relative wage positions and quit behavior evidence from linked employer employee data the authors analyze the importance of relative wage positions within firms in western germany in the context of individual quit decisions as an inverse measure of job satisfaction using a linked employer employee data set liab for the years 1996 2005 whose sample consists of full time male prime age workers in western germany without college degrees they ascertain whether workers find status or signal effects stronger motivators for quit decisions they find that workers with higher relative wage positions within their firms are on average more likely to quit their jobs than those with lower relative wage positions and that workers who experience a loss in their relative wage positions are also more likely to accept a wage cut associated with their job transition overall results suggest that a signal effect is on average stronger than a status effect

new perspectives on capital sticky prices and the taylor principle abstract our main result is that dynamic new keynesian dnk models with firm specific capital feature a substantial amount of endogenous price stickiness we use this insight to assess the desirability of alternative interest rate rules and make the case for combining active monetary policy with interest rate smoothing and or some responsiveness of the nominal interest rate to real economic activity the key mechanism behind our results is also useful from a positive point of view the feature of firm specific capital increases the empirical appealingness of dnk models as documented by a growing body of literature

airport congestion when carriers have market power this paper analyzes airport congestion when carriers are nonatomistic showing how the results of the road pricing literature are modified when the economic agents causing congestion have market power the analysis shows that when an airport is dominated by a monopolist congestion is fully internalized yielding no role for congestion pricing under monopoly conditions under a cournot oligopoly however carriers are shown to internalize only the congestion they impose on themselves a toll that captures the uninternalized portion of congestion may then improve the allocation of traffic the analysis is supported by some rudimentary empirical evidence

distributional consequences of airport congestion pricing abstract imposition of airport congestion pricing redistributes welfare among commercial regional and general aviation this article extends daniel s econometrica63 327 370 1995 stochastic bottleneck model with dynamically adjusting traffic rates queuing delays and congestion fees to include elastic demand heterogeneous operating time preferences and heterogeneous layover and queuing time values using parameters from minneapolis st paul airport simulations of congestion pricing determine its effects on equilibrium traffic patterns queuing delays schedule delays airport revenues and social welfare gains by commercial aviation common travelers and airport authorities exceed losses by general and regional aviation the article evaluates several price and rebate programs and proposes several that are self financing and pareto improving

evaluating unemployment policies what do the underlying theories tell us the paper surveys unemployment policies for advanced market economies and evaluates them by examining the predictions of the underlying macroeconomic theories the basic idea is that for the most part different unemployment policy prescriptions rest on different macroeconomic theories and our confidence in the prescriptions should depend at least in part on theories ability to predict some salient stylized facts about unemployment behavior the paper considers four types of policies laissez faire demand management policies supply side policies and structural policies copyright 1995 by oxford university press

