estimates of the returns to quality and coauthorship in economic academia salaries of academic economists are studied to determine if individuals receive differential returns to publishing articles of varying quality and to coauthored versus single authored articles estimates based on detailed data and a flexible nonlinear least squares procedure indicate that substantial returns to quality exist and that an individual s return from a coauthored paper with n authors is approximately 1 n times that of a single authored paper

formulating research policy on expert advice abstract national research assessments represent the principal policy used by countries with public university systems to improve the quality of their universities research they typically employ expert panels of local academics to assess journal quality and use such assessments to reward publications we propose a model of how experts assess quality and test this model using data from the recent australian assessment controlling for objective quality we show that experts cognitive biases dominate their assessments consequently such assessments exaggerate the quality of the experts research and understate that of their colleagues our model can explain 95 of the variation in assessments

marriage market divorce legislation and household labor supply this paper provides a theoretical framework for analyzing the impact of the marriage market and divorce legislation on household labor supply in our approach the sex ratio in the marriage market and the rules governing divorce are examples of distribution factors these factors are defined as variables that affect the household members bargaining position but not preferences or the joint budget set we extend the collective labor supply model developed by chiappori to allow for distribution factors we show that our model imposes new restrictions on the labor supply functions and eases the identification of individual preferences and the intrahousehold decision process the model is estimated using psid data for the year 1988 our results do not reject the restrictions imposed by the model also the sex ratio and divorce laws deemed favorable to women are found to affect labor supply behavior and the decision process in the directions predicted by the theory and to have sizable effects

aging and productivity among economists economists productivity over their careers and as measured by publication in leading journals declines very sharply with age there is no difference by age in the probability that an article submitted to a leading journal will be accepted rates of declining productivity are no greater among the very top publishers than among others and the probability of acceptance is increasingly related to the author s quality rather than the author s age

rational household labor supply traditionally household behavior is derived from the maximization of a unique utility function in this paper we propose an alternative approach in which the household is modeled as a two member collectivity taking pareto efficient decisions the consequences of this assumption are analyzed in a three good model in which only total consumption and each member s labor supply are observable if the agents are assumed egoistic i e they are only concerned with their own leisure and consumption it is possible to derive falsifiable conditions upon household labor supplies from both a parametric and nonparametric viewpoint if alternatively agents are altruistic restrictions obtain in the nonparametric context useful interpretation stems from the comparison with the characterization of aggregate demand for a private good economy

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

compensating wage differentials in stable job matching equilibrium abstract this paper studies implicit pricing of non wage job characteristics in the labor market using a two sided matching model it departs from the previous literature by allowing worker heterogeneity in productivity which gives rise to a double transaction problem in a hedonic model deriving sufficient conditions under which assortative matching is the unique stable job worker matching we show that observed wage differentials between jobs reflect not only compensating wage differentials but also worker productivity gaps between the jobs we find that the job worker matching pattern determines the extent to which compensating wage differentials are confounded with the worker productivity gap effect

how do sex ratios affect marriage and labor markets evidence from america s second generation sex ratios i e relative numbers of men and women can affect marriage prospects labor force participation and other social and economic variables but the observed association between sex ratios and social and economic conditions may be confounded by omitted variables and reverse causality this paper uses variation in immigrant flows as a natural experiment to study the effect of sex ratios on the children and grandchildren of immigrants the flow of immigrants affected the second generation marriage market because second generation marriages were mostly endogamous i e to members of the same ethnic group the empirical results suggest that high sex ratios had a large positive effect on the likelihood of female marriage and a large negative effect on female labor force participation perhaps surprisingly the marriage rates of second generation men appear to be a slightly increasing function of immigrant sex ratios higher sex ratios also appear to have raised male earnings and the incomes of parents with young children the empirical results are broadly consistent with theories where higher sex ratios increase female bargaining power in the marriage market

