandated benefits as a tool of social policy for example the centerpiece of president bill clinton s health care proposal is mandated employer provision of health insurance and more than 20 states have man

raising taxes through equalization a simple theory suggests that a common form of federal horizontal equalization grants should cause subnational governments to levy higher tax rates distorting local tax bases and so increasing federal transfers to test this i examine canadian provincial tax policies in the 1972 2002 period consistent with the theory provinces respond to expansions of equalization transfers by increasing their own tax rates i estimate that on average tax rates in grant receiving provinces were substantially and significantly higher as a consequence of the transfer formula jel classification h21 une theorie simple suggere qu une forme usuelle d octrois federaux de perequation horizontale devrait entrainer les gouvernements sub nationaux a imposer de plus hauts taux d imposition modifiant ainsi les bases de fiscalite locale et ce faisant accroissant les transferts federaux pour mettre au test cette hypothese on examine les politiques fiscales des provinces canadiennes pour la periode entre 1972 et 2002 d une maniere qui semble supporter l hypothese les provinces ont repondu a un accroissement des transferts de perequation en accroissant leur propre taux d imposition on estime que les taux moyens d imposition dans les provinces qui recoivent des transferts sont plus eleves de maniere substantielle et significative en raison de la formule de transferts

carbon price and wind power support in denmark abstract this paper aims at characterizing the conditions of wind power deployment in order to infer a carbon price level that would provide wind power with comparable advantage over fossil fuel technologies as effective wind support policies the analysis is conducted on denmark after the electricity market liberalization probit and tobit techniques are employed to take account of a potential threshold effect i find that the level and type of the support policy are the dominant drivers of deployment a feed in tariff significantly brings more wind power in than a premium policy the additional capacity installed monthly increases by more than 1 mw for each additional mwh of support this is compared to the effect of the electricity price investment cost interest rate and general economic activity if the policy is a premium i find that 23 mwh of support in addition to electricity price is needed to observe the connection of new turbines to the grid with a 0 5 probability i convert this support level into a carbon price of 27 ton if wind power competes with coal and 48 t if it competes with gas

the cost of climate policy in the united states abstract we re evaluate prospects for us economic growth and the likely costs of advanced technologies given recent developments and then apply the mit emissions prediction and policy analysis eppa model to evaluate three core ghg policy scenarios for the us that cap emissions at different levels the three policy scenarios involve allowance allocations that through 2050 are 1 constant at present emissions levels 2 linearly reduced to 50 below present 3 linearly reduce emissions to 80 below present the cumulative allowance allocations over the horizon of the policy are 287 203 and 167 gt of co 2 equivalent respectively we compare the results to previous analysis of these same policy scenarios to evaluate how the changed growth and technology prospects affect the results we focus on 203 and 167 gt scenarios because current proposals envision deep cuts in emissions from present the 167 gt scenario is closest to proposals currently being considered by congress and supported by the us administration however we do not attempt to model specific details of actual proposals we test results to alternative assumptions about program coverage and banking behavior measured in terms of changes in economic welfare the economic cost of 203 and 167 gt cases is in the range of 2 to 3 by 2050 with co 2 prices between 48 and 67 in 2015 rising to between 190 and 266 by 2050 implementation details matter when an idealized economy wide cap and trade is replaced by coverage omitting some sectors or if the credibility of long term target is weak limiting banking behavior prices and welfare costs change substantially

international trade and the gender wage gap new evidence from india s manufacturing sector summary this study examines how increasing competitive forces from india s trade liberalization have affected women s relative wages and employment neoclassical theory implies that costly discrimination against female workers should diminish over time with increased competition we incorporate this idea into a theoretical model of competition and industry concentration and test the model using repeated cross sections of india s national sample survey organization nsso household survey data merged with trade and production data from 1983 to 2004 estimates from ordinary least squares ols and fixed effects regressions at the industry level indicate that increasing openness to trade is associated with larger wage gaps in india s concentrated manufacturing industries

quantifying regional economic impacts of co2 intensity targets in china we acknowledge the support of the ministry of science and technology of china through the institute for energy environment and economy at tsinghua university and the support from graduate school of tsinghua university which is supporting zhang da s doctoral research as a 22 visiting scholar at the massachusetts institute of technology we are also grateful for the support provided by rio tinto china and social science key research program from national social science foundation china of grant no 09 zd029 we further acknowledge the support of eni s p a icf international and shell founding sponsors of the china energy and climate project for supporting this model development work we would further like to thank dr john reilly dr sergey paltsev dr kyung min nam dr henry chen paul kishimoto and tianyu qi at joint program on the science and policy of global change and participants in the annual meeting of china energy and climate project and ecomod 2012 conference for helpful comments and discussion 23

labor market effects of u s sick pay mandates this paper exploits temporal and spatial variation in the implementation of nine city and four state level u s sick pay mandates to assess their labor market consequences we use the synthetic control group method and traditional difference in differences models along with the quarterly census of employment and wages to estimate the causal effects of mandated sick pay on employment and wages we do not find much evidence that employment or wages were significantly affected by the mandates that typically allow employees to earn one hour of paid sick leave per work week up to seven days per year employment decreases of 2 percent lie outside the 92 percent confidence interval and wage decreases of 3 percent lie outside the 95 percent confidence interval abstract from author

perceived price in residential water demand evidence from a natural experiment abstract under complicated billing structures the price to which consumers respond remains inconclusive in this paper i exploit a quasi experiment to estimate a causal effect of price for residential water customers during the introduction of increasing block rates for a north carolina utility perceived price is identified through a billing anomaly in which changes in marginal and average prices move in opposite directions empirical results contribute evidence that residential water customers respond to average price average price elasticity estimates vary from 0 43 to 1 14 across the distribution of consumption in triple difference models with an estimate of 0 31 in the tightest bandwidth of regression discontinuity specifications

