unequal vulnerability to climate change and the transmission of adverse effects through international trade in this paper we consider the unequal distribution of climate change damages in the world and we examine how the underlying costs can spread from a vulnerable to a non vulnerable country through international trade to focus on such indirect effects we treat this topic in a north south trade overlapping generations model in which the south is vulnerable to the damages entailed by global pollution while the north is not we show that the impact of climate change in the south can be a source of welfare loss for northern consumers in both the short and the long run in the long run an increase in the south s vulnerability can reduce the welfare in the north economy even in the case in which it improves its terms of trade in the short run the south s vulnerability can also represent a source of intergenerational inequity in the north therefore we emphasize the strong economic incentives for non vulnerable and a fortiori less vulnerable economies to reduce the climate change damages on more vulnerable countries

sources of intra industry wage dispersion how much do employers matter observed human capital explains less than half of wage variation in bls industry wage surveys establishment based wage differentials controlling for occupation account for 20 70 percent of intra industry wage variation this corresponds to a standard deviation in wages of 14 percent of the mean almost as large as interindustry wage variation investigation suggests that establishment wage differentials are not random variations or returns to usual measures of human capital

caught in the trap welfare s disincentive and the labor supply of single men abstract youth unemployment is particularly large in many industrialized countries and has dramatic consequences in both the short and long term while there is abundant evidence about the labor supply of married women and single mothers little is known about how young childless singles react to financial incentives the french minimum income revenu minimum d insertion rmi often accused of generating strong disincentives to work offers a natural setting to study this question since childless single individuals primarily males constitute the core group of recipients exploiting the fact that childless adults under age 25 are not eligible for this program we conduct a regression discontinuity analysis using french census data we find that the rmi reduces the participation of uneducated single men by 7 10 at age 25 we conduct an extensive robustness check and discuss the implications of our results for youth unemployment and current policy developments

temperature shocks and establishment sales combining granular daily data on temperatures across the continental united states with detailed establishment data from 1990 to 2015 we study the causal impact of temperature shocks on establishment sales and productivity using a large sample yielding precise estimates we do not find evidence that temperature exposures significantly affect establishment level sales or productivity including among industries traditionally classified as heat sensitive at the firm level we find that temperature exposures aggregated across firm establishments are generally unrelated to sales productivity and profitability our results support existing findings of a tenuous relation between temperature and aggregate economic growth in rich countries

climate shocks and international trade evidence from china abstract this paper examines the impacts of climate shocks on international trade in china we find that there are substantial climate effects on exports but only little impacts on imports poorer warmer and non coastal cities suffer more from a warming climate

low carbon development for the least developed countries the global community has to act collectively to halt climate change but such collective action must take into account the development needs of the least developed countries ldcs which are likely to be hit earliest and hardest by climate change the priority of such countries remains poverty alleviation and the achievement of the millennium development goals but the three challenges of limiting climate change adapting to its consequences and reducing poverty have to be faced together this requires ldcs eventually to follow a development path that differs from those trodden by today s industrial countries and emerging market economies there is no room in the long term for high emission economies and high carbon growth is unsustainable given the possible consequences for fossil fuel supplies and climate change impacts

changes in male labor supply and wages in the 1980s both wages and labor supply of poorly educated men fell substantially relative to those of educated men some observers have interpreted this positive association between changes in w

weather variations and international trade in this paper i investigate the effect of weather variations in the exporter and importer countries separately as well as a the difference between weather variations in both countries on bilateral trade flows the analysis is done at the country sectoral and product levels worldwide and over the 1992 2014 period i find a negative effect of temperature variations in the exporter country and in the difference between exporter and importer countries on bilateral trade at the country level at the product level both negative and positive effects arise but the negative effect of temperature dominates the temperature effects are on the agricultural and manufacturing sectors especially in the textile and metals sectors i show that possible channels are the impact of temperature on output and labour productivity the negative impacts are larger in exporter countries that are closer to the equator that have lower quality of institutions and that export to more remote countries if countries are able to adapt to climate change the long term effects of temperature variations should be lower than the contemporaneous effect nevertheless my results on the long term effects analysis do not support this hypothesis suggesting no or very low adaptation moreover the negative effect of temperature is persistent and cumulative through several years after the temperature shock concerning precipitation variation effects they are found mainly at the product level with the positive effect dominating for the affected products