testing rent sharing using individualized measures of rent evidence from domestic helpers wing suen the market for resident domestic helpers offers a rare opportunity where the surplus from employment relationship can be quantitatively measured for each individual employee using the difference between employer s cost of time and employee s wage as a measure of rent it is found that wages for domestic helpers are positively related to rent however the apparent sharing of rent is better explained by matching than by efficiency wage models rent sharing is observed even in households where monitoring or turnover costs are low rent sharing is not observed among newly arrived foreign domestic helpers whose ability remains to be revealed jel j41 i introduction this article studies the pattern of wages for resident domestic helpers in hong kong no one would lure economists into paying attention to this arcane labor market were it not for one feature of the market for housework a measure of employment rent can be plausibly assigned to each individual employee having an individualized measure of rent at the worker level instead of a general measure at the firm level will shed considerable light on the large and growing literature of rent sharing in wage determination since 1975 the hong kong government has allowed the importation of foreign domestic helpers into the territory because of large wage differences between hong kong and some of its asian neighbors the program is highly popular the census and statistics department 1995 estimates that 92 700 households or 5 6 of all domestic households in hong kong employed domestic helpers in 1993 the figure is even more dramatic for high income households 44 of households with monthly income of over hk 50 000 had one or more domestic helpers 1 one consequence of the availability of market procured housework is that women who employ helpers have more time for market work in suen 1994 i estimate that the probability of labor force participation among married women who had domestic helpers is 22 percentage points higher than that for women without domestic help other things equal if hiring a helper enables a married woman to engage in market work then a plausible measure for the rent or surplus from this employment relationship is the difference between the woman s wage and her helper s wage if a woman with a domestic helper decides to stay home nonetheless the size of the surplus can be measured by the difference between the shadow value of leisure and the helper s wage wage information is readily available from census data and shadow wages can be estimated using standard techniques this article utilizes this rare opportunity to impute a measure of rent for each employer employee pair studying how the wages of domestic helpers vary wi th the magnitude of rent will provide direct evidence for rent sharing in the labor market there is a large literature which documents the fact that the characteristics of the employer such as industry affiliation and firm size are significantly correlated with the employees wages krueger and summers 19881 brown and medoff 1989 groshen 1991 helwege 1992 and many others offer convincing evidence that inter industry wage differentials and employer wage effects exist rent sharing is often invoked to account for such wage patterns however few studies in the literature offer a plausible account for the existence of or a measure for the size of the rent that is supposedly shared 2 at the industry level dickens and katz 1987 use variables such as concentration ratio capital labor ratio research and development expenditures and average rate of return on capital as covariates in wage equations these variables provide at best an indirect and error prone measure of employment rent campbell 1993 makes use of firm level characteristics instead of industry characteristics but t here is no information on profits in his firm level data

endogenous trip scheduling the henderson approach reformulated and compared with the vickrey approach abstract the henderson approach to modeling peak period congestion lacks equilibria when lateness is prohibited this paper reformulates the henderson approach and compares it to the vickrey approach both analytically and numerically the behavior of the reformulated henderson approach varies with its elasticity of travel delay with respect to traffic flow while the vickrey approach lacks such flexibility the behavior of the vickrey approach is the limit of that of the reformulated henderson approach as the elasticity of travel delay goes to infinity

cyclical quality adjustment in the labor market 1 introductionthe u s unemployment rate fell to very low levels during the 1990s even more impressively the unemployment rate for minorities and less educated individuals fell disproportionately convergence of relative unemployment rates in expansions and divergence in recessions has been a feature of the u s economy over the last 30 years there are many possible reasons for this feature for example if the costs of hiring and firing less skilled labor are low one would expect these individuals to have very procyclical employment in this paper i explore an alternative model when there is an excess supply of labor high skilled people take jobs that would normally be occupied by less skilled people in expansions the process reverses with less skilled workers getting access to jobs that they would normally not attain i refer to this process as cyclical quality adjustment reder 1955 p 834 was one of the first to discuss how hiring standards adjust to business cycle conditions quality variations in labor markets arise through upgrading and downgrading of members of the labor force relative to the jobs they are to fill when applicants become scarce employers tend to lower the minimum standards upon which they insist as a condition for hiring a worker to fill a particular job and vice versa when applicants become plentiful since then many papers have developed this idea theoretically and many economic commentators appear to share this view of the labor market for example the economic report of the president states that a strong labor market is particularly important to less advantaged groups in the labor market such as workers with less education younger workers racial and ethnic minorities and immigrants when employers find it hard to fill vacancies they are more willing to hire and train workers whom they might pass over when they have fewer openings and an abundance of applicants council of economic advisors 1999 p 103 likewise the expansion during the 1990s spawned many newspaper articles about the improvement in the types of jobs available to less skilled applicants however there is little systematic empirical work about changes in job assignment in the united states over the business cycle the empirical work in this paper seeks to redress this situation cyclical assignment changes are important for many reasons as mentioned earlier job upgrading is a potential explanation for the greater cyclical variation of employment experienced by less skilled workers it is well known that the unemployment rates of less skilled individuals and minorities are more countercyclical relative to more skilled individuals clark and summers 1981 kydland 1984 keane and prasad 1993 hoynes 1999 the standard explanation for this effect is that low ability workers are more likely to be laid off in downturns because training and hiring costs are lower for these workers no commensurate attention has been paid to the issue of how the decision of who to hire changes over the business cycle however assignment models present a natural explanation for the greater procyclicality of employment of the less skilled both the adjustment cost hypothesis and the upgrading hypothesis imply that less skilled workers will have more procyclical employment empirically they are distinguishable because the upgrading explanation implies that jobs obtained by comparable workers should vary systematically over the cycle the adjustment cost hypothesis relates to the composition of those whose jobs are terminated second these mechanisms suggest a reason why wages are particularly procyclical for job changers recent studies using panel data have indicated that the wages of job starters are much more procyclical than the wages of workers who do not change jobs researchers have suggested various explanations for this result beaudry and dinardo 1991 and macleod and malcomson 1993 present contracting models in which the wages of job starters depend on the state of the labor market when they join the firm