the effect of old age assistance on retirement abstract researchers have devoted considerable attention to analyzing the impact of social security on retirement with mixed findings however the means tested program old age assistance oaa dwarfed social security until the 1950s and coincided with the early decline in elderly labor force participation also oaa benefits were determined by the states a key source of policy variation i estimate the relationship between oaa benefits and elderly participation using individual data from the 1940 and 1950 censuses oaa s impact is found to be strong and implies that participation would have risen slightly instead of falling if benefits had not increased during the 1940s

general equilibrium electricity generation technologies and the cost of carbon abatement a structural sensitivity analysis abstract electricity generation is a major contributor to carbon dioxide emissions and abatement in this sector is a key determinant of economy wide regulation costs the complexity of an integrated representation of economic and electricity systems makes simplifying assumptions appealing but there is no evidence in the literature on how important the pitfalls may be the aim of this paper is to provide such evidence drawing on numerical simulations from a suite of partial and general equilibrium models that share common technological features and are calibrated to the same benchmark data we report two basic findings first general equilibrium inter sectoral effects of an economy wide carbon policy are large it follows that assessing abatement potentials and price changes in the electricity sector with a partial equilibrium marshallian demand can only provide a crude approximation of the complex demand side interactions second we provide evidence that widely used top down representations of electricity technologies produce fuel substitution patterns that are inconsistent with bottom up cost data this supports the view that the parametrization of substitution possibilities with highly aggregated production functions is difficult to validate empirically the overall picture that emerges is one of large quantitative and even qualitative differences highlighting the role of key structural assumptions in the interpretation of climate policy projections

the employment effects of low wage subsidies abstract low wage subsidies are often proposed as a solution to the unemployment problem among the low skilled but the empirical evidence on their effects is still scarce this paper examines the employment effects of a finnish payroll tax subsidy scheme which is targeted at the employers of older full time low wage workers the system s clear eligibility criteria open up an opportunity for a reliable estimation of the causal impacts of the subsidy scheme our results indicate that the subsidy system had no effect on the employment rate or wages of the eligible groups but it increased slightly working hours among those already at work

who pays for public employee health costs abstract we analyze the incidence of public employee health benefits because these benefits are negotiated through the political process relevant labor market institutions deviate significantly from the competitive private sector benchmark empirically we find that roughly 15 percent of the cost of recent benefit growth was passed onto school district employees through reductions in wages and salaries strong teachers unions were associated with relatively strong linkages between benefit growth and growth in total compensation our analysis is consistent with the view that the costs of public workers benefits are difficult to monitor contributing to benefit oriented and often under funded compensation schemes

the industrial organization of health care markets the u s health care sector is large and growing health care spending in 2011 amounted to 2 7 trillion and 18 percent of gdp approximately half of health care output is allocated via markets in this paper we analyze the industrial organization literature on health care markets focusing on the impact of competition on price quality and treatment decisions for health care providers and health insurers we conclude with a discussion of research opportunities for industrial organization economists including opportunities created by the u s patient protection and affordable care act

the gender and intergenerational consequences of the demographic dividend an assessment of the micro and macrolinkages between the demographic transition and economic development the demographic transition changes the age composition of a population potentially affecting resource allocation at the household level and exerting general equilibrium effects at the aggregate level if age profiles of income consumption and savings were stable and estimable for the entire population they might imply how the demographic transition will affect national savings rates but there is little agreement on the impact of age composition these age profiles differ by gender and are affected by human capital investments whereas an existing micro simulation are estimated from samples of wage earners that are not distinguished by sex or schooling and make no effort to model family labor supply behavior or physical and human capital accumulation considering these shortcomings of assessments of the demographic dividend a case study based on household surveys and long run social experiments may be more informative matlab bangladesh extended a family planning and maternal and child health program to half the villages in the district in 1977 and recorded fertility in the program villages was 15 16 percent lower than in the control villages for two decades households in the program villages realized health and productivity gains that were concentrated among women survival and schooling increased among children and after 19 years household physical assets were 25 percent greater per adult than in the control villages these large gains in the wake of the program induced demographic transition suggest reasons for designing new labor market and microcredit policies to help women during the demographic transition invest in productive skills shift their time more efficiently from child care to home production self employment and wage labor and invest more in the human capital of their children

labor market effects of employer provided health insurance i introduction increasing health insurance coverage is arguably an important policy goal the congressional budget office 2003 estimates that in 1998 20 30 million americans had no health insurance for the entire year approximately 40 million were uninsured at a specific point in time in the year and nearly 60 million were without coverage some time during the year most individuals who have health insurance in the united states obtain it through their employer in 1999 65 8 of nonelderly americans had employer provided insurance also called group insurance or employer sponsored insurance either through their own employer or through the employer of another household member see gruber 2001 employer provided insurance plans generally have lower premiums and offer more benefits than individual insurance plans health insurance providers can offer cheaper and better plans to company employees for at least two reasons first the average administrative cost of such plans is lower than individual plans second employment based plans are typically subject to less adverse selection than individual plans particularly so for large employers furthermore the tax subsidy afforded employment based health insurance renders the effective consumer price substantially lower than the cost see pauly 1986 and gruber 2001 together these various factors give a strong incentive for employers to offer and employees to accept coverage as part of their employment contract as employer provided insurance is by far the most prevalent form of coverage in the private sector policy makers look for further expansion of this base as a way to insure the uninsured while avoiding direct public financing as a way to increase employer based health insurance coverage some states either have or are considering government mandates that require employers to provide insurance to certain types of workers 1 the state of hawaii requires private sector employers to offer health insurance to all workers who work for more than 20 h a week and requires these workers to have insurance the state of california is currently considering a similar mandate there is a considerable interest from policy makers on the effects of such mandates on labor market outcomes in this study we report on an experiment that was designed to provide some insights about possible effects of alternative health insurance regulations on the competitive labor market with a particular focus on mandates since we only considered a competitive market setting with complete contracts and no wage rigidities our results may not be directly applicable to all labor market situations 2 however the study provides useful insights about the interaction of health insurance benefit provision wages and employment structure for labor markets where the competitive wage setting and the complete contracts assumptions are reasonable with these limitations in mind our results can be also generalized to other types of employer provided fringe benefits such as paid vacations or pension plans as any government intervention health insurance regulation may affect the labor market theory predicts that in perfectly competitive labor markets health insurance creates no distortionary effects on the labor market equilibrium as long as the coverage is not mandated and there are no wage rigidities 3 all workers who value insurance above its cost of provision are offered insurance and accept it the wages are adjusted downward see rosen 1986 and gruber 2000 summers 1989 used a simple supply and demand analysis to show that the effect of increases in premiums on equilibrium labor hours and wage depends both on the elasticity of labor demand and labor supply and on how fully workers value changes in the cost of health insurance if the demand or the supply of labor is completely inelastic or if workers fully value the insurance then an increase in the premium would result in an equal decrease shift in wages

