joint confidence intervals for income shares and lorenz curves in a recent paper beach and davidson 1983 extended the principles of statistical inference to lorenz curves and income shares by establishing the asymptotic distribution and covariance structure of a vector of lorenz curve ordinates corresponding to a set of quantile abscissae one can thus use the lorenz curve and income shares no longer just as descriptive devices for summarizing distribution information but now also as analytical tools for comparing alternative distributions and carrying out conventional statistical inference on them it would clearly be desirable however to extend and complement this work by providing a method for computing a set of joint confidence intervals about these income shares and for illustrating graphically a joint confidence band about a set of estimated lorenz curve ordinates the present paper provides a new and simple technique for doing this when analyzing differences between sets of income shares or lorenz curves one typically wants to elicit more detailed information than is provided by a standard joint chi square test on the overall set of shares that is when the hypothesis of two sets of shares being the same is rejected we generally want to know further which particular differences in shares are different from zero and of these nonzero differences which are positive and which negative savin 1980 a natural way of providing such information is through multiple comparison procedures developed in this paper in a recent work richmond 1982 has developed a general method of finding multiple comparison intervals that is particularly suited to the present problem and in this situation appears to dominate other conventional alternatives in contrast for example to scheff s s projection method richmond s approach focuses on a set of primary points of interest income shares among a more general set of points including the lorenz curve ordinates and optimizes the joint confidence interval lengths on this primary set of points since estimated lorenz curve ordinates are built up from underlying income shares these shares perhaps further supplemented are natural choices for the primary set the method however also provides a joint confidence band that geometrically bounds the set of lorenz curve ordinates and interpolated segments between them the present

inequality in male and female earnings the role of hours and wages the authors decompose annual earnings into hours of work and hourly earnings and analyze male female differences in earnings inequality using canadian data their results indicate that the larger female inequality in earnings is due to a greater inequality in the distribution of hours of work the distributions of wages for men and women are either statistically indistinguishable or more equal for women the authors compare two data points 1988 and 1981 and find the same structure in the gender comparisons also changes between 1988 and 1981 in earnings inequality are generated from movements in the hours distributions copyright 1996 by mit press

entropy limits to growth and the prospects for weak sustainability in this paper we analyze the consequences of mass and energy conservation and the second law of thermodynamics for economic activity in contrast to former studies we deduce our results formally from a general model of production and consumption we show that in a static setting for economies containing irreversible processes a non zero resource input as well as non zero emissions are necessary to sustain a positive level of consumption we generalize this result to a dynamic setting and apply it to the growth discussion and the sustainability discourse thereby we show that limits to growth of production and consumption are likely to exist and that the concept of weak sustainability is either morally unattractive or physically infeasible d 2005 elsevier b v all rights reserved

the evolution of the industrial organisation of the production of knowledge this work elaborates the notion of localised technological knowledge based upon the distinction between information competence and knowledge and analyses the emergence of the new knowledge industry the evolution of the organisation of knowledge production is analysed through four stylised modes scientific entrepreneurship institutional variety vertical integration and technological cooperation the new trends towards the growth of knowledge intensive business service industries are detected and underlined they are considered as the outcome of the institutional formation of a market for knowledge based upon a process of increasing appropriability of localised knowledge based on the blending of generic scientific information and competence and growing scope of applicability via computercommunication systems deverticalisation of research activities from the boundaries of corporations the specification of a demand for technological competence and the specialising of independent firms in the production of technological competence and knowledge

testing for poverty dominance an application to canada the paper proposes and applies statistical tests for poverty dominance that check for whether poverty comparisons can be made robustly over ranges of poverty lines and classes of poverty indices this helps provide both normative and statistical confidence in establishing poverty rankings across distributions the tests which can take into account the complex sampling procedures that are typically used by statistical agencies to generate household level surveys are implemented using the canadian survey of labour and income dynamics slid for 1996 1999 and 2002 although the yearly cumulative distribution functions cross at the lower tails of the distributions the more recent years tend to dominate earlier years for a relatively wide range of poverty lines failing to take into account slid s sampling variability as is sometimes done can inflate significantly one s confidence in ranking poverty taking into account slid s complex sampling design as has not been done before can also decrease substantially the range of poverty lines over which a poverty ranking can be inferred