airport charges and capacity expansion effects of concessions and privatization abstract this paper examines the decisions on airport charges and capacity expansion made by airports with different objectives we find that allowing an airport to have profitable concession operations may be more welfare improving than the alternative of depriving the airport of all profits from concession operations furthermore the airport charge of a social welfare maximizing airport would be lower than that of a budget constrained public airport which in turn would be lower than that of a privatized airport pursuing profit maximization we also show that a constrained public airport would add capacity later than a social welfare maximizing airport whilst a privatized airport would add capacity later still given that constrained public airports represent the second best situation the capacity decisions of privatized airports would be socially suboptimal

lack of confidence the zero lower bound and the virtue of fiscal rules abstract in the presence of the zero lower bound standard business cycle models with a taylor type monetary policy rule are prone to equilibrium multiplicity a drop in private sector confidence can drive the economy into a liquidity trap without any change in fundamentals i show in the context of a standard new keynesian model that it is possible to design ricardian fiscal spending rules that insulate the economy from such expectations driven liquidity traps in the case of price adjustment costs desirable fiscal rules ensure that a drop in confidence does not lead to a decline in real marginal costs in the case of nominal wage adjustment costs desirable fiscal spending rules ensure that a drop in confidence does not lead to a decline in the ratio of the marginal rate of substitution between private consumption and hours worked relative to the real wage rate

efficiency analysis of cournot competition in service industries with congestion we consider cournot competition in the presence of congestion effects our model consists of several service providers with differentiated services each competing for users who are sensitive to both price and congestion we distinguish two types of congestion effects depending on whether spillover costs exist that is where one service provider s congestion cost increases with the other providers output level we quantify the efficiency of an unregulated oligopoly with respect to the optimal social welfare with tight upper and lower bounds we show that when there is no spillover the welfare loss in an unregulated oligopoly is limited to 25 of the social optimum even in the presence of highly convex costs on the other hand when spillover cost is present there does not exist a constant lower bound on the efficiency of an unregulated oligopoly even with affine cost we show that the efficiency depends on the relative magnitude between the marginal spillover cost and the marginal benefit to consumers this paper was accepted by christian terwiesch operations management

congestion pricing and capacity of large hub airports a bottleneck model with stochastic queues this paper models and estimates congestion prices and capacity for large hub airports the model includes stochastic queues time varying traffic rates and endogenous intertemporal adjustment of traffic in response to queuing delay and fees relative costs of queuing and schedule delays are estimated using data from minneapolis st paul simulations calculate equilibrium traffic patterns queuing delays schedule delays congestion fees airport revenues airport capacity and efficiency gains the paper also investigates whether a dominant airline internalizes delays its aircraft impose it tests game theoretic specifications with atomistic nash dominant stackelberg dominant and collusive airline traffic

the link between ability and specialization an explanation for observed correlations between wages and mobility rates wage levels and turnover rates are negatively correlated across types of employment and this fact is often interpreted as evidence that high wage jobs are rationed a simple training model illustrates however that this correlation may arise because able workers have an incentive to choose highly specialized jobs in any job the most able workers possess the most valuable stocks of specific skills and therefore face the highest mobility costs thus able workers may have a comparative advantage in specialized employments data from the national longitudinal survey of youth provide an opportunity to evaluate the merits of the training model developed here data on worker training and mobility provide support for several implications of the model the model also provides new ways to interpret existing results in the literature on interindustry wage differentials