should a vehicle fuel economy standard be combined with an economy wide greenhouse gas emissions constraint implications for energy and climate policy in the united states abstract the united states has adopted fuel economy standards that require increases in the on road efficiency of new passenger vehicles with the goal of reducing petroleum use and more recently greenhouse gas ghg emissions understanding the cost and effectiveness of fuel economy standards alone and in combination with economy wide policies that constrain ghg emissions is essential to inform coordinated design of future climate and energy policy we use a computable general equilibrium model the mit emissions prediction and policy analysis eppa model to investigate the effect of combining a fuel economy standard with an economy wide ghg emissions constraint in the united states first a fuel economy standard is shown to be at least six to fourteen times less cost effective than a price instrument fuel tax when targeting an identical reduction in cumulative gasoline use second when combined with a cap and trade cat policy a binding fuel economy standard increases the cost of meeting the ghg emissions constraint by forcing expensive reductions in passenger vehicle gasoline use displacing more cost effective abatement opportunities third the impact of adding a fuel economy standard to the cat policy depends on the availability and cost of abatement opportunities in transport if advanced biofuels provide a cost competitive low carbon alternative to gasoline the fuel economy standard does not bind and the use of low carbon fuels in passenger vehicles makes a significantly larger contribution to ghg emissions abatement relative to the case when biofuels are not available this analysis underscores the potentially large costs of a fuel economy standard relative to alternative policies aimed at reducing petroleum use and ghg emissions it further emphasizes the need to consider sensitivity to vehicle technology and alternative fuel availability and costs as well as economy wide responses when forecasting the energy environmental and economic outcomes of policy combinations

heterogeneity and the effect of mental health parity mandates on the labor market health insurance benefit mandates are believed to have adverse effects on the labor market but efforts to document such effects for mental health parity mandates have had limited success i show that one reason for this failure is that the association between parity mandates and labor market outcomes vary with mental distress accounting for this heterogeneity i find adverse labor market effects for non distressed individuals but favorable effects for moderately distressed individuals and individuals with a moderately distressed family member on net i conclude that the mandates are welfare increasing for moderately distressed workers and their families but may be welfare decreasing for non distressed individuals

credit income and causality a contemporary co integration analysis abstract in this study we investigate the macroeconomic fundamental issue of causal relationship between credit and money income for the us postwar economy along the lines of the credit view theorists in the long run we provide significant evidence that credit causes income further we support the view that there is a rather weak causality effect from income to credit in the long run indeed we identified that there is a dynamic causality effect in the short run from income changes to credit ones a contemporary co integration analysis is applied using the maximum likelihood method additionally considering the formulated var a stability analysis of the equivalent first order dynamic system has been performed finally dynamic forecasts from the corresponding ecvar error correction var are obtained in order to verify the validity of the co integration vector used it may be useful to mention that we have not met in the relevant literature the type of forecasting presented here

do payroll tax breaks stimulate formality evidence from colombia s reform alternative work arrangements have grown rapidly around the world in latin america these alternative work arrangements have long been part of the labor market and have continued to grow the informal sector grew rapidly in latin america over the past few decades comprising up to half of the working population in many countries some attribute the growth in alternative work arrangements and informality to regulations and taxes while others argue that it is precisely the lack of enforcement of regulations that allows unprotected employment arrangements to flourish we examine whether reducing taxes associated with employment stimulates formal sector employment we exploit the fact that the tax reform introduced in colombia in 2012 affected only certain types of workers and not others in particular workers earning less than ten times the minimum wage and self employed workers with more than two employees experienced a reduction of payroll taxes of 13 5 percent between 2013 and 2014 we use the colombian household surveys social security records and the monthly manufacturing sample to conduct difference in differences analyses of the reform we find evidence of increased formal employment for the affected groups after the reform using all three data sets we find that the probability of formal employment and the likelihood of transitioning into registered employment increased for the affected groups after the reform we also find that the level and share of permanent employment relative to temporary employment grew after the reform for those earnings less than ten times the minimum wage the results are greatest for those in smaller firms and for those earnings close to the minimum wage

a cure for discrimination affirmative action and the case of california s proposition 209 proposition 209 enacted in california in 1996 and made effective the following year ended state affirmative action programs not only in education but also for public employment and government contracting this paper uses cps data and triple difference techniques to take advantage of the natural experiment presented by this change in state law to gauge the labor market impacts of ending affirmative action programs employment among women and minorities dropped sharply a change that was nearly completely explained by a decline in participation rather than by increases in unemployment this decline suggests that either affirmative action programs in california had been inefficient or that they failed to create lasting change in prejudicial attitudes

the labor market impact of state level anti discrimination laws 1940 1960 by the time congress passed the 1964 civil rights act 98 of non southern blacks 40 of all blacks already resided in states with fair employment laws prohibiting labor market discrimination using census data from the integrated public use microdata series the author assesses the impact of fair employment legislation on black workers relative income unemployment labor force participation migration and occupational and industrial distributions in general the fair employment laws adopted in the 1940s appear to have had larger effects than those adopted in the 1950s and the laws had considerably smaller effects on the labor market outcomes of black men than on those of black women

