cleaner energy for sustainable future this special issue of the journal of cleaner production focuses on energy for sustainable future it is designed to mirror the increasing relevance of renewable energy sources and improved efficiency as crucial topics for practitioners in industry for governmental policy makers as well as for civic service providers researchers and educators the purpose of this special issue is to serve as a catalyst for dialogue the global warming related to co2 emissions coupled with steeply rising energy prices and the recent global financial institutional melt down are causing massive societal concerns and give rise to increasing demand for ways to improve societal and individual energy efficiency and for ways to shift increasingly to alternative low or non carbon based energy systems until recently industrial energy efficiency improvements have focused on improvements on efficiency rather than on the integration of renewable sources the aim of this special issue is the identification of policies to support the development and implementation of technologies and management approaches we can employ to make the transition to more sustainable societies the collection of papers in this special issue provide a foundation for students researchers scholars practitioners and policy makers interested in making sustainable development more than a metaphor the papers include focus upon ways for a improving industrial process to achieve improvements in energy efficiency b minimising waste disposals and reducing their impact through better management c reducing co2 emissions by making progress toward lower carbon renewable energy based systems d improving production of biofuels and hydrogen production systems facilitated by employing cleaner production and novel lca tools e improving integration of advanced materials and energy efficient equipment in different industrial sectors current and future developments in national and world economies are closely connected to sustainable efficient and safe usage of raw materials and upon energy based on cleaner production concepts and approaches that are ecologically and economically appropriate for the short and for the long term future of society these challenges have received considerable attention in the media and scientific journals over the last several years the idea of developing a specialised conference focussed upon them was put forward on various occasions focus upon them became reality on the 5th and 6th may 2008 in the historic castle of veszprem hungary the current premises of the hungarian academy of science which hosted the workshop the workshop was a stimulating event and an overwhelming success with nearly 100 contributors from africa north america asia and europe representing 28 countries after a comprehensive selection and thorough reviewing procedure 11 papers were selected for this special issue

learning and wage dynamics we develop a dynamic model of learning about worker ability in a competitive labor market the model produces three testable implications regarding wage dynamics 1 although the role of schooling in the labor market s inference process declines as performance observations accumulate the estimated effect of schooling on the level of wages is independent of labor market experience 2 timeinvariant variables correlated with ability but unobserved by employers such as certain test scores are increasingly correlated with wages as experience increases and 3 wage residuals are a martingale we present evidence from the nlsy that is broadly consistent with the model s predictions

the effects of differential mortality rates on the progressivity of social security does the old age and survivors insurance portion of social security become regressive once we allow for the shorter lifespan of poor people this paper compares the net returns of poor households to the net returns of other households after taking into account differential longevity earnings and social security tax and benefit histories are simulated for u s families of various income levels in the 1925 birth cohort these tax and benefit profiles are then weighted by the agents probabilities of survival for some plausible values of key mortality parameters differences in mortality eliminate the progressive spread in returns across income categories excerpt

wealth accumulation over the life cycle and precautionary savings this article constructs and simulates a life cycle model of wealth accumulation and estimates the parameters of the utility function the rate of time preference and the coefficient of risk aversion by matching the simulated median wealth profiles with those observed in the panel study of income dynamics and in the survey of consumer finances the estimates imply a low degree of patience and a high degree of risk aversion the results are used to study the importance of precautionary savings in explaining wealth accumulation they imply that wealth accumulation is driven mostly by precautionary motives at the beginning of the life cycle whereas savings for retirement purposes become significant only closer to retirement

management practices across cultures role of support in technology usage as global corporations pursue a dual strategy of global integration and local responsiveness it becomes necessary to determine whether some management practices can be applied across borders using a sample of 143 employees from nine nigerian organizations we found that organizational support contributed to technology usage however only employees with low computer training associated support with aspects of technology usage such as daily use frequency of use and total application

co evolution entropy as a new index to explore power system transition a case study of china s electricity domain abstract power systems are bound to experience a long transition process which involves not only changes in technology but also changes in user practices regulations industrial networks infrastructures and cultures there are conflicts among these factors on account of the mutual uncoordinated changes which would hinder the development of power systems therefore keeping permanent coordination of numerous factors is a great challenge for the power system evolution current evaluation methods of power system evolution do not pay sufficient attention to the co evolution of factors particularly for technology society finance and policy as well as insight from innovation studies and the sociology of technology hence we propose a new index co evolution entropy which can indicate the positive negative entropy interaction coordinating system evolution then based on socio technical system we identify 14 factors participating in the evolution of power system from three layers landscape regime and niche finally we apply this index to china s electricity domain for identifying the evolution obstacles of non coordinates and propose a strategy to improve the system s co evolution results show that 1 the change in co evolution entropy from different layers has different characteristics for example the landscape mainly possesses negative entropy but the regime holds positive entropy 2 the power system s co evolution entropy changes from 0 043 to 0 154 and reaches the maximum 0 054 in 2000s which indicates that china s power system begins the coordinated development through a run in 3 the co evolution of the power system is hindered by too much policy intervention however technology innovation and electricity market opening could enhance its co evolution we also derive strategic policy recommendations from the analysis result and present a co evolution concept to improve the socio technical system