cyclical variation in the interindustry wage structure this paper presents an analysis of cyclical variation in the interindustry wage structure the study is therefore concerned with changes in relative wages among industries and not directly with the determination of the absolute wage level or changes in the absolute wage level the theory of the wage structure presented here is based on two hypotheses tihe first introduced initially as a maintained hypothesis is that differences among industries in the competitive structure of their product and labor markets result in wage inequalities for given skill levels the second hypothesis and the major finding of the paper is that the size of the wage differentials is a function not only of the extent and nature of the noncompetitive elements but also of the excess demand conditions in the labor market this result is derived from the proposition that under competitive supply conditions labor allocation is based on relative wages to support the theory a wage structure equation is estimated with the coefficient of variation of straight time average hourly earnings in the two digit manufacturing industries as the dependent variable the implications of the study for aggregate and industry wage equations are then discussed

airport pricing congestion tolls lumpy investment and cost recovery abstract in this paper we investigate the relationship between congestion tolls and capacity expansion costs for congestion prone transportation infrastructures with lumpy investment with constant variable costs and social marginal cost pricing this relationship determines the cost recovery status of an infrastructure authority the theoretical model for optimal user charges and the timing of capacity expansion shows that the relative magnitudes of total congestion tolls and total capacity costs in an investment cycle depend on the time pattern of traffic growth a point overlooked in the literature a queuing model is used to conduct a numerical experiment to determine the cost recovery ratios under various time paths of traffic growth

sectoral shifts and cyclical unemployment a substantial fraction of cyclical unemployment is better characterized as fluctuations of the frictional or natural rate than as deviations from some relatively stable natural rate shifts of employment demand between sectors of the economy necessitate continuous labor reallocation since it takes time for workers to find new jobs some unemployment is unavoidable this paper presents evidence that most of the unemployment fluctuations of the seventies unlike those in the sixties were induced by unusual structural shifts within the u s economy simple time series models of layoffs and unemployment are constructed that include a measure of structural shifts within the labor market these models are estimated and a derived natural rate series is constructed

cyclical variations in wage differentials and unemployment this paper attempts to reformulate in a general equilibrium framework reder s model which explains cyclical variations in wage differentials and their general tendencies to narrow specifically i focus on the three aspects of his model the microeconomic behavior of a firm under imperfect information about labor quality the mechanism of the economy creating unemployment and the interaction between wage differentials and unemployment i also explore its implications for the macroeconomic issues on the characteristics of current unemployment and the question of why aggregate employment fluctuates

okun s micro macro system a review article prices and quantities is the brilliant and disturbing last work of arthur m okun 1928 1980 for more than a decade okun was the foremost practitioner of macroeconomics in the united states his critical intelligence at both the theoretical and empirical ends of economics was unsurpassed these facts were virtually a manufacturer s warranty that the book whatever its argumentation and evidence would be significant we want to know what okun thought but this background was no guarantee of an important treatise and it must have taken some courage to venture a big theoretical work in an accessible style on urgent questions in fact okun has delivered a creative and virtuosic study in economic theory the book s contribution is to provide a complete description of an economy in which rational economic agents consider the distributional consequences of wage and price decisions the perspective adopted one which is winning growing favor of late is contract theoretic because they wish to economize on their costly transactions with one another people trade repeatedly with the same agent so trust and fidelity to understandings are important the ensuing analysis lodges some basic dissents from the informational expectational paradigm developed over the last score of years it is particularly stimulating and troubling on the main policy controversy of the decade the question of disinflation

the equity and efficiency of runway pricing abstract this paper poses and answers the following question if an airport authority is assumed to choose landing fees that maximize a weighted sum of airline consumers surpluses subject to a revenue requirement what set of weights is implied by currently observed fees the model is loosely applied to san francisco international airport the main result is that commuter airlines are much more favored than others