a cohort analysis of the association between work hours and wages among men the results of some recent ingenious labor supply research may appear incompatible with the notion that uncompensated wage elasticities for men are small perhaps negative this paper argues there is no incompatibility the methodology in this recent research results in computing wage responses that come closer to measuring intertemporal wage elasticities than to uncompensated wage elasticities to demonstrate this i use pseudopanel data constructed from the march current population surveys from 1967 to 1998 to measure both intertemporal wage elasticities and uncompensated wage elasticities the latter appear sensitive to the particular specification of the hours equation

climate shocks and exports this paper uses international trade data to examine the effects of climate shocks on economic activity we examine panel models relating the annual growth rate of a country s exports in a particular product category to the country s weather in that year we find that a poor country being 1 degree celsius warmer in a given year reduces the growth rate of that country s exports by between 2 0 and 5 7 percentage points with no detectable effects in rich countries we find negative effects of temperature on exports of both agricultural products and light manufacturing products with little apparent effects on heavy industry or raw materials the results confirm large negative effects of temperature on poor countries economies and suggest that temperature affects a much wider range of economic activity than conventionally thought this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

rain agriculture and tariffs this paper examines whether and how rainfall shocks affect tariff setting in the agricultural sector in a model of strategic trade policy the authors show that the impact of a negative rainfall shock on optimal import tariffs is generally ambiguous depending on the weight placed by the domestic policy maker on tariff revenue profits and the consumer surplus the more weight placed on domestic profits the more likely it is that the policy maker will respond to a rainfall shortage by reducing import tariffs these findings are robust to alternative assumptions about market structure and the timing of the game using detailed panel data on applied tariffs and rainfall for 70 nations the authors find robust evidence that rainfall shortages generally induce policy makers to set lower tariffs on agricultural imports

industrial output fluctuations in developing countries general equilibrium consequences of agricultural productivity shocks abstract this paper shows that a negative shock to agricultural productivity may increase food prices and labor and capital can move away from manufacturing into agriculture to meet the subsistence requirement for food this effect depends on income levels and openness to trade using annual manufacturing data and rainfall shocks as the instrument for crop yields proxy for agricultural productivity i find that an exogenous decline in yield decreases manufacturing output as well as employment and capital investment in manufacturing overall crop yield variation can explain up to 44 of industrial output fluctuations in developing countries rainfall shocks cause 31 of the fluctuations lastly this paper shows that such perverse phenomena in which resources move toward the sector with declining productivity can lead to a significant reduction in aggregate productivity

measuring poverty in a growing world or measuring growth in a poor world the extent to which growth reduces global poverty has been disputed for 30 years although there are better data than ever before controversies are not resolved a major problem is that consumption measured from household surveys which is used to measure poverty grows less rapidly than consumption measured in national accounts in the world as a whole and in large countries particularly india china and the united states in consequence measured poverty has fallen less rapidly than appears warranted by measured growth in poor countries one plausible cause is that richer households are less likely to participate in surveys but growth in the national accounts is also upward biased and consumption in the national accounts contains large and rapidly growing items that are not consumed by the poor and not included in surveys so it is possible for consumption of the poor to grow less rapidly than national consumption without any increase in measured inequality current statistical procedures in poor

regional labor markets and the determinants of wage inequality from 1972 to 1990 the united states experienced the largest increase in wage inequality of any developed country the spread in log wages between the 90th and 10th percentiles of the male wage distribution increased by about 60 points and inequality increased within virtually every demographic or skill category of the labor force see chinhui juhn et al 1993 various explanations have been offered including changes in the relative demand for skill intensive goods international trade immigration of less skilled workers and increased labor force participation of women yet attempts to quantify the relative importance of these factors have not met with much success this leaves skill biased technical change as the residual claimant that rationalizes the data this paper uses regional differences in the evolution of wage inequality to provide new evidence on the determinants of relative wages using a model of factor demand in geographic markets i isolate contributions of i changing skill ratios in the labor force ii increased participation of women iii technical change and iv changes in the industrial composition of labor demand the data indicate that changing skill ratios and women s labor supply have affected the wages of low skilled men in the west the data indicate that increased immigration of less skilled hispanic and asian workers has adversely affected the wages of natives causing a greater increase in inequality there than in any other region of the country i modeling wage inequality in regional markets

the role of fairness in wage determination neoclassical wage theory is based on the premise that a worker s utility is based on his own wage and his own hours of work without reference to the wages and hours of others this article reviews anecdotal evidence that the wages of others are a powerful force in determining worker satisfaction such that utility goes down when the wages of others go up the resulting comparisons are a powerful force in determining wage structure but do not exclude ultimate effect of neoclassical wage determinants