a revisionist perspective of european research in economics abstract the study by kalaitzidakis et al eur econom rev 113 1999a 1150 1168 hereafter kms continues to exert significant influence on the literature that evaluates the relative publication performance of european centres of research in economics the current paper argues that the methodology employed by kms is deficient and that it is not the methodology these authors intended to employ i utilise an improved approach to revise the original rankings that relied on publication output from 1991 to 1996 and to update the relevant findings using 1997 2002 data the revised rankings differ greatly from those reported by kms the results also suggest that there have been dramatic shifts in the relative ranking of the various european institutions over time as expected rankings are sensitive to the choice of journals considered however ranking sensitivity is considerably more pronounced with respect to changes in individual performance over time than to the group of journals used to measure performance

competitive search equilibrium in this paper i construct an equilibrium for markets with frictions which is competitive in the sense that all agents are price takers and maximize utility subject to a set of market parameters i show that the equilibrium allocation is socially optimal i also show how the competitive search equilibrium can be achieved if employers with vacancies can advertise publicly the wages they pay

international coordination in the design of macroeconomic policy rules abstract the paper examines international issues that arise in the design and evaluation of macroeconomic policy rules it begins with a theoretical investigation of the effects of fiscal and monetary policy in a two country rational expectations model with staggered wage and price setting and with perfect capital mobility the results indicate that with the appropriate choice of policies and with flexible exchange rates demand shocks need not give rise to international externalities or coordination issues price shocks however do create an externality and this is the focus of the empirical part of the paper using a simple seven country model consisting of canada france germany italy japan the united kingdom and the united states optimal cooperative and non cooperative nash policy rules to minimize the variance of output and inflation in each country are calculated the cooperative policies are computed using standard dynamic stochastic programming techniques and the non cooperative policies are computed using an algorithm developed by finn kydland the central result is that the cooperative policy rules for these countries are more accommodative to inflation than the non cooperative policy rules

a theory of participation in elections we analyze a model of participation in elections in which voting is costly and no vote is pivotal ethical agents are motivated to participate when they determine that agents of their type are obligated to do so unlike previous duty based models of participation in our model an ethical agent s obligation to vote is determined endogenously as a function of the behavior of other agents our model predicts high turnout and comparative statics that are consistent with strategic behavior jel d72

unemployment and the business cycle in a small open economy g m m estimation and testing with french data abstract what is a relevant model for the european business cycle in this paper the empirical performances of three models are compared a canonical walrasian r b c framework its extension to the case of a small open economy and a version of this model with search and wage bargaining on the labor market structural parameters of the models are estimated using g m m and their abilities to reproduce the french business cycle taken as representative of the european business cycle are tested only the small open economy with unemployment is able to generate theoretical moments that match their empirical counterparts

women on welfare a macroeconomic analysis look at the dramatic change in family structure that has occurred recently illustrated in figure 1 in the united states 23 percent of children lived with an unwed mother in 1998 compared with only 8 percent in 1960 1 of this 15 percentage point increase about 6 percentage points are due to a rise in the rate of divorce the remaining 9 percentage points arise from an increase in out of wedlock births why care about this change in the structure of families the lot of children living with a single mother is bleak about 70 percent of those children in a family with a never married mother were living near or below the poverty level in 1995 the corresponding figure for children being raised by a divorced mother was 45 percent associated with the increase in number of single mothers has been a rise in the percentage of the population on welfare in 1960 only 1 7 percent of the population was on afdc aid to families with dependent children while in 1995 about 5 2 percent were most mothers who received afdc were single 71 percent were in 1993 also afdc mothers tended to have more children 2 6 on average vs 2 1 for the population as a whole in 1993 it is interesting to note that there is evidence suggesting that more entrances into and exits out of welfare are connected with a shift in family structure rather than with a change in employment status for instance of the first time entrances into welfare during 1983 1991 about 21 percent were associated with an out of wedlock birth 23 percent were connected with a divorce or separation and 21 percent were linked with a reduction in the mother s work hours last real afdc benefits rose by about 70 percent between 1945 and 1977 they were about 25 percent higher in 1995 than in 1945 could this have contributed to the rise in single motherhood the task here is to outline a general equilibrium model in which at any point in time some individuals will marry others will divorce and yet others will choose to have out of wedlock births while the model is still prototypical in nature it will be shown how such a framework can be used to address public policy questions in particular the impact of welfare on family structure and the well being of the economy

