why federal workers don t quit quit rates in the federal government are abnormally low some economists and the federal government itself have taken this to mean that federal wages are too high this paper provides an alternative explanation it shows that the timing of compensation across a career as well as its level affect quit rates pensions in particular impose large penalties on workers who quit early and the portion of federal pay in the form of pensions is very high this feature of the federal pay structure may explain its abnormally low quit rate as a general proposition quit rates are poor indices for judging pay adequacy

the role of the desire for union status in the decision to enter local government job queues the us evidence following a two stage bivariate probit approach this study estimates local government and union job queues in a simultaneous equations framework by relaxing the restrictive assumption of independence between the worker s queuing and the employer s hiring decisions it overcomes a major limitation of most of the earlier job queue estimates the results indicate that the worker s queuing decision for local government jobs in the united states is determined partly by the desire for unionized employment the converse however is not true seniority with the current employer emerges as a significant determinant of both workers queuing and employers hiring decisions furthermore local governments act as model employers by being more likely to hire minorities and females from the pool of job applicants

gender and culture this paper reviews the literature on gender and culture gender gaps in various outcomes competitiveness labor force participation and performance in mathematics amongst many others show remarkable differences across countries and tend to persist over time the economics literature initially explained these differences by looking at standard economic variables such as the level of development women s education the expansion of the service sector and discrimination more recent literature has argued that gender differences in a variety of outcomes could reflect underlying cultural values and beliefs this article reviews the literature on the relevance of culture in the determination of different forms of gender gap i examine how differences in historical situations could have been relevant in generating gender differences and the conditions under which gender norms tend to be stable or to change over time emphasizing the role of social learning finally i review the role of different forms of cultural transmission in shaping gender differences distinguishing between channels of vertical transmission the role of the family horizontal transmission the role of peers and oblique transmission the role of teachers or role models

dynamic taxation of non renewable natural resources under asymmetric information about reserves optimal regulation is developed for a case with type dependent dynamics in costs in exploiting nonrenewable natural resources a government faces the problem that extraction companies possess private information about the size of the reserves optimal contracts in a two period framework distort both the extent and the pace of depletion the regulatory optimum is implementable by a menu of tangent planes generated by license fees and royalties or by a corporate income tax system containing type dependent depletion allowances and tax exempted income levels if the terminal time is endogenized it is optimal also to distort the number of extraction periods

union nonunion wage differentials in the public administration educational and private sectors 1970 1983 over the past thirty years union membership and bargaining activity in the united states has been declining in the private sector and rising in the public sector the authors use two large micro databases to estimate changes in the union wage premium among public administration education and private sector workers for the decade of the 1970s and early 1980s their empirical analysis indicates that the union relative wage effects continue to be lower in the public sector than in the private sector despite the relative gains in public sector union membership and bargaining activities copyright 1987 by mit press

a simple auction mechanism for the optimal allocation of the commons efficient regulation of the commons requires information about the regulated firms that is rarely available to regulators e g cost of pollution abatement this paper proposes a simple mechanism that implements the first best for any number of firms a uniform price sealed bid auction of an endogenous number of transferable licenses with a fraction of the auction revenues given back to firms paybacks which rapidly decrease with the number of firms are such that truth telling is a dominant strategy regardless of whether firms behave non cooperatively or collusively the mechanism also provides firms with incentives to invest in socially optimal r d jel d44 d62 d82 q28 regulatory authorities generally find that part of the information they need for implementing an efficient regulation is in the hands of those who are to be regulated regulating externalities such as access to common resources e g clean air water streams fisheries etc is a good example environmental regulators for example know little about firms pollution abatement costs so without communicating with firms they would be unable to establish the efficient level of pollution a number of mechanisms have been proposed for inducing firms to reveal their private information but for different reasons

gender role attitudes and the labour market outcomes of women across oecd countries this paper uses data from the world value surveys 1990 1995 1999 to investigate the impact of gender role attitudes and work values on women s labour market outcomes across 25 oecd countries anti egalitarian views are found to display the strongest negative association with female employment rates and the gender pay gap these views are however softening among recent cohorts on the other hand perceptions of women s role as homemakers which are likely formed in youth and linked to religious ideology are more persistent over time they could be implicated in the recent slowdown of the gender convergence in pay finally the unavoidable clash between family values and egalitarian views that takes the form of an inner conflict for many women the so called mother s guilt is another obstacle in the path towards greater gender equality in the labour market copyright 2005 oxford university press