how do learning externalities influence the evaluation of ontario s renewables support policies abstract support programs for renewable electricity generation in ontario have been in place since 2005 including feed in tariffs and a competitive procurement process these programs have been criticized on a number of fronts in particular critics claim the level of support was excessive and creating surplus supply however prior studies have ignored one potential benefit of renewable energy support that it can help to promote cost reductions in new technologies through learning by doing this paper uses a recursive dynamic computable general equilibrium cge model featuring learning by doing effects to assess the renewable support programs provided in ontario our results in line with previous studies do not justify the high support rates paid in ontario given our core range of assumptions but our modeling approach allows us to identify the combination of key parameter values relating to learning effects and environmental damages that justify the observed rates these parameters are hard to measure empirically and our modeling approach introduces a new tool for examining the impact of variations in these parameters on policy analysis

optimal income taxation with adverse selection in the labour market this article studies optimal linear and non linear redistributive income taxation when there is adverse selection in the labour market unlike in standard taxation models firms do not know workers abilities and competitively screen them through non linear compensation contracts unobservable to the government in a miyazaki wilson spence equilibrium adverse selection leads to different optimal tax formulas than in the standard mirrlees 1971 model because of the use of work hours as a screening tool by firms which for higher talent workers results in a rat race and for lower talent workers in informational rents and cross subsidies the most surprising result is that if the government has sufficiently strong redistributive goals welfare is higher when there is adverse selection than when there is not policies that endogenously affect adverse selection are discussed the model has practical implications for the interpretation estimation and use of taxable income elasticities which are central to optimal tax design

the prospects for coal to liquid conversion a general equilibrium analysis we investigate the economics of coal to liquid ctl conversion a polygeneration technology that produces liquid fuels chemicals and electricity by coal gasification and fischer tropsch process ctl is more expensive than extant technologies when producing the same bundle of output in addition the significant carbon footprint of ctl may raise environmental concerns however as petroleum prices rise this technology becomes more attractive especially in coal abundant countries such as the u s and china furthermore including a carbon capture and storage ccs option could greatly reduce its co2 emissions at an added cost to assess the prospects for ctl we incorporate the engineering data for ctl from the u s department of energy doe into the mit emissions prediction and policy analysis eppa model a computable general equilibrium model of the global economy based on doe s plant design that focuses mainly on liquid fuels production we find that without climate policy ctl has the potential to account for up to a third of the global liquid fuels supply by 2050 and at that level would supply about 4 6 of global electricity demand a tight global climate policy on the other hand severely limits the potential role of the ctl even with the ccs option especially if low carbon biofuels are available under such a policy world demand for petroleum products is greatly reduced depletion of conventional petroleum is slowed and so the price increase in crude oil is less making ctl much less competitive

did the affordable care act young adult provision affect labor market outcomes analysis using tax data using a data set of us tax records spanning 2008 to 2013 the authors study the impact of the affordable care act aca young adult dependent coverage requirement on labor market related outcomes including measures of employment status job characteristics and postsecondary education they find that the aca provision did not result in substantial changes in labor market outcomes results show that employment and self employment are not statistically significantly affected although some evidence supports the increased likelihood of young adults earning lower wages not receiving fringe benefits enrolling as full time or graduate students and young men being self employed the magnitudes imply extremely small impacts on these outcomes in absolute terms and when compared to other estimates in the literature the authors find these results to be consistent with health insurance being less salient to young adults compared to other populations when making labor market decisions

fiscal consolidation and climate policy an overlapping generations perspective abstract this paper examines the distributional and efficiency impacts of public debt consolidation financed through a carbon tax employing a dynamic general equilibrium model with overlapping generations of the u s economy the numerical model features government taxes and spending and a multi sectoral production structure including intermediate production specific detail on the energy sector both in terms of primary energy carriers and energy intensive industries and sector and fuel specific carbon inputs in contrast to revenue neutral carbon tax swaps using the carbon revenue for deficit reduction implies a relaxation of future public budgets as debt repayment results in lower future interest obligations while intergenerational welfare impacts depend importantly on what tax recycling instrument is used we find that combining public debt consolidation with a carbon policy entails the possibility of sustained welfare gains for future generations if social discount rates are sufficiently low or if social preferences exhibit a large aversion with respect to intergenerational inequality combining fiscal consolidation and climate policy may offer the chance for societal gains even without considering potential benefits from averted climate change

capture and the bureaucratic mafia does the revolving door erode bureaucratic integrity does the revolving door phenomenon erode bureaucratic integrity to answer this question we undertake a quantitative case study of a private university in south korea that recruited a former vice minister of education as its president specifically we investigate whether after employing this high ranking former public official the university received favorable treatment from the education ministry in terms of funding estimates from difference in difference triple difference and synthetic control methods all suggest that the high profile public official s recruitment is associated with financial benefits from the official s former employing agency no such advantage however was observed for benefits from other agencies this result offers suggestive but compelling evidence that the revolving door distorts the allocation of government resources the financial benefits the university received are due not to the recruited official s greater competence expertise or knowledge but rather to his implicit collusion with the government

the incidence of medicare abstract the medicare program transfers nearly 300 billion annually from taxpayers to beneficiaries this paper considers the incidence of such transfers in the context of a life cycle model with uncertainty about future health care expenditures we find the distributional consequences of the medicare program are roughly neutral in dollar terms households living in high income neighborhoods pay more in taxes but they also receive more in benefits these dollar flows however ignore the insurance value of the medicare system given the incomplete insurance coverage of lower income elderly households prior to the medicare program the money metric benefits to lower income groups exceed the dollar flows suggesting that medicare redistributes more than a simple accounting exercise would suggest

labor disputes and the economics of firm geography a study of domestic investment in india abstract acrimonious relations between employers and employees in developing countries have often been cited as impediments to progress this article considers various measures of labor disputes and investigates whether these have detrimental effects on the location choice of new domestic investment across the various states of india conventional wisdom holds that an increase in measures such as the number of strikes the number of man days lost in work stoppages and the percentage of unionized workers would hinder the location of new projects using panel data and a fixed effects methodology that controls for the effect of state specific unobservables we find significant evidence that this is indeed the case in india furthermore disaggregation by industrial classifications shows that although labor disputes continue to exert negative effects location choices are also conditioned on factors such as proximity to raw materials and minerals

