has job stability decreased population data from a small open economy we use a population based employer employee dataset to analyze changes in job stability in norway we first present descriptive analyses of tenure and separation rates followed by regression adjusted measures controlling for changes in demographics and the business cycle we see only weak evidence of changes in the tenure rates in particular for the public sector we find a slight increase in short tenures and a decrease in tenures above eight years however we do not find that this tendency towards less stable jobs leads to an increase in the flow to unemployment or out of the labor force

s p 500 cash stock price volatilities s p 500 stock return volatilities are compared to the volatilities of a matched set of stocks after controlling for cross sectional differences in firm attributes known to affect volatility no significant difference in volatility is observed between 1975 and 1983before the start of trade in index futures and index options since then s p 500 stocks have been relatively more volatile the difference is statistically but not economically significant the relative increase occurs primarily in daily returns and only to a lesser extent in longer interval returns other factors besides the start of derivative trade could be responsible for the small increase in volatility stock price volatility has received much attention in the popular press over the last few years especially since the october 19 1987 stock market crash the rise in volatility has alarmed investors regulators and the public in general some suggest that the start of trade in stock index futures and index options increased speculative activity that in turn destabilized cash markets causing higher volatility large trading activity in the derivative contracts makes the suggestion plausible volume in index futures and index options increased dramatically since their introductions in 1982 and 1983 by 1987 the average daily dollar volume in the s p 500 futures contracts alone exceeded the dollar volume of cash s p 500 trade by a factor of about two while the dollar value of the daily net change in total open interest is about 8 of s p 500 stock dollar volume speculative trade in futures and options frequently is accused of destabilizing underlying cash markets the charge has been made for more than a century in the agricultural precious metal and currency markets recent evidence by french and roll 1986 showing stock variance to be strongly related to trading session hours heightens these concerns unfortunately theoretical analyses of whether speculative trade destabilizes cash markets lead to conflicting conclusions depending on what assumptions are made 1 school of business administration university of southern california and office of economic analysis u s securities and exchange commission i wish to thank mary denny mcsweeny and steve hornstein for their valuable research assistance and the referee and editor for their many suggestions and insights the opinions expressed in this paper do not necessarily reflect those of the u s securities and exchange commission or those of the author s colleagues on its staff an increase in well informed speculative trade has two opposite effects on measured volatility it decreases volatility due to order flow imbalances caused by uninformed traders because informed traders provide liquidity in such events and it increases volatility due to new fundamental information since the information which is assumed to be generated at discrete time intervals is impounded into

the behavior of prices in the nikkei spot and futures market abstract we examine the relation between the prices of japanese stocks traded on the tokyo stock exchange tse as reflected in the nikkei stock average nsa stock index and the prices of the nsa futures contract traded on the singapore international monetary exchange simex since the inception of trading in september 1986 the nsa futures contract has generally sold at a discount relative to its theoretical value trading restrictions and transaction costs may explain some of this mispricing which has been declining over time as in the u s markets

revisiting the employment impact of offshoring abstract the productivity gains due to offshoring may in part accrue to workers this paper estimates the magnitude of these gains and compares it to the magnitude of employment loss due to worker displacement a model based on the production task framework from grossman and rossi hansberg 2008 is used to demonstrate that the effect of offshoring depends on the intensity of use of these tasks and ultimately impacts domestic employment through three channels a direct displacement effect which negatively impacts employment an output effect generated by the productivity gains from offshoring which reorganizes and increases aggregate production in the economy and impacts domestic employment positively and a substitution effect among factors and tasks which has an ambiguous effect using the model s structure as a roadmap and applying it to detailed u s manufacturing sector data over 2001 2007 results from gmm 3sls regressions provide overall support for the structure and predictions of the tasks model of offshoring in particular the economic magnitude of the productivity gains is found to have been important

intergenerational economic mobility in the united states 1940 to 2000 we estimate trends in intergenerational economic mobility by matching men in the census to synthetic parents in the prior generation we find that mobility increased from 1950 to 1980 but has declined sharply since 1980 while our estimator places greater weight on location effects than the standard intergenerational coefficient the size of the bias appears to be small our preferred results suggest that earnings are regressing to the mean more slowly now than at any time since world war ii causing economic differences between families to become more persistent however current rates of positional mobility appear historically normal

