individual heterogeneity and cultural attitudes in credence goods provision abstract i study the heterogeneity of credence goods provision in taxi drivers taking detours in new york city first i document that there is significant detouring on average by drivers second there is significant heterogeneity in detouring across individuals yet each individual s propensity to take detours is stable drivers who detour almost always detour while those who do not detour almost never do drivers who take longer detours on each trip also take such trips more often third cultural attitudes plausibly explain some of this heterogeneity in behavior across individuals

reassessing the gender wage gap in madagascar does labor force attachment really matter abstract in the labor economics literature it has been argued that differences in labor force attachment across gender are important to explain the extent of the gender wage gap however measures of women s work experience are particularly prone to errors given discontinuity in labor market participation using proxy measures such as potential experience may lead to biased estimates of the returns to human capital such biases cannot be ignored since these returns are used in the standard decomposition techniques to measure the extent of gender based wage discrimination by matching two original surveys conducted in madagascar in 1998 a labor force survey and a biographical survey we built a unique data set that enabled us to combine the original information gathered from each of them particularly the earnings from current employment and the entire professional trajectories our results lead to a reassessment of the returns to human capital as potential experience always exceeds actual experience for b

condemning corruption while condoning inefficiency an experimental investigation into voting behavior this article reports results from an economic experiment that investigates the extent to which voters punish corruption and waste in elections while both are responsible for reductions in voters welfare they are not necessarily perceived as equally immoral the empirical literature in political agency has not yet dealt with these two dimensions of voters choice calculus our results suggest that morality and norms are indeed crucial for a superior voting equilibrium in systems with heterogeneous politicians while corruption always is punished self interest alone in the absence of norms leads to the acceptance and perpetuation of waste and social losses

interrupted work careers depreciation and restoration of human capital the quantitative effects and even the existence of a human capital depreciation phenomenon have been a subject of controversy in the recent literature prior work however was largely cross sectional and the longitudinal dimension if any was retrospective using longitudinal panel data on married women in nls we have now established that real wages at reentry are indeed lower than at the point of labor force withdrawal and the decline in wages is greater the longer the interruption another striking finding is a relatively rapid growth in wages after the return to work this rapid growth appears to reflect the restoration or repair of previously eroded human capital the phenomenon of depreciation and restoration is also visible in data for immigrants to the united states however while immigrants eventually catch up with and often surpass natives returnees from the nonmarket do not fully restore their earnings potential

reducing bureaucratic corruption interdisciplinary perspectives on what works abstract this article offers the first comprehensive review of the interdisciplinary state of knowledge regarding anti corruption policies with a particular focus on reducing corruption among civil servants drawing on the work of economists political scientists sociologists and anthropologists we examine seven policy categories 1 rewards and penalties 2 monitoring 3 restructuring bureaucracies 4 screening and recruiting 5 anti corruption agencies 6 educational campaigns and 7 international agreements notably rigorous empirical evaluation is lacking for the majority of commonly prescribed anti corruption policies nevertheless we find growing evidence of the effectiveness of policies based on monitoring including anti corruption audits and e governance in addition adequate civil service wages seem to be a necessary but insufficient condition for control of corruption an emerging skepticism regarding the effectiveness of anti corruption agencies also is apparent in the literature we conclude with broader lessons drawn from our review such as the recognition that when corruption is a systemic problem it cannot be treated in the long term with individual level solutions

panel estimates of male female earnings functions this paper applies single and simultaneous equation fixed effects fe and random effects re panel data estimation techniques to obtain male and female earnings function parameters using the panel study of income dynamics psid the paperfinds that earnings appreciation with experience and depreciation with labor market intermittency are comparable for men and women further skill atrophy rates increase not decrease once one controls for heterogeneity and endogeneity finally the unexplained male female wage differential declines from 40 percent to 20 percent when one adjusts for heterogeneity adjusting for endogeneity depends very much on the choice of instruments however when adjusting for endogeneity the gender earnings gap falls and approaches zero percent these results hold for two separate subsamples so that the estimates appear robust independent of sample selectivity

it s not just the thought that counts an experimental study on the hidden cost of giving receiving a gift can create an impulse to reciprocate even when doing so may be inefficient and potentially harmful to a third party this paper provides a theoretical framework for a pure gift effect on reciprocity impulses and experimental evidence that such an effect exists that is a gift receiver will favor an actual gift giver over an intended gift giver even if the intended gift giver incurred the same costs and signaled the same intention to give this result contrasts with the predictions of existing theories on social preferences we also show that the pure gift effect is present even when it leads to a less efficient outcome or when the gift is given without the expectation of future returns our findings suggest that when reciprocating a gift becomes socially inefficient it may be more advantageous to guard against gift receiving or to keep donations secret than to try to control the intent to give

the productivity of working hours observations on munition workers most of them women are organised to examine the relationship between their output and their working hours the relationship is non linear below an hour s threshold output is proportional to hours above a threshold output rises at a decreasing rate as hours increase implications of this finding for the estimation of labour supply functions are considered the findings also link up with the current research on the effects of long working hours on accidents and injuries