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

fertility shocks and equilibrium marriage rate dynamics why did the marriage probability of single females in france after world war 1 rise 50 above its pre war average despite a 33 drop in the male female singles ratio we conjecture that war time disruption of the marriage market generated an abnormal abundance of men with relatively high marriage propensities our model of matching over the lifecycle when calibrated to pre war data and two war time shocks succeeds in matching the french time path under the additional assumption of a pro natalist post war preference shock we conclude that endogeneity issues make the sex ratio a potentially unreliable indicator of female marriage prospects

an updated ranking of academic journals in economics we conduct an update of the ranking of economic journals by kalaitzidakis mamuneas and stengos 2003 however our present study differs methodologically from that earlier study in an important dimension we use a rolling window of years between 2003 and 2008 for each year counting the number of citations of articles published in the previous ten years this allows us to obtain a smoother longer view of the evolution of rankings in the period under consideration and avoid the inherent randomness that may exist at any particular year using this framework we proceed to examine the relative ranking of the canadian journal of economics over time we find the canadian journal managed not only to maintain its relative position but to also improve it over time

the baby boom and baby bust what caused the baby boom and can it be explained within the context of the secular decline in fertility that has occurred over the last 200 years the hypothesis is that a the secular decline in fertility is due to the relentless rise in real wages that increased the opportunity cost of having children b the baby boom is explained by an atypical burst of technological progress in the household sector that occurred in the middle of the last century this lowered the cost of having children a model is developed in an attempt to account quantitatively for both the baby boom and bust

grading journals in economics the abcs of the abdc many institutions and governments grade academic journals for the evaluation of research in this paper we implement a multi bibliometric methodology for the evaluation of such a list of journal grades we examine the grades assigned by the australian business deans council abdc for over 750 journals in the fields of economics and statistics firstly we generate up to 48 bibliometric based grades for each journal based on the grade distribution implied by the abdc secondly we categorize the bibliometrics employing a cluster analysis of an interrater agreement statistic thirdly we present a visualization of the consistency of the grading by journal finally we list those journals where the majority of the matched bibliometrics indicate a higher or lower grade than their abdc grade

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

cohabitation marriage and divorce in a model of match quality the objective of this research is to further our understanding of how and why individuals enter and leave coresidential relationships we develop and estimate an economic model of nonmarital cohabitation marriage and divorce that is consistent with current data on the formation and dissolution of relationships jovanovic s journal of political economy 87 1979 972 90 theoretical matching model is extended to help explain household formation and dissolution behavior implications of the model reveal what factors influence the decision to start a relationship what form this relationship will take and the relative stability of the various types of unions the structural parameters of the model are estimated using longitudinal data from a sample of female high school seniors from the united states new numerical methods are developed to reduce computational costs associated with estimation the empirical results have interesting interpretations given the structural model they show that a significant cause of cohabitation is the need to learn about potential partners and to hedge against future bad shocks the estimated parameters are used to conduct several comparative dynamic experiments for example we show that policy experiments changing the cost of divorce have little effect on relationship choices