are ghettos good or bad spatial separation of racial and ethnic groups may theoretically have positive or negative effects on the economic performance of those groups we examine the effects of segregation on outcomes for blacks in schooling employment and single parenthood we find that blacks in more segregated areas have significantly worse outcomes than blacks in less segregated areas we control for the endogeneity of location choice using instruments based on political factors topographical features and residence before adulthood a one standard deviation decrease in segregation would eliminate one third of the black white differences in most of our outcomes

ethnicity neighborhoods and human capital externalities the socioeconomic performance of today s workers depends not only on parental skills but also on the average skills of the ethnic group in the parents generation or ethnic capital this paper investigates the link between the ethnic externality and ethnic neighborhoods the evidence indicates that residential segregation and the external effect of ethnicity are linked partly because ethnic capital summarizes the socioeconomic background of the neighborhood where the children were raised ethnicity has an external effect even among persons who grow up in the same neighborhood when children are exposed frequently to persons who share the same ethnic background copyright 1995 by american economic association

energy consumption synchronization between europe united states and japan a spectral analysis assessment abstract this paper aims to advance a model able to explain the synchronization tendency in energy consumption under the impact of international technology transfers the key argument is related to the differences in energy consumption efficiency of local and foreign technologies one direct testable consequence of the model is that there might be a certain correlation between the energy consumption between countries and or economic areas where a free movement of capital goods and technologies takes place hence it is further tested in the framework of a multivariate spectrum analysis the case of energy consumption synchronization between europe and respectively united states and japan for a time span between 1981 and 2011 based on the data provided by u s energy information administration there are evidences of a leading behavior of energy consumption in united states and japan in respect to europe as well as of short run phase delays of 2 up to 5 months

are any growth theories robust this article investigates the strength of empirical evidence for various growth theories when there is model uncertainty with respect to the correct growth model using model averaging methods we find little evidence that so called fundamental growth theories play an important role in explaining aggregate growth in contrast we find strong evidence for macroeconomic policy effects and a role for unexplained regional heterogeneity as well as some evidence of parameter heterogeneity in the aggregate production function we conclude that the ability of cross country growth regressions to adjudicate the relative importance of alternative growth theories is limited despite the vast amount of empirical research generated by new growth theories there is remarkably little consensus on which mechanisms are most salient in explaining cross country differences this article is designed to provide some evidence on this question by examining the robustness of empirical support for different growth the ories as determinants of both aggregate growth and its underlying components total factor productivity tfp growth and physical and human capital accumulation one reason for the lack of empirical consensus on growth determinants is that the main statistical tool in empirical studies cross country growth regressions provides very different answers depending on how the regression is specified which for this context typically amounts to the choice of control variables individual papers typically employ regressions that include modest subsets of the body of regressors that have been pro posed in the literature as a whole others employ a kitchen sink approach to evaluate the relative evidentiary support of competing growth theories in such an exercise a large number of variables are included in a regression and those variables that prove to be significant are then declared to be the important determinants of growth while the others are dismissed as unimportant rodrik et al 2002 sachs 2003

energy taxes and endogenous technological change abstract this paper studies the effects of a tax on energy use in a growth model where market structure is endogenous and jointly determined with the rate of technological change because this economy does not exhibit the scale effect a positive relation between tfp growth and aggregate r d the tax has no effect on the steady state growth rate it has however important transitional effects that give rise to surprising results specifically under the plausible assumption that energy demand is inelastic there may exist a hump shaped relation between the energy tax and welfare this shape stems from the fact that the reallocation of resources from energy production to manufacturing triggers a temporary acceleration of tfp growth that generates a shaped time profile of consumption if endogenous technological change raises consumption sufficiently fast and by a sufficient amount in the long run and households are sufficiently patient the tax raises welfare despite the fact that in line with standard intuition it lowers consumption in the short run