corruption investments and contributions to public goods experimental evidence from rural liberia we analyze how corruption affects incentives to invest or contribute to public goods we obtain a proxy for corruption among liberian community leaders by keeping track of a flow of inputs associated with a development intervention measuring these inputs before and after giving them in custody to the chief we then use the gap between these measurements missing inputs to explain variation in investment behavior of villagers investment behavior is gauged with two simple artefactual field experiments our main results are that corruption i undermines incentives for voluntary contributions to local public goods and ii may reduce private investments of individuals subject to rent seeking by the chief in real life we also provide weaker evidence that the impact of corruption on investments and contributions to public goods is heterogeneous this impact may be gender specific and appears to vary with accessibility of communities

the culture of corruption tax evasion and economic growth this study uses a dynamic general equilibrium model to quantify the effects of corruption and tax evasion on fiscal policy and economic growth the model is calibrated to match estimates of tax evasion in developing countries the calibrated model is able to generate reasonable predictions for net tax rates the corruption associated with public investment projects and the negative correlation between corruption and tax revenue the presence of corruption and evasion is shown to have significant but not large negative effects on economic growth the relatively moderate effects help explain the absence of a robust negative correlation between growth and corruption in cross country data the model also implies that cracking down on tax evasion before addressing corruption can be a bad idea and that higher wages for public officials can improve welfare jel h3 o4

a longitudinal analysis of white women s wages according to human capital theory women s work participation decisions will strongly affect their wages and wage growth we test human capital predictions about how labor force withdrawals both past and prospective part time work experience and working in male rather than in female jobs affect wages and wage growth for white women we do this by estimating a wage change model for the years 1967 1979 for a national sample of white women we find that wages drop immediately following withdrawals but that this is followed by a rapid wage growth so that the net loss in wages from dropping out of the labor force is small we further find that wage growth is not significantly lower in female than in male jobs but that part time work experience does not lead to significant wage growth in either male or female jobs

over identification tests in earnings functions with fixed effects the fixed effects model for panel data imposes restrictions on coefficients from regressions of all leads and lags of the dependent variable on all leads and lags of right side variables in the standard fixed effects model the omnibus goodness of fit statistic is shown to simplify to the degrees of freedom times the rz from a regression of analysis of covariance residuals on all leads and lags of right side variables this result is applied to test models for the union wage effect using data from the national longitudinal survey of youth nlsy identification and estimation of the return to schooling in models with fixed effects is also discussed although schooling is often treated as time invariant schooling increases over a five year period for nearly 20 of continuously employed men in the nlsy the analysis of covariance estimate of the returns to schooling is precisely estimated and roughly twice as large as the ordinary least squares estimate unlike in the union wage effects equation however

the career costs of children this paper analyzes the life cycle career costs associated with child rearing and decomposes their eects into unearned wages as women drop out of the labor market loss of human capital and selection into more child friendly occupations we estimate a dynamic life cycle model of fertility occupational choice and labor supply using detailed survey and administrative data for germany for numerous birth cohorts across dierent regions we use this model to analyze both the male female wage gap as it evolves from labor market entry onward and the eect of pro fertility policies we show that a substantial portion of the gender wage gap is explainable by realized and expected fertility and that the long run eect of policies encouraging fertility are considerably lower than the short run eects typically estimated in the literature

identification of supplier induced demand in the health care sector this paper explores the issues and pitfalls encountered when attempting to test empirically the hypothesis that physician hospital or any other input supply level induces increasing demand for health services in the strict sense of demand shift and through that increased demand for the input in question evidence is presented which suggests that an empirical test of the supplier induced demand sid hypothesis of the type traditionally performed may not in fact be feasible with cross sectional aggregate data such as is usually used

individual and opportunity factors influencing job creation in new firms we build on multiple theoretical perspectives to investigate the unique and joint effects of individual and opportunity level factors affecting job creation in new firms we tested hypotheses using survey data from individuals who transitioned from unemployment to self employment under the auspices of a german public policy program our findings reveal that an entrepreneur s breadth of knowledge has a negative influence on the firm s job creation whereas the entrepreneur s leadership experience has a positive influence however as the sector specific labor requirements of a business opportunity increase both breadth of knowledge and leadership experience allow founders to operate their firms with fewer employees

postponing maternity in ireland as in many other developed countries ireland has experienced a postponement of maternity whilst a number of authors have commented on this trend suggesting greater female participation in the workforce results in delayed maternity to date little research has tested this proposition we develop a model to consider the main trends related to the phenomenon of maternity postponement considering changes in first and later births separately using retrospective life history data developed from the 1994 living in ireland survey we estimate a hazard model to empirically test the relationship between career planning and the timing of first and subsequent births we incorporate a declining marginal return to experience and thereby provide a human capital career planning explanation for maternity postponement the results of our analysis demonstrate that career planning has an impact on the timing of maternity the findings also establish an income effect that influences the timing of first births copyright the author 2010 published by oxford university press on behalf of the cambridge political economy society all rights reserved oxford university press

