booms busts and babies health we study the relationship between the unemployment rate at the time of a baby s conception and parental characteristics parental behaviors and babies health babies conceived in times of high unemployment have a reduced incidence of low and very low birth weight fewer congenital malformations and lower post neonatal mortality these health improvements are attributable both to selection changes in the type of mothers that conceive during recessions and to improvements in health behavior during recessions black mothers tend to be higher socio economic status as measured by education and marital status in times of high unemployment whereas white mothers are less educated

overwork and the slow convergence in the gender gap in wages despite rapid changes in women s educational attainment and continuous labor force experience convergence in the gender gap in wages slowed in the 1990s and stalled in the 2000s using cps data fr

does drinking really decrease in bad times this paper investigates the relationship between macroeconomic conditions and drinking using individual level data from 1987 to 1999 interview years of the behavioral risk factor surveillance system brfss we confirm the procyclical variation in overall drinking identified in previous research using aggregate sales data and show that this largely results from changes in consumption by existing drinkers rather than movements into or out of drinking moreover the decrease occurring during bad economic times is concentrated among heavy consumers with light drinking actually rising we also find no evidence that the decline in overall alcohol use masks a rise for persons becoming unemployed during contractions these results suggest that any stress induced increases in drinking during bad economic times are more than offset by declines resulting from changes in economic factors such as lower incomes

who is credit constrained in the u s economy an important assumption of the life cycle model of consumption is the postulate of perfect capital markets this hypothesis has recently been challenged by substantial empirical evidence hall and mishkin 1982 using the panel study of income dynamics estimate that 20 percent of united states families are liquidity constrained mariger 1986 derives a life cycle model with endogenous liquidity constraints and using a cross section estimates this fraction to be 19 4 percent hubbard and judd 1986 simulate a model with a constraint on net worth which shows that with reasonable assumptions about preferences 19 0 percent of united states consumers are liquidity constrained the emerging consensus points therefore to a fraction of approximately 20 percent of the population behaving in a manner that is inconsistent with the pure life cycle model in addition hayashi 1985 and zeldes 1989 investigate the correlation among consumption wealth and income for various population groups and infer that liquidity constraints are more important for younger families with low levels of wealth and saving the main limitation of these studies is that in their data sets constrained consumers are not observable and have to be identified via indirect evidence thus there is as yet little firm evidence about the characteristics of the consumers who are likely to be credit constrained this paper adopts an approach that differs from previous tests for liquidity constraints because it makes use of data where constrained consumers are observable and explicitly links their existence to credit market imperfections and personal characteristics the data drawn from the 1983 survey of consumer finances scf and described in section ii provide information on individuals whose request for credit has been rejected by financial intermediaries in section iii a model is developed in which consumers and lenders behavior jointly determines the probability that a consumer is rationed in the credit market this probability is then

abortion legalization and child living circumstances who is the marginal child weexaminethe impact ofincreased abortion availabilityon the averageliving standards of children through a selection effect would the marginal child whowas not born have grown up in different circumstances than the average child we use variation in the timing of abortion legalization across states to answer this question cohorts born after legalized abortion experienced a signiecant reduction in a number of adverse outcomes we end that the marginal child would have been 40 60 percent more likely to live in a single parent family to live in poverty to receive welfare and to die as an infant access to abortion is one of the most contentious public policy issues facing the united states today the period since the legalization of abortion under the roe v wade decision of 1973 has been marked by incessant debate over the appropriate government enancing and legal status of abortions meanwhile pregnancy resolution through abortion is a very common outcome in the united states roughly 25 percent of all pregnancies are aborted ventura et al 1995 as a result major changes in abortion access could have substantial effects on the birthrate indeed levine staiger kane and zimmerman end that the legalization of abortion in the early 1970s led to an 8 percent reduction in the birthrate 1

aggregation and the estimated effects of economic conditions on health this paper considers the relationship between economic conditions and health with a focus on different approaches to geographic aggregation after reviewing the tradeoffs associated with more and less disaggregated analyses i update earlier state level analyses of mortality and infant health and then consider how the estimated effects vary when the analysis is conducted at differing levels of geographic aggregation this analysis reveals that the results are sensitive to the level of geographic aggregation with more disaggregated analyses particularly county level analyses routinely producing estimates that are smaller in magnitude further analyses suggest this is due to spillover effects of economic conditions on health outcomes across counties