revisiting wage earnings and hours profiles abstract for the youngest cohorts whose entire working life can be observed hours start falling much earlier than wages wages do not fall if they fall at all until one s late 60s the data suggest that many workers start a smooth transition into retirement by working progressively fewer hours while still facing an upward sloping wage profile this pattern is not an artifact of staggered abrupt retirement or selection this evidence imposes restrictions on dynamic models of the aggregate economy and provide updated numerical profiles that can be readily used in quantitative macroeconomic analysis to incorporate this new pattern into aggregate models

national culture and strategic change in belief formation this paper studies strategy related beliefs in five organizations in hungary with substantial foreign participation we find that one of the strongest determinants of similarity of beliefs was being a member of the functional area favored by the strategic change the effect of being in the favored area was greater than the effect of all other individual characteristics including nationality

micro and macro elasticities in a life cycle model with taxes we build a life cycle model of labor supply that incorporates changes along both the intensive and extensive margin and use it to assess the consequences of changes in tax and transfer policies on equilibrium hours of work we find that changes in taxes have large aggregate effects on hours of work moreover we find that there is no inconsistency between this result and the empirical finding of small labor elasticities for prime age workers in our model micro and macro elasticities are effectively unrelated our model is also consistent with other cross country patterns

an empirical model of labor supply in a life cycle setting this paper formulates and estimates a structural intertemporal model of labor supply using theoretical characterizations derived from an economic model of lifetime behavior a two step empirical analysis yields estimates of intertemporal and uncompensated substitution effects which provide the information needed to predict the response of hours of work to life cycle wage growth and shifts in the lifetime wage path

the labor supply response to mismeasured but predictable wage changes most panel data studies of intertemporal labor supply assume classical measurement error recent validation studies refute this assumption in this study i address nonclassical measurement error explicitly i use data on males from the panel study of income dynamics validation study to purge measurement error from the panel study of income dynamics i find a large amount of predictable wage variation in the data even after allowing for measurement error however there is almost no labor supply response to these predictable wage changes therefore failure to control for nonclassical measurement error cannot explain the low estimated labor supply elasticities in other papers

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

rising mortality and life expectancy differentials by lifetime earnings in the united states are mortality and life expectancy differences by socioeconomic groups increasing in the united states using a unique data set matching administrative and survey data this study explores trends in these differentials by lifetime earnings for the 1983 2003 period results indicate a consistent increase in mortality differentials across sex and age groups the study also finds a substantial increase in life expectancy differentials by lifetime earnings the top to bottom quintile premium increased 30 percent for men and almost doubled for women these results complement recent research to point to almost five decades of increasing differential mortality in the united states

long term changes in married couples labor supply and taxes evidence from the us and europe since the 1980s abstract we document the time series of employment rates and hours worked per employed by married couples in the us and seven european countries belgium france germany italy the netherlands portugal and the uk from the early 1980s through 2016 relying on a model of joint household labor supply decisions we quantitatively analyze the role of non linear labor income taxes for explaining the evolution of hours worked of married couples over time using as inputs the full country and year specific statutory labor income tax codes we further evaluate the role of consumption taxes gender and educational wage premia and the educational composition the model is quite successful in replicating the time series behavior of hours worked per employed married woman with labor income taxes being the key driving force it does however capture only part of the secular increase in married women s employment rates in the 1980s and early 1990s suggesting an important role for factors not considered in this paper an independent and important contribution of the paper is that we make the non linear tax codes used as an input into the analysis available as a user friendly and easily integrable set of matlab codes

is there a retirement savings puzzle in this paper we ask whether households are saving enough for their retirement we use data on income expenditure and expenditure components to analyse patterns of behaviour at and around the time of retirement for successive date of birth cohorts we compare periods of unemployment to periods of retirement and separate expenditures into categories reflecting work related expenditures basic necessities and other goods we find that income typically falls by more at unemployment than retirement but the reverse is true for expenditure we observe falls in expenditure at retirement for all expenditure categories using a stochastic life cycle model including mortality rates we assess the anticipated impact of retirement on consumption against that of unemployment the inter relationship between goods and leisure explains a large part of the persistent fall in expenditure at retirement we argue that the only way in which the life cycle hypothesis could be reconciled with the remaining unanticipated dip in consumption would be with the systematic arrival of unexpected adverse information at the time of retirement

social security and retirement across the oecd abstract employment to population ratios differ markedly across organization for economic cooperation and development oecd countries especially for people aged over 55 years in addition social security features differ markedly across the oecd particularly with respect to features such as generosity entitlement ages and implicit taxes on social security benefits this study postulates that differences in social security features explain many differences in employment to population ratios at older ages this conjecture is assessed quantitatively with a life cycle general equilibrium model of retirement at ages 60 64 years the correlation between the simulations of this study s model and observed data is 0 67 generosity and implicit taxes are key features to explain the cross country variation whereas entitlement age is not

managerial behaviors and job performance a successful manager in los angeles may not succeed in hong kong few studies have attempted to examine how american managers actually manage while on assignment in foreign countries or the effectiveness of these managerial behaviors this study compared the self reported managerial behaviors of american expatriate managers in hong kong to a sample of american managers in the u s and hong kong chinese managers in hong kong the results from the study indicated that american expatriate managers in hong kong exhibit very similar managerial behaviors to the sample of managers in the u s however while these managerial behaviors were positively related to job performance for the managers in the u s they were not related to job performance for the expatriates in hong kong nor were these managerial behaviors related to job performance for hong kong chinese managers in hong kong

