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

occupational self selection a human capital approach to sex differences in occupational structure a rich and diverse literature exists concerning the distribution of labor incomes one approach namely that of human capital concentrates on lifetime accumulation paths of earnings capacity units human capital individual variations in human capital imply differences in earnings power thereby yielding strong implications concerning earnings distribution within a population despite its explanatory power the human capital model has been widely criticized one criticism centers on its inability to obtain inferences concerning occupational distribution the purpose of this paper is to alleviate at least some such criticism by applying the hedonic price approach so as to embed occupational choice into the human capital framework the significance is that neoclassical economic theory can be used to obtain implications concerning the determinants of occupational structure excerpt

the political economy of gender explaining cross national variation in the gender division of labor and the gender voting gap mainstream political economy has tended to treat the family as a unit when examining the distributional consequences of labor market institutions and of public policy in a world with high divorce rates we argue that this simplification is more likely to obscure than to instruct we find that labor market opportunities for women which vary systematically with the position of countries in the international division of labor and with the structure of the welfare state affect women s bargaining power within the family and as a result can explain much of the cross country variation in the gender division of labor as well as the gender gap in political preferences

did unilateral divorce laws raise divorce rates a reconciliation and new results application of the coase theorem to marital bargaining suggests that shifting from a consent divorce regime to no fault unilateral divorce laws should not affect divorce rates each iteration of the empirical literature examining the evolution of divorce rates across us states has yielded different conclusions about the effects of divorce law liberalization i show that these results reflect a failure to jointly consider both the political endogeneity of these divorce laws and the dynamic response of divorce rates to a shock to the political regime taking explicit account of the dynamic response of divorce rates to the policy shock i find that liberalized divorce laws caused a discernible rise in divorce rates for about a decade but that this increase was substantially reversed over the next decade that said this increase explains very little of the rise in the divorce rate over the past half century both administrative data on the flow of new divorces and measures of the stock of divorcees from the census support this conclusion these results are suggestive of spouses bargaining within marriage with an eye to their partner s divorce threat

property rights regimes and natural resources a conceptual analysis revisited summary more than two decades ago schlager and ostrom 1992 developed a conceptual schema for arraying property rights regimes that distinguishes among diverse bundles of rights the conceptual framework has profoundly influenced research on natural resource governance common property and community resource management however currently natural resource governance has changed dramatically challenging the applicability of the conceptual schema there are now many more social actors involved in resource management than the local communities at the focus of original analysis additionally resource management increasingly provides access to various kinds of benefits from outside the immediate context including indirect benefits such as payments for environmental services and results based payments for redd these changes demand addition of new property rights to the original framework this paper updates the conceptual schema in reaction to changes in natural resource governance proposing three specific modifications on the focus of use rights control rights and authoritative rights to come up with a framework that distinguishes eight types of property rights we apply the framework to three purposefully selected governance interventions in china and laos that include the provision of indirect benefits in addition to the direct benefits derived by local people from natural resources the empirical application shows how contemporary governance changes may not lead to local people s outright dispossession since they continue to possess direct use rights to natural resources however local people may be excluded from control and authoritative rights which are exercised exclusively by state agencies and international actors the latter make available indirect benefits to local people which may or may not translate into use rights in the sense of policy based entitlements the empirical insights suggest the possibility of a wider trend of compensated exclusions in natural resource governance

distribution and redistribution in postindustrial democracies this paper analyzes the processes of distribution and redistribution in post industrial democracies we combine a pooled time series data base on welfare state effort and its determinants assembled by huber ragin and stephens 1997 with data on income distribution assembled in the luxembourg income survey lis archive in the case of the lis data we re calculate the micro data in order to remove the distorting influence of pensioners on pre tax pre transfer income distribution we examine the determinants of three dependent variables pre tax pre transfer income inequality post tax post transfer income inequality and the proportional reduction in inequality from pre to post tax and transfer inequality we hypothesized that pre tax pre transfer income inequality would be determined by labor market institutions union density bargaining centralization labor market conditions unemployment and economic structures post industrialism third world imports we hypothesized that the reduction in inequality would be determined by political configurations directly by left government and indirectly via their effect on welfare state generosity by left government and christian democratic government post tax and transfer income inequality was hypothesized to be a product of the combination of labor market variables and political variables the results broadly confirms our hypotheses and the overall fit is very good