government employment and the provision of fringe benefits this study uses individual level data from the united states to examine the influence of government employment on the provision of five major fringe benefits four of the five benefits are more likely to be provided to government workers than to their private sector counterparts unlike wage comparisons which typically find substantial overpayment only for federal workers the findings suggest that past wage differentials underestimate the true compensation advantage enjoyed by government workers

extracting information or resource the hotelling rule revisited under asymmetric information we characterize the optimal extraction path when a concessionaire has private information on the initial stock of resource under asymmetric information a virtual hotelling rule describes how the resource price evolves over time and how extraction costs are compounded with information costs along an optimal extraction path in sharp contrast with the case of complete information elds which are heterogeneous in terms of their initial stocks follow di erent extraction paths some resource might be left unexploited in the long run as a way to foster incentives the optimal contract may sometimes be implemented through royalties and license fees with a market of concessionaires asymmetric information leads to a virtual her ndahl principle and to a new form of heterogeneity across active concessionaires under asymmetric information the market price converges faster to its long run limit exhibiting more stability

the political economy of fertility this paper studies the political economy of fertility specifically i argue that fertility may be a strategic choice for ethnic groups engaged in redistributive conflict i first present a simple conflict model where high fertility is optimal for each ethnic group if and only if the economy s ethnic diversity is high institutions are weak or both i then test the model in a cross national dataset consistent with the theory i find that economies where the product of ethnic diversity and a measure of institutional weakness is high have increased fertility rates i conclude that fertility may depend on political factors

a dynamic model of cleanup estimating sunk costs in oil and gas production the environmental remediation required to permanently decommission most industrial projects is an expensive irreversible investment real options literature shows that temporary closure has value under uncertainty however even if there is no intention to restart operations there is an incentive to label a closure as temporary to avoid having to remediate ongoing or future environmental externalities i estimate a dynamic discrete choice model of closure under price and quantity uncertainty to evaluate the likelihood of reactivation the model reveals that the option to temporarily close is being widely used to avoid environmental remediation of oil and gas wells in canada

fertility and the plough of populations today we show that a history of plough agriculture today is associated with attitudes of gender inequality and with less female participation in the labor force entrepreneurial activities and politics 2 in the present paper we continue this line of enquiry by analyzing the effect of historic plough use on beliefs about fertility at first one may expect that societies with historic plough use and unequal gender roles will have higher levels of fertility if women are less likely to participate in market activities outside of the home this lowers the cost of having children and increases fertility the current study tests this hypothesis and finds a surprising result societies that historically engaged in plough agriculture today have lower fertility not higher fertility we show that this relationship is robust and is not caused by statistical outliers or omitted variables bias we argue and provide ethnographic evidence that the finding is explained by the fact that with plough agriculture children like women are relatively less useful in the field the plough requires strength and eliminates the need for weeding a task par ticularly suitable for women and children this in turn generates a preference for fewer children lowering fertility

establishment size public administration and government wage differentials abstract this study presents new and more comprehensive estimates of government wage differentials they improve on previous estimates by including the influence of establishment size and by estimating separate differentials for public administrators and non administrators these improvements result in a more complex set of differentials and a more sophisticated understanding of government wage patterns

economic growth and individualism the role of informal institutions abstract this paper shows that the degree of ancestral individualism is positively related to annual earnings across second generation us immigrants this provides evidence in favor of gorodnichenko and roland s 2011b hypothesis that the individualistic dimension of culture is important for long term economic growth

fringe benefits and labor mobility interindustry factor mobility is a crucial determinant of the income distribution effects of exogenous changes in relative commodity prices this examination of interindustry variation in wages and profits using data from manufacturing industries from

on optimal extraction under asymmetric information over reclamation costs abstract polluting exhaustible resource extraction ends with costly reclamation and producers have better information about future reclamation costs than the regulator this paper analyzes optimal contract between the regulator and the mining firm in a two stage model in which extraction and pollution generation is followed by reclamation with asymmetric information over reclamation costs the contract consists of a pollution tax and a mechanism used for cost information revelation and it extracts all the profit from the highest cost type leaves profits for the more efficient types and dictates a reclamation effort that is lower than the complete information effort it is further shown that the optimal pollution tax under asymmetric information can be lower or higher than the tax under complete information in addition the exclusion of the most expensive types is analyzed the results can help to design policies that improve the existing ones by saving public funds by improving the state of the environment and by excluding those mining operations that do not produce net benefits for the society