in and out of the labour market long term income consequences of child related interruptions to women s paid work why do canadian mothers have lower incomes than women who have never had children microdata from the 1995 gss allow examination of two hypotheses 1 mothers have spent more time out of the labour force thus acquiring less human capital 2 higher levels of unpaid work lead to fatigue and or scheduling difficulties measuring work history does little to account for the family gap the estimated child penalty is reduced by allowing for human capital depreciation and controlling for unpaid work hours but the two hypotheses together cannot entirely explain the gap jel classification j0 j3 entrees et sorties marche du travail et consequences a long terme des interruptions dans l experience sur le marche du travail a cause des enfants ce memoire se demande pourquoi les femmes canadiennes qui ont eu des enfants ont des revenus plus bas que ceux des femmes qui n en ont pas eus les microdonnees de l enquete sociale generale de 1995 de statistiques canada permettent d examiner deux hypotheses 1 les meres ont passe plus de temps en dehors de la main d oeuvre active et donc ont accumule moins de capital humain ou 2 des niveaux plus eleves de travail non remunere peuvent entrainer fatigue ou difficultes d organisation du temps des efforts pour construire une meilleure image de l experience de travail des femmes ne permettent pas d expliquer cet ecart familial meme si la possibilite qu il y ait depreciation du capital humain reduit la penalisation attachee au fait d avoir un enfant en particulier si l interruption dans l experience sur le marche du travail est suivie d un changement d emploi le nombre hebdomadaire d heures de travail non paye est relie negativement aux revenus et si l on normalise pour tenir compte des heures de travail non paye cela reduit la penalisation attachee au fait d avoir un enfant cependant les deux hypotheses combinees ne suffisent pas pour expliquer l ecart

following the crowd leisure complementarities beyond the household leisure externalities across households have important implications for labor market regulations but have proven very difficult to identify this paper exploits the unique features of school holidays and paid leave regulations in france to show that exogenous increases in the amount of leisure time enjoyed by workers living with children induce very significant increases in the demand for leisure of workers living in other households we also provide evidence that these cross effects are driven by complementarities in nonmarket time rather than workplace norms or workplace externalities

discrimination fact or fiction an examination using an alternative approach women earn less than men blacks earn less than whites these facts are blatantly observable in the economy with the proliferation of civil rights legislation in the last two decades social scientists have become increasingly concerned with the determination of the wage gap attributable to discrimination because workers have different productivities statistical methods have been used to isolate the discrimination effect from wage differences justified by differences in productivity the primary method estimates an equation with wages expressed as a function of productivity and sex or race since productivity cannot be directly observed a number of proxies for productivity have been used such as education tenure and experience statisticians 11 have shown that the necessity of using proxies results in statistical biases which may tend to overestimate discrimination they have shown that mismeasuring any independent variable can impart a bias on each regression coefficient thereby causing a severe misestimate of discrimination these errors are proportional to the degree of mismeasurement the relative degree of error variance in the independent variables as well as to the amount of intercorrelation between each variable and race or

the gap between male and female pay in the spanish tourism industry abstract this paper analyzes wage differentials between male and female workers in the spanish tourism industry using a large administratively matched employer employee data set obtained from a representative sample of companies this allows us to control for unobserved firm specific factors likely to affect the magnitude of the gender wage gap our findings indicate that male workers earn on average 6 7 higher monthly wages than their socially comparable female counterparts in particular the type of contract held the qualifications required for the job and the specific sub sector of employment are very important variables in explaining this gender wage difference we also find that only around 12 of the mean wage difference in the tourism industry cannot be explained by differences in observable characteristics which is well below the average for the rest of the industries in spain 87 our interpretation is that minimum wage legislation provides a particularly effective protection to women in the tourism industry which is characterized by a large number of low wage earners

empirical determinants of corruption a sensitivity analysis many variables have been proposed by past studies as significant determinants of corruption this paper asks if their estimated impact on corruption is robust to alteration of the information set a global sensitivity analysis based on the leamer s extreme bounds analysis gives a clear answer five variables are robustly related to corruption corruption is lower in richer countries where democratic institutions have been preserved for a long continuous period and the population is mainly protestant corruption is instead higher where political instability is a major problem finally a country s colonial heritage appears to be a significant determinant of present corruption