global warming and endogenous technological change revisiting the green paradox one of the most pressing policy challenges facing the world today concerns how to mitigate global warming while improving people s well being the green paradox argues that increasing taxes on co2 emissions exacerbates global warming in the present because firms have the incentive to bring forward the extraction and sale of fossil fuels this paper shows that whenever technological progress allows the extraction costs of fossil fuels to be reduced over time and a positive r d subsidy is paid a growing tax on co2 emissions reveals a welfare maximizing policy

labor regulations and job quality evidence from india the authors examine whether measures of job quality in india s manufacturing sector differ systematically across states with varying types of labor regulation their analysis uses repeated cross sections of india s national sample survey organization nsso household survey data from 1983 to 2004 merged with data on state level regulations covering employment adjustment and dispute resolution results from a differences in differences procedure show that restrictions on employment adjustment and dispute settlement in a pro worker direction contribute to improved job quality for women along most measures such regulations yield mixed results for men however results indicate that higher wages come at the expense of fewer hours substitution toward in kind compensation and less job security the authors conclude that india s labor legislation does have a silver lining with respect to job quality but that silver lining applies selectively

the costs of wrongful discharge laws we estimate the effects on employment and wages of wrongful discharge protections adopted by u s state courts during the last three decades we find robust evidence that one wrongful discharge doctrine the implied contract exception reduced state employment rates by 0 8 to 1 7 the initial impact is largest for female and less educated workers those who change jobs frequently while the longer term effect is greater for older and more educated workers those most likely to litigate by contrast we find no robust employment or wage effects of two other widely recognized wrongful discharge laws the public policy and good faith exceptions i introduction w hat is the price of protection this paper estimates the social costs in possibly lower employment and wages of common law protections designed to protect american workers from wrongful discharge economic the ory suggests that employment protection is a double edged sword it provides employment security to incumbent work ers but makes employers reluctant to hire leading to a less flexible labor market with potentially lower employment and wages it is frequently argued that the stagnant employment performance of many european economies during the 1980s and 1990s eurosclerosis can be attributed in part to the significant employment protection given european workers see lazear 1990 and blanchard and wolfers 1999 krueger and pischke 1998 provide a contrasting view among the obstacles to testing this hypothesis is the difficulty of making reliable inferences using cross country comparisons in this paper we study the effects of employment protec tion in the united states numerous scholars have examined the effects of american federal employment laws on em ployment and unemployment acemoglu and angrist 2001 deleire 2000 and jolls and prescott 2004 present evidence that the americans with disabilities act ada decreased employment of disabled persons oyer and schaefer 2000 2002 conclude that the federal civil rights act of 1991 increased the frequency of mass layoffs and raised the returns to experience for workers who have a downward sloping age litigation profile hahn todd and van der klaauw 2001 also evaluate the costs of federal antidiscrimination laws a major hurdle for each of these studies is that these federal statutes apply all at once to the entire country this makes it difficult to separate the effects of the statute from all other changes occurring simulta neously cf donohue 1998 donohue and heckman

the role of asset testing in public health insurance reform abstract starting slowly with the 1996 welfare reform act and culminating in the 2010 affordable care act means tested public health insurance eligibility expanded to include adults in low income families regardless of their asset holdings this paper quantifies the effects of these eligibility expansions within the context of the 2010 affordable care act i construct a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with indivisible labor supply expanded to include an endogenous household choice of health insurance coverage and calibrate it to u s data i establish that changes in the distribution of labor and welfare associated with removal of asset testing are driven by exit of high productivity and high wealth households from the labor market i then expand my analysis to the 2010 affordable care act to demonstrate that removal of asset testing is critical to the obtained results even when combined with other provisions of the act finally i find that a simple asset test for eligibility of health insurance transfers undoes the distortion to the household labor supply decision among high productivity types these results are robust to the introduction of employer premium contributions an independent health insurance market and idiosyncratic shocks to eligibility for employment based health insurance

distributional impacts of carbon pricing a general equilibrium approach with micro data for households article i nfo many policies to limit greenhouse gas emissions have at their core efforts to put a price on carbon emissions carbon pricing impacts households both by raising the cost of carbon intensive products and by changing factor prices a complete analysis requires taking both effects into account the impact of carbon pricing is determined by heterogeneity in household spending patterns across income groups as well as heterogeneity in factor income patterns across income groups it is also affected by precise formulation of the policy how is the revenue from carbon pricing distributed as well as the treatment of other government policies e g the treatment of transfer payments what is often neglected in analyses of policy is the heterogeneity of impacts across households even within income or regional groups in this paper we incorporate 15 588 households from the u s consumer and expenditure survey data as individual agents in a comparative static general equilibrium framework these households are represented within the mit usrep model a detailed general equilibrium model of the u s economy in particular we categorize households by full household income factor income as well as transfer income and apply various measures of lifetime income to distinguish households that are temporarily low income e g retired households drawing down their financial assets from permanently low income households we also provide detailed within group distributional measures of burden impacts from various policy scenarios

employment effects of payroll taxes an empirical test for germany this study tests to what degree the incidence of payroll taxes in germany is on employment and whether in consequence payroll taxes in particular social insurance contributions are the culprit behind the growing unemployment problem using industry level data for 18 years 1977 1994 a system of five dynamic factor demand equations is estimated various simulations indicate that the employment effects of payroll taxes are minimal

formal but less equal gender wage gaps in formal and informal jobs in urban brazil in developing countries a large share of employees work informally and are not covered by employment protection legislation i study here how gender wage inequality differs across formal and informal jobs in brazil the raw gender wage gap is higher in informal jobs 13 compared to formal jobs 5 but i show that this difference is an artefact of different male and female selection processes first women have better observable characteristics than men and the female advantage is stronger among formal employees second men and women entering formal and informal jobs have different unobservable characteristics controlling for endogenous selection into formal vs informal jobs i find that the gender gap in wage offers is high and increases with education in formal jobs in informal jobs however estimated wage offers are the same for men and women i discuss the potential implications of these findings regarding the effect of labour market regulation on gender wage gaps