the evolution of value systems a review essay on ian morris s foragers farmers and fossil fuels foragers farmers and fossil fuels how human values evolve is a large scale history of the world through the different modes of production humanity has adopted over time and their implications in terms of moral values morris argues that the predominant value systems of human societies are cultural adaptations to the organizational structures of the societies themselves their institutions and ultimately to their modes of production in particular the book contains a careful analysis of how the hunting gathering mode of production induces egalitarian values and relatively favorable attitudes toward violent resolution of conflicts while farming induces hierarchical values and less favorable attitudes toward violence and in turn the fossil fuel that is industrial mode of production induces egalitarian values and nonviolent attitudes the narrative in the book is rich diverse and ultimately entertaining morris s analysis is very knowledgeable and informative arguments and evidence are rooted in history anthropology archeology and social sciences in general nonetheless the analysis falls short of being convincing about the causal nature of the existing relationship between modes of production and moral value systems

south south migration and discrimination against women in social institutions a two way relationship summary using the social institutions and gender index sigi from the oecd development centre this paper provides evidence on the two way relationship between discrimination against women in social institutions and south south migration on the one hand discriminatory social institutions in both origin and destination countries are an additional determinant of female migration on the other hand migration implies changes in discrimination against women according to the level of gender inequalities at destination specifically migration toward countries with low levels of discrimination promotes gender equality in social institutions at home while migration toward destinations with high levels of discrimination has the reverse effect

gender the welfare state and public employment a comparative study of seven industrialized countries using data from the luxembourg income study lis the authors explore the influence of government employment on the gender gap in earnings in seven countries they address four questions on the effects of public sector employment on the gender gap in earnings 1 do governments offer jobs that are comparatively high paying 2 does public employment benefit some workers such as low paid workers more than others 3 are public sector employment advantages explained by differences in worker characteristics and the occupational mix 4 what is the effect of public employment its extent and its pay structure on gender gaps in wages the results indicate marked variation across liberal conservative and social democratic welfare states but reveal a number of uniformities as well in most of the seven countries in the sample public sector workers earn more on average than do workers in the private sector and most earnings advantages are concentrated on the low end of the earnings distribution the effect of public employment on the overall gender gap in wages is limited in most countries the authors discuss the implications of these results for theory and research on gender and the welfare state

the effect of unionism on fringe benefits this study analyzes the impact of unionism on fringes paid to production workers using data on individual establishments it compares fringe expenditures in establishments having the same level of compensation per hour and finds that unionism raises the share of compensation allotted to fringes particularly to pensions vacation pay and life accident and health insurance in addition since unionism also raises the straight time wage rate itself a prime determinant of expenditures on fringes unionism has a very sizeable impact on total fringe expenditures as well as on the fringe share of compensation the union fringe effect exceeds in percentage terms the union wage effect and is sufficiently large to suggest that standard union wage studies understate the union effect on total compensation the study also compares the fringe expenditures of production and non production workers within the same establishment controlling for within establishment pay policies the findings suggest that the pres

gender roles and human capital inverstment the relationship between traditional attitudes and female labour market performance this paper investigates the relationship between the labour market behaviour of females and their attitudes towards traditional gender roles an attitudes index is constructed by employing individuals responses to statements related to the role of women and examined to determine whether it is correlated with individual characteristics the paper examines whether these attitudes influence human capital attainment and whether they are weakly exogenous to educational attainment it also focuses on the impact of these traditio nal attitudes upon labour supply and the return to education the results are dramatic it is found that females attitudes towards working women are developed in their youth and result in substantial reductions in their human capital investment labour supply and rates of return to education furthermore it is found that these attitudes are determined outside the educational process

fossil fuels stock externalities and backstop technology the hotelling exhaustible resource model is extended to include stock pollution and nonpolluting backstop technology it is shown that an optimal energy consumption strategy typically includes a regime in which the two energy sources are consumed simultaneously along this regime fossil fuel consumption decreases and backstop consumption increases together fossil fuel and backstop consumption may form eleven optimal regime combinations a decrease in the backstop price decreases the initial level of optimal emission tax