weather shocks agriculture and crime evidence from india we use detailed crime agriculture and weather data from india during the years 1971 2000 to conduct a systematic analysis of the relationship between weather shocks and multiple categories of crime we find that drought and heat exert a strong impact on virtually all types of crimes that the impact on property crimes is larger than for violent crimes and that this relationship has been relatively stable over three decades of economic development we then use seasonal and geographical disaggregations of weather and agricultural cultivation to examine the prevailing hypothesis that agricultural income shocks drive the weather crime relationship in developing countries the patterns we find are consistent with this hypothesis in the case of rainfall shocks but suggest additional mechanisms may play an important role in driving the heat crime relationship consistent with evidence from industrialized countries

exchanging goods and damages the role of trade on the distribution of climate change costs the impacts of climate change vary significantly across world regions whereas tropical and subtropical regions are expected to suffer severely from the effects of climate change the impacts in northern latitudes should remain relatively moderate however regions are not self sufficient and the costs of climate change can spread across regions through international trade i study the international spillover of climate impacts within a regionalised climate sensitive dynamic computable general equilibrium model of the world economy using data from a global climate model shows that the world regions face welfare losses between 0 6 and 2 1 due to climate change i also show that climate change affects terms of trade and sectoral competitiveness by means of a decomposition method the extent of spillover impacts through international trade can be identified spillover impacts significantly affect either positively or negatively the total costs of climate change for a region for regions with low exposure to climate change and high adaptive capacities spillover effects are responsible for a 1 6 of the total cost of climate change

employee spinoffs and other entrants stylized facts from brazil using a comprehensive linked employer employee database from brazil for the period 1995 2001 we are able for the first time to compare firms founded as employee spinoffs to new firms without parents and to diversification ventures of existing firms entering a new industry employee spinoffs are defined either as the director manager having moved from a parent in the same industry or as one quarter of the employees having shifted from a common parent depending on definition employee spinoffs account for between one sixth and one third of the new firms in brazil s private sector during this period regardless of definition size at entry is larger for employee spinoffs than for new firms without parents but smaller than for diversification ventures of existing firms similarly exit rates for employee spinoffs are less than for new firms without parents and comparable to those for diversification ventures of existing firms these results suggest that we can think of some part of a firm s productivity draw in the jovanovic 1982 model as embodied in the firm s employees and portable by them to a new firm

income shocks and hiv in africa we examine how variation in local economic conditions has shaped the aids epidemic in africa using data from over 200 000 individuals across 19 countries we match biomarker data on individuals serostatus to information on local rainfall shocks a large source of income variation for rural households we estimate infection rates in hiv endemic rural areas increase by 11 for every recent drought an effect that is statistically and economically significant income shocks explain up to 20 of variation in hiv prevalence across african countries suggesting existing approaches to hiv prevention could be bolstered by helping households manage income risk better the relationship between income and health has long been of interest to economists and a lengthy literature documents strong linkages between economic conditions and many important health outcomes currie 2009 there has been much less progress however in understanding the economic foundations of the hiv aids epidemic one of the most important global health challenges such an understanding might yield particular dividends in sub saharan africa ssa where over a million people continue to become newly infected with the disease each year unaids 2010 in this article we explore the role of negative income shocks in shaping the

what do we learn from the weather the new climate economy literature a rapidly growing body of research applies panel methods to examine how temperature precipitation and windstorms influence economic outcomes these studies focus on changes in weather realizations over time within a given spatial area and demonstrate impacts on agricultural output industrial output labor productivity energy demand health conflict and economic growth among other outcomes by harnessing exogenous variation over time within a given spatial unit these studies help credibly identify i the breadth of channels linking weather and the economy ii heterogeneous treatment effects across different types of locations and iii nonlinear effects of weather variables this paper reviews the new literature with two purposes first we summarize recent work providing a guide to its methodologies datasets and findings second we consider applications of the new literature including insights for the damage function within models that seek to assess the potential economic effects of future climate change jel c51 d72 o13 q51 q54

empirical studies on agricultural impacts and adaptation abstract agricultural production is heavily dependent on weather outcomes and hence climate change has the potential to significantly alter the sector s productivity both reduced form studies as well as integrated assessment models have found that the agricultural sector might experience significant impacts we discuss the advantages of empirical reduced form studies and their link and potential usefulness to integrated assessment models we further discuss challenges facing empirical studies and recent research that looks at the longer term changes in climate and attempts to measure adaptation