economics and sustainability balancing trade offs and imperatives the concept of sustainability has been increasingly invoked in scholarly and public policy debates discussion has been hampered however by uncertainty and lack of uniformity in the meaning of sustainability this paper seeks to identify some common ground among economists ecologists and environmen tal ethicists two issues seem salient require ments for intergenerational and the defi nition of social capital to be provided to future generations a concept of safe minimum standard which has received at least some recognition in the ecology philosophy and eco nomics literatures may provide the beginnings of a common ground for debate about sus tainability jel q2

consistent testing for stochastic dominance under general sampling schemes we propose a procedure for estimating the critical values of the extended kolmogorov smirnov tests of stochastic dominance of arbitrary order in the general k prospect case we allow for the observations to be serially dependent and for the first time we can accommodate general dependence amongst the prospects which are to be ranked also the prospects may be the residuals from certain conditional models opening the way for conditional ranking we also propose a test of prospect stochastic dominance our method is based on subsampling and we show that the resulting tests are consistent and powerful against some n 1 2 local alternatives we also propose some heuristic methods for selecting subsample size and demonstrate in simulations that they perform reasonably we describe an alternative method for obtaining critical values based on recentring the test statistic and using full sample bootstrap methods we compare the two methods in theory and in practice

triggers of change structural trajectories and production dynamics the transformation of production structures has been at the centre of the historical dynamics of capitalist economies since the first industrial revolution the article concentrates on production processes as principal loci of structural economic dynamics along increasing and decreasing returns trajectories these trajectories are triggered by structural opportunities and constraints embedded in production systems and their historical realisation is subject to different institutional configurations production units at different levels of aggregation the approach envisioned suggests the possibility of governing economic dynamics by structural policies working on the technological and organisational conditions of production as well as on the configuration of production processes within production units capitalist economies have to rely on a mix of co ordination devices across different production units and aggregation levels for capturing structural opportunities and avoiding structural constraints

the deindustrialisation tertiarisation hypothesis reconsidered a subsystem application to the oecd7 the diffusion of outsourcing both national and international and vertical fdis among manufacturing firms along with the higher integra tion of business services in manufacturing has recently led to question the empirical evidence supporting the deindustrialisation tertiarisation dt hypothesis rather than a real phenomenon it has been argued dt would be an apparent one mainly due to the reorganization of production across national and sectoral boundaries the empirical studies that have dealt with the topic so far have not been able to effectively rule out such possibility because of two main limitations the sectoral level of the analysis and or the national focus in order to overcome them the paper carries out an appreciative investigation of the actual extent of the dt occurred in the oecd area over the 80s and the 90s by moving from a sector to a subsystem perspective thus retaining both direct and indirect relations and by referring to a pseudo world of 7 oecd countries thus taking into account the global dimension of the phenomenon the results strongly support the dt hypothesis although the weight of business sector services in the manufacturing subsystem increased acting as a counterbalancing tendency to the manufacturing decline subsystem shares significantly decreased thus confirming dt as a more fundamental trend of modern economies

how significant is intersectoral outsourcing of employment in south africa south africa like many other middle income countries as well as most upper income countries has seen an increase in services and fall in manufacturing as shares of total employment there has been speculation about the extent to which these changes actually represent a genuine structural shift as opposed to a statistical artifact deriving from the domestic outsourcing of activities from manufacturing to services very limited evidence is available as to how much of the apparent changes in the sectoral composition of employment are explained by intersectoral outsourcing this article develops a methodology using household and labor survey data to analyze the extent of intersectoral outsourcing of specific labor intensive activities in south africa from 1997 2007 it is shown that the relatively high growth in services employment is driven by expansion of employment of cleaners and security guards and in particular by outsourcing type reallocation of these activities from manufacturing and the public sector toward private services once outsourcing is accounted for employment seems to have grown at similar rates in manufacturing and in private services the analysis has implications for understanding changes in the sectoral structure of middle income economies and whether services employment is as dynamic as it appears to be copyright 2010 the author 2010 published by oxford university press on behalf of associazione icc all rights reserved oxford university press