trends in the male female wage gap the 1980s compared with the 1970s 1 introduction an interesting pattern emerges when contrasting men s and women s wage growth in the 1970s and 1980s from 1979 to 1989 female wages grew 1 7 per annum faster than male wages this wage growth in the 1980s resulted in a 17 narrowing of the gender wage gap on the other hand from 1969 to 1979 female wages grew at a rate only 0 39 per year faster than male wages resulting in very little narrowing of the gender wage gap blau 1998 as noted by smith and ward 1989 these contrasting trends puzzled many because it is well known that female work behavior shot up more dramatically in the 1970s than in the 1980s if female wage growth is related to increasing labor force activity one would have expected the male female wage gap to narrow more in the 1970s than in the 1980s the purpose of this paper is to identify some of the reasons why the male female wage gap narrowed more quickly in the 1980s than in the 1970s despite a deceleration of the growth in female labor force activity in the 1980s what appears to be the case is that predominantly younger and less experienced females entered the labor force in the 1970s the entry of women with relatively little human capital brought down the growth in women s average human capital o neill 1985 so that despite the upsurge of women s labor force participation in the 1970s women s average human capital relative to men s increased more slowly in the 1970s than in the 1980s this relatively slower growth in women s human capital appears to have played itself out in the 1980s both because the number of women joining the labor force slowed and because women s labor force attachment as measured by the proportion of potential work years actually worked increased blau 1998 with these trends average female human capital increased in the 1980s resulting in greater overall wage gains because of the stark differences between the 1970s and 1980s this paper concentrates on distinguishing the factors that contribute to men s and women s wage growth in the two decades despite the substantial literature on the male female wage gap the interdecade difference in the trend has not been adequately examined in what follows this paper uses the panel study of income dynamics psid to illustrate the effects of the demographic changes alluded to above 1 first it presents wage trends for the 1970s and 1980s second it provides direct measures of changes in human capital growth within each decade third to illustrate the importance of these demographic trends especially how new young labor market entrants bring down wages it shows that the higher relative female wage growth in the 1980s is reduced and the relatively slower female wage growth in the 1970s is enhanced when one controls for individual human capital characteristics these effects are illustrated first by including actual experience type variables in a regression whose coefficients measure wage growth and second by eliminating new entrants from 1970s and 1980s regression analysis the paper shows that with these controls increases in female average growth in both the 1970s and 1980s were more comparable than previously thought 2 recent literature on trends in the male female wage gap this is not the first paper to recognize the trend in male female wage convergence o neill 1985 blau and beller 1988 smith and ward 1989 goldin 1990 katz and murphy 1992 wellington 1993 o neill and polachek 1993 blau and kahn 1997 and blau 1998 all note that women s wages have risen relative to men smith and ward 1989 find that female relative wages rose between 1920 and 1980 when adjusting for worker skills goldin 1990 piecing together various data sources finds a similar long term narrowing according to her the ratio of female to male earnings in the economy as a whole rose from 0 46 to 0 56 during the period 1890 to 1930 but was virtually stable from 1950 to around 1980 p

why the gender gap in wages narrowed in the 1980s since 1976 the gender gap in wages on average declined by about 1 per year this article focuses on identifying the factors underlying this trend three data sets are analyzed the current population survey the panel study of income dynamics and the national longitudinal survey we find that convergence in measurable work related characteristics schooling and work experience explains one third to one half the narrowing the remainder is attributable to a relative increase in women s returns to experience as well as to declining wages in blue collar work and other factors

the back scratching game we develop a new experiment to study the emergence of welfare reducing bilateral alliances within larger groups and the effectiveness of institutional interventions to curtail back scratching in each of the 25 rounds of our experiments a player the allocator nominates one of three others in a group as a co worker the receiver which determines the group production that period to be the productivity of the receiver which varies by round but also gives the receiver a bonus and makes them the allocator in the next round alliances then form if two individuals keep choosing each other even when their productivities are lower than that of others causing efficiency losses we study whether particular interventions reduce the rate of alliance formation random allocator rotation policies were found to be ineffective whether implemented prior to or following a baseline treatment low bonuses did significantly reduce the advent of alliances there hence seems to be some hope in preventing back scratching via reducing the gain that can be made by alliances

is more competition always better an experimental study of extortionary corruption using a laboratory experiment we assess whether increasing competition among public officials reduces extortionary corruption we find that increasing the number of providers has no effect on bribe demands when citizens search costs are high but it increases corruption when search costs are low the effect is absent in a parallel setting framed as a standard market which we attribute to citizens using a nonsequential search strategy as opposed to sequential search in the corruption setting we conclude that efforts to reduce search costs such as infrastructure investments are preferable to anti corruption policies aimed at increasing the number of providers jel d73 d49 c91

unsecured debt with public insurance from bad to worse abstract in u s data income interruptions the receipt of public insurance and the incidence of personal bankruptcy are all closely related the central contribution of this paper is to evaluate bankruptcy protection and public insurance in a unified setting where each program alters incentives in the other our analysis delivers two striking conclusions first we find that u s personal bankruptcy law is an important barrier that prevents the public insurance system from improving welfare second contrary to popular belief we find that increases in the generosity of public insurance will lead to more not less bankruptcy

working hours and productivity in swedish manufacturing the magnitude of the elasticity of output with regard to working hours is an important factor in the debate on working time despite some attempts at its estimation little is known about this elasticity and empirical studies have yielded contradictory results feldstein 1967 craine 1973 and leslie 1984 obtain an output elasticity with respect to working hours considerably above one which implies that shorter working hours reduce productivity on the other hand elasticities below one are reported in studies by malinvaud 1973 tatom 1980 leslie and wise 1980 hart and macgregor 1984 and aberg 1985 suggesting that shorter working hours increase labor productivity part of this discrepancy naturally reflects differences between the economies and sectors studied types of data and the methods applied the main objective of this study is to analyze the sensitivity of the magnitude of the elasticity of output with respect to working hours to different production function specifications along the lines suggested by hart and macgregor 1984