the dark side of sunshine regulatory oversight and status quo bias abstract as the mortgage foreclosure crisis accelerated in the u s in the late 2000s state level policymakers implemented measures designed to protect consumers and stem the tide of foreclosures one form of policy was simply to require lenders to report on foreclosure prevention activities such policies represented a shift from the status quo for mortgage loan servicing firms operating under incomplete information doing nothing with non paying loans while waiting for more information to be revealed to either foreclosing on the borrower or offering the borrower a modification of loan terms using a difference in difference in differences empirical strategy we exploit one policy implemented in maryland for a subset of mortgage servicers and find evidence that firms perform more loan modifications as well as file more foreclosures increasing foreclosure filings was contrary to the intent of the policy suggesting that policymakers should be aware of how firms exhibit systematic biases much like individuals

labor market effects of payroll taxes in developing countries evidence from colombia abstract we use a panel of manufacturing plants from colombia to analyze how the rise in payroll tax rates over the 1980s and 1990s affected the labor market our estimates indicate that formal wages fall by between 1 4 and 2 3 as a result of a 10 rise in payroll taxes this less than full shifting is likely to be the result of weak linkages between benefits and taxes and the presence of downward wage rigidities in colombia because the costs of taxation are only partly shifted from employers to employees employment also falls our results indicate that a 10 increase in payroll taxes lowered formal employment by between 4 and 5 in addition we find some evidence of less shifting and larger disemployment effects for production than for nonproduction workers these results suggest that policies aimed at boosting the relative demand of less skilled workers by reducing social security taxes may be effective in latin american countries where minimum wages bind and benefits are often not directly lin

a public choice view on the climate and energy policy mix in the eu how do the emissions trading scheme and support for renewable energies interact abstract in this paper we analyze the rationale for an energy policy mix when the european emissions trading scheme ets is considered from a public choice perspective that is we argue that the economic textbook model of the ets implausibly assumes 1 efficient policy design and 2 climate protection as the single objective of policy intervention contrary to these assumptions we propose that the ets originates from a political bargaining game within a context of multiple policy objectives in particular the emissions cap is negotiated between regulators and emitters with the emitters abatement costs as crucial bargaining variable this public choice view yields striking implications for an optimal policy mix comprising res supporting policies whereas the textbook model implies that the ets alone provides sufficient climate protection our analysis suggests that support for renewable energies 1 contributes to a more effective ets design and 2 may even increase the overall efficiency of climate and energy policy if other externalities and policy objectives besides climate protection are considered thus our analysis also shows that a public choice view not necessarily entails negative evaluations concerning efficiency and effectiveness of a policy mix

a review of the stern review on the economics of climate change how much and how fast should we react to the threat of global warming the stern review argues that the damages from climate change are large and that nations should undertake sharp and immediate reductions in greenhouse gas emissions an examination of the review s radical revision of the economics of climate change finds however that it depends decisively on the assumption of a near zero time discount rate combined with a specific utility function the review s unambiguous conclusions about the need for extreme immediate action will not survive the substitution of assumptions that are consistent with today s marketplace real interest rates and savings rates

who pays for obesity evidence from health insurance benefit mandates is there an obesity externality in the late 1990s and early 2000s many state governments began requiring health insurance plans to cover treatments for diabetes using difference in difference analysis of restricted geocode data from the 1979 national longitudinal survey of youth to compare wages across states with and without diabetes mandates i find that obese people pay for all of their own increased health costs in the form of lower wages rather than passing them on to employers insurers and co workers

policy equilibria in a federal system the effects of higher tax ceilings for unemployment insurance abstract in many federal systems a higher authority imposes changes that may alter lower level policies depending on the type of change and differences among lower level parties for example we model changes in the parameters of american states unemployment insurance ui systems when the federal government raises the ui tax ceiling bargaining among interested parties alters ui benefits and taxes we estimate a difference in differences model describing ui tax payments when federal increases in 1972 1978 and 1983 increased some states ceilings where the federal constraint was binding taxes rose nearly 20 percent the theory and empirical analysis suggest themselves as examples for future research on topics in public finance labor economics and international trade

tax distortions and global climate policy abstract we consider the efficiency implications of policies to reduce global carbon emissions in a world with pre existing tax distortions we first note that the weak double dividend the proposition that the welfare improvement from a tax reform where environmental taxes are used to lower distorting taxes must be greater than the welfare improvement from a reform where the environmental taxes are returned in a lump sum fashion need not hold in a world with multiple distortions we then present a large scale computable general equilibrium model of the world economy with distortionary taxation we use this model to evaluate a number of policies to reduce carbon emissions we find that the weak double dividend is not obtained in a number of european countries results also demonstrate the point that the interplay between carbon policies and pre existing taxes can differ markedly across countries thus one must be cautious in extrapolating the results from a country specific analysis to other countries

the medicaid notch labor supply and welfare participation evidence from eligibility expansions i assess the impact of losing public health insurance on labor market decisions of women by examining a series of medicaid eligibility expansions targeted toward young children these targeted expansions severed the historical tie between afdc and medicaid eligibility the reforms allowed a mother s earnings to increase without losing public health insurance for her young children increasing the income limit for medicaid resulted in a decrease in afdc participation and an increase in labor force participation among these women the effects were large for ever married women and negligible for never married women

electoral cycles in savings bank lending we provide evidence that german savings banks which are controlled by county level politicians systematically adjust lending policies in response to local electoral cycles the different timings of county elections across states and the existence of a comparable group of cooperative banks that are very similar to savings banks but lack their political connectedness allow for identification of the effects of county elections on savings bank lending these effects are economically meaningful and very robust to various specifications we find that election induced lending negatively impacts savings bank profitability and is associated with an increase in credit defaults roughly three years after an election examining the political economy aspects of our findings we provide evidence that savings bank excess lending and public spending at the county level are substitute levers for county politicians finally we find indications that subpar pre election economic county performance hurts re election prospects and increases the intensity of lending cycles