atomistic congestion tolls at concentrated airports seeking a unified view in the internalization debate abstract the goal of this paper is to bring some unity to the theoretical side of the debate on internalization of airport congestion by showing that all the literature s theoretical results can be derived within one simple and unified framework the analysis starts by replicating the results of brueckner brueckner j k 2002 airport congestion when carriers have market power american economic review 92 1357 1375 who showed that because airlines behaving in cournot fashion internalize congestion they should be charged low congestion tolls the analysis then validates the findings of daniel daniel j i 1995 congestion pricing and capacity of large hub airports a bottleneck model with stochastic queues econometrica 63 327 370 who argued that larger atomistic tolls are required in a model where a stackelberg leader interacts with competitive fringe airlines however it is shown that this result only holds approximately when the carriers outputs are imperfect substitutes

premiums to employment in larger establishments evidence from peru abstract examination of the employer size wage effect for males in urban peru suggests the following higher wages in larger establishments do not merely compensate for higher worker quality or inferior working conditions size differences in the use of rising wage tenure profiles cannot provide a market clearing explanation for the employer size wage effect unless workers are extremely impatient thus larger employers appear to pay premiums unionization explains none of the premiums and minimum wage compliance explains at best a small fraction shirking based efficiency wage explanations for premiums are implausible because peruvian job security legislation greatly inhibits dismissals in larger establishments explanations meriting further research involve the use of high wages to reduce turnover and to improve productivity enhancing morale

capital subsidies versus labor subsidies a trade off between capital and employment this paper investigates regime switching in the response of u s output to a monetary policy action we find substantial statistically significant time variation in this response that corresponds to high response and low response regimes we then investigate whether the timing of the regime shifts are consistent with three particular manifestations of asymmetry by modeling the transition probabilities governing the switching process as functions of state variables we find strong evidence that policy actions taken during recessions have larger effects than those taken during expansions we find less evidence of asymmetry related to the direction or size of the policy action

the value of scarce water measuring the inefficiency of municipal regulations abstract rather than allowing urban water prices to reflect scarcity rents during periods of drought induced excess demand policy makers have mandated command and control approaches primarily rationing the use of water outdoors while such policies are ubiquitous and likely inefficient economists have not had access to sufficient data to estimate their economic impact using unique panel data on residential end uses of water in 11 north american cities we examine the welfare implications of urban water rationing in response to drought using estimates of expected marginal prices that vary both across and within markets we estimate price elasticities specific to indoor and outdoor water use our results suggest that current policies do target water uses that households themselves are most willing to forgo nevertheless we find that rationing outdoor water in cities has costly welfare implications primarily due to household heterogeneity in willingness to pay for scarce water we find that replacing rationing policies with a market clearing drought price would result in welfare gains of more than 29 of what households in the sample spend each year on water

congestion pricing of canadian airports abstract under congestion pricing canadian airports would annually save between 72 and 105 million social costs per landing and takeoff decrease about 300 at toronto and vancouver and 50 at calgary and montreal slot constraints fail to eliminate this airport congestion congestion prices are lower on average than existing weight based prices current airport capacity accommodates at least five more years of traffic growth before congestion reaches current levels substantial welfare gains occur even if dominant airlines already internalize their self imposed delays this article calculates equilibrium congestion pricing schedules traffic rates queuing delays layover times and connection times by time of day

canadian jobs and firm size do smaller firms pay less even after controlling for observable workers characteristics and for occupation and industry specific effects a substantial wage differential remains between large and small firms what underlies the remaining wage differential is unclear direct evidence on pension plan coverage and on lay off rates by firm size is inconsistent with the bad working conditions hypothesis the union avoidance hypothesis does not seem to explain an important portion o f the wage differential as suggested by efficiency wage models part of the remaining wage differential may be due to firms heterogeneity similarly perhaps large firms pay higher wages simply partly beca use they employ workers with more unobserved abilities because differen t explanations of the wage differential may lead to different policy implications determining the source of the wage firm size effect is an important question for future research

local and personal networks in employment and the development of labor markets evidence from the cut flower industry in ethiopia summary we examine the roles of local and personal networks in the employment process and the emergence and development of the labor market in ethiopia s growing cut flower industry using primary survey data of 320 workers randomly sampled from all 64 farms we find that workers who were recruited informally using the social ties were paid less than the formally recruited workers at hiring however these workers quickly increased their productivity and the effect of social ties on wages disappeared over time further we find that the development of labor market for this newly emerged industry took place particularly within the industrial cluster