some models for estimating technical and scale inefficiencies in data envelopment analysis in management contexts mathematical programming is usually used to evaluate a collection of possible alternative courses of action en route to selecting one which is best in this capacity mathematical programming serves as a planning aid to management data envelopment analysis reverses this role and employs mathematical programming to obtain ex post facto evaluations of the relative efficiency of management accomplishments however they may have been planned or executed mathematical programming is thereby extended for use as a tool for control and evaluation of past accomplishments as well as a tool to aid in planning future activities the ccr ratio form introduced by charnes cooper and rhodes as part of their data envelopment analysis approach comprehends both technical and scale inefficiencies via the optimal value of the ratio form as obtained directly from the data without requiring a priori specification of weights and or explicit delineation of assumed functional forms of relations between inputs and outputs a separation into technical and scale efficiencies is accomplished by the methods developed in this paper without altering the latter conditions for use of dea directly on observational data technical inefficiencies are identified with failures to achieve best possible output levels and or usage of excessive amounts of inputs methods for identifying and correcting the magnitudes of these inefficiencies as supplied in prior work are illustrated in the present paper a new separate variable is introduced which makes it possible to determine whether operations were conducted in regions of increasing constant or decreasing returns to scale in multiple input and multiple output situations the results are discussed and related not only to classical single output economics but also to more modern versions of economics which are identified with contestable market theories

data improvement and labor economics the expansion of available data for research has transformed empirical labor economics over the past generation this paper briefly highlights some of the changes and describes a few examples of papers that illustrate the advances it also documents the changing ways data have been used in the journal of labor economics over the past 30 years including a trend toward a higher fraction of papers using any data and among those papers using any data a higher fraction using nonpublic data a higher fraction using international data and more frequent use of multiple data sources finally this paper describes work that came out of the recent princeton data improvement initiative a program that considers and furthers improved data collection

job polarization and task biased technological change evidence from sweden 1975 2005 this paper shows that between 1975 and 2005 sweden exhibited a pattern of job polarization with expansions of the highest and lowest paid jobs compared to middle wage jobs the most popular explan

trends in intergenerational income mobility previous studies of recent u s trends in intergenerational income mobility have produced widely varying results partly because of large sampling errors by making more efficient use of the available information in the panel study of income dynamics we generate more reliable estimates of the recent time series variation in intergenerational mobility our results which pertain to the cohorts born between 1952 and 1975 do not reveal major changes in intergenerational mobility

pounds that kill the external costs of vehicle weight heavier vehicles are safer for their own occupants but more hazardous for other vehicles simple theory thus suggests that an unregulated vehicle fleet is inefficiently heavy using three separate identification strategies we show that controlling for own vehicle weight being hit by a vehicle that is 1000 pounds heavier generates a 40 50 increase in fatality risk these results imply a total accident related externality that exceeds the estimated social cost of us carbon emissions and is equivalent to a gas tax of 0 97 per gallon 136 billion annually we consider two policies for internalizing this external cost a weight varying mileage tax and a gas tax and find that they are similar for most vehicles the findings suggest that european gas taxes may be much closer to optimal levels than the us gas tax language en

influence of policy operational and market conditions on seaport efficiency in newly emerging economies the case of vietnam located in southeast asia as one of the most dynamic economic regions in the world and close to north south shipping routes vietnam s seaports play a vital role in promoting its international trad

offshoring of tasks taylorism versus toyotism this paper contributes to the recent debate on trade in tasks drawing on insights from the theory of the firm as well as recent developments in trade theory recent empirical literature suggests that between 20 and 30 per cent of all jobs in key oecd countries could be digitised and offshored this study offers a cluster analysis which documents that offshorable and non offshorable tasks tend to be performed together across occupations therefore when assessing the offshorability of a job one needs to take into account all tasks being performed by the worker and the gains from fragmenting jobs versus the benefits of multi tasked workers taylorism versus toyotism furthermore one needs to distinguish between fragmentation of production and fragmentation of jobs

rough and lonely road to prosperity a reexamination of the sources of growth in africa using bayesian model averaging this paper takes a fresh look at africa s growth experience by using the bayesian model averaging bma methodology bma enables us to consider a large number of potential explanatory variables and sort out which of these variable can effectively explain africa s growth experience posterior coefficient estimates reveal that key engines of growth in africa are substantially different from those in the rest of the world more precisely it is shown that mining primary exports and initial primary education exerted differential effect on african growth these results are examined in relation to the existing literature copyright 2008 john wiley sons ltd

offshoring and outsourcing potentials evidence from german micro level data this paper provides two indicators that measure i offshoring potentials cross country geographical relocation and ii outsourcing potentials organisational relocation separately at the level of jobs occupations tasks and industries we use four waves of the bibb baua labour force survey in germany and apply principal component analysis based on a large set of potential determinants of offshoring and outsourcing derived from the literature our results show significant variation across these levels in the determinants of both dimensions we provide a comprehensive empirical classification of the determinants of how easily jobs can be offshored and outsourced this can serve as a basis for further research to investigate the economic effects of job offshoreability