which is a better investment choice in the hong kong residential property market a big or small property the relationship between property size and property investment yield is an interesting issue in the real estate market previous studies usually use the mean variance criterion to compare the return risk profiles of the yields of different property sizes in the united states however this criterion has a few shortcomings this article provides the first attempt to use a stochastic dominance approach to analyse this issue we adopt two powerful stochastic dominance tests to compare the yields of five property size classes in the hong kong residential property market in our study we analyse two possible investment outcomes 1 investors could not rent out their properties and thus they would gain lose from the appreciation depreciation of residential property prices 2 investors could also gain from rental incomes our empirical results provide strong evidence to show that the yields of smaller property classes stochastically dominate the yields of bigger property classes suggesting that buying smal

monetary policy natural resources and federal redistribution can monetary policy shocks induce redistribution across natural resource rich and poor states within a federation we conjecture that resource rich states are capital intensive hence their investment is more responsive to changes in monetary policy consequently contractionary monetary policy shocks e g increases in the interest rate may induce redistribution from resource poor states to resource rich ones via an equalizing federal transfer scheme because investment is reduced more strongly in the latter we test these hypotheses using a panel of u s states covering several decades and find that 1 resource rich states are significantly and persistently more capital intensive 2 contractionary monetary policy shocks induce a relative drop increase in investment federal transfers in resource rich states over the course of four years 3 these patterns are driven by resource induced differences in the capital share in the economy we estimate that a one standard deviation contractionary monetary shock induces within the first year federal redistribution of approximately 2 5 billion from the resource poor to the resource rich states representing about 11 of the total average annual federal transfers received by the latter states

structural change under new labour the paper examines specific features of structural change in the uk since 1997 contrasting the decline in industrial jobs with the rise in a variety of service jobs it examines the proximate causes of structural change in particular whether the chronically slow growth of manufacturing output in the 1980s has persisted the implications of this structural change are considered particularly the effects on the balance of payments and regional employment patterns the paper suggests that the main impact of government policies on regional employment may have been through the direct and multiplier effects of public expenditure

spatial growth and industry age between 1970 and 2000 employment growth across u s counties exhibited very different patterns in manufacturing and services whereas manufacturing employment growth was negatively related to initial manufacturing employment across the entire distribution of counties service employment growth was positively related to initial service employment for intermediate sized counties this paper presents a theory to rationalize these facts local sectoral growth is driven by technological diffusion across space and depends on the age of the sector the theory correctly predicts the relation between county employment growth and initial county employment in manufacturing at the turn of the 20th century

the effect of public sector employment on local labour markets this paper considers the impact of public sector employment on local labour markets using english data at the local authority level for 2003 2007 we find that public sector employment has no identifiable effect on total private sector employment however public sector employment does affect the sectoral composition of the private sector specifically each additional public sector job creates 0 5 jobs in the non tradable sector construction and services while crowding out 0 4 jobs in the tradable sector manufacturing when using data for a longer time period 1999 2007 we find no multiplier effect for non tradables stronger crowding out for tradables and consistent with this crowding out for total private sector employment

have air pollutant emissions converged among u s regions evidence from unit root tests previous studies of income distribution have found evidence indicating that incomes across u s regions have converged supporting the prediction of the neoclassical growth model a potential shortcoming in these studies is that only one measure of well being is considered a measure of wealth linked to incomes or production this paper examines whether income convergence was accompanied by air pollutant emission convergence results from unit root tests provide some evidence that indicators of environmental quality have converged across u s regions during the 1929 1994 period

conservation of mass and instability in a dynamic economy environment system abstract this paper considers a variant of the neumann leontief sraffa general equilibrium models in the context of a jointly determined economy environment system subject to a conversation of mass condition it shows that the conservation of mass contradicts the free disposal free gifts and non innovation assumptions of such models that an expanding economy will be associated with continuous disequilibrating change in the material transformations of both economy and environment and that this change is uncontrollable through the price system