the african growth miracle measures of real consumption based on the ownership of durable goods the quality of housing the health and mortality of children the education of youths and the allocation of female time in the household indicate that sub saharan living standards have for the past two decades been growing about 3 4 3 7 percent per year that is three and a half to four times the rate indicated in international data sets

wages and participation during the last 25 years annual hours worked by prime aged men fell by the equivalent of six 40 hour workweeks the reduction was more pronounced among those younger than among mid age workers among black men than among white men and among those with less schooling thus hours worked not only fell but showed increased dispersion increases that paralleled the growth in wage dispersion that has become so familiar to students of trends in wages the argument advanced here is that the correspondence is not coincidental the changes in hours worked are simply the labor supply responses that follow the changes in the structure of wages

natural disasters and countries exports new insights from a new and an old database this paper is the first to uncover in details the impact of different families of disasters on exports from 1979 to 2000 storms floods earthquakes and changes in temperatures besides our paper is the first to compare in a quasi systematic way the results across the two data sets at hand the standard em dat data and geomet data a newly available data set based on geophysical and meteorological data european economic review 2013 58 18 journal of development economics 2014 111 92 we run series of regressions while accounting progressively for the characteristics of products all traded goods v s agriculture ones the characteristics of the country size level of development and the intensity of the catastrophes when pooling all countries and all types of disasters we do not find any statistical impact on exports but when focusing on each of them separately and on agricultural goods the occurrence of an earthquake appears to reduce exports of about 3 regardless of its location a windstorm shock even when it happens to be very severe has hardly any impact a flood on its side is estimated to reduce export flows of a small country by nearly 3 the effect of changes in temperatures is ambiguous all in all except for temperature related disasters the results are consistent across both data sets em dat and geomet although they appear to be slightly more in line with our expectations in the case of geomet

does outsourcing reduce wages in the low wage service occupations evidence from janitors and guards outsourcing of labor services grew substantially during the 1980s and 1990s and was associated with lower wages fewer benefits and lower rates of unionization the authors focus on two occupations for which they can identify outsourcing in those two decades using industry and occupation codes janitors and guards across a wide array of specifications they find that the outsourcing wage penalty ranged from 4 to 7 for janitors and from 8 to 24 for guards their findings on health benefits mirror those on wages evidence suggests that the outsourcing penalty was not due to compensating differentials for higher benefits or lower hours skill differences or the types of industries that outsourced rather outsourcing seems to have reduced labor market rents for workers especially for those in the upper half of the occupational wage distribution industries with higher historical wage premia were more likely to outsource service work

gains from trade and the sovereign bond market abstract increasing international flows of goods services and financial assets have been shown to increase a country s welfare through various channels this paper studies how a country s access to a bond market affects its welfare gains from international trade we do so by incorporating a sovereign bond market into a simple armington 1969 s trade model while standard trade models suggest surprisingly small gains from trade our model implies that introducing channels through a sovereign bond market greatly magnifies the gains from trade key mechanisms in the model are confirmed by data and the results are found to be robust to a variety of considerations

union density and varieties of coverage the anatomy of union wage effects in germany collective bargaining in germany takes place at either industry or firm level and bargaining coverage is much higher than union density the share of a firm s employees covered can vary between 0 and 100 suggesting that researchers should distinguish union density coverage at the firm level and coverage at the individual level using linked employer employee data the authors estimate ols and quantile regressions of wages on these dimensions of union influence they find that a higher share of employees in a firm covered by industrywide or firm specific contracts is associated with higher wages but find no clear cut effect on wage dispersion yet holding coverage at the firm level constant individual coverage is associated with lower wages and less wage dispersion higher union density reinforces the effects of coverage but for employees in firms without coverage density s effect is negative and thus compresses the wage distribution in firms without coverage

changes in relative wages and family labor supply the large changes in relative wages that occurred during the 1980s provide fertile ground for studying the behavioral responses of married couples to the wage changes of husbands and wives i find estimates of own wage and cross wage elasticities for men that are very small the own wage elasticity for women is positive and the cross wage elasticity for women suggests a strong negative response of female labor supply to changes in their husband s wages family labor supply behavior determines how changes in individual wage rates translate into family earnings changes the responses of women to changes in their husband s wages attenuated somewhat the increases in individual wage inequality at the family level the results suggest that the earnings of the wives of low income men would actually have fallen over the decade if women s labor supply did not respond to changes in their husbands wages however assortative mating implies that wage changes of husbands and wives are correlated and so family earnings inequality still grew during the decade of the 1980s