can t buy me love a field experiment exploring the trade off between income and caste status in an indian matrimonial market i introduction the relationship between economic motive and observance of discriminatory social customs is hardly new to economists this is implicit in the writings of becker 1957 1973 1974 on discrimination and other social customs and explicit in arrow s essay 1972 on discrimination and akerlof s work 1980 on the interactive relationship between economic incentives and discriminatory social customs as scholars like becker arrow and akerlof have investigated the relationship between economic incentives and the prevalence of custom based discrimination of which status based discrimination is an example it is natural to consult the related empirical evidence on the impact of economic incentives on the extent of status based discrimination surprisingly the extant empirical literature is mostly silent on how economic incentives may directly interact with status based discrimination 1 this is atypical as one would be hard pressed to find an issue as weighty as status based discrimination yet our knowledge in this aspect remains oddly limited our study aspires to rectify this gap this study investigates whether and what magnitude of economic incentive can diminish the incidence of status based discrimination by designing a controlled field experiment in an actual marketplace a reputable arranged marriage market that is conducted via newspaper advertisements the existing literature suggests that this market might be especially prone to strong discriminatory mate selection behavior based on the social identity status of an individual where caste identity of an individual is an easily measured indicator of social status the genesis of this discrimination can be attributed to a high status female s concern for a decline in her social status if she engages in a marital relationship with a low status male against this backdrop we ask whether a low status male could attempt to weaken this enduring form of discrimination by providing systematic economic incentive in the form of high monthly groom incomes to a high status female so that the former s marriage proposal receives preliminary consideration by the latter conditional on both individuals participation in this market the marketplace that we utilize is a well functioning arranged marriage market conducted via matrimonial advertisements in a widely circulated bengali language newspaper marriageable males in this market typically advertise their caste and income information among other attributes after these advertisements appear in the newspaper interested families contact the advertiser mostly in form of detailed letters expressing their interest in that advertisement this provides a confidential and reliable measure of first intent of the interested party in this case females therefore the conjunction of an exceptionally strong status based mate selection behavior a reputed market for arranged marriages and an exclusive correspondence process furnish us with a unique opportunity to investigate the main research hypothesis of our study to the best of our knowledge this is the first field experiment that exclusively focuses on how economic incentives can influence status based discrimination in an actual market 2 to operationalize the experiment we create nine unique matrimonial advertisements each representing a fictitious groom type 3 these potential grooms belong to one of the three blocks where each block contains three grooms from a given caste group we vary the caste status across these blocks we consider three different caste groups high middle and low strictly ranked so in the study region we vary the income features of grooms within a block we consider three different monthly income levels i e high medium and low that are considered feasible for each caste group in the study region furthermore we randomly assign other characteristics relevant for this market to all the potential grooms so that these features on average do not affect the behavior of responders

household consumption when the marriage is stable we develop a novel framework to analyze the structural implications of the marriage market for household consumption we de ne a revealed preference characterization of e cient household consumption when the marriage is stable stability means that the marriage matching is individually rational and has no blocking pairs we characterize stable marriage with intrahousehold consumption transfers but without assuming transferable utility we show that our revealed preference characterization generates testable conditions even with a single consumption observation per household and heterogeneous individual preferences across households the characterization also allows for identifying the intrahousehold decision structure including the sharing rule under the same minimalistic assumptions an application to dutch household data demonstrates the usefulness of our theoretical results we nd that the female gets a higher income share when her relative wage increases which we can give a structural interpretation in terms of outside options from marriage that vary with individual wages

reputation and earnings the roles of quality and quantity in academe we examine the determinants of professional reputation does quantity of exposures raise reputation independent of quality does quality of the most important exposure have extra effects on reputation in a very large sample of academic economists there is little evidence that a scholar s most influential work provides any extra enhancement of reputation quality rankings matter more than absolute quality quantity has a zero or even negative effect on proxies for reputation data on salaries however show positive effects of quantity independent of quality we test explanations for the differences between the determinants of reputation and salary jel l14 j31

match quality new information and marital dissolution this article investigates the role of surprises in marital dissolution surprises consists of changes in the predicted earning capacity of either spouse data from the national longitudinal study of the high school class of 1972 is used we find that an unexpected increase in the husband s earning capacity reduces the divorce hazard while an unexpected increase in the wife s earning capacity raises the divorce hazard couples sort into marriage according to characteristics that are likely to enhance the stability of the marriage the divorce hazard is initially increasing with the duration of marriage and the presence of children and high levels of property stabilizes the marriage