using the fisherian concept of income to guide a nation s transition to a steady state economy abstract many ecological economists have long been advocating that industrialised nations should abandon their growth predilection and initiate the transition to a steady state economy to demonstrate how a nation s transition to a steady state economy might be usefully guided fisherian national income one of the best known indicators of sustainable economic welfare is calculated for australia for the period 1967 1997 also calculated for the study period is the changing physical scale of the australian economy by juxtaposing per capita fisherian income and the growth of the australian economy it is shown that australia surpassed its optimal macroeconomic scale in the mid 1970s while around this time australia began a transition to a lower rate of growth that arrested the steep decline in per capita fisherian income australia had reverted back to a high growth policy by the end of the study period it chose not to continue the deceleration towards a steady state economy a policy stance that is likely to be detrimental to the sustainable economic welfare enjoyed by the average australian

consistent testing for stochastic dominance a subsampling approach we study a very general setting and propose a procedure for estimating the critical values of the extended kolmogorov smirnov tests of first and second order stochastic dominance due to mcfadden 1989 in the general k prospect case we allow for the observations to be generally serially dependent and for the first time we can accommodate general dependence amongst the prospects which are to be ranked also the prospects may be the residuals from certain conditional models opening the way for conditional ranking we also propose a test of prospect stochastic dominance our method is based on subsampling and we show that the resulting data tests are consistent

regional convergence and national inequality this paper explores the implications of regional income convergence for measures of inequality at the national level in general such convergence occurs as poorer regions overtake more developed ones it is difficult to imagine any realistic scenario in which rising incomes in poorer regions would not have the effect of reducing absolute poverty at the same time it seems reasonable to assume that national inequality would fall as the mean incomes in the various regions converge given these general presumptions the recent economic history of regional convergence between the southern united states and the rest of the nation is quite puzzling over the last twenty five years mean family income in the southern united states has gone from about 80 of the national mean to about 93 at the same time inequality in the south and that in the non south have been changing only slightly when measured by gini coefficients under these circumstances with no serious deterioration in intraregional measures of inequality we would expect to observe a substantial reduction in national inequality as these two broad regions converge in mean incomes nevertheless there has been no significant decline in the national gini coefficient this apparent paradox is in contrast to an earlier period in u s history in which regional convergence occurred while national inequality was falling smolensky 1961 1963 the purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the relationship between regional convergence and overall inequality is far from obvious in particular we shot that the convergence of mean incomes among regions ceteris paribus is not a sufficient condition for a reduction in common measures of ov erall inequality such as the gini coefficient the ceteris paribas conditions here are that the distribution of population across regions and the relative distribution of income within each region are held constant the proof of this assertion is made in section ii in section iii we demonstrate the relevance of this analysis to the u s case we show that the simple mean convergence of family incomes between the southern united states and the rest of the nation over the last twenty five years should not have been expected to have a direct effect on national inequality the naive link between regional income convergence and national income distribution does not hold up in this important case hence the arguments of section ii are more than analytical curiosa in a situation where the direct effects of income convergence are insufficient to reduce overall inequality there is the possibility that the broader process of regional convergence achieves this result more indirectly regional convergence may involve economic changes that work on intra regional income distributions or the distribution of population across regions in ways favorable to greater national equality in section iv we speculate on such indirect effects from a theoretical point of view we conclude that the direction and extent of such interactions are not obvious

accounting for south non south real wage differentials and for changes in those differentials over time a unified accounting framework for analyzing differences in real wages between the south and non south in 1979 and for changes in south non south wage ratios between 1973 and 1979 is outlined cross section analysis of real wage differentials allows two sources of regional wage variation 1 worker and job characteristics and 2 returns to those characteristics our results suggest that differences in the latter may be as important in accounting for regional wage differentials as the former an interactive specification permits decomposition of changes in regional wage ratios into direct effects of changes in characteristics and indirect effects of region year and region year variations in returns more than half the predicted changes in south non south wage ratios can be accounted for by changing relative returns to characteristics between the south and non south