the family and the state the immaturity of children sometimes precludes efficient arrangements between children and parents or others responsible for child care the difficulty in establishing efficient relations within families provides the point of departure for our interpretation of the heavy state involvement in the family the authors believe that a surprising number of state interventions mimic the agreements that would occur if children were capable of arranging for their care many regulations of the family improve the efficiency of family activities these interventions include subsidies to education and training social security and other old age support subsidies to births laws that limit access to divorce and the sale of children and laws that require parents permission for early marriage and other choices of children families that leave bequests can force children to repay parents for investments in human capital by reducing bequests therefore these families do not underinvest in childrens human capital by contrast families that do not leave bequests often poorer families do underinvest in children the state may subsidize schools and other training facilities to raise investments in children by poorer families to efficient levels authors modified

gendering the varieties of capitalism a study of occupational segregation by sex in advanced industrial societies this article explores the unintended gendered consequences of employment protection and vocational training systems it develops a micrologic of skill investment by workers and employers to identify the mechanism by which specific skills become disadvantageous for women the central claim of the article is that institutions that encourage male investment in specific skills exacerbate occupational sex segregation the article finds that coordinated market economies because of their robust institutional protection of male skill investments are generally more sex segregating than are liberal market economies the empirical section provides cross sectional analyses of advanced industrial countries

economic development and gender equality is there a gender kuznets curve this research note examines the relationship between economic development and gender equality drawing on the concept of the kuznets curve the authors hypothesize that the relationship between economic development and gender inequality is curvilinear s shaped with three distinct stages in the first stage economic development improves gender equality because it enables greater female labor force participation an independent income stream increases women s intrahousehold bargaining power the opportunity to develop human capital confers greater political and social recognition in the second stage labor force stratification and gender discrimination encourage divergent male female income trajectories which decrease the opportunity costs of female labor force withdrawal and lend traction to social resistance against burgeoning gender norms consequently there is a deceleration in initial equality gains in the final stage gender equality again improves as greater educational participation and technological advancement provide new employment opportunities for women increase the opportunity costs of staying home and encourage the evolution of new social institutions and norms that overcome prior discriminatory practices the authors find support for this argument in statistical tests of the relationship between economic development and gender equality on a panel of 146 developing countries for the period 1980 2005 they employ four indicators that reflect distinct dimensions of women s political social and economic status they find economic development positively influences gender equality when per capita incomes are below 8 000 10 000 these equality gains level off or decline slightly in the second stage from 8 000 10 000 to about 25 000 30 000 beyond this level economic development is again associated with improvements in gender equality the key implication is that the effect of economic development on gender equality is contingent on the level of development policymakers and social activists should develop policy correctives to ensure that economic development confers improvements in gender equality across phases of development

occupation segregation a defense of human capital predictions this article examines worker sorting across occupations in response to the risk of death on the job we use family structure as a proxy for willingness to trade safety for wages to test the proposition that workers with strong aversion to this risk sort

who does more housework rich or poor a comparison of 33 countries this article studies the relationship between household income and housework time across 33 countries in most countries low income individuals do more housework than their high income counterpart

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

the effect of trade openness on women s welfare and work life summary this study of 134 countries analyzes whether women are generally the losers or winners of globalization the results show that economic integration does not directly improve women s life expectancies women s access to primary and secondary education may improve slightly although women s welfare does not seem to improve more than that of men on the other hand economic integration does influence women s professional lives in developing countries trade openness increases female labor force participation in industrialized states it decreases the share of working women trade openness in developed countries increases the number of women employed in the service sector while in developing states it increases the number of women working in industrial jobs and in agriculture