trade creation and diversion revisited accounting for model uncertainty and natural trading partner effects summary the effect of preferential trade agreements ptas on trade flows is subject to model uncertainty stemming from the diverse and even contradictory effects suggested by the theoretical pta literature the existing empirical literature has produced remarkably disparate results and the wide variety of empirical approaches reflects the uncertainty about the correct set of explanatory variables that ought to be included in the analysis to account for the model uncertainty that surrounds the validity of the competing pta theories we introduce bayesian model averaging bma to the pta literature statistical theory shows that bma successfully incorporates model uncertainty in linear regression analysis by minimizing the mean squared error and by generating predictive distributions with optimal predictive performance once model uncertainty is addressed as part of the empirical strategy we find strong evidence of trade creation trade diversion and open bloc effects our results are robust to a range of alternative empirical specifications proposed by the recent pta literature copyright 2010 john wiley sons ltd

interindustry wage differentials technology adoption and job polarization abstract based on observations that high wage industries in 1980 experienced more evident job polarization between 1980 and 2009 we hypothesize that the persistent structure of interindustry wage differentials leads to heterogeneity in job polarization across industries as the relative price of ict capital declines firms respond to exogenous wage differentials by replacing routine workers with capital our empirical analysis shows that during the last three decades the annualized growth rate of ict capital per worker increased by 0 34 percent and that of routine employment decreased by 0 41 percent in the u s industries that paid 10 percent higher wages in 1980

local high tech job multipliers in europe examining employment growth in local labor markets across europe this article finds that each worker in a high skilled occupation creates up to five extra jobs in local less skilled intensive services in the same region however it is also shown that there exist persistent differences in the size of this local high tech job multiplier across regions in particular we find that the multiplier is larger in regions with higher immigration an abundance of less skilled workers and lower gross output per capita at the country level we also show that this results in local high tech job multipliers that are larger in southern european countries than in the rest of europe

occupations at risk job tasks job security and wages germany similar to other developed countries witnessed a sharp decline in jobs that used to constitute the middle class in the 1970s and 1980s this decline has been associated with the level to which jobs are codifiable there is evidence that codifiable tasks are more prone to technological substitution and outsourcing compared with tacit tasks this article empirically investigates two crucial aspects of the decline in codified jobs first it studies what happened to workers in codified occupations in terms of unemployment occupational change and wages second it revisits the hypothesis that code based technologies are the major driver of this labor market shift we find that job codification is associated with both higher unemployment and higher occupational change it is also associated with wage losses for workers who left routinized jobs we find however little evidence that code based technologies were the driving factor behind these dynamics

wage shocks and the technological substitution of low wage jobs we extend the task based empirical framework used in the job polarization literature to analyze the susceptibility of low wage employment to technological substitution we nd that increases in the cost of low wage labor via minimum wage hikes lead to relative employment declines at cognitively routine occupations but not manuallyroutine or non routine low wage occupations this suggests that low wage routine cognitive tasks are susceptible to technological substitution while the short run em

does futures trading increase stock market volatility 1988 does futures trading increase stock market volatility financial analysts journal vol 44 no 1 pp 63 69

program trading and market volatility a report on interday relationships ten months of daily observations on stock market volatility and program trading on the nyse reveal no relation between volatility and program trading intensity the days on which volatility was high were not systematically the days on which program trading intensity was high this is evident both from casual observation of the data and from analyses of the correlation and regression results there does appear to be however a positive relation between the intensity of dot volume relative to nyse volume and volatility there also appears to be a positive relation between the intensity of non program dot volume relative to nyse volume and volatility this suggests that very volatile days are also days when the retail customer generated dot order flow is large relative to institutional block trades which are not dot delivered

how many jobs can be done at home evaluating the economic impact of social distancing measures taken to arrest the spread of covid 19 raises a fundamental question about the modern economy how many jobs can be performed at home we classify the feasibility of working at home for all occupations and merge this classification with occupational employment counts we find that 37 of jobs in the united states can be performed entirely at home with significant variation across cities and industries these jobs typically pay more than jobs that cannot be done at home and account for 46 of all us wages applying our occupational classification to 85 other countries reveals that lower income economies have a lower share of jobs that can be done at home