job recruitment networks and migration to cities in india abstract economists have focused on job search and supply side explanations for network effects in labour transactions this paper develops and tests an alternative explanation for the high prevalence of network based labour market entry in developing countries in our theoretical framework employers use employee networks as screening and incentive mechanisms to improve the quality of recruitment our framework suggests a negative relationship between network use and the skill intensity of jobs a positive association between economic activity and network use and a negative relationship between network use and pro labour legislation furthermore social identity effects are expected to intensify when compared to information sharing and other network mechanisms using data from an all india employment survey we implement a novel empirical strategy to test these relationships and find support for our demand side explanation

the economics of airport congestion pricing abstract conventional economic wisdom suggests that congestion pricing would be an appropriate response to cope with the growing congestion levels currently experienced at many airports several characteristics of aviation markets however may make naive congestion prices equal to the value of marginal travel delays a non optimal response this paper develops a model of airport pricing that captures a number of these features the model in particular reflects that 1 airlines typically have market power and are engaged in oligopolistic competition at different sub markets 2 part of external travel delays that aircraft impose are internal to an operator and hence should not be accounted for in congestion tolls and 3 different airports in an international network will typically not be regulated by the same authority we present an analytical treatment for a simple two node network and some numerical results to illustrate our findings some main conclusions are that second best optimal tolls are typically lower than what would be suggested by congestion costs alone and may even be negative and that cooperation between regulators need not be stable but that non cooperation may lead to welfare losses also when compared to a no tolling situation

airlines strategic interactions and airport pricing in a dynamic bottleneck model of congestion abstract this paper analyzes efficient pricing at a congested airport dominated by a single firm unlike much of the previous literature we combine a dynamic bottleneck model of congestion and a vertical structure model that explicitly considers the role of airlines and passengers we show that a stackelberg leader interacting with a competitive fringe partially internalizes congestion and that there are various toll regimes that induce the welfare maximizing outcome widening the set of choices for regulators in particular charging the congestion toll that would apply for fully competitive carriers and that ignores any internalization to both the leader and the fringe yields the first best outcome

the perils of taylor rules abstract since john taylor s 1993 carnegie rochester conf ser publ policy39 195 214 seminal paper a large literature has argued that active interest rate feedback rules that is rules that respond to increases in inflation with a more than one for one increase in the nominal interest rate are stabilizing in this paper we argue that once the zero bound on nominal interest rates is taken into account active interest rate feedback rules can easily lead to unexpected consequences specifically we show that even if the steady state at which monetary policy is active is locally the unique equilibrium typically there exist an infinite number of equilibrium trajectories originating arbitrarily close to that steady state that converge to a liquidity trap that is a steady state in which the nominal interest rate is near zero and inflation is possibly negative journal of economic literature classification numbers e52 e31 e63

theoretical foundations for sticky wages abstract the paper compares three different types of theoretical explanation of sticky wages they are implicit contracts efficiency wage models and insider outsider models it then reconsiders keynes rationale for sticky wages which focuses on relative wage issues finally the paper considers possible directions for future research

migration and imperfect labor markets theory and cross country evidence from denmark germany and the uk we investigate the labor market effects of immigration in denmark germany and the uk three countries which are characterized by considerable differences in labor market institutions and welfare states institutions such as collective bargaining minimum wages employment protection and unemployment benefits affect the way in which wages respond to labor supply shocks and hence the labor market effects of immigration we employ a wage setting approach which assumes that wages decline with the unemployment rate albeit imperfectly we find that the wage and employment effects of immigration depend on wage flexibility and the composition of the labor supply shock in germany immigration involves only moderate wage but large unemployment effects since immigrants are concentrated in labor market segments with low wage flexibility the reverse is true for the uk and denmark