the role of economic shocks on health evidence from german reunification sudden economic shocks impact the everyday lives of people from one day to the next a number of studies have examined the association between economic fluctuations and health however no consensus on the nature of this relationship has been established by exploiting the dramatic economic fluctuations following the german reunification of 1990 which included a sudden change from a socialist to a capitalist system in east germany this study examines the association between broad negative economic shocks and health the article finds that increases in state unemployment rates are associated with large and statistically significant declines in health outcomes estimates are stronger for people who became unemployed shortly after reunification for low income individuals and for east germans a group confronted with larger economic fluctuations when examining potential mechanisms that could explain the observed health deteriorations the study finds significant reductions in exercise frequency and increases in economic uncertainty and overall stress

state abortion rates the impact of policies providers politics demographics and economic environment abstract this paper uses data on abortion rates by state from 1974 1988 to estimate two stage least squares models with fixed state and year effects restrictions on medicaid funding for abortion are correlated with lower abortion rates in state and higher rates among nearby states a maximal estimate suggests that 19 25 of the abortions among low income women that are publicly funded do not take place after funding is eliminated parental notification laws for teen abortions do not significantly affect aggregate abortion rates a larger number of abortion providers in a state increases the abortion rate primarily through inducing cross state travel

a game theoretic mathematical programming analysis of cooperative phenomena in oligopolistic markets this paper investigates cooperative behavior in an industry that supplies a homogeneous product and consists of oligopolistic firms the analysis is conducted within a game theoretic framework in which each firm is viewed as a player whose strategy is its level of production by defining a suitable characteristic function that evaluates the worth of each possible coalition we attempt to quantify the individual and collective bargaining powers of firms in order to predict merger or contractual agreements and production strategies in particular we define three games via three characteristic functions each of which is based upon some assumed market behavior on the part of the players for each game we investigate whether the firms would choose to remain separate or form a grand coalition or some other coalition structure for some insightful special cases we are able to establish the resulting outcome and assert whether a core allocation of profits among members of an emerging coalition exists and whether the shapley value allocation belongs to the core in the more general case we use the u s copper industry as an example to illustrate how shapley values may be used to determine possible emerging coalition structures

crime in europe and the united states dissecting the reversal of misfortunes contrary to common perceptions today both property and violent crimes with the exception of homicides are more widespread in europe than in the united states while the opposite was true thirty years ago we label this fact as the reversal of misfortunes we investigate what accounts for the reversal by studying the causal impact of demographic changes incarceration abortion unemployment and immigration on crime for this we use time series data 1970 2008 from seven european countries and the united states we find that the demographic structure of the population and the incarceration rate are important determinants of crime our results suggest that a tougher incarceration policy may be an effective way to contrast crime in europe our analysis does not provide information on how incarceration policy should be made tougher nor does it provide an answer to the question whether such a policy would also be efficient from a cost benefit point of view we leave this to future research paolo buonanno francesco drago roberto galbiati and giulio zanella

children of a policy revolution the introduction of universal child care and its effect on fertility what role does affordable and widely available public child care play for fertility we exploit a major german reform generating large temporal and spatial variation in child care coverage for children under the age of three our precise and robust estimates on birth register data reveal that increases in public child care have significant positive effects on fertility the fertility effects are more pronounced at the intensive than at the extensive margin and are not driven by changes in the timing of births or selective migration our findings inform policy makers concerned about low fertility by suggesting that universal early child care holds the promise of being an effective means of increasing birth rates

a multiple leader stackelberg model and analysis this paper presents a new multiple leader follower model that is a consistent extension of stackelberg s leader follower duopoly the development contrasts with other existing extensions by demonstrating how the leader firms can utilize the true reaction curve of the follower firms it also provides sufficient conditions for some useful convexity and differentiability properties of this function for the proposed model we conduct a static analysis and discuss the existence uniqueness and computation of an equilibrium solution as well as study certain issues regarding the relative profits of leader and follower firms since the cournot oligopoly and the stackelberg leader follower models are special cases of this model the analysis in this paper hopefully provides some further insights about these types of models