robust determinants of intergenerational mobility in the land of opportunity abstract this paper revisits the influential work by chetty et al 2014 who attempt to explain the variation in intergenerational mobility across commuter zones in the us i e spatial mobility using nine classes of variables we employ bayesian model averaging methods that allow for model uncertainty to identify robust predictors of spatial mobility in doing so we pay special attention to the specification of model and parameter priors we also investigate the heterogeneous effects of these predictors on spatial mobility across commuter zones in different average income quintiles our findings suggest a more nuance and complex characterization of the spatial mobility process than that proposed by chetty hendren kline and saez

this job is getting old measuring changes in job opportunities using occupational age structure high and low wage occupations are expanding rapidly relative to middle wage occupations in both the u s and the e u we study the reallocation of workers from middle skill occupations towards the tails of the occupational skill distribution by analyzing changes in age structure within and across occupations because occupations typically expand by hiring young workers and contract by curtailing such hiring we posit that growing occupations will get younger while shrinking occupations will get old after verifying this proposition we apply this observation to local labor markets in the u s to test whether markets that were specialized in middle skilled occupations in 1980 saw a differential movement of both older and younger workers into occupations at the tails of the skill distribution over the subsequent 25 years consistent with aggregate trends employment in initially middle skill intensive labor markets hollowed out between 1980 and 2005 employment losses among non college workers in the middle of the occupational skill distribution were almost entirely countered by employment growth in lower tail occupations for college workers employment losses at the middle were offset in roughly equal measures by gains in the upper and lower tails of the occupational skill distribution but gains at the upper tail were almost entirely limited to young college workers consequently older college workers are increasingly found in lower skill lower paying occupations this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

service offshoring and firm employment abstract major technological advances have recently spurred a new wave of offshoring in services which used to be non tradable should service workers in developed countries worry about their jobs trade theory has given a nuanced answer to this question suggesting that efficiency gains from offshoring may counteract direct job losses which leaves the predicted net effect ambiguous this paper investigates the employment effects of service offshoring in a newly combined and exceptionally detailed panel dataset covering almost the entire universe of german firms service imports over the years 2001 2013 it exploits firm specific export supply shocks by partner countries and service types as an instrumental variable to find that service offshoring has increased firm employment in line with the canonical trade in tasks model the employment gains are greater in firms with higher initial levels of service offshoring

cross country rankings in intergenerational mobility a comparison of approaches from economics and sociology this paper summarizes research on the relative level of intergenerational mobility whether classified by income education or social class the literatures on education and income mobility reveal a similar ranking with south america other developing nations southern european countries and france tending to have rather limited mobility although the nordic countries exhibit strong mobility estimates of mobility based on social class point to rather different patterns and we demonstrate that these differences are most likely generated by intergenerational earnings persistence within social classes the second part of the paper looks for explanations for the differences in earnings and education persistence and finds that mobility is negatively correlated with inequality and the return to education but positively correlated with a nation s education spending

immigration and wage dynamics evidence from the mexican peso crisis how does the us labor market absorb low skilled immigration i address this question using the 1995 mexican peso crisis an exogenous push factor that raised mexican migration to the us in the short run high immigration states see their low skilled labor force increase and native low skilled wages decrease with an implied local labor demand elasticity of 7 internal relocation dissipates this shock spatially in the long run the only lasting consequences are for low skilled natives who entered the labor force in high immigration years a simple quantitative many region model allows me to obtain the counterfactual local wage evolution absent the immigration shock

does school quality matter returns to education and the characteristics of public schools in the united states this paper estimates the effects of school quality measured by the pupil teacher ratio average term length and relative teacher pay on the rate of return to education for men born between 1920 and 1949 using earnings data from the 1980 census we find that men who were educated in states with higher quality schools have a higher return to additional years of schooling rates of return are also higher for individuals from states with better educated teachers and with a higher fraction of female teachers holding constant school quality measures however we find no evidence that parental income or education affects average state level rates of return