on the efficiency of competitive markets for operating licenses some economists and policy makers have suggested that market allocation of scarce operating licenses broadcasting licenses and airport slots for instance would lead to their efficient use this paper demonstrates that a competitive market allocation of operating licenses whether attained through auctioning selling or allowing resale of the rights does not in general assure efficiency the profit criterion that would guide the allocation of licenses in a competitive market would not necessarily lead to the uses that maximize social benefits the paper shows that the difference between private and social incentives in the allocation process can be quite large the theory is then applied to discussions of allocating airport takeoff and landing slots and broadcasting licenses

sequential peak load pricing the case of airports and airlines we investigate airport peak load pricing using a vertical structure of airport and airlines we find that a profit maximizing airport would charge higher peak and off peak runway prices and a higher peak off peak price differential than a public airport consequently airport privatization would lead to both fewer total passengers and fewer passengers in the peak period although peak travelling passengers benefit from fewer delays this low level of peak congestion is not efficient suggesting that airport privatization cannot be judged based on its effect on congestion alone we also examine pricing behaviour of a public airport constrained to charge a time independent price on etudie la tarification de pointe dans une structure verticale d aeroports et de compagnies d aviation on decouvre qu un aeroport qui maximise ses profits chargerait des prix plus eleves pour l usage des pistes tant aux heures de pointe qu en autre temps qu un aeroport public ainsi qu un differentiel plus grand entre ces differents moments en consequence la privatisation des aeroports va entrainer a la fois moins de passagers et moins de passagers aux heures de pointe meme si ceux qui voyagent aux heures de pointe vont devoir subir moins de delais cette moindre congestion n est pas efficace voila qui suggere qu on ne doit pas evaluer la privatisation des aeroports seulement a l aune de l impact sur la congestion les auteurs examinent aussi les strategies de tarification d un aeroport public contraint a imposer une tarification qui ne peut varier selon le moment d usage dans le temps

eliminating a deflationary trap through superinertial interest rate rules abstract this paper demonstrates that even in the presence of a zero lower bound on nominal interest rates central banks can eliminate a deflationary trap by the conduct of interest rate rules that have superinertia

optimal monetary policy at the zero interest rate bound what should a central bank do when faced with a weak aggregate demand even after reducing the short term nominal interest rate to zero to address this question we solve a central bank s intertemporal loss minimization problem in which the non negativity constraint on nominal interest rates is explicitly considered we find that the optimal path is characterized by policy inertia in the sense that a zero interest rate policy should be continued for a while even after the natural rate of interest returns to a positive level by making such a commitment the central bank is able to achieve higher expected inflation lower long term nominal interest rates and a weaker domestic currency in the adverse periods when the natural rate of interest significantly deviates from a steady state level

wage policies of a russian firm and the financial crisis of 1998 evidence from personnel data 1997 to 2002 the authors use a rich personnel data set from a russian firm for the years 1997 to 2002 to analyze how the firm adjusts wages and employment during this period in which local labor market conditions changed in the aftermath of the financial crisis in 1998 they relate the development of turnover and wages for various employment categories to alternative models of wage and employment determination the authors argue that the firm s behavior is consistent with the predictions of efficiency wage models of the shirking and turnover type

do carriers internalize congestion costs empirical evidence on the internalization question abstract economists have long suggested overhauling the existing u s airport landing departure fees to reflect market valuations of scarce runway capacity economists however do not agree on the optimal congestion based pricing scheme while some researchers advocate for a uniform congestion fee regardless of a carrier s airport market share others suggest that airport tolls should only reflect the congestion costs imposed on other carriers this paper uses ten years of ontime performance data to empirically determine if carriers internalize congestion costs while previous researchers e g mayer christopher sinai todd 2003a network effects congestion externalities and air traffic delays or why all delays are not evil american economic review 93 4 1194 1215 use excess travel time to measure flight delays the contribution of this paper is the addition of on time arrival and delay measures based on actual versus scheduled arrival and departure times we find that estimates based on these new delay measures reverse earlier findings by mayer and sinai 2003a network effects congestion externalities and air traffic delays or why all delays are not evil american economic review 93 4 1194 1215 and hence imply that carriers are not internalizing flight congestion costs

