credentials and wage discrimination the subject is wage discrimination among workers with differing privately known reservation wages and costs of obtaining credentials that can be observed by a monopsonist firm numerical examples are studied in which workers are equally productive and in the population their reservation wages and credentialing costs have a normal distribution with negative correlation according to these examples wage discrimination is unprofitable

computation of the beveridge nelson decomposition for multivariate economic time series abstract this note shows how the result of newbold 1990 newbold p 1990 precise and efficient computation of the beveridge nelson decomposition of economic time series journal of monetary economics 26 453 457 can be extended to the computation of the beveridge nelson decomposition in the multivariate case where series are generated by vector arima models a separate treatment is provided for the cointegrated case

better schools less crime i estimate the impact of attending a first choice middle or high school on adult crime using data from public school choice lotteries in charlotte mecklenburg school district cms seven years after random assignment lottery winners had been arrested for fewer serious crimes and had spent fewer days incarcerated the gain in school quality as measured by peer and teacher inputs was equivalent to moving from one of the lowest ranked schools to one at the district average the reduction in crime comes largely from years after enrollment in the preferred school is complete the impacts are concentrated among high risk youth who commit about 50 less crime across several different outcome measures and scalings of crime by severity i find suggestive evidence that school quality explains more of the impact in high school whereas peer effects are more important in middle school copyright 2011 oxford university press

the beveridge nelson decomposition of economic time series a quick computational method this note describes a much simpler computational method for carrying out the beveridge and nelson decomposition of economic time series into permanent and cyclical components

unions and strikes with asymmetric information strikes seem to be a pareto inefficient outcome of bargaining between a union and a firm however this paper shows that strikes can be the outcome of rational behavior by both agents if the firm has more information than the union concerning the state of nature the union can use strikes as a way of gaining information the paper uses an asymmetric information model where the firm has information about the state i e profitability that the union does not know the schedule of wage offers by the union then depends on the probability that a given state will occur

strike incidence and the business cycle in ireland strike incidence equations are estimated for manufacturing strikes in ireland from 1960 to 1989 using both poisson and negative binomial regression models a number of alternative business cycle measures are specified the pro cyclicity of strikes is confirmed in all cases and is invariant to the measurement of the cyclical component the numerical size of the cyclical effect on strike activity is however quite small

real business cycles under test abstract according to the theory of real business cycles exogenous technological productivity shocks are the primary source of economic fluctuations following the lines of the multisectoral long and plosser 1983 model the paper shows that such a view of business cycles leads to an inherent sectoral ordering in which non consumer sectors are exogenous on the contrary empirical evidence based on var testing and cross spectral methods reveals that consumer goods sectors precede this result can be explained by a simple extension of the dynamic long and plosser innovation process in which significant stochastic demand disturbances are taken into account in particular these demand shocks have to dominate inverse supply innovations such issues of real business cycle theory suggest that only a more explicit modelling of demand influences will reconcile theory with observation

are business cycles asymmetric some european evidence economic thought has often regarded business cycles as asymmetric this study examines the existence of asymmetries over the business cycle in seven european countries france germany ireland italy luxembourg the netherlands and the united kingdom to analyse this issue industrial production in these countries from 1957 to 1998 is examined and quarterly contractions and expansions in this variable are compared the results obtained with both parametric and non parametric methods allow the existence of asymmetries in these countries to be questioned

crime and punishment the role of student body characteristics in schools disciplinary behaviours abstractdiscretion in schools discipline choices can provide an efficient and effective misconduct management structure but could lead to discipline based on unrelated factors consequently schools disciplinary decisions can significantly limit students access to education by removing students from familiar learning environments we investigate schools disciplinary decisions for serious misconducts and show that punishments are more severe in schools that do not report misconducts to local law enforcement agencies moreover we show that schools that report fewer misconducts to law enforcement impose more severe punishments when the student body is characterized as having a higher proportion of minority students lower socioeconomic status students and a higher proportion of students who are below the 15th percentile of standardized test scores these results suggest that between school punishment differentials are associated with student body traits