outsourcing and the us labour market there is worldwide concern about the vulnerability of the current labour force to displacement by future imported services in the usa some have suggested that as much as one third of the workforce might be vulnerable to such outsourcing however the labour market impacts of this displacement are difficult to assess using purely analytical or statistical approaches in this paper simulation methods are used to understand how sensitive the us economy and labour market are to increases in services imports specifically the scenario examined assumes that the share of imported services in total employment increases from 0 8 per cent to 7 25 per cent over a time horizon in which workers are unable to change occupations in response it is found that all industries increase their use of imported services and their use of the composite input that is comprised of imported services and tradable labour with the exception of legal workers all workers in tradable occupations experience declines in their real wages demand for non tradable occupations labour rises in the industries that expand the most while demand falls in shrinking industries the non tradable occupations that are used intensively in the shrinking industries experience declines in real wages while the real wages rise for workers in non tradable occupations used intensively in the expanding industries

the geography of trade and technology shocks in the united states abstract this paper explores the geographic overlap of trade and technology shocks across local labor markets in the united states regional exposure to technological change as measured by specialization in routine task intensive production and clerical occupations is largely uncorrelated with regional exposure to trade competition from china while the impacts of technology are dispersed throughout the united states the impacts of trade tend to be more geographically concentrated owing in part to the spatial agglomeration of labor intensive manufacturing our findings highlight the feasibility of separately identifying the impacts of recent changes in trade and technology on us regional economies

what drives labor market polarization in advanced countries the role of china and technology this article explores the effects of offshoring technology and chinese import competition on labor market polarization in european countries we find that polarization occurs mostly as a result of polarization within individual industries while the reallocation of employment away from less polarized industries toward more highly polarized industries contributed only about one third of the total change we find that both technological change and chinese net import competition contributed to labor market polarization but that they did so in distinct ways in european manufacturing industries ict adoption explains a third of within industry polarization while chinese net import competition contributed to a much smaller extent the process of between industry polarization is driven by widespread deindustrialization and servitization in developed countries we find that chinese net import competition explains about a fifth of the employment decline in lowly polarized manufacturing industries and was thus an important driver of the reallocation of labor within economies away from lowly polarized manufacturing industries we present tentative evidence that employment grew faster in initially highly polarized service industries moreover these industries appear unaffected by their indirect input output exposure to chinese net import competition while this was not the case for initially lowly polarized service industries while polarization patterns in different european labor markets show considerable heterogeneity labor market institutions seem to be insufficient to explain these cross country differences

program trading and systematic stock price behavior 1989 program trading and systematic stock price behavior financial analysts journal vol 45 no 3 pp 61 67

does futures trading increase stock market volatility the case of the nikkei stock index futures markets abstract we propose new tests to examine whether stock index futures affect stock market volatility these tests decompose spot portfolio volatility into the cross sectional dispersion and the average volatility of returns on the portfolio s constituent securities our tests show that for nikkei stocks spot portfolio volatility increased and cross sectional dispersion decreased compared with average volatility when nikkei futures began trading on the osaka securities exchange but not on the singapore international monetary exchange for non nikkei stocks no shift occurred when futures trading began on either exchange these findings are consistent with the hypotheses that futures trading increases spot portfolio volatility but that there is no volatility spillover to stocks against which futures are not traded however the increase in volatility attributable to futures trading is small compared with volatility shifts induced by changes in broad economic factors

trade in goods and trade in tasks an integrating framework abstract we introduce a simple but flexible analytical framework in which both trade in goods and trade in tasks arise we use this framework to provide versions of the gains from trade and the famous four ho theorems heckscher ohlin factor price equalisation stolper samuelson and rybczynski that apply to this environment we extend our framework to accommodate monopolistic competition and two way offshoring and to integrate theoretical results of the early offshoring literature

futures trading activity and stock price volatility we examine whether greater futures trading activity volume and open interest is associated with greater equity volatility we partition each trading activity series into expected and unexpected components and document that while equity volatility covaries positively with unexpected futures trading volume it is negatively related to forecastable futures trading activity further though futures trading activity is systematically related to the futures contract life cycle we find no evidence of a relation between the futures life cycle and spot equity volatility these findings are consistent with theories predicting that active futures markets enhance the liquidity and depth of the equity markets

do concerns about labor market competition shape attitudes toward immigration new evidence abstract are concerns about labor market competition a powerful source of anti immigrant sentiment several prominent studies have examined survey data on voters and concluded that fears about the negative effects of immigration on wages and employment play a major role generating anti immigrant attitudes we examine new data from a targeted survey of u s employees in 12 different industries in contrast with previous studies the findings indicate that fears about labor market competition do not appear to have substantial effects on attitudes toward immigration and preferences with regard to immigration policy among this large and diverse set of voters