the dynamics of marriage and divorce we formulate and estimate a dynamic model of marriage divorce and remarriage using panel data on two cohorts of danish men and women the marital surplus is identified from the probability of divorce and the surplus shares of husbands and wives from their willingness to enter marriage we find that the educations of husbands and wives are complements education raises the share of the marital surplus for men but not for women as men and women get older husbands receive a larger share of the marital surplus the estimated costs of divorce are high both early and late in marriage

the relative impacts of economics journals 1970 1990 our data collection and database assembly efforts were assisted by john p sophocleus mark gwartney michele butler and scott ralston we received extremely valuable computer programming assistance from jon brunson and edward novak constructive comments were receivedfrom two anonymous reviewers financial supportfrom the faculty development committee at salisbury state university is gratefully acknowledged

perfect competition in the continuous assignment model abstract this paper provides a rigorous formalization in the context of the transferable utility assignment model of perfect competition as the inability of individuals to favorably influence prices the central tool for the analysis is the social gains function the central issue is differentiability of the gains function with respect to the population seven conditions are shown to be equivalent to perfect competition perfect competition and imperfect competition are possible for both finite and continuum assignment economies but most finite economies are imperfectly competitive while most continuum economies are perfectly competitive however most large finite assignment economies are approximately perfectly competitive journal of economic literature classification numbers c61 c62 c78

marriage and divorce changes and their driving forces the family is not a static institution in recent decades marriage rates have fallen divorce rates have risen and the defining characteristics of marriage have changed the economic approach to the family seeks to explain these trends by reference to models that can also explain how and why families form gary becker s 1981 treatise on the family proposed a theory based on production complementarities in which husband and wife specialize in the market and domestic spheres respectively production complementarities also arise in the production and rearing of one s own children however production complementarities at least as initially described are decreasingly central to modern family life increased longevity and declining fertility mean that most of one s adult life is spent without one s own children in the household also the rise in marital formation at older ages including remarriage means that many families form with no intention of producing children moreover increases in female labor force participation suggest that household specialization has either declined or at least taken on a different meaning these changes have come about as what is produced in the home has been dramatically altered both by the emergence of labor saving technology in the home and by the development of service industries that allow much of what was once provided by specialized homemakers to be purchased in the market the availabil

who marries whom and why this paper proposes and estimates a static transferable utility model of the marriage market the model generates a nonparametric marriage matching function with spillover effects it rationalizes the standard interpretation of marriage rate regressions and points out its limitations the model was used to estimate u s marital behavior in 1971 72 and 1981 82 the marriage matching function estimates show that the gains to marriage for young adults fell substantially over the decade unlike contradictory marriage rate regression results the marriage matching function estimates showed that the legalization of abortion had a significant quantitative impact on the fall in the gains to marriage for young men and women

comparing the global performance of alternative exchange arrangements abstract this paper presents and applies a methodology useful for studying the operating characteristics of a number of alternative monetary arrangements using a large scale simulation model of the world economy we consider the performance of the regimes when policymakers do or do not observe the shocks and when policymakers infer the shocks using an optimal filtering rule although the results are model specific and at best illustrative of the issues involved the approach does have the advantage of providing a richer framework of analysis than is possible in simple models of international interdependence

a matching model with endogenous skill requirements we consider a labor market in which workers differ in their abilities and jobs differ in their skill requirements the distribution of worker abilities is exogenous but we model the choice of skill requirements by firms high skill jobs produce more output than low skill jobs but high skill jobs require high skill workers and thus are more difficult to fill we use a matching model together with a nash bargaining approach to wage setting to determine the equilibrium mix of job types along with the equilibrium relationship between worker and job characteristics wages and unemployment

collective labor supply and welfare the paper develops a general collective model of household labor supply in which agents are characterized by their own possibly altruistic preferences and household decisions are only assumed to be pareto efficient an alternative interpretation is that there are two stages in the internal decision process agents first share nonlabor income according to some given sharing rule then each one optimally chooses his or her own labor supply and consumption this setting is shown to generate testable restrictions on labor supplies moreover the observation of labor supply behavior is sufficient for recovering individual preferences and the sharing rule up to a constant finally the traditional tools of welfare analysis can be adapted to the new setting