child related transfers household labour supply and welfare what are the macroeconomic effects of transfers to households with children how do alternative policies fare in welfare terms we answer these questions in an equilibrium life cycle model with household labour supply decisions skill losses of females associated to non participation and heterogeneity in terms of fertility childcare expenditures and access to informal care calibrating our model to the u s economy we first provide a roadmap for policy evaluation by contrasting transfers that are conditional on market work childcare subsidies and childcare credits with those that are not child credits when both types can be means tested or universal we then evaluate expansions of current arrangements for the u s and find that expansions of conditional transfers have substantial positive effects on female labour supply that are largest at the bottom of the skill distribution expanding childcare credits leads to long run increases in the participation of married females of 10 6 while an equivalent expansion of child credits leads to the opposite 2 4 expanding existing programs generates substantial welfare gains for newborn households which are largest for less skilled households expanding childcare credits leads to the largest welfare gains for newborns and achieves majority support

the racial wage gap the importance of labor force attachment differences across black mexican and white men labor market attachment differs significantly across young black mexican and white men although it has long been agreed that potential experience is a poor proxy for actual experience for women many view it as an acceptable approximation for men using the nlsy this paper documents the substantial difference between potential and actual experience for both black and mexican men we show that the fraction of the black white and mexican white wage gaps that are explained by differences in potential experience are quite different from the fraction of the racial wage gaps that are explained by actual real experience differences

trends in structural productivity levels in the major industrialized countries abstract estimating returns to hours worked and the employment rate provides us with an original interpretation of changes in us productivity and other industrialized countries catch up with us productivity levels over recent decades

honesty on the streets a field study on newspaper purchasing many publishers use an honor system for selling newspapers in the street we conducted a field experiment to study honesty in this market finding that a moral reminder increases the level of honesty in payments whereas the same message has no effect on whether one is honest reminding customers of the legal norm has no effect we argue that these results are consistent with a preference for honesty based on an internalized social norm auxiliary evidence suggests that the moral message remains effective when it is posted for longer periods and even when it is removed again authors abstract

women s earnings reexamined since a discussion of details may obscure important general issues we start by restating what we consider to be the two major contributions of our 1974 study 5 1 the methodological contribution lies in the specification of an earnings function when human capital investment occurs at different rates including zero over various segments of the life cycle such specifications are appropriate for persons when market work does not continue throughout the usual working age or for analyses of continuous work histories segmented by some relevant criteria such as job change and occupational or geographic mobility applied work on these subjects continues 1 and specifications are undergoing refinement in retrospect the model we used to analyze earnings of women is not the best but it is serviceable which permits us to refrain from injecting new matters into the present discussion 2 the substantive interest in our study of earnings of women focuses on several propositions a even with identical current characteristics women whose past experience was shorter have currently lower wages as their total job investments were smaller b total investments are smaller not only because they are spread over fewer years of work experience but also because persons who spend less time in market work invest less per year worked than persons with longer work experience c if work experience is interrupted for any significant length of time job skills tend to erode so the human capital stock is reduced by depreciation or atrophy the relevance of these propositions to the analysis of the sexual wage gap is obvious in part women s wages are lower than men s because their labor force attachment is shorter and often discontinuous also the gap widens over the life cycle since initial differences in experience are necessarily small

the gender pay gap beyond human capital heterogeneity in noncognitive skills and in labor market tastes abstract focused on human capital economists typically explain about half of the gender earnings gap for a national sample of mbas we account for 82 percent of the gap by incorporating noncognitive skills for example confidence and assertiveness and preferences regarding family career and jobs those two sources of gender heterogeneity account for a quarter of the explained pay gap with half due to human capital variables and the other quarter due to hours worked and current job characteristics female mbas appear to pay a penalty for good citizen behavior choosing jobs that contribute to society and characteristics higher ethical standards

trust in large organizations several authors suggest that trust is an important determinant of cooperation between strangers in a society and therefore of performance of social institutions we argue that trust should be particularly important for the performance of large organizations in a cross section of countries evidence on government performance participation in civic and professional societies importance of large firms and the performance of social institutions more generally supports this hypothesis moreover trust is lower in countries with dominant hierarchical religions which may have deterred networks of cooperation trust hold up remarkably well on a cross section of countries this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

part time work wages and productivity evidence from belgian matched panel data the authors use matched employer employee panel data on belgian private sector firms to estimate the relationship between wage productivity differentials and the firm s labor composition in terms of part time work and gender findings suggest that the groups of women and part timers generate employer rents but also that the origin of these rents differs relatively lower wages for women relatively higher productivity for part timers interactions between gender and part time work suggest that the positive productivity effect is driven by male part timers working more than 25 hours whereas the share of female part timers is associated with wage penalties the authors conclude that men and women differ with respect to motives for reducing working hours and the types of part time jobs available to them women often have to accommodate domestic constraints by downgrading to more flexible jobs whereas male part time work is frequently related to training and collectively negotiated reductions in hours that