labor supply and government programs a cross country analysis abstract there are substantial cross country differences in labor supply late in the life cycle age 50 a theory of labor supply and retirement decisions is developed to quantitatively assess the role of social security disability insurance and taxation for understanding differences in labor supply late in the life cycle across european countries and the united states the findings support the view that government policies can go a long way towards accounting for the low labor supply late in the life cycle in the european countries relative to the united states with social security rules accounting for the bulk of these effects

wealth inequality and intergenerational links previous work has had difficulty generating household saving behaviour that makes the distribution of wealth much more concentrated than that of labour earnings and that makes the richest households hold onto large amounts of wealth even during very old age i construct a quantitative general equilibrium overlapping generations model in which parents and children are linked by accidental and voluntary bequests and by earnings ability i show that voluntary bequests can explain the emergence of large estates while accidental bequests alone cannot and that adding earnings persistence within families increases wealth concentration even more i also show that the introduction of a bequest motive generates lifetime savings profiles more consistent with the data

taxation of human capital and wage inequality a cross country analysis wage inequality has been significantly higher in the united states than in continental european countries ceu since the 1970s moreover this inequality gap has further widened during this period as the us has experienced a large increase in wage inequality whereas the ceu has seen only modest changes this paper studies the role of labor income tax policies for understanding these facts we begin by documenting two new empirical facts that link these inequality differences to tax policies first we show that countries with more progressive labor income tax schedules have significantly lower before tax wage inequality at different points in time second progressivity is also negatively correlated with the rise in wage inequality during this period we then construct a life cycle model in which individuals decide each period whether to go to school work or be unemployed individuals can accumulate skills either in school or while working wage inequality arises from differences across individuals in their ability to learn new skills as well as from idiosyncratic shocks progressive taxation compresses the after tax wage structure thereby distorting the incentives to accumulate human capital in turn reducing the cross sectional dispersion of before tax wages we find that these policies can account for half of the difference between the us and the ceu in overall wage inequality and 76 of the difference in inequality at the upper end log 90 50 differential when this economy experiences skill biased technological change progressivity also dampens the rise in wage dispersion over time the model explains 41 of the difference in the total rise in inequality and 58 of the difference at the upper end

cross country differences in unemployment fiscal policy unions and household preferences in general equilibrium we develop a five period overlapping generations model with individuals who differ by ability and with an imperfect labour market union wage setting for the individuals of lower ability the model explains human capital formation hours worked and unemployment within one coherent framework its predictions match the differences in the unemployment rate across 12 oecd countries remarkably well a shapley decomposition of these differences reveals an almost equal role for fiscal policy variables and union preferences as to fiscal policy differences in unemployment benefits play a much more important role than tax differences differences in households taste for leisure are unimportant

towards a micro founded theory of aggregate labour supply we build a heterogeneous agents life cycle model that captures a large number of salient features of individual male labour supply over the life cycle by education both along the intensive and extensive margins the model provides an aggregation theory of individual labour supply firmly grounded on individual level micro evidence and is used to study the aggregate labour supply responses to changes in the economic environment we find that the aggregate labour supply elasticity to a transitory wage shock is 1 75 with the extensive margin accounting for 62 of the response furthermore we find that the aggregate labour supply elasticity to a permanent compensated wage change is 0 44

uncertain medical expenses and precautionary saving near the end of the life cycle this paper introduces a dynamic structural model of household consumption decisions in which elderly families consider the effects of uncertain future medical expenses when deciding current levels of consumption the model with uncertain medical expenses implies a potentially important role for precautionary saving incentives to explain slow rates of dissaving among elderly americans during retirement rather than just simulating the stochastic dynamic model preference parameters are estimated using panel data on health wealth and expenditures for retired families the health uncertainty model predicts consumption levels closer to observed expenditures than a life cycle model with uncertain longevity however elderly families typically dissave their financial assets more slowly than even the baseline health uncertainty model predicts is optimal

does increased access increase equality gender and child health investments in india increases in access to social services are often thought to decrease inequality in the level of these services between advantaged and disadvantaged groups this is an issue in the developing world where policy makers often argue that increasing the level of health care for example will decrease gender inequality however increases in access to services often have empirically ambiguous eects on inequality increasing it in some cases and decreasing it in others this paper argues that this is not surprising and simple economic theory suggests that we should expect a non monotonic relationship between access and inequality at low levels of access to investments there is no investment for either the advantaged or disadvantaged group producing equality increases in access increase investment for the advantaged group rst generating inequality further increases in access increase investment in the disadvantaged group decreasing inequality i test the predictions of this theory using data on the availability of health camps or distance to health centers and gender dierences in vaccinations in india i nd strong support for a non monotonic relationship between access and gender equality

interpreting aggregate wage growth the role of labor market participation a new and easily implementable framework for the empirical analysis of the relationship between aggregate and individual wages is developed aggregate real wages are shown to contain three important bias terms one associated with the dispersion of individual wages a second deriving from compositional changes in the selected sample of workers and a third reflecting the distribution of working hours their importance for interpreting the path of aggregate wages and of the returns to education for recent experience in britain is highlighted a close correspondence between the estimated biases and the patterns of differences shown by aggregate wages is established