optimal monetary policy and determinacy under active passive regimes abstract should one expect inflation to be stable when monetary policy is passive according to the workhorse model for monetary policy analysis the answer should be no if the passive spell is too long in this paper i develop a new keynesian model in which monetary policy is optimal subject to a loose commitment constraint i show that there is a threshold degree of commitment such that the equilibrium is locally unique when monetary policy switches between active and passive stances regardless of the length of the passive spell this result also holds for a version of the model where the passive spell is endogenous and due to a demand shock driving the economy to the zero lower bound

human capital vs signalling explanations of wages increases wages by directly increasing the worker s productivity this learning explanation is usually associated with human capital theory however it seems unlikely that learning explains all the wage differences associated with schooling and work history better educated workers are not a random sample of workers they have lower propensities to quit or to be absent are less likely to smoke drink or use illicit drugs and are generally healthier it is unlikely that employers make full use of differences in propensities to quit or to be absent or sick when hiring workers these characteristics are often not directly observed and the americans with disabilities act precludes firms from using either poor health or the likelihood of future sickness as a hiring criterion unless it is directly related to job performance however if low levels of education are associated with these unfavorable employee characteristics and employers are allowed to take education into account when hiring workers we would expect employers to favor better educated workers as a means of reducing their costs of sickness and job turnover in turn students will take these hiring criteria into account when deciding how long to stay in school students will choose a length of schooling to signal their ability to employers and employers will demand a minimum level of schooling

a model of the natural rate of unemployment since the publication of edmund phelps volume the new macroeconomics has treated the labor market as a dynamic process of rational search by unemployed workers for available vacancies wages are viewed as at least potentially flexible though free contracting between workers and firms may lead to fixed wages in the short run imperfect information is a crucial element of the theory for it implies both a need for contracting and a need for rational search rather than simple market clearing in each period a positive rate of frictional unemployment may exist in equilibrium denoted as the natural rate this unemployment is due to the frictions in the search process and imperfections in information rather than to any deficiency in aggregate demand milton friedman defined the natural rate as the level that would be ground out by the walrasian system of general equilibrium equations provided there is embedded in them the actual structural characteristics of the labor and commodity markets including market imperfections stochastic variability in demands and supplies the cost of gathering information about job vacancies and labor availabilities the costs of mobility and so on p 8 this paper reexamines the micro foundations of the natural rate in a model of labor market equilibrium in which turnover flows and imperfect information are explicitly considered workers may quit their current jobs to enter the unemployment pool in order to search among available vacancies for a more preferred position firms economize on turnover by an appropriate wage policy

on the harris todaro model with intersectoral migration of labour aspects of labor migration in developing countries are examined using the approach developed by j r harris and m p todaro in particular the author attempts to model the process of labor turnover between the urban unemployed and urban firms and between the rural sector and the urban unemployed the model includes a dynamic system of wage rates and urban unemployment rates annotation

a note on keynesian unemployment as a worker discipline device abstract keynesian sales constraints are introduced into a model with endogeneous wages and involuntary equilibrium umemployment the result is a lower real wage and a higher unemployment rate

manipulable congestion tolls the recent literature on congestion pricing with large agents contains a remarkable inconsistency though agents are large enough to recognize self imposed congestion and exert market power over prices they do not take into account the impact of their own actions on the magnitude of congestion tolls when large agents are confronted with tolls derived under this parametric assumption but understand the rule used to generate them the toll system will no longer guide the market to the social optimum to address this problem the present paper derives alternate manipulable toll rules which are designed to achieve the social optimum when agents anticipate the full impact of their actions on toll liabilities

economics of a bottleneck abstract drawing on vickrey amer econ rev 59 251 261 1969 and subsequent literature this paper provides a thorough economic analysis of the simplest bottleneck model of road congestion with peak load demand in the morning rush hour a fixed number of identical individuals one per car must travel from home to work between which is a bottleneck of given capacity the costs of travel include queuing time and schedule delay time early or late for work the frequency distribution of departure times adjusts so that in equilibrium all individuals have the same travel costs the paper extends the previous literature by examining a coarse toll and solving for optimal capacities the application of congestion tolls can generate efficiency gains by altering the frequency distribution of departure times previous estimates of the efficiency gains from congestion tolling are likely to be substantially downward biased because they have ignored this effect