underpaid and overworked measuring the effect of imperfect information on wages this paper investigates the degree of shortfall between the wages workers earn and what they could earn assuming perfect or costless information in the labor market we use the stochastic frontier regression technique to estimate the degree of shortfall found in wages on an individual basis the paper tests in addition a number of hypotheses supplied by search theory in this context the results generally confirm the propositions from search theory and indicate that on the average worker wages fall short of worker potential wages by approximately 10 percent

bribery behavioral drivers of distorted decisions we experimentally investigate behavioral drivers of bribery focusing on the role of self interest reciprocity and moral costs associated with distorting judgment in our laboratory experiment two participants compete for a prize a referee picks the winner participants can bribe the referee when the referee can keep only the winner s bribe bribes distort her judgment when the referee keeps the bribes regardless of the winner bribes no longer influence her decision an experiment in an indian market confirms these results these findings imply that our participants are influenced by bribes out of self interest and not because of a desire to reciprocate further evidence shows that self interest guides decisions to a greater extent when referees have scope for avoiding the moral costs associated with distorting judgment as a result limiting referees ability to form self serving evaluations can significantly reduce the effectiveness of bribes less

securing property rights a dilemma experiment in austria mexico mongolia south korea and the united states abstract secure property rights result from a combination of public enforcement private protective measures and voluntary norm compliance we conduct a laboratory experiment to study how culture interacts with institutions in shaping individuals behaviors and group outcomes in a property rights dilemma the experiment is conducted in five countries austria mexico mongolia south korea and the united states we find that the security of property varies with the experimentally available institutions and country level indicators such as trust and quality of government subjects from countries with higher levels of trust are more likely to abstain initially from theft devote more resources to production and support funding public protection of property through taxation our findings highlight the relevance of cultural and institutional factors and their interaction in addressing the collective action problem of safeguarding property rights

urban effects on participation and wages are there gender differences abstract this paper estimates participation and wage equations using panel data from the united kingdom to explore gender differences in urban wage and participation premiums the results suggest a small but economically significant urban participation premium for women but none for men results from the wage estimations suggest that after controlling for sample selectivity observed and unobserved heterogeneity the urban premium is larger for women this wage premium is also larger for married or cohabiting women relative to others there is also evidence of higher urban returns to experience for men and lower urban wage depreciation for both men and women

female earnings and the divorce rate a simultaneous equations model economists have contributed a great deal of research both theoretical and empirical to the study of marital formation and dissolution many empirical examinations of marriage and divorce rates exist based on becker s seminal contributions to the literature all of these divorce studies are single equation models with female earnings assumed exogenous as discussed by becker 1981 however causality may run in the opposite direction as well the divorce rate may influence female earnings this paper estimates a simultaneous equations model in which divorce rates and female earnings are the jointly endogenous variables data are by state for 1960 1970 1980 and 1990 the state wide divorce rate equation is an extension of waters and ressler 1999 and the specification of a state wide earnings equation follows standard human capital theory the specification of joint endogeneity between female earnings and the divorce rate allows valid inferences to be made regarding the effect of female earnings on

the relevance of equal splits in ultimatum games abstract in this note we present a slightly altered version of the mini ultimatum game of g e bolton and r zwick 1995 games econ behav 10 95 121 more specifically we replaced exactly equal splits by nearly equal splits either slightly favoring the proposer or the responder such a minor change should not matter if behavior was robust we find however a significant change in behavior fair offers occur less often when equal splits are replaced by nearly equal splits journal of economic literature classification numbers c72 c78 c92

propensities to engage in and punish corrupt behavior experimental evidence from australia india indonesia and singapore abstract this paper examines cultural differences in individual decision making in a corruption game we define culture as an individual s accumulated experience shaped by the social institutional and economic aspects of the environment in which the individual lives based on experiments run in australia melbourne india delhi indonesia jakarta and singapore we find that there is a greater variation in the propensities to punish corrupt behavior than in the propensities to engage in corrupt behavior across cultures consistent with the existing corruption indices the subjects in india exhibit a higher tolerance of corruption than the subjects in australia however the subjects in singapore have a higher tolerance and the subjects in indonesia have much lower tolerance of corruption than expected we conjecture that this is due to the nature of the recent institutional changes in these two countries we also vary our experimental design to examine the impact of the perceived cost of bribery and find that the results are culture specific