overcoming incentive constraints by linking decisions consider a bayesian collective decision problem in which the preferences of agents are private information we provide a general demonstration that the utility costs associated with incentive constraints become negligible when the decision problem is linked with a large number of independent copies of itself this is established by defining a mechanism in which agents must budget their representations of preferences so that the frequency of preferences across problems mirrors the underlying distribution of preferences and then arguing that agents incentives are to satisfy their budget by being as truthful as possible we also show that all equilibria of the linking mechanisms converge to the target utility levels the mechanisms do not require transferable utility or interpersonal comparisons of utility and are immune to manipulations by coalitions

specifying a structural matching game of trading networks with transferable utility structural estimation of matching games with transferable utility including matching games of trading networks and many to many matching is increasingly popular in empirical work i explore several modeling decisions that need to be made when specifying a structural model for a matching game one decision is the choice of a game theoretic solution concept to impose in the structural model i discuss pairwise stability competitive equilibrium and noncooperative games such as auctions another decision is whether to work with a continuum of agents or a finite number of agents i explore other issues as well

excess worker reallocation workers face a trade off between macroeconomic and individual incentives to work in different occupations industries namely between search frictions and personal comparative advantages workers endowed with heterogeneous multi dimensional skills search for jobs that require different skill combinations in equilibrium specialized individuals contact few selected types of vacancies where they are likely to be hired those with weak comparative advantages are seldom chosen among competing applicants thus seek any job type in a tight labour market comparative advantages dominate waiting costs offsetting labour mobility across industries occupations excess worker reallocation is lower and matches are more successful consistently with direct and indirect evidence

specification of policy rules and performance measures in multicountry simulation studies abstract much recent analysis of international monetary and fiscal policy issues has been conducted by stochastic simulations with multicountry econometric models in these studies it has become standard practice to consider alternative policy rules of a form that calls for departures of a policy instrument from some baseline reference path that are proportional to deviations of a specified target variable from its own baseline path the present paper argues that this standard rule form is seriously defective for such issues because th eimplied rules often fail to be operational and have associated performance measures that can be misleading in important cases jel c50 f30

the assignment of workers to jobs in an economy with coordination frictions this paper studies the assignment of heterogeneous workers to heterogeneous jobs owing to the anonymity of a large labor market workers use mixed strategies when applying for jobs this randomness generates coordination frictions two workers may apply for a particular job whereas an identical job gets no applications the model generates assortative matching with a positive but imperfect correlation between matched workers and firms types it predicts that a worker s wage is increasing in her job s productivity and a firm s profit is increasing in its employees productivity the model also yields a version of the welfare theorems

long term partnership formation marriage and employment of course marriage and employment are different nevertheless a worker looking for a job a rm looking for worker or a single person looking for a marriage partner face similar problems as all are seeking a long term partner indeed forming long term partnerships is a common occurrence in life there are many other examples business people search for other business people to form a pro table relationship bridge players seek to nd a suitable partners students search for a good university we would all like to nd a good friend etc the problem becomes signi cant if there are substantial differences in the return obtained from forming a partnership with different partners for example employers differ in the wages they offer or in the work environment they provide in such a situation a worker may reject some job offers similarly as many have learned to their cost some make better marriage partners than others the problem is two sided while a worker is evaluating a potential employer the employer is also evaluating the worker it is this two sided aspect of the problem that generates a signi cant interest a worker s willingness to accept employment at a rm depends not only on the characteristics of the rm but also the other possible options open to the worker the better an individual s opportunities elsewhere the more selective he or she will be in evaluating a potential partnership an academic who believes harvard may make an offer in the near future will be more selective in evaluating offers from lesser universities in this way expectations play a role if a single man believes that few if any women will nd him an acceptable marriage partner then he may accept the rst opportunity that presents itself partnership formation typically does not comply with a classic market situation where all participants know everything and all trades take place at zero cost finding a job nding a husband or wife or nding a business partner is a time consuming activity where opportunities typically arrive over time at uncertain intervals of time of course we can act in ways that in uence the arrival rate of potential partner workers go to employment agencies or read help wanted advertisements in newspapers singles of a certain age go to discos or join tennis clubs the literature on search and matching sm see mortensen 1982 and pissarides 1990 for early examples 1 provides an excellent framework for the economic journal 109 june f307 f334 royal economic society 1999 published by blackwell publishers 108 cowley road oxford ox4 1jf uk and 350 main street malden ma 02148 usa