collusion fluctuating demand and price rigidity we study an infinitely repeated bertrand game in which an i i d demand shock occurs in each period each firm receives a private signal about the demand shock at the beginning of each period at the end of each period all information but the private signals becomes public we consider the optimal symmetric perfect public equilibrium sppe mainly for patient firms we show that price rigidity arises in the optimal sppe if the accuracy of the private signals is low we also study the implications of more firms and firms impatience on collusive pricing empirical evidence shows that prices in oligopolistic markets tend to be more rigid than prices in competitive markets dixon 1983 carlton 1986 this suggests that collusion may result in firms inflexible pricing behavior it is not obvious however that collusion causes price rigidity why do colluding firms not adjust prices according to changing environments by which they can potentially earn higher profits what limits colluding firms ability to coordinate thereby leading to price rigidity in this article we study how information asymmetry among firms limits colluding firms ability to respond to demand shocks and characterize the conditions under which prices are rigid specifically we consider private information about demand in an infinitely repeated bertrand game with two identical firms in which an i i d binary demand shock occurs in each period each firm receives a conditionally independent private signal about the underlying demand state at the beginning of each period and then charges a price the accuracy of private signals is measured by the probability of receiving a high respectively low signal conditional on a high respectively low underlying demand state therefore the lower the accuracy the higher the degree of informational asymmetry at the end of each period firms observe the underlying demand and the prices but they never observe their rivals signals we adopt symmetric perfect public equilibria sppe as our solution concept which requires that at each period firms pricing schemes

precise and efficient computation of the beveridge nelson decomposition of economic time series abstract this note shows how the beveridge nelson decomposition of economic time series can be precisely computed without the necessity for truncating infinite sums the algorithm includes those of beveridge and nelson 1981 and miller 1988 as special cases for particular models correcting an error in the latter

a new approach to decomposition of economic time series into permanent and transitory components with particular attention to measurement of the business cycle abstract this paper introduces a general procedure for decomposition of non stationary time series into a permanent and transitory component allowing both components to be stochastic the permanent component is shown to be a random walk with drift and the transitory or cyclical component is a stationary process with mean zero the decomposition methodology which depends only on past data and therefore is computable in real time is applied to the problem of measuring and dating business cycles in the portwar u s economy we find that measured expansions and contractions are of roughly equivalent duration and that our dating of cyclical episodes tends to lead the traditional nber dating and to a lesser extent the growth cycle chronology of zarnowitz and boschan 1977

the relationship between education and adult mortality in the united states prior research has uncovered a large and positive correlation between education and health this paper examines whether education has a causal impact on health i follow synthetic cohorts using successive u s censuses to estimate the impact of educational attainment on mortality rates i use compulsory education laws from 1915 to 1939 as instruments for education the results suggest that education has a causal impact on mortality and that this effect is perhaps larger than has been previously estimated in the literature copyright 2005 wiley blackwell

does education improve citizenship evidence from the united states and the united kingdom abstract many studies document an association between schooling and civic participation but none credibly investigate causal links we explore the effect of extra schooling induced through compulsory schooling laws on the likelihood of becoming politically involved in the united states and the united kingdom we find that educational attainment is related to several measures of political interest and involvement in both countries we find a strong and robust relationship between education and voting for the united states but not for the united kingdom our us results approach the uk findings when conditioning on registration possibly indicating that registration rules present a barrier to participation

the crime reducing effect of education in this article we study the crime reducing potential of education presenting causal statistical estimates based upon a law that changed the compulsory school leaving age in england and wales we frame the analysis in a regression discontinuity setting and uncover significant decreases in property crime from reductions in the proportion of people with no educational qualifications and increases in the age of leaving school that resulted from the change in the law the findings show that improving education can yield significant social benefits and can be a key policy tool in the drive to reduce crime

relational incentive contracts standard incentive theory models provide a rich framework for studying informational problems but assume that contracts can be perfectly enforced this paper studies the design of self enforced relational contracts i show that optimal contracts often can take a simple stationary form but that self enforcement restricts promised compensation and affects incentive provision with hidden information it may be optimal for an agent to supply the same inefficient effort regardless of cost conditions with moral hazard optimal contracts involve just two levels of compensation this is true even if performance measures are subjective in which case optimal contracts terminate following poor performance jel c73 d82 l14

capital flows and saving in latin america and asia a reinterpretation abstract both theory and the empirical evidence for a broad range of countries have identified a negative relationship between domestic and foreign saving still based on the experience of the 1990s a popular view has emerged that domestic and foreign saving are positively related in asia and negatively related in latin america we argue that this popular discussion does not discriminate between trends in domestic saving which are very different in the two regions and the cyclical component of saving which is linked to capital flows we show that when trend and cyclical components of domestic saving and capital flows are properly taken into account the two regions do not differ in the short run response of domestic saving to capital inflows we conclude that the main differences pertain to the long run behavior of saving rates which are driven by trends in demographic factors per capita gdp and other factors that have little to do with fluctuations in capital flows