foreign capital and gender differences in promotions evidence from large brazilian manufacturing firms proquest denotes formulae omitted widespread consensus asserts that occupational segmentation is the chief determinant for gender differences in wages in the brazilian labor market see for example oliveira 2001 although women represent 39 percent of the formal workforce in brazil they amount to only 23 percent of the employees in the sectors that pay relatively higher wages in 2004 as well the predominance of segmentation increases if one restricts attention to managerial positions of which women hold only 14 percent this suggests that limited promotion prospects for women in the brazilian job market may present barriers to their promotion to the upper rungs of the corporate ladder this paper contributes to the literature by examining data from the larg est firms of the brazilian manufacturing industry in particular our goal is to determine whether obstacles to women s ascension exist by tracking the amount of time it takes for a woman to get a promotion to a managerial posi tion the aim is to complement the literature on gender differences in promo tions whose papers mainly focus on computing the promotion rates time to promotion offers a different angle in that samples with a large time span could well present similar likelihoods of promotion for both genders even if the promotion durations are different we construct the duration variable by following from january 1996 to december 2005 every individual who enters the annual report of social information rais database between january 1991 and december 1995 we denote as nonpromoted the individuals who do not obtain a promotion to a managerial position within the sample that is the right censored observations whereas we assign duration zero to the workers who already are in managerial positions in january 1996 accordingly we label as promoted the individuals within our sample who rise to a managerial position that is those with uncensored positive durations investigating dif ferences in promotions is particularly difficult because observationally simi lar male and female workers may display equal promotion rates and durations even in the presence of gender differences for example promotions may differ in quality as far as we know this is the first study to examine gender differences in promotions using microdata from a developing country apart from the obvious interest in finding whether the main stylized facts hold in a latin american country we were also motivated by the quality and availability of the brazilian data in contrast to the many studies that employ data from individual firms see for example cabral ferber and green 1981 gerhart and milkovich 1989 baker gibbs and holmstrom 1994 our study relies on a homogeneous sample of recently hired workers from the brazilian manufac turing industry in the period from 1996 to 2005 our data set is particularly convenient first the data include a wide array of controls for worker and firm characteristics second unlike blau and devaro 2007 we observe multiple workers per establishment at different occupations and hierarchical levels as well as their career paths in terms of occupation and wage a potential limi tation is that our data set does not include any direct measure of on the job productivity and hence we must come up with indirect controls interestingly we find that there are significantly fewer gender differences in the time to promotion within foreign owned firms than within domestic firms in the brazilian manufacturing industry our findings complement to some extent the literature on the differences between multinationals and domestic firms doms and jensen 2006 greene and others 2009 as well as the evidence that gender differences may depend on the nature of the firm 1 we argue that such gender differences are consistent with statistical discrimi nation and self selection we reason as follows suppose there are relatively more women than men who prefer to dedicate more time to their family than to their careers

on the stability of the constant relative risk aversion crra utility under high degrees of uncertainty growth models under uncertainty and constant relative risk aversion crra utility are fragile in explaining consumers choice as equilibrium consumption is dependent on distributional assumptions we show that under semi nonparametric distributions general equilibrium models are stable as the existence of expected utility is guaranteed

sorting through global corruption determinants institutions and education matter not culture abstract identifying the robust determinants of corruption among cultural economic institutional and geographical factors has proven difficult from a policy perspective it is important to know whether inherent largely unchangeable attributes are responsible or if institutional and economic attributes are at work accounting for model uncertainty we use bayesian model averaging bma to analyze a comprehensive list of 36 potential corruption determinants across 123 countries covering 87 percent of the world population the bma methodology sorts through all 68 719 476 736 possible model combinations 2 36 in order to carve out the robust correlates we then take a step toward alleviating endogeneity concerns in an instrumental variable bma framework our results indicate that cultural factors are largely irrelevant whereas particular economic and institutional characteristics matter the rule of law emerges as the most persistent predictor with a posterior inclusion probability pip in the true model of 1 00 whereas we find strong evidence for government effectiveness pip of 0 88 urbanization 0 85 and the share of women in parliament 0 80 as meaningful determinants of lower corruption levels in developing countries the extent of primary schooling enters as a powerful factor with a pip of 1 00

the relative earnings of young mexican black and white women this analysis of data from the national longitudinal survey of youth indicates that young mexican women and young black women earned respectively 9 5 and 13 2 less than young white women in 1994 differences in education appear to be the most important explanation for the mexican white wage gap whereas differences in labor force attachment are the most important determinant of the black white wage gap the authors show that accounting for actual labor market experience rather than simply imputing experience based on years since leaving school is crucially important in such analyses recent research has renewed interest in the relatively poor labor market performance of mexican men trejo 1997 1998 reimers 1994 chavez 1991 chapa 1990 trejo 1997 found that lower levels of education english deficiencies and the relative youth of mexican men explain 75 of the gap between mexican and white wages in contrast these factors explain less than 30 of the wage gap between black and white men despite the flurry of recent research exploring the poor performance of mexican men we are aware of

wage variation resulting from staggered work hours abstract this paper presents a theoretical basis for varying wage rates with staggered work hours urban scale economies and decreasing marginal returns to labor are shown to exert opposite but not necessarily equal influences on marginal wages an ordered probit model is used with survey data from singapore to estimate income as a function of work start time results indicate the presence of production effects due to staggered work hours urban scale economies are shown to dominate the effect of decreasing marginal returns

nonemployment stigma as rational herding a field experiment abstract long spells of unemployment are known to reduce the likelihood of re employment but it is difficult to discern the reasons for this observation using an experimental method that controls for search intensity and possible discouragement of job applicants i document that job market opportunities for the nonemployed diminish rapidly over time in this experiment duration dependence is solely due to firm perceptions why do firms view long spells of nonemployment as negative signals rational herding is one important factor managers believe that unemployed applicants were previously interviewed and if the applicants were productive they would have been hired