a sorted tale of globalization white collar jobs and the rise of service offshoring abstract we study how the rise of unaffiliated trade in services with china and india has impacted u s labour markets the topic has two understudied aspects it deals with service trade most studies deal with manufacturing trade and it examines the historical first of u s workers competing with educated but low wage foreign workers our empirical agenda is made complicated by the endogeneity of service imports and the endogenous sorting of workers across occupations to develop an estimation framework that deals with these we imbed a partial equilibrium model of trade in tasks within a general equilibrium model of occupational choice the model highlights the need to estimate labour market outcomes using changes in the outcomes of individual workers and in particular to distinguish workers who switch up from those who switch down switching down means switching to an occupation that pays less on average than the current occupation we apply these insights to matched cps data for 1996 2007 the cumulative 10 year impact of rising service imports from china and india has been as follows 1 downward occupational switching increased by 7 percentage points from 21 to 28 and upward occupational switching increased by 6 percentage points from 17 to 23 2 transitions to unemployment were imprecisely measured to have increased by half a percentage point potentially raising the white collar unemployment rate from 3 0 to 3 5 3 the earnings average across all white collar workers fell by a small 1 however for the sub population of workers who switched down or became unemployed earnings fell by 15 and 47 respectively 4 service exports had partially offsetting effects on switching and unemployment

a new approach to measure speculation in the oil futures market and some policy implications abstract we propose using a new relative measure the speculative ratio defined as trading volume divided by open interest to gauge speculative activity in the oil futures market we apply the speculative ratio to examine the relation between basis and speculative activity in the oil futures market before and after the financialization of the oil market in 2003 our finding suggests that the oil futures market is dominated by uninformed speculators in the post financialization period our finding carries several practical policy implications as follows 1 both the commodity exchange and the regulator should design regulations and trading policies that improve basis risk 2 on the commodity exchange side new policies on margin requirements and position limits for speculators should be implemented 3 margin requirements should be based on the level of basis risk 4 regulators should speed up implementation of the position limit rule in the dodd frank act and 5 stronger and more meaningful enforcement actions by regulators are required to punish and deter market manipulators

does complexity explain the structure of trade this paper analyzes whether complexity measured by the number of skilled tasks that are performed simultaneously in production explains countries commodity trade structure we modify romalis 2004 model to incorporate differences in complexity across commodities together with differences in average skills across countries and monopolistic competition our model predicts that the share of developed countries in world trade increases with products complexity the empirical tests confirm this prediction moreover in most cases complexity seems to provide a better explanation of countries commodity trade structure than the one offered only by skill intensity

a stochastic frontier model of the productive efficiency of korean container terminals a central objective of port privatization and or deregulation policies is stimulating greater efficiency by engendering a more competitive market and commercial approach to management korea provides a prime example of a nation that is implementing such policies also its ports play a pivotal role in world shipping particularly in the ever burgeoning container market the success of these policies in increasing the productive efficiency of korean container terminals is assessed the uk container terminal sector provides a useful benchmark for comparison since privatization and deregulation have formed an integral part of uk port reforms for nearly 20 years and the effect on efficiency having had time to mature will be much easier to gauge the stochastic frontier model is justified as the chosen methodology for estimating productive efficiency levels and is applied to cross sectional data under a variety of distributional assumptions a panel data model is also estimated results are consistent and su

us versus them mass attitudes toward offshore outsourcing economists have argued that outsourcing is another form of international trade however based on a representative national survey of americans conducted in 2007 and 2009 the distribution of preferences on these two issues appears to be quite different this article examines the origins of attitudes toward outsourcing focusing on the extent to which it reflects 1 the economic vulnerabilities of individuals 2 the information they receive about outsourcing including their subjective understanding of what constitutes outsourcing and 3 noneconomic attitudes toward foreign people and foreign countries the findings emphasize the importance of variations in understandings of the term as well as the highly symbolic nature of attitudes toward this issue individuals who believe the us should distance itself from international affairs more generally who are nationalistic or who feel that members of other ethnic and racial groups within the us are less praiseworthy than their own group tend to have particularly hostile reactions to outsourcing the informational cues people receive are also important influences on their understanding of and attitudes toward outsourcing experimental results further emphasize the symbolic nature of attitudes toward outsourcing taken together the results strongly suggest that attitudes are shaped less by the economic consequences of outsourcing than by a sense of us versus them