china s sloping land conversion program institutional innovation or business as usual abstract china s sloping land conversion program slcp is the largest land retirement reforestation program in the developing world having the goal of converting 14 67 million hectares of cropland to forests by 2010 4 4 million of which is on land with slopes greater than 25 and an additional soft goal of afforesting a roughly equal area of wasteland by 2010 pending successful completion it could represent a 10 20 increase in china s national forest area and a 10 decrease in current cultivated area in contrast to china s other forest sector policies slcp uses a public payment scheme that directly engages millions of rural households as core agents of project implementation and has the stated principals of volunteerism thus insofar as current or future de facto program implementation involves decentralized voluntary grassroots participation slcp represents an important departure from business as usual in how china manages its forest resources this work draws upon current available research of the program and uses a 2003 household and village level survey conducted by the center for chinese agricultural policy cas to examine program design implementation and outcomes to date results indicate that significant problems in design and implementation exist with these including shortfalls in subsidies delivered lack of respect of the principals of volunteerism and insufficient technical support and budgeting for local implementation costs more fundamentally some program goals appear to be based on common misperceptions regarding the linkages between forests and watershed services overall slcp contains both innovative elements volunteerism and the direct engagement of farmers as well as components that hark back to policies and mindsets of decades past the program s top down simplified contract structure lack of sufficient consultation with local communities and rural households and campaign style mobilization the paper concludes by providing four main suggestions to improve the program 1 increase local community input in design and implementation and ensure that households have full autonomy in participation choice 2 improve technical support and budgeting for local administrative costs and capacity building 3 clarify the environmental services targeted and verify the measures needed to acquire these services and 4 integrate slcp into an overall package of complementary policies aimed at the rural sector

recentralizing while decentralizing how national governments reappropriate forest resources summary decentralization initiatives have been launched in the majority of developing countries but these rarely lay the foundations necessary to reach decentralization s purported efficiency and equity benefits this paper uses a comparative empirical approach to show how central governments in six countries senegal uganda nepal indonesia bolivia and nicaragua use a variety of strategies to obstruct the democratic decentralization of resource management and hence retain central control effective decentralization requires the construction of accountable institutions at all levels of government and a secure domain of autonomous decision making at the local level

public sector unions corporatism and macroeconomic performance what accounts for the apparent breakdown of the positive relationship between powerful trade union organizations and macroeconomic performance is corporatism a relic of a different age a luxury o

property transfers and environmental pollution incentive effects of alternative policies this paper considers how trans ferring some or all future responsibility for cleanup of a contaminated site affects the cur rent owner s incentives to reduce contamina tion given that he anticipates selling his prop erty in the future the results depend on the probabilities that the parties will be judgment proof the distribution of surplus and whether there is joint and several liability contrary to popular belief we show that transferring liabil ity can actually increase the seller s incentive to invest in pollution abatement furthermore abatement incentives are at least as great and generally greater with joint and several liability than without it jel q2

why the poor do not expropriate the rich an old argument in new garb we consider a political economy with two partisan parties each party represents a given constituency of voters if one party labour represents poor voters and the other christian democrats rich voters if a redistributive tax policy is the only issue and if there are no incentive considerations then in equilibrium the party representing the poor will propose a tax rate of unity if however there are two issues tax policy and religion for instance then this is not generally the case the analysis shows that if a simple condition on the distribution of voter preferences holds then as the salience of the non economic issue increases the tax rate proposed by labour in equilibrium will fall possibly even to zero even though a majority of the population may have an ideal tax rate of unity 1998 elsevier science s a all rights reserved

participatory exclusions community forestry and gender an analysis for south asia and a conceptual framework abstract the idea of people s participation has long been part of development thinking but today the management of local natural resources by village communities is widely accepted as an institutional imperative it is therefore essential to examine how these institutions perform especially from the perspective of the more disadvantaged based on extensive fieldwork among community forestry groups in india and nepal and existing case studies this paper demonstrates how seemingly participatory institutions can exclude significant sections such as women it provides a typology of participation spells out the gender equity and efficiency implications of such exclusions and analyzes what underlies them it also outlines a conceptual framework to help analyze the process of gender exclusion and how it might be alleviated