local multipliers at work we measure the effects of a substantial place based policy shock on the local labor market systems exploiting as an instrumental variable the peculiar information necessary to apply for capital subsidies in italy during the period 1996 2006 the results show the presence of positive multipliers in the south of italy slightly lower than what was previously found for the us but much higher than those identified for european and asian countries the reasons for this finding lie in the greater accuracy of the data in the relevance of the instrument used and in the widespread underutilization of production factors

knowledge dynamics structural change and the geography of business services the article provides a review of and presents some empirical evidence on the dynamics of knowledge structural change and spatial concentration of economic activities focusing on the case of business services it explores how the role of knowledge has evolved in relation to the dimensions of i science technology and structural change ii the long term processes of tertiarisation of the economy in particular the growth of business services iii the spatial concentration of business services as an outcome of the increasing volume and complexity of knowledge and the need to manage it through spatial proximity our arguments are supported by empirical evidence on the spatial concentration of business services in the european regions

could the global financial crisis improve the performance of the g7 stocks markets abstractfinancial crises are normally associated with negative effects on financial markets in this article we investigate whether the most recent global financial crisis gfc had any positive impact on the g7 canada france germany italy japan the united kingdom and the united states indices to conduct the analysis we employ the mean variance mv analysis capm statistics hurst exponent runs test multiple variation ratio test and stochastic dominance sd tests our mv and capm results conclude that most of the g7 stock indices are significantly less volatile the results from hurst exponent run tests and multiple variation ratio confirm that efficiency improved in the post gfc period finally our sd results conclude that there is no arbitrage opportunity and the markets are efficient due to the gfc and in general investors prefer investing in the indices after the gfc overall we conclude that the gfc led to markets that are more efficient and mature confirming that crises can also

production consumption and general equilibrium with physical constraints abstract this paper analyzes the consequences of integrating the conservation laws of mass and energy into the microeconomic models of production consumption and general equilibrium we show that abstract models and especially general equilibrium theory are consistent with these physical constraints but most applied and environmental economic models are not we analyze the consequences of physical conservation laws for substitution possibilities and show that these constraints limit the number of independent substitution processes but not the value of the substitution elasticities finally we propose a method for integrating physical constraints into static microeconomic models with a minimum of changes

innis lecture inference on income distributions this paper attempts to provide a synthetic view of varied techniques available for performing inference on income distributions two main approaches can be distinguished one in which the object of interest is some index of income inequality or poverty the other based on notions of stochastic dominance from the statistical point of view many techniques are common to both approaches although of course some are specific to one of them i assume throughout that inference about population quantities is to be based on a sample or samples and formally all randomness is due to that of the sampling process inference can be either asymptotic or bootstrap based in principle the bootstrap is an ideal tool since in this paper i ignore issues of complex sampling schemes and suppose that observations are iid however both bootstrap inference and to a considerably greater extent asymptotic inference can fall foul of difficulties associated with the heavy right hand tails observed with many income distributions i mention some recent attempts to circumvent these difficulties ce memoire tente de fournir une vue synthetique des diverses techniques disponibles pour faire des inferences a partir des repartitions de revenus on peut distinguer deux approches principales l une dans laquelle l objet vise est un indice d inegalite de revenus ou de pauvrete l autre est construite sur des notions de dominance stochastique d un point de vue statistique plusieurs techniques sont utilisees par les deux approches mais certaines techniques sont specifiques a l une ou a l autre approche l auteur postule que l inference a propos de quantites demographiques est fondee sur un echantillon ou des echantillons et que formellement tout le caractere aleatoire est attribuable au processus d echantillonnage l inference est soit asymptotique soit derivee par des technique de bootstrap en principe la seconde facon de proceder est un outil ideal puisque dans ce memoire l auteur ignore les problemes de procedures d echantillonnage complexes et presume que les observations sont idd cependant la seconde facon de proceder et encore plus la premiere peuvent rencontrer des difficultes associees au fait que l on observe des queues de distribution epaisses vers la droite dans plusieurs profils de repartition des revenus l auteur mentionne certains efforts recents pour contourner ces difficultes