hungarian western partnerships a grounded theoretical model of integration processes and outcomes international cooperative ventures icvs are known to be strongly influenced by the parent firms values practices and systems vpss however less clear is whether and why vpss actually adopted by an icv are those of either parent singly both parents jointly or neither parent this question is especially timely in the transition economies of central and eastern europe where cooperative activity with western multinationals is growing rapidly and where decades old legacies of communism abound in this exploratory study we used a multiple case study methodology to examine 17 hungarian western icvs results show that a majority of the icvs adopted the vpss of the western partner we develop a theoretical model of integration process and outcomes and suggest future research directions

saving and liquidity constraints this paper is concerned with the theory of saving when consumers are not permitted to borrow and with the ability of such a theory to account for some of the stylized facts of saving behavior the models presented in the paper seem to account for important aspects of reality that are not explained by traditional life cycle models copyright 1991 by the econometric society

a welfare analysis of social security in a dynastic framework in this article we study the welfare effects of unfunded social security in a general equilibrium model populated with overlapping generations of altruistic individuals that differ in lifetime expectancy and earnings ability contrary to previous research our results indicate that steady state welfare increases with social security for most households although by very different amounts this result is mainly due to two factors first the presence of two sided altruism significantly mitigates the crowding out effect of unfunded social security second ability shocks and uncertain lifetimes generate significant heterogeneity among households to yield different induced preferences for social security

lessons in cross vergence restructuring the thai subsidiary corporation this paper explores the impact of indigenous business culture upon the corporate restructuring program initiated in the thai subsidiary of a western multinational defined in terms of behavioral institutionalization change implementation was largely resisted by one of two key strategic departments using a conceptual framework developed from existing cross cultural business research we examine the key determinants of local opposition and trace the emergence of cross vergent business practices acceptable to both thai market and western corporate agendas implications for the management of western corporate subsidiaries in the developing economy of thailand are then discussed

the effect of social security on labor supply a cohort analysis of the notch generation this article uses aggregate birth year calendar year level data derived from the current population survey cps to estimate the effect of social security wealth on the labor supply of older men in the 1970s and 1980s the analysis focuses on measuring the impact of the 1977 amendments to the social security act which created a substantial unanticipated reduction in social security wealth for individuals born after 1916 this differential in benefits has become known as the benefit notch results indicate that labor supply continued to decline for the notch babies who received lower social security benefits than earlier cohorts

a cross national assessment of the values of latin america managers contrasting hues or shades of gray we draw upon studies from the social sciences to develop and test hypotheses about similarities and differences in the importance of values among managers in 12 latin american countries using the rokeach value survey data from 1015 owner managers of small businesses indicated convergence among values relating to group interests but significant variation among values serving individual interests in addition several groups of countries were identified as culturally similar whereas brazil and mexico remained culturally discrete the results suggest that common perceptions of latin america as a culturally homogeneous region are stereotypical and incorrect and that divergence in the importance of values can explain differences in business phenomena across the region

is consumption growth consistent with intertemporal optimization evidence from the consumer expenditure survey in this paper we show that some of the predictions of models of consumer intertemporal optimization are in line with the patterns of nondurable expenditure observed in u s household level data we propose a flexible specification of preferences that allows multiple commodities and yields empirically tractable equations we estimate preference parameters using the only u s micro data set with complete consumption information we show that previous rejections can be explained by the simplifying assumptions made in previous studies we also show that results obtained using good consumption or aggregate data can be misleading

social security and cross country differences in hours a general equilibrium analysis abstract i develop a general equilibrium life cycle model with an intensive and extensive margin of labor supply and endogenous human capital accumulation i use the model to assess the effects of changes to various features of social security on labor supply outcomes of particular interest are changes to the scale of the program and to the relevant eligibility rules i find that the cross country differences in social security programs account for at least 79 of the differences in employment rates of people aged 55 64 and 17 31 of the differences in aggregate hours worked between the us and continental europe

humps and bumps in lifetime consumption in this article we argue that the life cycle model that allows demographics to affect household preferences and relaxes the assumption of certainty equivalence can generate hump shaped consumption profiles over age that are very similar to those observed in household level data sources and in particular match the differences in shape across different education groups liquidity constraints or myopia are not required to explain the empirical features of observed life cycle patterns

cross national empirical generalization in business services buying behavior we examine cross national generalization of the relative importance of factors that affect supplier selection and level of usage for global business services providers tests indicate that the majority of the response coefficients for a model of foreign exchange markets are equal across the four countries studied u s canada u k and germany inter country differences in buyer response seem most related to competitiveness and identifiable country specific institutional factors

the sustainable energy concept making sense of norms and co evolution within a large research facility s energy strategy abstract the analysis presents an evolving energy concept and strategy at an energy intensive research facility in order to contribute understanding of how organisations may implement renewable energies and improve energy efficiency whilst also delivering broader socio economic benefits a framework is developed that infuses institutional perspectives with a micro level view it facilitates positioning of strategy against instrumental altruistic and factual relational extremes and analysis of organisational strategy in the face of internal external stakeholder and institutional forces applied to a seven year case this supports understanding of strategy purpose and inputs as they co evolve along a project time line it is found that the energy strategy evolves from a dominantly instrumental but stakeholder driven position towards approaches aligned with deliberate public good provision in areas beyond direct organizational interests and that changes required significant redefinition of the design and operational models developments are explained as largely the result of internal agency and culture building influences from an energy department equipped with concrete management tools and autonomy at the case level the study concludes that the energy concept implementation has sparked a change in energy management at large global research facilities the work also demonstrates that longitudinal multi level institutional analysis can contribute to deeper understanding of strategy development