women s rising market opportunities and increased labor force participation i introduction this paper examines the secular increase in the labor market activity of married women in the united states from 1975 to 1991 overall the female employment rate increased from 49 in 1975 to 67 in 1991 not surprisingly the employment gains of married women the primary focus of this study largely accounted for this increase 1 in particular the employment rate of married women climbed from 44 in 1975 to 64 in 1991 analysis of the dramatic increase in female labor force participation is certainly not new for example smith and ward 1985 document the time series growth in female labor force participation from the beginning of this century to 1980 goldin s work 1977 1989 stresses that women s role in the labor market began changing well before world war ii most broad based studies of female labor force participation end their analyses around 1980 thus this research updates earlier work and provides a glimpse of what happened to women during the 1980s more importantly the present research places special emphasis on the degree of married women s attachment to the labor force conventional wisdom suggests that women particularly married women or women with children are not as productive or as attached to their jobs as their male or other female counterparts my findings combat this view and demonstrate a strengthening in married female labor force attachment over the period studied regardless of children s presence 2 this paper finds that the fraction of the married female population who worked a full year significantly increased from the 1977 1981 time period to the 1987 1991 time period this coincided with a decrease of equal magnitude in the fraction who did not work at all during the calendar year moreover although the absolute number of married women who work part time has increased in prevalence their representation among the population of working married women has declined in fact the fraction of married women who work part time has increased only among those who work part of the year a shrinking category of women even more interesting this study shows that the increase in married female employment from 1975 to 1991 stems primarily from a substantial decline in their exit rates from employment this holds for the sub population of married women with young children as well these results suggest that an increase in the duration of married women s employment spells was the most significant contributor to the increase in their employment rates over this time period not only did married women s employment increase but so did their wages during the period studied however the wages of higher and lesser skilled women diverged a story that has already become familiar for men in the case of women the higher skilled have made significant wage gains while the wages of the least skilled have stagnated with this in mind this research links women s employment increases to their changing market opportunities the findings suggest that women work more primarily because of their willingness to work more at the same wage supply shift and not because of their rising potential wage demand shift 3 in fact less than 15 of the increase in employment can be explained by rising wages regardless of skill category i interpret these results to reinforce the hypothesis of increased labor market attachment among married women the remainder of this paper is organized as follows section ii describes the current population survey cps data set used for the empirical work section iii documents the secular increase in married women s labor market participation from 1975 to 1991 in particular the employment increase for married women is disaggregated by race presence of children education group and own skill group section iv disentangles the effects of women who work more because of their rising potential wage from the effects of women who work more at the same wage because of either a possible decline in their non market opportunities or changes in behavior arising from possible changes in preferences

growth in the labor force attachment of married women accounting for changes in the 1970s the sustained and marked increase in the labor force participation of married women characterized by some as a subtle revolution has been widely documented 22 increased labor force attachment has been manifested by adult women in all age groups up to age 65 and the most dramatic increases have been manifested by women in their mid 20s to mid 30s particularly white married women using data from the national longitudinal surveys of work experience nls this paper examines the growth between the late 1960s and late 1970s in labor force participation and hours worked among white married women aged 30 to 34 our purpose is to determine to what extent this growth can be attributed to changes in characteristics of women in this age range and to what extent important behavioral changes have occurred the data and methods of analysis are described in section ii while empirical estimates of the determinants of married women s work activity are presented in section iii analysis of the importance of the past decade s changes in these determinants characteristics in accounting for the observed growth in labor supply is provided in section iv concluding observations along with some speculation concerning the future course of married women s labor force attachment are in section v

property rights regimes and natural resources a conceptual analysis the term common property resource is an example of a term repeatedly used to refer to property owned by a government or by no one it is also used for property owned by a community of resource users such usage leads to confusion in scientific study and policy analysis in this paper we develop a conceptual schema for arraying property rights regimes that distinguishes among diverse bundles of rights ranging from authorized user to claimant to proprietor and to owner we apply this conceptual schema to analyze findings from a variety of empirical settings including the maine lobster industry

small states and skill specificity austria switzerland and interemployer cleavages in coordinated capitalism the varieties of capitalism literature has put skill systems at the center of comparative politics yet its claims about skill specificity are driven by two large coordinated economies germany and

media freedom and gender equality a cross national instrumental variable quantile analysis we investigate the impact of media freedom on gender equality in education for a sample of 63 countries taken over the period 1995 2004 our analysis is motivated by the idea that the impact of media freedom on gender equality may differ over the conditional distribution of the response variable using instrumental variable quantile regression to control for endogeneity in per capita income we find that greater freedom of the media improves gender equality only in the 0 25 and 0 50 quantiles of the conditional distribution countries with the greatest disparities in gender outcomes experience no significant impact of media freedom