poverty and survival a recent literature highlights the uncertainty concerning whether economic growth has any causal protective effect on health and survival but equal rates of growth often deliver unequal rates of poverty reduction and absolute deprivation is more clearly relevant using state level panel data for india we contribute the first estimates of the impact of changes in poverty on infant survival we identify a significant within state relationship which persists conditional upon state income indicating the size of survival gains from redistribution in favour of households below the poverty line the poverty elasticity declines over time after 1981 it is invariant to controlling for income inequality but diminished upon controlling for education fertility and state health expenditure and eliminated once we introduce controls for omitted trends

contributions to cournot oligopoly theory abstract this work contributes to a number of questions concerning oligopoly models in particular uniqueness of the cournot equilibrium point is demonstrated under the assumption that either the unit price function is differentiable and the derivative is strictly negative or the cost functions are strictly convex also under the assumption of either strictly decreasing unit price function or strictly convex cost functions it is shown that a the total production level at equilibrium increases with entry of additional players b that cooperation between some of the players necessarily entails profit for the others and c cooperative grouping causes decrease in production levels

the causes and consequences of distinctively black names in the 1960s blacks and whites chose relatively similar first names for their children over a short period of time in the early 1970s that pattern changed dramatically with most blacks particularly those living in racially isolated neighborhoods adopting increasingly distinctive names but a subset of blacks actually moving toward more assimilating names the patterns in the data appear most consistent with a model in which the rise of the black power movement influenced how blacks perceived their identities among blacks born in the last two decades names provide a strong signal of socioeconomic status which was not previously the case we find however no negative relationship between having a distinctively black name and later life outcomes after controlling for a child s circumstances at birth

a mathematical programming approach to a nash cournot equilibrium analysis for atwo stage network of oligopolies this paper deals with the existence characterization and computation of equilibrium solutions arising from related mathematical programming problems associated with a particular market structure the generic structure analyzed herein represents a two stage production process in which a set of some firms produces a semifinished product that serves as an input to another set of firms which converts this to a final good in addition there exists a third set of vertically integrated firms these firms perform the operations jointly performed by the other two sets of firms in producing the final product on the demand side an econometrically derived demand curve is specified for the final product the aim of this paper is to characterize the nature of the equilibrium solutions for such problems under various market behavioral structures derive sufficient conditions under which one can claim the existence of these equilibrium solutions and prescribe methods for computing equilibrium solutions the analysis provides a machinery for considering the effects of mergers and integrations on a firms profits and on industry outputs and prices thereby suggesting incentives or otherwise to merge or integrate

stackelberg nash cournot equilibria characterizations and computations the supply side of an oligopolistic market supplying a homogeneous product noncooperatively is modeled in this market there is one leader and n followers the followers operate under the cournot assumption of zero conjectural variation and are accordingly called cournot firms the leader called a stackelberg firm specifically takes into account the reaction of the cournot firms to its output for this situation we study the behavior and implications of the joint cournot reaction curve as generated by plausible economic market assumptions in particular we study the existence and uniqueness of a stackelberg nash cournot equilibrium in addition we prescribe an efficient algorithm to determine a set of equilibrating output quantities for the firms

the impact of stock market fluctuations on the mental and physical well being of children the stock market crash of 2008 caused a severe impact to households earlier research has explored the impacts of a stock market crash on life well being psychological stress and adult health behaviors we extend this literature by documenting impacts of stock market fluctuations on a range of child outcomes including effects on both mental and physical health we show a negative effect of a market crash on hospitalizations child reported health status sick days from school and an aggregate health index measure both graphical and regression based analysis reveal that our results are not driven by a preexisting trend of declining child health before the market crash and extensive sensitivity analysis demonstrates that the results are robust to multiple empirical specifications jel i15 e32 j13

the impact of legalized abortion on crime we offer evidence that legalized abortion has contributed significantly to recent crime reductions crime began to fall roughly eighteen years after abortion legalization the five states that allowed abortion in 1970 experienced declines earlier than the rest of the nation which legalized in 1973 with roe v wade states with high abortion rates in the 1970s and 1980s experienced greater crime reductions in the 1990s in high abortion states only arrests of those born after abortion legalization fall relative to low abortion states legalized abortion appears to account for as much as 50 percent of the recent drop in crime