multinational enterprises service outsourcing and regional structural change this paper offers a joint analysis of two phenomena characterizing most advanced economies in recent decades the rise of foreign ownership in manufacturing activities and the pervasiveness of the service economy the aim of the study is to examine the structural transformation of regional economic systems within the uk by focusing on the role played by foreign multinational enterprises mnes in manufacturing in facilitating the development of services from a conceptual perspective this research relies on different strands of literature on the impact of foreign direct investment fdi on recipient economies on outsourcing and regional structural transformation and on the identification of local multipliers the empirical analysis focuses on a specific demand side channel for structural change the forward linkage established by foreign manufacturing mnes with local service providers through outsourcing descriptive evidence shows that service outsourcing by foreign plants operating in manufacturing is pervasive compared to outsourcing by their domestic counterparts on this basic premise we estimate the multiplicative effects that foreign manufacturing activity has on the creation of service jobs in local labour markets in order to produce reliable estimates of a local multiplier the methodology adopts an instrumental variable approach our findings suggest that foreign presence in manufacturing can be a catalyst of regional structural change by stimulating the generation of new jobs in the tertiary sector via demand linkages

trickling down the rising tide new estimates of the link between poverty and the macroeconomy this paper uses pooled time series regressions of regional data to reexamine the link between poverty and the macroeconomy the use of disaggregated data provides additional degrees of freedom and permits the inclusion of controls for demographic changes and increased income inequality the results indicate a stronger relationship between poverty rates and the macroeconomy in the 1980s than that found in prior research and confirm that the dramatic reduction in unemployment during the late 1990s was instrumental in reducing poverty rates the estimated results for the 1990s imply a 0 4 0 9 increase in the poverty rate for each 1 increase in the unemployment rate

statistical inference for the measurement of the incidence of taxes and transfers we establish the asymptotic sampling distribution of general functions of quantile based estimators computed from samples that are not necessarily independent the results provide the statistical framework within which to assess the progressivity of taxes and benefits their horizontal inequity and the change in the inequality of income which they cause by the same token these findings characterise the sampling distribution of a number of popular indices of progressivity horizontal inequity and redistribution they can also be used to assess welfare and inequality changes using panel data and to assess poverty when it depends on estimated population quantiles we illustrate these results using micro data on the incidence of taxes and benefits in canada

the measurement and trend of housing inequality in the united states 1978 85 inequality in housing services for renters owners and all households in the united states is estimated for 1978 and 1985 hedonic techniques are applied to data from the american housing survey to derive values for housing services that include publicly provided as well as subsidized housing we find significant disparities in housing but substantially less inequality than in incomes in 1978 the top decile garnered 19 2 of housing services while the bottom decile received only 5 1 the trend however is towards greater equality in housing with large and statistically significant shifts across all deciles by 1985 the share of the top decile dropped to 16 3 a percentage decrease in share of 15 3 while that of the bottom decile rose to 5 7 a percentage increase of 11 4

sources of inequality in the philippines insights from stochastic dominance tests for richness and poorness new stochastic dominance sd tests of richness and poorness are applied to income and expenditure distributions in the philippines to measure relative welfare levels and investigate sources of inequality from 2000 to 2012 we successfully demonstrate that welfare analyses based on ascending and descending sd principles offer a stronger characterisation of changing levels of welfare in a population than what could be obtained using standard sd approach alone empirically our results show that large improvements in relative welfare over time in the philippines favoured older and female headed households mainly in the urban areas further female headship and more years in education promoted higher welfare within and among the population groups on the other hand the growth of remittance incomes may have caused the greater imbalance in the distributions found in more recent years analysis by age groups meanwhile showed that over time there are increasing concentrations of poorer households among the youngest cohort 30 and under at the same time that there are also increasing concentrations of richer households among the over 60s the combined impact of these factors provides a viable explanation as to why the gap between the rich and the poor has remained high in the philippines for a very long time now