democratic limits to redistribution inclusionary versus exclusionary coalitions in the knowledge economy the knowledge economy deindustrialization and the decline of fordism have undermined the economic complementarities that once existed between skilled and semiskilled workers the result has everywhere been a decline in coordinated wage bargaining and unionization and a notable rise in labor market inequality yet the political responses have been very different across advanced democracies while labor markets for part time and temporary employment have been deregulated across the board some countries have compensated losers through increased cash transfers and active labor market programs and others have allowed inequality and insider outsider divisions to grow deeper the article argues that the divergent government responses reflect differences in underlying electoral coalitions and that these in turn mirror the structure of party and electoral systems the authors support their argument with evidence for government responses to economic shocks in the period 1980 to 2010

economic man social woman the case of the gender gap in support for the canada united states free trade agreement do differences in basic values and concerns underlie differences in the issue positions of women and men this article uses a decomposition approach to assess the contribution of male female differ

labor supply and marital separation panel data are used to estimate the effect of marital separation on labor supply female labor supply increases substantially and male labor supply declines marginally lending support to the theory of specialization within the household the most interesting finding is that women began to increase their labor supply well before the actualsplit occurs suggesting either that shocks to labor supply change divorce probabilities or that women with a higher likelihood of divorcework more this argument is pursued by constructing and estimating a simultaneous model of labor supply and divorce risk copyright 1986 by american economic association

the structure of inequality and the politics of redistribution against the current consensus among comparative political economists we argue that inequality matters for redistributive politics in advanced capitalist societies but it is the structure of inequality not the level of inequality that matters our theory posits that middle income voters will be inclined to ally with low income voters and support redistributive policies when the distance between the middle and the poor is small relative to the distance between the middle and the rich we test this proposition with data from 15 to 18 advanced democracies and find that both redistribution and nonelderly social spending increase as the dispersion of earnings in the upper half of the distribution increases relative to the dispersion of earnings in the lower half of the distribution in addition we present survey evidence on preferences for redistribution among middle income voters that is consistent with our theory and regression results indicating that the left parties are more likely to participate in government when the structure of inequality is characterized by skew

indivisible toxic torts the economics of joint and several liability cost effective or efficient pollution control has traditionally devoted most of its attention to analyzing the effects of legislative or regulatory policy instruments such as emission taxes or marketable emission permits recent contributions have expanded this focus to include the effects of monitoring and enforcement policies 2 with a few noteworthy exceptions 3 however the role of the court system in general and liability law in particular have not received analytical attention among environmental economists in proportion to their importance in resource allocation

unitary or noncooperative intrahousehold model evidence from couples in uganda we present an overview of the evidence regarding the unitary collective and non cooperative models of household decision making and discuss how they can affect individual and household welfare we then discuss the results of an artefactual experiment conducted in uganda with spouses in order to test whether household members maximize common preferences or instead are willing to pay a significant cost to hide money from their spouse we find that both the unitary and non cooperative models exist in the intra household decision making process and that a one size fits all model of household decision making is unlikely to be satisfactory

liability for past environmental contamination and privatization this paper examines the role ofliability for past environmental contaminationin the privatization processes of central andeastern europe in particular it establishes alink between a risk averse investor s amount ofinformation regarding the extent of pastenvironmental contamination and its cleanupcosts and the investor s willingness to payfor a particular enterprise i e bid as theinvestor obtains a more precise estimate of theuncertain cleanup costs the investor facesless risk therefore the investor s riskpremium falls and the investor s bid rises this link generates four hypotheses regarding aprivatization agency s responses to theinvestor s knowledge of clean up costs

why have women become left wing the political gender gap and the decline in marriage the last three decades have witnessed the rise of a pohtical gender gap in the united states wherein more women than men favor the democratic party we trace this development to the decline in marriage which we posit has made men richer and women poorer data for the united states support this argument first there is a strong positive correlation between state divorce prevalence and the political gender gap higher divorce prevalence reduces support for the democrats among men but not women second longitudinal data show that following marriage divorce women are less more likely to support the democratic party