exchange rate management and macroeconomic policy a national perspective this paper reviews the literature on alternative exchange rate arrangements for a small economy it discusses exchange rate management for short run stabilization purposes and the choice of exchange rate regimes to foster policy discipline recent research has emphasized that the appropriate degree of exchange rate flexibility depends on the nature of disturbances exchange rate movements provide information about shocks and can serve as a basis for intervention rules empirically operational guidelines have not yet been provided floating rates are said to be desirable because they allow policy makers greater autonomy recent research has questioned the implicit assumption that autonomy is always useful rules that prevent discretionary policy may be preferable what role if any the exchange rate should play in such rules has not yet been resolved

moral bias in large elections theory and experimental evidence in this article we provide evidence that voters in large elections tend to vote against their material self interest and to vote for a morally or ethically appealing alternative it may seem puzzling that voters might behave differently in small elections than they do in large ones however we show that such behavior is a logical consequence of voters having a conflict between obtaining a better material outcome and choosing a moral action we develop a simple model of this conflict and show that decreasing the probability that a single vote is decisive i e pivot probability reduces the importance of outcomes relative to actions in voter decision making because pivot probability is generally small in large elections alternatives that are understood by voters to be morally superior are more likely to win in large elections than in small ones thus compared to the preferences of voters election results will be biased in favor of moral alternatives 1 the model produces a set of predictions that we test in a laboratory experiment to clarify ideas consider a situation in which two outcomes are possible a and b assume that b gives

cross border marriage costs and marriage behavior theory and evidence this article analyzes cross border marriages between mainland china and hong kong hk we examine the effects of a reduction in cross border marriage costs following an increase in marriage migration quotas and the handover of hk to china we find that cross border marriages mainly involve men from the low tail of the hk attribute distribution we also find that hk women s position in the marriage market and within households deteriorated following the reduction in cross border marriage costs and that their disadvantaged position exerts an incentive effect on their labor market behavior these outcomes are consistent with our matching model

differntial fecundity markets and gender roles women are fecund for a shorter period of their lives than men this paper investigates how differential fecundity interacts with marriage labor and financial markets to affect gender roles the main findings of the paper are as follows i fecund women are relatively scarce men will behave differently than women in response to this scarcity in the most fundamental way demand and supply conditions in the marriage market affect gender roles ii differential fecundity does not have any market invariant gender effect gender roles depend on the way in which marriage labor and financial markets interact iii gender differences in the labor market can occur without corresponding differences in labor market opportunities productivities in child rearing or social norms iv with uncertainty in human capital accumulation and no insurance against this uncertainty the model s predictions are consistent with observed gender roles

directed search on the job heterogeneity and aggregate fluctuations we study a labor market where workers search for jobs both on the job and off the job in the model there are aggregate productivity shocks and match specific shocks we outline the proof of existence of an equilibrium which we call a block recursive equilibrium bre in which individuals decisions and market tightness are independent of the distribution of workers over wages or contracts a critical assumption that is responsible for a bre to exist is that search is directed by firms posting of contracts we explain why a bre does exist under the assumption of directed search and why it does not under the assumption of random search finally we generalize the proof of existence of a bre to allow workers to be ex ante heterogeneous with respect to some observable characteristics such as education and skill this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