social security liquidity and early retirement abstract this paper investigates the effect of social security on retirement decisions it argues that it is important to take realistic account of how recipients evaluate potential benefit flows the paper presents a simple retirement model in which liquidity constraints prompt individuals to use higher than market discount rates in evaluating future pension benefits as a consequence even an apparently actuarially fair early retirement benefit could on average discourage continued work using data on individual retirement decisions i find support for the argument that this phenomenon contributes to some of the observed increase in early retirement

labor force dynamics of older men this paper describes and analyzes movements of older men among labor force states in the united states using quarterly observations derived from the retirement history survey rhs the results indicate substantial undercounts in the biannual data indicating that the prevalence of labor force movements at older ages has been underestimated previously the results show that labor force dynamics at older ages are important including duration and spell occurrence dependence and work experience effects these effects are robust to nonparametric controls for unobserved heterogeneity the estimates indicate that social security benefits have strong effects on the timing of labor force transitions at older ages but that changes in social security benefit levels over time have not contributed much to the trend toward earlier labor force exit excerpt

the effect of part time work on wages evidence from the social security rules this article identifies the part time wage effect using hours variation caused by the social security rules we show that work hours and wages drop sharply at ages 62 and 65 we argue that the hours decline causes the wage decline resulting in a 25 wage penalty for men who cut their work week from 40 to 20 hours however we find little evidence for such an effect among women we also show that models that fail to account for the joint determination of hours and wages will understate the labor supply response to a tax change by about 26

the effects of health insurance and self insurance on retirement behavior this paper provides an empirical analysis of the effects of employer provided health insurance medicare and social security on retirement behavior using data from the health and retirement study we estimate a dynamic programming model of retirement that accounts for both saving and uncertain medical expenses our results suggest that medicare is important for understanding retirement behavior and that uncertainty and saving are both important for understanding the labor supply responses to medicare half the value placed by a typical worker on his employer provided health insurance is the value of reduced medical expense risk raising the medicare eligibility age from 65 to 67 leads individuals to work an additional 0 074 years over ages 60 69 in comparison eliminating 2 years worth of social security benefits increases years of work by 0 076 years

the international business ethics index european union the present study expands the systematic measurement of consumers sentiments towards business ethical practices to the international arena data for the business ethics index bei were gathered in three countries of the european union uk germany spain the germans were the most pessimistic while the british were the most optimistic about the future ethical behaviour of businesses

intertemporal substitution in labor supply evidence from micro data the sensitivity of the supply of labor to intertemporal variation in the wage is an important issue in macroeconomics the analysis of social security and pensions and the study of life cycle patterns of work this paper explores two approaches to the measurement of intertemporal substitution that have appeared in the literature the first approach is to use consumption to control for wealth and unobserved expectations about future wages in the labor supply equation the second approach is to estimate a first difference equation for hours in which labor supply from the previous period serves as a control for wealth and wage expectations the results indicate that intertemporal substitution elasticity for married men is positive but small

when firms make sense of environmental agendas of society abstract the objective of this article is to present arguments for the need to obtain knowledge about how firms make sense of environmental agendas of society several empirical studies point out that highly formalized and rational management methods to manage environmental decisions are not appropriate in a firm s planning theoretical contributions within the field of organizational theory are critical to the rational actor approach that concentrates on firms as economic units acting in rational ways in order to increase profit instead recent organizational theories suggest using sociocultural theory in analyzing a firm s interpretation of societal agendas methods and results from an empirical qualitative case study based upon non rationalistic theory are presented and discussed the theoretical discussion and the empirical results call for a need to broaden environmental thinking about how to motivate firms to act in an environmental manner

confidence and the real value of money in an overlapping generations economy we demonstrate that stochastic bubbles which have a constant exogenous probability of collapsing may exist in general equilibrium on an intrinsically useless and unbacked asset money this may happen provided that the probability q that the bubble will persist next period is large enough and exceeds a threshold level q which we call the minimum rate of confidence this condition is always violated when the economy without bubble is dynamically efficient it is more likely to be satisfied in dynamically inefficient economies the larger the size of the inefficiency as measured by the excess of the growth rate over the no bubble interest rate we study both exchange and production economies

political complements in the welfare state health care and social security abstract all oecd countries target a large majority of their welfare spending to the elderly through public pensions and health care programs spending in both programs has largely increased in the past decades often more than the share of elderly in the population we suggest that these phenomena may be due to political complementarities between these two transfer programs we show that these two programs may coexist because public health care may increase the political constituency in favor of social security and vice versa specifically public health decreases the absolute longevity differential between low and high income individuals therefore rising the retirement period and the total pension benefits of the former relatively to the latter this effect increases the political support for social security among the low income young we show that in a political equilibrium of a two dimensional majoritarian election a voting majority of low income young and retirees supports a large welfare state the composition between public health and social security is determined by intermediate median income types who favor the contemporaneous existence of these two programs since public health increases their longevity enough to make social security more attractive technological improvements in health care strengthens this complementarity and lead to more welfare spending

