determinants of skills shortages and hard to fill vacancies in the hospitality sector abstract the aim of this paper is to analyse the regional determinants of hard to fill vacancies and skills shortages in the hospitality sector the data source for this study was generated in the year 2000 and includes information on 181 hotels and 121 restaurants in andalusia the results of the estimations show that hourly net wages are the main instrument firms use to reduce hard to fill vacancies and skills shortages however there are several factors affecting the conditions of local labour markets such as unemployment rates the level of business activity real estate prices and the location of the firm in relation to the main regional tourism destinations that have a significant effect on the probability of having hard to fill vacancies and skills shortages

optimal nonuniform pricing with generalized consumer choice a frequent assumption in nonuniform pricing models is that local maximizing conditions are met exactly once for each purchasing consumer no consumer can be indifferent between two nonadjacent usage levels each consumer then responds to a change in marginal price only by incrementally reducing her usage more realistically maximizing conditions are sometimes twice met for some interior users who can be indifferent between nonadjacent usage levels and may therefore jump discretely if marginal prices change at either level the author derives a monopolist s generalized price schedule under these circumstances and shows that marginal price may fall below marginal cost copyright 1994 by blackwell publishing ltd

ends against the middle determining public service provision when there are private alternatives abstract public provision of a service coexists with private market provision the quality of public provision is determined by majority vote preferences are not single peaked owing to the presence of private alternatives we identify two cases in one majority voting equilibrium always exists and the median income voter is pivotal in the other a necessary condition for equilibrium indentifies the pivotal voter who must have income below the median when equilibrium exists a coalition of middle income households who consume the public alternative will be opposed by a coalition of rich and poor households with the rich choosing private consumption

a directional theory of issue voting from stokes s 1963 early critique on it has been clear to empirical researchers that the traditional spatial theory of elections is seriously flawed yet fully a quarter century later that theory remains the dominant paradigm for understanding mass elite linkage in politics we present an alternative spatial theory of elections that we argue has greater empirical verisimilitude based on the ideas of symbolic politics the directional theory assumes that most people have a diffuse preference for a certain direction of policy making and that people vary in the intensity with which they hold those preferences we test the two competing theories at the individual level with national election study data and find the directional theory more strongly supported than the traditional spatial theory we then develop the implications of the directional theory for candidate behavior and assess the predictions in light of evidence from the u s congress

a matching model with endogenous skill requirements we consider a labor market in which workers differ in their abilities and jobs differ in their skill requirements the distribution of worker abilities is exogenous but we model the choice of skill requirements by firms high skill jobs produce more output than low skill jobs but high skill jobs require high skill workers and thus are more difficult to fill we use a matching model together with a nash bargaining approach to wage setting to determine the equilibrium mix of job types along with the equilibrium relationship between worker and job characteristics wages and unemployment

can supply create its own demand implications for rising skill differentials in the 1980s several advanced countries saw rising skilled wage differentials at the same time as increases in the supply of skilled labour some commentators use the orthodox factor demand model based on a competitive labour market to deduce that there must have been shifts in the relative demand curve towards more educated labour in this paper we show that use of this argument is in some situations vulnerable to two criticisms i it is possible to write down reasonable economic models in which the increase in the relative supply of a group can actually increase its relative wage and employment ii as an empirical matter sample selection bias could be a problem to illustrate these two points we first present a simple matching model and then some empirical evidence based on the large increase in the relative supply of more educated workers that followed the late 1980s changes in the uk educational system but did not result in falling wage differentials of the more educated 1997 elsevier science b v

an economic model of representative democracy this paper develops an approach to the study of democratic policy making where politicians are selected by the people from those citizens who present themselves as candidates for public office the approach has a number of attractive features first it is a conceptualization of a pure form of representative democracy in which government is by as well as of the people second the model is analytically tractable being able to handle multidimensional issue and policy spaces very naturally third it provides a vehicle for answering normative questions about the performance of representative democracy

monopoly and quality distortion effects and remedies a monopolist that sells in a market in which consumers differ in their willingness to pay for quality will distort and enlarge the range of products offered for sale we examine the positive and normative impacts of remedies used to counteract such distortions for the case of a price ceiling the monopolist improves quality at the low quality end of the market offsetting the distortion induced by the unregulated exercise of monopoly power social welfare can be shown to increase for a sufficiently slight degree of price regulation for minimum quality standards the social welfare implications are ambiguous because the standards may exclude some consumers from the market

monopoly with incomplete information recent theoretical research on principal agent relationships has emphasized incentive problems that arise when the parties involved are constrained by either asymmetric information or their inability to monitor each other s actions here we concentrate on the former constraint and consider the case of a single principal the monopolist the main contribution is to show that under a separability assumption strong conclusions can be drawn about the nature of optimal incentive schemes although the primary focus is on optimal quantity discounts in a monopolized market the results also shed light on related topics such as optimal income taxation and commodity bundling