an examination of firms employment costs the existence of quasi fixed costs of work may affect firms desired employee hours and number of workers which has important implications for the estimation of labour supply parameters firm level data from the 1982 employment opportunity pilot project is used to estimate the importance to firms of employee quasi fixed costs related to searching hiring training and firing specifically this paper examines how these costs affect number of workers and hours per worker turnover and vacancies to the extent that the costs are determined by the firm s presumably exogenous industrial classification an attempt is made to control for biases due to employee heterogeneity as well results show that higher costs are associated with lower turnover fewer vacancies and longer hours as predicted by a model of labour demand

fast food consumption and the ban on advertising targeting children the quebec experience abstract amid growing concerns about childhood obesity and the associated health risks several countries are considering banning fast food advertising targeting children in this article the authors study the effect of such a ban in the canadian province of quebec using household expenditure survey data from 1984 to 1992 authors examine whether expenditure on fast food is lower in those groups affected by the ban than in those that are not the authors use a triple difference indifference methodology by appropriately defining treatment and control groups and find that the ban s effectiveness is not a result of the decrease in fast food expenditures per week but rather of the decrease in purchase propensity by 13 per week overall the authors estimate that the ban reduced fast food consumption by us 88 million per year the study suggests that advertising bans can be effective provided media markets do not overlap

the elusive wage benefit trade off the case of employer provided health insurance this study shows that standard regressions estimated to measure a trade off between wages and health insurance are misspecified by insufficiently accounting for establishment and firm size an interactive size corrected specification is more likely to reveal a trade off furthermore because insurance decisions are typically made by firms and wages set by establishments the insurance constraint on establishments in multi establishment firms weakens the trade off we use model generated data to show that both factors contribute to the failure in previous research to identify a trade off and data from a cross section of northern californian establishments to test for a trade off in multi establishment and single establishment firms

parental leave a policy evaluation of the swedish daddy month reform abstract many governments are making attempts to increase fathers share of parental leave in order to correct for unequal labor market outcomes using swedish data we ask whether fathers can be encouraged to take more parental leave in order to mitigate the negative consequences of mothers career interruptions the unique data stem from a reform of parental leave resulting in a clean natural experiment data comprise all children born before control group and after treatment group the date of implementation of the reform in cohorts of up to 27 000 newborns mothers and fathers we find strong short term effects of the incentives on male parental leave but no behavioral effects in the household fathers in the treatment group do not take larger shares of the leave taken for care of sick children which is our measure for household work we also investigate a second data set on fathers and mothers long term wages and employment without finding evidence for substantial effects of the reform

money and credit in the monetary transmission process the title of this session asks about the roles of money or credit in the transmission of monetary and real shocks our answer repeated in different forms for more than two decades is that the analysis of the transmission process is incomplete without both the money and credit markets and their interaction for many years economists ignored the role of the credit markets recently there has been some change concerns about financial fragility banking failures debt default and loan rationing focussed attention on credit markets reexamination of experience during the early 1930 s ben bernanke 1983 raises an issue about whether credit market shocks operated 1 as an independent or exogenous impulse supplementing and reinforcing the monetary decline or 2 as part of the interaction of credit money and other financial markets

do private transfers displace the benefits of public transfers evidence from south africa abstract this paper investigates whether government transfer programs displace or crowd out private support focusing on a large increase in state old age pensions in south africa using data spanning the period of the expansion we find that each rand of public pension income to the elderly leads to a 0 25 0 30 rand reduction in private transfers from children living away from home however despite the large increase in income there were no significant changes in migration labor supply or household composition we also show that evaluations of the distributional effects of the pension are overstated when crowding out is ignored

is there job lock evidence from the pre hipaa era we estimate discrete time hazard models of employment duration and standard logarithmic wage equations using the 1987 and 1990 panels of the survey of income and program participation sipp to examine the phenomenon of job lock we test for job lock using differences in differences approaches among those with and without employer provided health insurance and family members with and without health problems we find no statistically significant evidence of job lock on employment duration or wages using this approach we do find some evidence of shorter employment spells for those with employer provided health insurance and spouse provided health insurance and longer employment spells for those with employer provided health insurance and large families others have interpreted these findings as evidence of job lock however the wage equation results using these measures are not consistent with job lock although anecdotal evidence makes it clear that some workers have been locked into less than optimal jobs because of the combination of health problems and employer provided health insurance our results do not suggest that this phenomenon is pervasive in the u s economy

the credit view financial announcements and interesr rate responses abstract proponents of the credit view have argued that aggregate commercial bank lending decisions have strong macro economic effects this view is in contrast to the monetarist view that it is sufficient to consider the liability side of the banking sector s balance sheet in analyzing the economic outlook in this paper we examine whether or not financial markets reacted to unexpected changes in aggregate commercial bank lending during much of the 1980s in contrast to the implications of the credit view no evidence of a significant reaction to such shocks is uncovered however there is evidence to suggest that unexpected commercial paper activity is important to financial markets but the sign of the association is the opposite of that predicted by the credit view

the demand for hours of labor direct evidence from california california s longstanding requirement that most women receive time and a half pay for workhours beyond eight in one day was extended to men in 1980 analyzing current population survey data from 1973 1985 and 1991 we find that this overtime penalty substantially reduced the amount of daily overtime worked by california men relative to men in other states comparisons that use women to control for california specific shocks show even stronger effects the estimates imply a price elasticity of demand for overtime hours of at least 20 5

who pays the high health costs of older workers evidence from prostate cancer screening mandates between 1992 and 2009 30 us states adopted laws mandating that health insurance plans cover screenings for prostate cancer because prostate cancer screenings are used almost exclusively by men over age 50 these mandates raise the cost of insuring older men relative to other groups this article uses a triple difference empirical strategy to take advantage of this quasi random natural experiment in raising the cost of employing older workers using integrated public use microdata series data from the march supplement of the current population survey i find that the increased cost of insuring older workers results in their receiving 2 8 lower hourly wages being 2 less likely to be employed and being 0 7 less likely to have employer sponsored health insurance