medicaid insurance in old age the old age provisions of the medicaid program were designed to insure retirees against medical expenses we estimate a structural model of savings and medical spending and use it to compute the distribution of lifetime medicaid transfers and medicaid valuations across currently single retirees compensating variation calculations indicate that current retirees value medicaid insurance at more than its actuarial cost but that most would value an expansion of the current medicaid program at less than its cost these findings suggest that for current single retirees the medicaid program may be of the approximately right size

management style and productivity in two cultures global competition has motivated an increasing number of united states firms to set up production facilities in mexico this study examines productivity and management style differences in a mexican maquiladora operation and its u s parent plant likert s system 4 theory was used as the theoretical basis of comparison as hypothesized significant differences were found in the management systems while productivity at the two facilities was equal

wage risk and employment risk over the life cycle we specify a structural life cycle model of consumption labour supply and job mobility in an economy with search frictions that allows us to distinguish between different sources of risk and to estimate their effects the sources of risk are shocks to productivity job destruction the process of job arrival when employed and unemployed and match level heterogeneity our model allows for four main social insurance programmes in contrast to simpler models that attribute all income fluctuations to shocks our framework allows us to disentangle the effects of the shocks from the responses to these shocks estimates of productivity risk once we control for employment risk and for individual labour supply choices are substantially lower than estimates that attribute all wage variation to productivity risk increases in productivity risk impose a considerable welfare loss on individuals and induce substantial precautionary saving increases in employment risk have large effects on output and primarily through this channel affect welfare the welfare value of government programs such as food stamps which partially insure productivity risk is greater than the value of unemployment insurance which provides partial insurance against employment risk and no insurance against persistent shocks

the importance of work goals an international perspective the paper probes into the basic question of what individuals seek from working results from a representative sample of the labor force in seven countries n 8192 showed that the two most dominant work goals are interesting work and good pay these were consistent internationally across different organizational levels between the genders and among different age categories

towards a quantitative theory of automatic stabilizers the role of demographics employment volatility is larger for young and old workers than for the prime aged at the same time in countries with high tax rates the share of total hours supplied by young old workers is lower these two observations imply a negative correlation between government size and business cycle volatility this paper assesses in a heterogeneous agent olg model the quantitative importance of these two facts to account for the empirical relation between government size and macroeconomic stability

the distribution of lifetime medicare benefits taxes and premiums evidence from individual level data abstract the absence of individual level data linking earnings histories to the receipt of medicare benefits has hampered the study of the program s distributional properties data developed by the social security administration for an early cohort of medicare beneficiaries includes both earnings records and medicare payment records and thus overcomes this limitation for this early cohort lifetime benefits and taxes are found to rise with lifetime earnings but taxes rise more rapidly resulting in redistribution from higher to lower earning beneficiaries lifetime benefits in the top decile of the earnings distribution are 19 higher than in the bottom decile but taxes and premiums are four times higher in the top than in the bottom decile once taxes and premiums are subtracted net benefits in the top decile are 79 of net benefits in the bottom decile

the effects of health wealth and wages on labour supply and retirement behaviour this paper estimates a life cycle model of labour supply retirement and savings behaviour in which future health status and wages are uncertain individuals face a fixed cost of work and cannot borrow against future labour pension or social security income the method of simulated moments is used to match the life cycle profiles of labour force participation hours worked and assets that are estimated from the data to those that are generated by the model the model establishes that the tax structure of the social security system and pensions are key determinants of the high observed job exit rates at ages 62 and 65 removing the tax wedge embedded in the social security earnings test for individuals aged 65 and older would delay job exit by almost one year by contrast social security benefit levels health and borrowing constraints are less important determinants of job exit at older ages for example reducing social security benefits by 20 would cause workers to delay exit from the labour force by only three months

prosperity and depression prosperity and depression are relative concepts today both france and japan are depressed relative to the united states equivalently the united states is prosperous relative to these countries i say these countries are depressed relative to the united states because their output per working age person is 30 percent less than the u s level an interesting and important policy question is why are these countries depressed the answers for these two countries turn out to be very different the united states is prosperous relative to france because the u s intratemporal tax wedge that distorts the trade off between consumption and leisure is much smaller than the french wedge i will show that if france modified its intratemporal tax wedge so that its value was the same as the u s value french welfare in consumption equivalents would increase by 19 percent consumption would have to increase by 19 percent now and in all future periods to achieve as large a welfare gain as that resulting from this tax reform the united states is prosperous relative to japan because production efficiency is higher in the united states in the united states total factor productivity is approximately 20 percent higher than in japan if japan suddenly became as efficient in production as the united states its welfare gain in consumption equivalents would be 39 percent equally interesting and important are big changes over time in relative output per working age person across countries why are new zealand s and switzerland s economies depressed by over 30 percent relative to their 1970 trend corrected levels both of these countries have small populations but depressions are not restricted to small countries japan with its 125 million people is now depressed by 20 percent relative to its 1991 trend corrected level on the prosperity side why are ireland and south korea so prosperous now relative to their 1970 trend corrected levels this lecture is concerned primarily with big international differences among relatively rich industrial countries and changes in these differences over time the countries that receive primary attention all have market economies and healthy well educated populations in the countries considered the variations in aggregate output per working age person are large and reasonably good measures of the factor inputs are available this permits in many cases the identification of the change in policy or the difference in policy that gave rise to prosperity or depression this is in contrast to business cycle theory which provides little guidance to policy except for the important policy implication that a stabilization effort will have either no effect or a perverse effect the output variations studied and analyzed in this lecture are big an order of magnitude larger than the much studied business cycle fluctuations the variations studied however are an order of magnitude smaller than the muchstudied differences between the richest and poorest countries surprisingly only recently have depressions been systematically studied from the perspective of growth theory which is the theory used university of minnesota and federal reserve bank of minneapolis i thank my colleagues at the university of minnesota and the federal reserve bank of minneapolis for helpful discussions and comments in particular i thank tim kehoe ellen mcgrattan and nancy stokey for their help i also thank martin weale and franck portier for providing some british and french tax information used in this lecture thanks also go to sami alpanda and james macgee for research assistance and helpful discussions this lecture draws heavily on collaborative research with fumio hayashi i thank the economic and social research institute cabinet office government of japan and the u s national science foundation for financial support the views expressed herein are those of the author and not necessarily those of the federal reserve bank of minneapolis or the federal reserve system