optimal nonuniform prices we consider optimal nonuniform pricing schedules where the price depends upon the amount purchased such schedules are regularly used by public utilities and other services welfare optimal nonuniform prices are related to the theory of optimal uniform prices developed by ramsey we characterize situations in which upward or downward discontinuities in pricing schedules are optimal our results are applicable to a number of related problems including optimal taxation insurance and incentives economic theory has confined most of its attention to markets with uniform prices in which the price per unit charged is invariant to the level of a customer s purchases this focus is warranted when goods are resellable since any attempt to charge nonuniform prices could be circumvented by reselling amongst customers but when goods are not resellable nonuniform prices are not only possible but common public utilities have declining block pricing with lower unit charges for large levels of consumption many agencies providing services including communications transportation even education use two part pricing with a fixed entry or retainer charge and a further charge per unit consumption nonuniform price schedules can be expected to be ever more common as services become a larger fraction of total output the increasing prevalence of nonuniform pricing policies have made them the focus of recent public and economic attention oi 1971 feldstein 1972 and ng and weisser 1974 have examined optimal two part pricing policies leland and meyer 1976 examine block pricing and show by example that optimal welfare policies may require nonuniform prices if zero profit constraints are binding in this paper we consider arbitrary nonuniform pricing policies using variational techniques two part and block pricing schedules are of course special cases of the environment we consider the work most closely related to our examination is the seminal paper by spence 1978 and subsequent analysis by roberts 1979 spence however does not pay explicit attention to the key role played by constraints on optimal pricing schedules roberts considers upward price discontinuities which lead to bunching of consumers at a given level of consumption but not downward price discontinuities which lead to regions in which no consumer chooses to consume gaps bunching or gaps may appear in the optimal price schedule even when underlying demand and cost functions are smooth and well behaved the prevalence of discontinuous pricing schedules e g the block pricing structures of public utilities argues that these questions are of practical as well as theoretical interest

optimal bypass and cream skimming this paper develops a normative model of regulatory policy toward bypass and cream skimming it analyzes the effects of bypass on second degree price discrimination on the rent of the regulated firm and on the welfare of low demand customers it shows that pricing under marginal cost may be optimal for the regulated firm excessive cream skimming occurs if access to the bypass technology is not regulated and the prohibition of bypass may increase or decrease the regulated firm s rent jel 026 613 the regulation of natural monopolies is often associated with policies toward competition including restrictions on entry this paper is concerned with a common form of competition which threatens the regulated firm on its most lucrative markets examples abound in the telecommunications industry the development of microwave radio and communication satellites in the 1960 s introduced the possibility that big telecommunication customers might bypass the major common carrier att and the 1978 natural gas policy act in the united states has created the possibility for industrial plants to bypass the local distribution utilities by building direct connections to the pipelines gas producers or intermediaries

ethnic diversity social sanctions and public goods in kenya abstract this paper examines ethnic diversity and local public goods in rural western kenya the identification strategy relies on the stable historically determined patterns of ethnic land settlement ethnic diversity is associated with lower primary school funding and worse school facilities and there is suggestive evidence that it leads to poor water well maintenance the theoretical model illustrates how inability to impose social sanctions in diverse communities leads to collective action failures and we find that school committees in diverse areas do impose fewer sanctions on defaulting parents we relate these results to the literature on social capital and economic development and discuss implications for decentralization in less developed countries

history social divisions and public goods in rural india we examine the influence of three historically important sources of social divisions on the availability of public goods in rural india colonial power landowner peasant relations as determined by the land tenure system and social fragmentation based on the hindu caste system and the presence of sizable religious minorities using data on public goods from 1991 we find that regions that were under british colonial power in the pre independence period and those where agrarian power was concentrated in the hands of landlords have lower access to these goods as do areas with high levels of social fragmentation jel h41 p16

heterogeneous preferences and in kind redistribution theory and evidence abstract this paper examines the impact of social heterogeneity on in kind redistribution we contribute to the previous literature in two ways we consider i the provision of several public goods and ii agents different not only in income but also in their preferences over the various goods provided by the public sector in this setting both the distribution and size of goods provision depend on the heterogeneity of preferences our main result is that preference heterogeneity tends to decrease in kind redistribution while income inequality tends to increase it an empirical investigation based on united states census bureau data confirms these theoretical findings

voting inequality and redistribution this paper surveys models of voting on redistribution under reason able assumptions the baseline model produces an equilibrium with the extent of redistributive taxation chosen by the median income earner if the median is poorer than average redistribution is from rich to poor and increasing inequality increases redistribution however under different assumptions about the economic environment redistribution may not be simply rich to poor and inequality need not increase redistribution several lines of argument are presented in particular political participation public provision of private goods public pensions and tax avoidance or evasion

majority voting and the single crossing property when voters belong to separate groups we provide conditions under which a condorcet winner exists when voters are exogenously distributed in groups with preferences satisfying the single crossing property separately inside each group we also show that the majority voting social preference is acyclic

can the mortensen pissarides model with productivity changes explain u s wage inequality this article examines whether the mortensen pissarides matching model with productivity changes can explain the time pattern of wage inequality the main finding is that the model produces counterfactual results the main source of failure seems to be the exogenous matching function and or the exogenous surplus share neither of which allows firms to use wage policies to direct workers searches

optimality and sustainability regulation and intermodal competition in telecommunications as regulators continue to open utility markets to entry new market contestants may specialize in providing service for the utility s largest customers consequently old utility pricing procedures may no longer be sustainable taking telecommunications regulation as an example this article develops optimal pricing strategies for utilities that have large customers who have other attractive service options i demonstrate that under an optimal nonuniform price schedule utilities can legitimately price high level usage below its associated marginal usage cost furthermore customers will make economically efficient choices when deciding whether to forego utility service