assessing the effect of payroll taxes on formal employment the case of the 2012 tax reform in colombia in 2013 colombia implemented a tax reform that reduced payroll taxes by a total of 13 5 percentage points of wages this paper evaluates the effects of this component of the 2012 colombian tax reform on firms formal employment and average wages we construct a panel of firms based on their employees administrative records to account for the endogeneity of the treatment we use an instrumental variables technique that exploits the exogenous variation from the decisions of firms that are similar to each other in several dimensions but belong to different economic sectors based on our preferred specification we estimate a positive and significant increase in formal employment as a result of the implementation of the reform of approximately 213 000 jobs in existing pre reform firms in the long run these effects will increase to more than 600 000 jobs the effect of the reform on the average wages paid by firms was also found to be positive for some sizes of firms but the overall effect in the short run is rather small

the incidence of payroll taxation evidence from chile i provide new evidence on the incidence of payroll taxation by examining the experience of chile before and after the privatization of its social security system this policy change led to a sharp exogenous reduction in the payroll tax burden on chilean firms on average payroll tax rates fell by 25 over 6 years using data from a census of manufacturing firms i estimate that the incidence of payroll taxation is fully on wages with no effect on employment this finding is robust to a variety of empirical approaches to the problem of measurement error in firm level measures of taxes worker

estimating welfare in insurance markets using variation in prices we provide a graphical illustration of how standard consumer and producer theory can be used to quantify the welfare loss associated with inefficient pricing in insurance markets with selection we then show how this welfare loss can be estimated empirically using identifying variation in the price of insurance such variation together with quantity data allows us to estimate the demand for insurance the same variation together with cost data allows us to estimate how insurers costs vary as market participants endogenously respond to price the slope of this estimated cost curve provides a direct test for both the existence and the nature of selection and the combination of demand and cost curves can be used to estimate welfare we illustrate our approach by applying it to data on employerprovided health insurance from one specific company we detect adverse selection but estimate that the quantitative welfare implications associated with inefficient pricing in our particular application are small in both absolute and relative terms

the regulation of labor author s botero juan djankov simeon la porta rafael lopez de silanes florencio shleifer andrei abstract we investigate the regulation of labor markets through employment collective relations and social security laws in 85 countries we find that the political power of the left is associated with more stringent labor regulations and more generous social security systems and that socialist french and scandinavian legal origin countries have sharply higher levels of labor regulation than do common law countries however the effects of legal origins are larger and explain more of the variation in regulations than those of politics heavier regulation of labor is associated with lower labor force participation and higher unemployment especially of the young these results are most naturally consistent with legal theories according to which countries have pervasive regulaory styles inherited from the transplantation of legal systems

integrating information about the cost of carbon through activity based costing abstract environmental protection has been an issue of serious concern for many years it is not a trend but the responsibility of corporations this responsibility for environmental protection should be internalized into business operations prior to production in order to reflect the true cost of the final product due to the use of traditional cost accounting many organizations have not estimated their environmental costs precisely therefore environmental accounting systems such as carbon management accounting environmental management accounting and greenhouse gas accounting have attracted worldwide attention in this paper we propose an integrated concept the activity based costing approach to solve the problem of environmental and cost evaluation we include a case study of an existing pulp and paper company in taiwan to show that the activity based costing method estimates emissions of waste and the environmental costs of a final product more accurately than traditional approaches do the method can therefore provide information for use in existing environmental accounting systems and help managers incorporate environmental costs into their decision making processes

the un framework on business and human rights a workers rights critique the protect respect remedy framework along with the un guiding principles on business and human rights is the current global standard regarding corporate conduct this article analyses the un framework from the vantage point of labour rights in india by looking at the garment supply chain it argues that it can do little to induce states and businesses to bring substantive improvements to working conditions in a largely informal economy like india without the state performing its duty to protect human rights the secondary responsibility of corporations can do very little in realising the rights of workers nonetheless its tallest contribution is that it has given a platform for civil society to push for better conduct from all businesses and marks the beginning of a unified international business and human rights agenda

the craft of labormetrics using a wide array of examples from the literature and from original estimates the author examines the pitfalls that make good empirical research in labor economics at least as much craft as statistical technique among the subjects discussed are the appropriateness and cleanliness of data problems of extreme observations the validity of attempts to produce exogeneity using instrumental variables natural experiments and structural models and the treatment of selectivity and unobservable individual effects the author stresses the importance of testing empirical results to ensure that they make sense and of presenting them clearly and economically

growth renewables and the optimal carbon tax optimal climate policy is investigated in a ramsey growth model of the global economy with exhaustible oil reserves an infinitely elastic supply of renewables stock dependent oil extraction costs and convex climate damages four regimes can occur depending on the initial social cost of oil being larger or smaller than that of renewables and depending on the initial oil stock being large or small we also offer some policy simulations for the first and second regime which illustrate that with a lower discount rate more oil is left in situ and renewables are phased in more quickly we identify the conditions under which the optimal carbon tax rises or decreases subsidizing renewables without a carbon tax induces more oil to be left in situ and a quicker phasing in of renewables but oil is depleted more rapidly initially the net effect on global warming is ambiguous abstract from author

the effects of expanding the generosity of the statutory sickness insurance system summary this article evaluates an expansion of employer mandated sick leave from 80 to 100 of forgone gross wages in germany we employ and compare parametric difference in difference did matching did and mixed approaches overall workplace absences increased by at least 10 or 1 day per worker per year we show that taking partial compliance into account increases coefficient estimates further heterogeneity in response behavior was of great importance there is no evidence that the increase in sick leave improved employee health a finding that supports a shirking explanation finally we provide evidence on potential labor market adjustments to the reform copyright 2013 john wiley sons ltd

health insurance market reform and employee compensation the case of pure community rating in new york abstract pure community rating which was enacted to improve access to health insurance in new york s small group market in 1993 prevents carriers from charging different premiums based on the ages of a firm s workers if small firms were adjusting compensation packages prior to reform to offset higher health care costs of older workers then community rating could lead to greater relative wages for older workers post reform and not necessarily induce adverse selection that results in changes in who is insured i present evidence showing that relative wages of older workers in small firms increased in comparison with other states and with large firms within new york following reform