dynamic marriage matching an empirical framework the paper proposes a dynamic version of the frictionless becker shapley shubik marriage matching model with transferable utility its primary objective is to develop a tractable model that rationalizes the marriage distribution of who marries whom by age this behavioral dynamic model rationalizes a new marriage matching function an empirical methodology that relies on the equilibrium outcomes of the model identies the marital preferences over spouses this framework also allows the inverse problem of computing the vector of aggregate marriages given a new distribution of available single individuals and estimated preferences to be solved the solution to this inverse problem has been shown to exist under mild conditions this paper also develops a simple test of the model s empirical validity using aggregate data of new marriages and available single men and women in the us in 1970 1980 and 1990 i investigate the changes in the gains to marriage over this period

on the state of the union an overlapping generations model of marriage and divorce is constructed to analyze family structure and intergenerational mobility agents differ by sex marital status and human capital single agents meet in a marriage market and decide whether to accept or reject proposals to wed married couples must decide whether to separate or not parents invest in their children depending on their wherewithal a simulated version of the theoretical prototype can generate an equilibrium with a significant number of female headed families and a high degree of persistence in income across generations to illustrate the model s mechanics the effects of two antipoverty policies namely child support and welfare are investigated

the determinants of equilibrium unemployment the paper takes the search and matching model of the aggregate labor market to the data it tests the model s empirical validity and employs structural estimation to generate a characterization of the optimal behavior of firms and workers the model is applied to israeli data that are uniquely suited for this kind of empirical investigation the structural estimates are used to quantify the frictions embodied in the model including the costs of search the congestion and trading externality effects and the matching process a calibration simulation analysis then studies the effect of several key variables on equilibrium unemployment

the international transmission of economic shocks in a three country world under mixed exchange rates the international transmission of economic disturbances is analysed in a three country world where two countries have no macroeconomic impact on a third country but are large enough to influence each other under a system of mixed exchange rates a system that combines the fixed exchange rates fers among two ec member countries germany and france and the flexible exchange rates flers towards a third country the rest of the world usa we find that a positive output demand shock originating in germany or france has a positive effect on domestic output but due to a special third country effect is likely to produce a contractionary impact on foreign output negative transmission while the total effect on the world economy is expansionary money supply shocks in either germany or france have identical effects on the output of the two countries the fler component of the mer regime serves as an important tool for dampening the impact of us shocks on the output of the ec

solving for optimal simple rules in rational expectations models this paper presents algorithms that solve for optimal simple monetary policy rules in rational expectations models with precommitment and discretion the algorithms are applied to the models in fuhrer j money credit banking 29 1997 214 clarida et al j econ lit 37 1999 1661 and rudebusch econ j 112 2002 402 to examine the efficiency properties of operational policy rules we show that optimized taylor type rules preform well in these models but that aside from the fuhrer moore model this result is sensitive to whether the central bank can respond to current period shocks taylor type rules that are operational in the sense that they do not respond to current period information are found to be highly inefficient in the rudebusch model and in the clarida et al 1999 model

the journals of economics we examine the principal journals of economics with particular attention to the communication between journals as reflected by the network of interjournal citations during 1987 90 and the changes over the past century in the characteristics of the authors and the techniques they have used the numerical results and those of the statistical modeling of these results reinforce the importance of economic theory as an exporter of intellectual influence to applied economics the study includes an examination of the degree of specialization among different subfields of economics a statistical model is presented for measuring the flow of intellectual influence as measured by citations in terms of simple univariate scores

an empirical model of the medical match abstract this paper develops a framework for estimating preferences in a many to one matching market using only observed matches i use pairwise stability and a vertical preference restriction on one side to identify preferences on both sides of the market counterfactual simulations are used to analyze the antitrust allegation that the centralized medical residency match is responsible for salary depression due to residents willingness to pay for desirable programs and capacity constraints salaries in any competitive equilibrium would remain on average at least 23 000 below the marginal product of labor therefore the match is not the likely cause of low salaries jel c78 i11 j31 j44 k21 l44