gender differences in displacement cost evidence and implications this paper uses a unique and newly available data set on displaced workers to estimate differences in the wage costs of displacement between women and men while predisplacement wages rise at about the same rate with tenure for women as men in this data set women lose more from displacement than men and the magnitude of this loss increases with tenure overall we interpret our results as not supportive of the specific capital hypothesis that women accumulate less firmspecific human capital than men and we suggest that future attempts to explain our result focus on gender differences in the process of search for a new job

a note on some limitations of crra utility abstract in a standard environment for choice under uncertainty with constant relative risk aversion crra the existence of expected utility is fragile with respect to changes in the distributions of random variables changes in prior information or the assumption of rational expectations

spatial dynamics and heterogeneity in the cyclicality of real wages neither the issue of how local and aggregate labor markets interact over time nor the issue of how heterogeneity by education race and other factors interacts with these spatial dynamics has prev

corruption and culture an experimental analysis article i nfo article history why do some people choose corruption over honesty and others not do the social norms and values prevailing in the societies in which they grew up affect their decisions in 2005 we conducted a bribery experiment and found that among undergraduates we could predict who would act corruptly with reference to the level of corruption in their home country among graduate students we could not in 2007 we replicated our result and also found that time spent in the uk was associated with a decline in the propensity to bribe although this does not explain our inability to predict graduate behaviour we conclude that while corruption may in part be a cultural phenomenon individuals should not be prejudged with reference to their country of origin

is the market price of risk infinite abstract in a bayesian model a rational expectations euler equation involves a learning wedge that disconnects the consumer s imrs from the rational expectations pricing kernel the wedge is extremely volatile and explains the high volatility of the rational expectations pricing kernel

gender bias and credit access we extract an exogenous measure of gender bias from survey responses by descendants of u s immigrants on questions about the role of women in society we then use data on around 6 000 small business firms from 17 countries and find that in high gender bias countries female entrepreneurs are more likely to opt out of the loan application process and to resort to informal finance even though banks do not appear to actively discriminate against them these results are not driven by credit risk differences between female and male owned firms or by any idiosyncrasies in the set of countries in our sample

returns to human capital under the communist wage grid and during the transition to a market economy we estimate returns to human capital during communism and the transition using data on 2 284 men in the czech republic we show a extremely low and constant rates of return to education under the communist wage grid and dramatic increases in transition which do not differ by firm ownership b radical changes in returns to several fields of study and sheepskin effects in both regimes c identical wage experience profile in both regimes d similar 1996 returns to human capital obtained in communism and in transition and e changes in the interindustry wage structure a decomposition of the variance of wages finds individuals unobservable effects from communism to persist into transition but most of the variance is due to unobservable effects introduced in the transition

home production with endogenous growth abstract benhabib et al 1991 and greenwood and hercowitz 1991 demonstrate that general equilibrium beckerian home production models that incorporate separate technology shocks to the home and market production functions are able to explain either the comovements in employment across consumption and investment sectors of the economy or the comovement in output across market and home investment sectors but not both simultaneously this paper demonstrates that these comovements can be resolved by introducing endogenous growth into the model while retaining only a single technology shock to market production the additional margin for allocating time between formal training and market activities is sufficient to bring about the observed positive comovements in employment and output across sectors

career interruptions and subsequent earnings a reexamination using swedish data this paper reexamines the link between career interruptions and subsequent wages using a rich new swedish dataset we are able to disaggregate time out of work into several components regressing

i paid a bribe an experiment on information sharing and extortionary corruption abstract theoretical and empirical research on corruption has flourished in the last three decades however identifying successful anti corruption policies remains a challenge in this paper we ask whether bottom up institutions that rely on voluntary and anonymous reports of bribe demands such as the i paid a bribe website first launched in india in 2010 could act as effective anti corruption tools and if this is the case whether and how their effectiveness could be improved we overcome measurement and identification problems by addressing our research questions in the laboratory our results show that the presence of a reporting platform like the i paid a bribe website may be insufficient to systematically lower bribery a more effective platform is one where posts disclose specific information about the size of the bribes and the location of their requestors i e a platform that could serve as a search engine for the least corrupt officials especially if posting is restricted to service recipients our results also show that while citizens rarely post false information lying by officials when allowed to post on the platform is widespread

the returns to labour services in west german manufacturing industry production functions distinguishing between the stock and utilisation dimensions of factor labour and capital inputs are critically surveyed an extension to the existing literature is suggested whereby normal and overtime hours are separated within an appropriate non linear functional specification the econometric performance of this model is then compared with the main alternatives from the existing literature the empirical work is based on pooled cross section time series data which refer to west german manufacturing industries 1968 1978 estimates of the returns to labour services are also discussed in the light of related theoretical aspects of factor demand functions

sources of bias in women s wage equations results using sibling data we use data on sisters to jointly address heterogeneity bias and endogeneity bias in estimates of wage equations for women this analysis yields evidence of biases in ols estimates of wage equations for white and black women some of which are detected only when the two sources of bias are addressed simultaneously for both white and black women there is evidence of upward bias in the estimated returns to schooling bias corrected estimates of the effect of marriage on wages for white women suggest a positive marriage premium we also use the sibling data to identify our models and test a number of other commonly used identifying assumptions as overidentifying restrictions