taxation and labor supply of married couples across countries a macroeconomic analysis we document contemporaneous dierences in the aggregate labor supply of married couples across 18 oecd countries relative to their us counterparts european married men work on average 9 to 17 percent and married women in western and southern europe 26 and 31 percent fewer hours married women in scandinavia and eastern europe however work almost as many hours as us married women we nd that a model of joint household decision making can largely replicate these facts if the full non linearity of labor income taxes and the tax treatment of married couples are taken into account going to a system of strictly separate taxation would increase labor supply of married women by more than 100 hours annually in a third of our sample countries

old sick alone and poor a welfare analysis of old age social insurance programmes all individuals face some risk of ending up old sick alone and poor is there a role for social insurance for these risks and if so what is a good programme a large literature has analysed the costs and benefits of pay as you go public pensions and found that the costs exceed the benefits this article instead considers means tested social insurance mtsi programmes for retirees such as medicaid and supplemental security income we find that the welfare gains from these programmes are large moreover the current scale of mtsi in the u s is too small in the following sense if we condition on the current social security programme increasing the scale of mtsi by 1 3 benefits both the poor and the affluent when a payroll tax is used to fund the increase

a cross cultural comparative study of managerial job attitudes effective managerial performance is influenced by the types of rewards which managers seek in their work environment and by their perceptions of the degree to which their job expectations are being satisfied this research provides empirical evidence on the nature of job related values and outcomes in 4 countries canada france japan and the uk the survey data reveal that the types of job outcomes sought by managers differ significantly from one culture to another the results should be of practical value to companies seeking to develop more effective management motivational devices in the countries studied moreover the approach and methodology may provide a useful model for further cross cultural studies

what did medicare do the initial impact of medicare on mortality and out of pocket medical spending abstract we study the impact of the introduction of one of the major pillars of the social insurance system in the united states the introduction of medicare in 1965 our results suggest that in its first 10 years the establishment of universal health insurance for the elderly had no discernible impact on elderly mortality however we find a substantial reduction in the elderly s exposure to out of pocket medical expenditure risk specifically we estimate that the introduction of medicare was associated with a 40 decline in out of pocket spending for the top quartile of the out of pocket spending distribution a stylized expected utility framework suggests that the welfare gains from such reductions in risk exposure alone may be sufficient to cover almost two fifths of the costs of medicare these findings underscore the importance of considering the direct insurance benefits from public health insurance programs in addition to any indirect benefits from an effect on health

trends in male labor force participation and retirement some evidence on the role of pensions and social security in the 1970 s and 1980 s this article estimates the effects of changes in pension plans and social security in the 1970s and 1980s on the steady state retirement of men work incentives associated with pension coverage and plan characteristics are calculated primarily from the 1969 79 retirement history study and the 1983 and 1989 surveys of consumer finances simulations with a structural retirement model suggest that the long run effects of changes in pension plans and social security account for about a quarter of the reduction in full time work by men in their early sixties but cannot explain the reduction by those age 65

determinants of managerial performance a cross cultural comparison of the perceptions of middle level managers in four countries this paper examines differences in what affects managerial performance of middle level managers in four countries china n 204 india n 184 the philippines n 220 and the united states n 176 important differences were predicted and found in factors affecting managerial performance as perceived by the respondents while east west differences exist significant differences are noted among the three asian countries specifically chinese and american managers represented two extremes in their beliefs about what determines managerial performance of middle level managers both filipino and indian managers were found more similar to their u s counterparts than their chinese counterparts implications of the findings are discussed

a structural retirement model the life cycle model analyzed here constrains most work on the main job to be full time partial retirement entails a wage reduction and frequently a job change maximum likelihood estimates of utility function parameters are designed to incorporate information on the age of leaving full time work and the age of full retirement the model closely tracks retirement behavior including peaks in retirement activity at 62 and 65 the paper explores the relation of these peaks to nonlinearities in the budget constraint created by various retirement programs policy analyses based on this and on earlier models with simpler structures are compared the retirement choice is one of the more prominent manifestations of life cycle behavior the decision is the result of an interplay between an individual s preferences and a set of incentives which change in complicated ways as the individual progresses through his or her late 50 s and 60 s the purpose of this study is to formulate and estimate a structural model which incorporates in a fundamental way this interplay between lifetime preferences and incentives and to illustrate how such a model may be used to investigate retirement behavior a structural model of this type is essential for analyzing potential policy changes which can be expected to affect incentives in varying ways over a number of years in the life cycle the current study incorporates two structural features which have frequently been omitted from previous studies first the model requires that an individual who wishes to reduce work effort below full time must accept a reduced hourly wage rate in order to do so this reflects empirical evidence from micro data sets which indicates that around one third of older individuals engage in part time work at one time or another and that regardless of whether or not these older workers change jobs to obtain part time work they usually take wage cuts as compared to their previous full time work 2 the fact that an individual is willing to accept a lower wage rate in return for the opportunity to work fewer than full time hours contains important information about the preferences of the