the growth of temporary services work the temporary help services industry which provides client firms with workers on an as needed basis has expanded at a phenomenal rate over the last 20 years since 1972 the industry s employment has grown at an annual rate of over 11 percent and its share of total u s employment has risen from under 0 3 percent in 1972 to more than 1 8 percent in 1995 the growth of the temporary services industry has fueled controversy some analysts fear that temporary workers may become locked into a labor market underclass with low wages no benefits negligible job security little training and no possibility for advancement others challenge such claims and point to efficiencies created by temporary employment relationships this article will examine the growth of the temporary services industry and discuss the quality of temporary services jobs how such jobs fit into workers careers and some of the forces that may be driving the growth of temporary services work

the rise of domestic outsourcing and the evolution of the german wage structure the nature of the relationship between employers and employees has been changing over the past three decades with firms increasingly relying on contractors temp agencies and franchises rather than hiring employees directly we investigate the impact of this transformation on the wage structure by following jobs that are moved outside the boundary of lead employers to contracting firms we develop a new method for identifying outsourcing of food cleaning security and logistics services in administrative data using the universe of social security records in germany we document a dramatic growth of domestic outsourcing in germany since the early 1990s event study analyses show that wages in outsourced jobs fall by approximately 10 15 relative to similar jobs that are not outsourced we find evidence that the wage losses associated with outsourcing stem from a loss of firm specific rents suggesting that labor cost savings are an important reason firms choose to contract out these services finally we tie the increase in outsourcing activity to broader changes in the german wage structure in particular showing that outsourcing of cleaning security and logistics services alone accounts for around 9 of the increase in german wage inequality since the 1980s

estimating labor supply responses and welfare participation using a natural experiment to validate a structural labor supply model in this paper we formulate and estimate an economic model of labor supply and welfare participation the model is estimated on data on single men from quebec drawn from the 1986 canadian census budget sets for each work welfare combination accounting for income taxes tax credits and welfare benefit rules are derived using a microsimulation model we validate our model by comparing reactions to a welfare reform that implied a dramatic increase in welfare benefits predicted by our model to those obtained by using a regression discontinuity approach the results show that our model is capable of recovering actual changes in labor supply and welfare participation we also show the advantage of having estimated a structural model by illustrating how labor supply and welfare participation change when benefit levels change

bargaining sorting and the gender wage gap quantifying the impact of firms on the relative pay of women there is growing evidence that rm specic pay premiums are an important source of wage inequality these premiums will contribute to the gender wage gap if women are less likely to work at high paying rms or if women negotiate worse wage bargains with their employers than men using longitudinal data on the hourly wages of portuguese workers matched with balance sheet information for rms we show that the wages of both men and women contain rm specic premiums that are strongly correlated with employer productivity we then show how the impact of these rm specic pay dierentials on the gender wage gap can be decomposed into a combination of bargaining and sorting eects consistent with the bargaining literature we nd that women receive only 90 of the rm specic pay premiums earned by men notably we obtain very similar estimates of the relative bargaining power ratio from our analysis of between rm wage premiums and from analyzing changes in

the effect of social benefits on youth employment combining regression discontinuity and a behavioral model natural experiments provide robust identifying assumptions for the estimation of policy effects yet their use for policy design is often limited by the difficulty of extrapolating on the basis of reduced form estimates in this study we exploit an age condition in the eligibility for social assistance in france which lends itself to a regression discontinuity rd design we suggest making the underlying labor supply model explicit that is translating the reduced form discontinuity in terms of discontinuous changes in disposable incomes this exercise shows the potential of combining natural experiments and behavioral models in particular we can test the external validity of the combined approach we find that it predicts the effect of a subsequent reform which extends transfers to the working poor remarkably well the model is then used to simulate the extension of social assistance to young people and finds that a transfer program with an in work component would not create further disincentives to work in this population

the migration response to increasing temperatures climate change especially the warming trend experienced in recent years by several countries could affect agricultural productivity as a consequence the income of rural populations will change and with it the incentives for people to remain in rural areas using data from 115 countries between 1960 and 2000 we analyze the effect of differential warming trends across countries on the probability of either migrating out of the country or from rural to urban areas we find that higher temperatures in middle income economies increased migration rates to urban areas and to other countries in poor countries higher temperatures reduced the probability of migration to cities and to other countries consistently with the presence of severe liquidity constraints in middle income countries migration represents an important margin of adjustment to global warming potentially contributing to structural change and even increasing income per worker such a mechanism however does not seem to work in poor economies