do etfs increase volatility due to their low trading costs exchange traded funds etfs are a potential catalyst for short horizon liquidity traders the liquidity shocks can propagate to the underlying securities through the arbitrage channel and etfs may increase the nonfundamental volatility of the securities in their baskets we exploit exogenous changes in index membership and find that stocks with higher etf ownership display significantly higher volatility etf ownership increases the negative autocorrelation in stock prices the increase in volatility appears to introduce undiversifiable risk in prices because stocks with high etf ownership earn a significant risk premium of up to 56 basis points monthly

how many us jobs might be offshorable using detailed information on the nature of work done in over 800 us bureau of labor statistics occupational codes this paper ranks those occupations according to how easy hard it is to offshore the work either physically or electronically using this ranking it is estimated that somewhere between 22 and 29 of all us jobs are or will be potentially offshorable within a decade or two no estimate is made of how many jobs will actually be offshored since the rankings are subjective two alternatives are presented one is entirely objective the other is an independent subjective ranking in general they corroborate the rankings albeit not perfectly it is found that there is little or no correlation between an occupation s offshorability and the skill level of its workers as measured either by educational attainment or wages however it appears that controlling for education the most highly offshorable occupations were already paying significantly lower wages in 2004

an examination of stock market return volatility during overnight and intraday periods 1964 1989 this paper examines the variance of hourly market returns during 1964 89 results indicate that return volatility falls from the opening hour until early afternoon and rises thereafter and is significantly greater for intraday versus overnight periods market variance is also shown to change significantly over time rising after nasdaq began in 1971 rising after trading in stock options began in 1973 falling after fixed commissions were eliminated in 1975 rising after trading in stock index futures was introduced in 1982 and falling after margin requirements for stock index futures became larger in 1988 copyright 1990 by american finance association

following the pied piper do individual returns herd around the market do equity returns indicate the presence of herd behavior on the part of investors during periods of market stress to test this proposition the cross sectional standard deviation of returns or dispersion is used to capture herd behavior when individual returns herd around the market consensus dispersions are predicted to be relatively low in contrast rational asset pricing models predict an increase in dispersion because individual returns are repelled away from the market return when stocks differ in their sensitivity to market movements the results for both daily and monthly returns are inconsistent with the presence of herding during periods of large price movements for example during extreme down markets when herding is expected to be most prevalent the magnitude of the increase in the dispersion of actual returns is mirrored by the increase in the dispersion of predicted returns that are estimated from a rational asset pricing model

intellectual property rights product complexity and the organization of multinational firms this paper studies how the intellectual property right ipr regime in destination countries influences the way multinationals structure the international organization of their production in particular we explore how multinationals divide tasks of dierent complexities across countries with dierent levels of ipr protection the analysis studies the decision of firms between procurement from related parties and outsourcing to independents suppliers at the product level it also breaks down outsourcing into two types by distinguishing whether or not they involve technology sharing between the two parties we combine data from a french firm level survey on the mode choice for each transaction with a newly developed complexity measure at the product level our results confirm that firms are generally reluctant to source highly complex goods from outside firm boundaries by studying the interaction between product complexity and the ipr protection we obtain that i for technology sharing outsourcing iprs promote outsourcing of more complex goods to a destination country by guaranteeing the protection of their technology ii for non technology related outsourcing iprs attract the outsourcing of less complex products that are more prone to reverse engineering and simpler to decodify and imitate

the political economy of intergenerational income mobility the intergenerational elasticity of income is considered one of the best measures of the degree to which a society gives equal opportunity to its members while much research has been devoted to measuring this reduced form parameter less is known about its underlying structural determinants using a model with exogenous talent endowments endogenous parental investment in children and endogenous redistributive institutions we identify the structural parameters that govern the intergenerational elasticity of income the model clarifies how the interaction between private and collective decisions determines the equilibrium level of social mobility two societies with similar economic and biological fundamentals may have vastly different degrees of intergenerational mobility depending on their political institutions we offer empirical evidence in line with the predictions of the model we conclude that international comparisons of intergenerational elasticity of income are not particularly informative about fairness without taking into account differences in politico economic institutions jel e24 j62 j68 p16