does medicare benefit the poor abstract measuring the progressivity of age targeted government programs is difficult because no single data set measures income and benefit use throughout life previous research using zip code as a proxy for lifetime income has found that medicare benefits flow primarily to the most economically advantaged groups and that the financial returns to medicare are often higher for the rich than the poor however our analysis produces the starkly opposed result that medicare is an extraordinarily progressive public program in dollar terms or welfare terms these new results owe themselves to our measurement of socioeconomic status as an individual s education rather than the geographically aggregated measures of income used by previous research we argue that individual education has important practical and conceptual advantages over geographically aggregated measures of income our results suggest the crucial importance of accurate poverty measurement in evaluating the progressivity of complex government programs like medicare or social security

how social security and medicare affect retirement behavior in a world of incomplete markets this paper provides an empirical analysis of how the u s social security and medicare insurance system affect the labor supply of older males in the presence of incomplete markets for loans annuities and health insurance we estimate a detailed dynamic programming dp model of the joint labor supply and social security acceptance decision focusing on a sample of males in the low to middle income brackets whose only pension is social security the dp model delivers a rich set of predictions about the dynamics of retirement behavior and comparisons of actual vs predicted behavior show that the dp model is able to account for wide variety of phenomena observed in the data including the pronounced peaks in the distribution of retirement ages at 62 and 65 the ages of early and normal eligibility for social security benefits respectively we identify a significant fraction of health insurance constrained individuals who have no form of retiree health insurance other than medicare and who can only obtain fairly priced private health insurance via their employer s group health plan the combination of significant individual risk aversion and a long tailed pareto distribution of health care expenditures implies that there is a significant security value for these individuals to remain employed until they are eligible for medicare coverage at age 65 overall our model suggests that a number of heretofore puzzling aspects of retirement behavior can be viewed as artifacts of particular details of the social security rules whose incentive effects are especially strong for lower income individuals and those who do not have access to fairly priced loans annuities and health insurance

a cross national study of managerial values this study investigated cross national differences in managerial values a total of 567 managers from twelve nations participated in the study managerial values were assessed by means of rokeach s value survey factor analysis of the eighteen instrumental values included in rokeach s value survey revealed four underlying value dimensions the value dimension that included the instrumental values broadminded capable and courageous was ranked as the most important value dimension by managers from all twelve nations national differences were found on three of the four value dimensions

social security unanticipated benefit increases and the timing of retirement between 1969 and 1972 real u s social security retirement benefits rose by 20 the rise was unanticipated and followed over 15 years of relatively constant real benefits this paper proposes a model of retirement behaviour in which workers respond differently although in a theoretically consistent manner to the anticipated and unanticipated components of the social security benefit they can receive upon retirement the retirement age decision in the presence of unanticipated benefit changes is shown to be a special case of utility maximization under a nonlinear budget constraint the model is estimated using the longitudinal retirement history survey between 1969 and 1973 real social security benefits for u s workers with fixed earnings histories were raised by more than 20 these increases were the first significant increases in social security since the early 1950 s at the same time that retirement benefits were rising the trend toward early retirement among older american men accelerated in the period from 1965 to 1970 the labour force participation rate of men aged 55 to 64 fell 1 6 percentage points from 84x6 to 83 0 but in the five years after 1970 the rate fell an additional 7 4 points to 75 6 the participation rate of men over 65 fell by 1 1 points in the five years after 1965 but by 5 2 points during the mid 1970 s 1 not surprisingly a large share of this labour force decline has been attributed to the effects of the social security increases enacted in 1969 and 1972 the purpose of this paper is to determine the precise effect of the unanticipated benefit increases on the timing of retirement the effect of social security on the age at retirement has been the subject of lively debate in recent years the literature has been reviewed in two recent papers by mitchell and fields 1982 and hurd 1983 who reach nearly opposite conclusions about the lessons that can be drawn from past empirical research mitchell and fields find that no definite judgment can be reached about the effects of social security on retirement while hurd argues that more careful studies have all found a significant and meaningful effect of social security on early retirement certainly the earlier studies by boskin 1977 and boskin and hurd 1978 found very large social security effects with boskin concluding that the social security system has been the major factor in the explosion in earlier retirement boskin 1977 p 1 very recent studies by burkhauser and quinn 1983 burtless and moffitt 1984 diamond and hausman 1984 fields and mitchell 1984 and hausman and wise 1985 have found smaller social security effects however none of them dealt explicitly with the rapid rise in real benefits during the early 1970 s the approach taken in this paper differs significantly from that in the earlier research just cited the proposed econometric model takes full account of the nonlinear relationship between goods consumption and the age at retirement introduced by social security