do dropouts drop out too soon wealth health and happiness from compulsory schooling abstract this paper uses compulsory schooling laws to evaluate high school dropout decisions the main empirical result is that lifetime wealth increases by about 15 with an extra year of compulsory schooling students compelled to stay in school are also less likely to report being in poor health unemployed and unhappy the main conclusion is that high school aversion alone is unlikely to explain why dropouts forgo substantial gains to lifetime wealth the results are more consistent with the possibility that adolescents ignore or heavily discount future consequences when deciding to drop out of school if teenagers are myopic making school compulsory or offering incentives to stay in school may help improve lifetime outcomes

cyclical fluctuations in strike durations canadian data on strikes between 1946 and 1983 are used to estimate linear regression models for the logarithm of completed duration a thorough investigation of the influence of the business cycle reveals strong support for the hypothesis that strike durations are countercyclical the cyclical effect is shown to be robust to both the choice of cyclical variable and the econometric specification and the magnitude of the effect is quite substantial experimentation with different representations of the cycle reveals that it is difficult to improve on a simple formulation involving a single continuous variable

relational incentive contracts with productivity shocks abstract this paper extends levin s 2003 relational contract model by having not only the agent s cost of effort agent s type but also the value of that effort to the principal principal s type subject to i i d shocks when optimal effort is fully pooled across agent types for multiple principal types it is also pooled across those principal types when optimal effort separates some agent types for multiple principal types efforts of those agent types may be separated across principal types but then somewhat perversely some agent type s effort is decreasing in the principal s value of effort when agent type is uniformly distributed that applies to agent types with lower effort cost so reducing the difference in effort between low and high effort cost types this result extends to the principal s type being observed only by the principal if the marginal cost of effort to the agent is sufficiently convex

a theory of exit in duopoly we develop a duopoly model in which exit occurs because of the existence of fixed costs or opportunity costs each firm enters the market knowing its own cost but not that of its opponent as times goes on each firm becomes increasingly pessimistic about the cost of its remaining rival the time of exit is the only strategic variable so that our model is a war of attrition in contrast to the classic war of attrition however we assume that with positive probability each firm s costs may be low enough that staying in forever is a dominant strategy thus our model unlike the classic one has a unique equilibrium

compulsory schooling laws and school crime extensive literature demonstrates that compulsory schooling laws improve educational attainment well being civic involvement and labour market outcomes however at risk youth incapacitated to schools may impact the learning environment and school safety the purpose of this article is to study whether raising the minimum dropout age mda requirement above 16 increases crime committed within us public high schools a difference in difference estimation exploits changes in state level mda laws over time and indicates that schools in states that raise their mda requirement to 18 incur more overall crime relative to schools in states that do not while no effect on overall crime is identified when the mda requirement is raised to 17 furthermore these effects persist for 4 years after passage and more intensely in metropolitan areas coupling this research with existing literature suggests that when the mda requirement is raised to 18 only a small portion of the observed reduction in juvenile crime is

does compulsory school attendance affect schooling and earnings we establish that season of birth is related to educational attainment because of school start age policy and compulsory school attendance laws individuals born in the beginning of the year start school at an older age and can therefore drop out after completing less schooling than individuals born near the end of the year roughly 25 percent of potential dropouts remain in school because of compulsory schooling laws we estimate the impact of compulsory schooling on earnings by using quarter of birth as an instrument for education the instrumental variables estimate of the return to education is close to the ordinary least squares estimate suggesting that there is little bias in conventional estimates every developed country in the world has a compulsory schooling requirement yet little is known about the effect these laws have on educational attainment and earnings 1 this paper exploits an unusual natural experiment to estimate the impact of compulsory schooling laws in the united states the experiment stems from the fact that children born in different months of the year start school at different ages while compulsory schooling laws generally require students to remain in school until their sixteenth or seventeenth birthday in effect the interaction of school entry requirements and compulsory schooling laws compel students born

computation of the beveridge nelson decomposition in the case of cointegrated systems with i 0 variables abstract this paper shows how the result of arino and newbold economics letters 61 1998 37 for the multivariate bn decomposition in the cointegrated case can be extended when i 0 variables are considered in the vec model an application of the extended procedure to the spanish peseta french franc real exchange rate is also provided

the beveridge nelson decomposition of economic time series another economical computational method abstract this note describes a simple and an economical computational procedure for generating the permanent cyclical decomposition of economic time series proposed by beveridge and nelson 1981 our procedure is a more complete alternative than the method suggested by cuddington and winters 1987