nutrition and nonparticipation in the us food stamp programme microdata from the national food consumption survey are used to test for differences in caloric and protein intake distributions we compare poor households that participate in the us food stamp programme to eligible households that do not participate tests for stochastic dominance provide unambiguous evidence that eligible nonparticipants suffer from relative undernutrition compared to participating households probit analysis is used to identify characteristics of participating and nonparticipating households

theories of risk testing investor behaviour on the taiwan stock and stock index futures markets investor behavior towards risk lies at the heart of economic decision making in general and modern investment theory and practice in particular this paper uses both the mean variance mv criterion and stochastic dominance sd procedures to analyze the preferences for four of the most widely studied investor types in the taiwan stock and stock index futures market we find that risk averters concave utility function prefer spot to futures whereas risk seekers convex utility function prefer futures to spot our findings also show that investors with s shaped utility functions prefer spot futures to futures spot when markets move upward downward finally our results imply that investors with reverse s shaped utility functions prefer futures spot to spot futures when markets move upward downward these results are robust with respect to sub periods spot returns including dividends and diversification although we do not check whether risk averters risk seekers and investors with s shaped and reverse sshaped utility functions actually exist in the market we do show that their existence is plausible the implications of our findings on market efficiency and the existence of arbitrage opportunities are also discussed in this study

the rise of domestic outsourcing and the evolution of the german wage structure the nature of the relationship between employers and employees has been changing over the past three decades with firms increasingly relying on contractors temp agencies and franchises rather than hiring employees directly we investigate the impact of this transformation on the wage structure by following jobs that are moved outside the boundary of lead employers to contracting firms we develop a new method for identifying outsourcing of food cleaning security and logistics services in administrative data using the universe of social security records in germany we document a dramatic growth of domestic outsourcing in germany since the early 1990s event study analyses show that wages in outsourced jobs fall by approximately 10 15 relative to similar jobs that are not outsourced we find evidence that the wage losses associated with outsourcing stem from a loss of firm specific rents suggesting that labor cost savings are an important reason firms choose to contract out these services finally we tie the increase in outsourcing activity to broader changes in the german wage structure in particular showing that outsourcing of cleaning security and logistics services alone accounts for around 9 of the increase in german wage inequality since the 1980s

ecosystem prices activity analysis applied to ecosystems abstract in this paper a method is developed to derive prices for natural goods from information about material and energy flows within ecosystems the derivation is based on an analogy between ecological and economic systems both systems are characterized by flows of material and energy to derive ecosystem prices the mathematical structure of koopman s economic linear production model his activity analysis is applied to a material flow model of ecosystems the ecological interpretation of these prices is discussed and the uniqueness of the price system is investigated an algorithm for price calculation is derived and demonstrated with a numerical example finally it is discussed whether ecosystem prices may be suitable as surrogates for economic valuations of natural goods

convergence of the south and non south income distributions 1969 1979 income distribution and inequalities in the southern united states are analyzed and compared with data for the rest of the country the evidence presented in this paper reveals that in the 1970s the souths income distribution either converged or moved significantly closer to the income distribution of the rest of the country the degree of convergence depends on the definition of the recipient unit and to a degree on the particular cost of living index used to deflate southern and non southern incomes the convergence is attributed in part to the labor unionization in the northeast and the resulting relocation of companies to the south data are from the 1970 and 1980 censuses and concern total household income excerpt

equality of opportunity and luck definitions and testable conditions with an application to income in france abstract we offer a model of equality of opportunity that encompasses different conceptions expressed in the public and philosophical debates in addition to circumstances whose effect on outcome should be compensated and effort which represents a legitimate source of inequality we introduce a third factor luck that captures the random factors whose impact on outcome should be even handed for equality of opportunity to be satisfied then we analyze how the various definitions of equality of opportunity can be empirically identified given data limitations and provide testable conditions definitions and conditions resort to standard stochastic dominance tools lastly we develop an empirical analysis of equality of opportunity for income acquisition in france over the period 1979 2000 which reveals that the degree of inequality of opportunity tends to decrease and that the degree of risk of income distributions conditional on social origin appears very similar across all groups of social origins