on efficiency inducing taxation for a non renewable resource monopolist the problem of using taxes to induce a monopolist supplier of a non renewable resource to extract efficiently has been solved under the assumption that the government has perfect information about the monopolist s cost function and reserves and is able to precommit to an entire sequence of taxes over time we extend this literature by constructing an efficiency inducing tax mechanism that does not require the government to have any information about the cost function or reserves and which does not require it to precommit to a sequence of taxes over time

optimal resource royalties with unknown and temporally independent extraction cost structures the authors study optimal nonrenewable resource royalty contracts when the extracting agent has private information on costs this is a dynamic incentive problem in which the repeated relationship between the principal and the agent is constrained by initial reserves commitment is limited to one period and costs are intertemporally independent compared with full information extraction information asymmetry shifts production to the future when the optimal contract requires exhaustion in two periods when exhaustion by all types in two periods is not warranted the effect on the terminal period is ambiguous and the output of even the lowest cost firm is always distorted copyright 1995 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

mothers and sons preference formation and female labor force dynamics this paper argues that the growing presence of a new type of man one brought up in a family in which the mother worked has been a significant factor in the increase in female labor force participation over time we present cross sectional evidence showing that the wives of men whose mothers worked are themselves significantly more likely to work we use variation in the importance of world war ii as a shock to women s labor force participation as proxied by variation in the male draft rate across u s states to provide evidence in support of the intergenerational consequences of our propagation mechanism

government wage differentials a sample selection approach this paper uses the econometrics of sample selection to estimate the net wage differential between workers in the public and private sectors of the united states the results indicate workers self select by systematically locating in the sector which offers them the higher expected wage as a consequence previous research based on the assumption of random allocation between sectors is subject to serious specification bias the present estimation indicates government workers are slightly underpaid taking into account their observed characteristics and the selection process

protecting the environment when costs and benefits are privately known in this survey i analyze different approaches for protecting the environment when stakeholders are privately informed about the costs and benefits of pollution reduction the presence of asymmetric information calls for some important departures from the textbook prescriptions of marketable permits and emission taxes for controlling pollution for instance it may no longer be optimal to equate the social marginal benefits to the marginal cost of cleanup in determining appropriate abatement levels i conclude this review with some suggestions for future research in this area

the payoff to work without pay volunteer work as an investment in human capital despite the widespread belief that volunteer work enhances an individual s employment prospects the hypothesis that volunteer work increases one s earnings has

the dynamics of continuous cultural traits in social networks abstract we consider an overlapping generations model where continuous cultural traits are transmitted from an adult generation to the children a weighted social network describes how children are influenced not only by their parents but also by other role models within the society parents can invest into the purposeful socialization of their children by strategically displaying a cultural trait which need not coincide with their true cultural trait we observe a cultural substitution effect when parents choose their behavior optimally based on nash equilibrium behavior we then study the dynamics of cultural traits throughout generations these converge if parent s influence on their children is large enough compared to the social environment s influence under convergent dynamics closed subgroups fully assimilate while heterogeneous traits prevail in the other groups speed of convergence is low when parents incentives to socialize their children to the own trait are high

hotelling under pressure we show that oil production from existing wells in texas does not respond to oil prices while drilling activity and costs respond strongly to explain these facts we reformulate hotelling s class

performance in competitive environments gender differences even though the provision of equal opportunities for men and women has been a priority in many countries large gender differences prevail in competitive high ranking positions suggested explanations include discrimination and differences in preferences and human capital in this paper we present experimental evidence in support of an additional factor women may be less effective than men in competitive environments even if they are able to perform similarly in non competitive environments in a laboratory experiment we observe as we increase the competitiveness of the environment a significant increase in performance for men but not for women this results in a significant gender gap in performance in tournaments while there is no gap when participants are paid according to piece rate this effect is stronger when women have to compete against men than in single sex competitive environments this suggests that women may be able to perform in competitive environments per se

swimming upstream trends in the gender wage differential in the 1980s using michigan panel study of income dynamics data for 1979 and 1988 we analyze how a falling gender wage gap occurred despite changes in wage structure unfavorable to low wage workers the decrease is traced to gender specific factors which more than counterbalanced changes in measured and unmeasured prices working against women supply shifts net of demand were unfavorable for women generally and hurt high skilled more than middle and low skilled women by analyzing wages we find support for the notion of a gender twist in supply and demand having its largest negative effect on high skilled women