targeting the real exchange rate theory and evidence abstract this paper presents a theoretical and empirical analysis of policies aimed at setting a more depreciated level of the real exchange rate an intertemporal optimizing model suggests that in the absence of changes in fiscal policy a more depreciated level of the real exchange rate can only be attained temporarily this can be achieved by means of higher inflation and or higher real interest rates depending on the degree of capital mobility evidence for brazil chile and colombia supports the model s prediction that undervalued real exchange rates are associated with higher inflation

strategic bargaining models and interpretation of strike data attrition screening and signalling models of strategic bargaining are characterized in terms of their predictions about the incidence mean duration and settlement rates of strikes and the terms of wage settlements these predictions are compared with the general features observed in empirical studies of strikes in canada and the united states conclusions are drawn about the types of models capable of generating these features and about the conformity of the models to the evidence methods are described for computing the numerical examples used to illustrate the models

an empirical test of an asymmetric information model of strikes recent developments in the theory of strategic bargaining demonstrate how informational asymmetries can lead to prolonged and costly bargaining these models can be applied to contract negotiations yielding an economic theory of strikes to date however few empirical tests of these models have been carried out in this paper a set of predictions concerning the incidence and unconditional duration of strikes is derived from a simple bargaining model in which the union is uncertain about the firm s future profitability these predictions are then tested on a micro data set of major u s contract negotiations that took place from 1973 to 1977

does raising the school leaving age reduce teacher effort evidence from a policy experiment this paper examines the impact of an increase in the school leaving age on high school teachers absence behaviour we estimate differ ence in difference models of absenteeism using count data approaches employing data from the spanish labour force survey our findings suggest that high school teachers reduced their effort due to the re form that raised the age of compulsory education commencing in the academic year 1998 1999 in spain in particular they take 15 more sickness absence in the posttreatment period this result should be of interest to both policy makers and researchers who rely upon com pulsory school law changes as a source of exogenous variation in edu cational attainment

the effect of education on crime evidence from prison inmates arrests and self reports we estimate the effect of high school graduation on participation in criminal activity accounting for endogeneity of schooling we begin by analyzing the effect of high school graduation on incarceration using census data instrumental variable estimates using changes in state compulsory attendance laws as an instrument for high school graduation uncover a significant reduction in incarceration for both blacks and whites when estimating the impact of high school graduation only ols and iv estimators estimate different weighted sums of the impact of each schooling progression on the probability of incarceration we clarify the relationship between ols and iv estimates and show that the weights placed on the impact of each schooling progression can explain differences in the estimates overall the estimates suggest that completing high school reduces the probability of incarceration by about 76 percentage points for whites and 3 4 percentage points for blacks we corroborate these findings using fbi data on arrests that distinguish among different types of crimes the biggest impacts of graduation are associated with murder assault and motor vehicle theft we also examine the effect of drop out on self reported crime in the nlsy and find that our estimates for imprisonment and arrest are caused by changes in criminal behavior and not educational differences in the probability of arrest or incarceration conditional on crime we estimate that the externality of education is about 14 26 of the private return to schooling suggesting that a significant part of the social return to education comes in the form of externalities from crime reduction

implicit contracts incentive compatibility and involuntary unemployment this paper considers the enforceability of employment contracts when employees performance cannot be verified in court so that piece rate contracts are not legally enforceable part i shows that there exists a variety of self enforcing implicit contracts modelled as perfect equilibria in a repeated game and characterizes all the wage and performance outcomes that can be implemented implementation requires a strictly positive surplus from employment the form of the contract depending on how this surplus is divided between firm and employee piece rate contracts and contracts with an informally agreed bonus can be made self enforcing but the use of severance pay and bonding does not extend the set of implementable allocations the resulting contracts resemble actual labor contracts more than do the contracts in standard principal agent models part ii analyses market equilibrium with these contracts also modelled as perfect equilibria in a repeated game and shows that many such equilibria exist unfilled vacancies and unemployed workers can co exist despite the existence of contracts that are potentially mutually beneficial for those jobs that are filled any division of the potential surplus is possible so that the market can have at the same time involuntary unemployment and vacancies that are unfilled despite filled jobs earning positive profits as a criterion for selecting equilibria a notion of renegotiation proofness is applied then either all workers are employed or all jobs filled but any division of the potential surplus is still possible the paper explores what further restrictions on beliefs give rise to a walrasian outcome in which all the potential surplus goes to the short side of the market and to an efficiency wage type outcome in which the potential surplus goes to the long side