household choices and child development the growth in labor market participation among women with young children has raised concerns about the potential negative impact of the mother s absence from home on child outcomes recent data show that mother s time spent with children has declined in the last decade while the indicators of children s cognitive and noncognitive outcomes have worsened the objective of our research is to estimate a model of the cognitive development process of children nested within an otherwise standard model of household life cycle behavior the model generates endogenous dynamic interrelationships between the child quality and employment processes in the household which are found to be consistent with patterns observed in the data the estimated model is used to explore the eects of schooling subsidies and employment restrictions on household welfare and child development

collective labor supply and household production this paper emphasises the importance of incorporating household production into the collective model of the household and considers how and to what extent the results of chiappori 1992 can be extended to this case this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

congestion games with player specific payoff functions a class of noncooperative games in which the players share a common set of strategies is described the payoff a player receives for playing a particular strategy depends only on the total number of players playing the

child care prices and maternal employment a meta analysis the literature estimates for labor force participation elasticity with regard to child care prices are extensive and varying while some estimates imply substantial gains from child care subsidies others find insignificant effects to determine the causes of the variance this paper reviews and analyzes the elasticity sizes using estimates from 36 peer reviewed articles and working papers in the literature we start by reviewing the theoretical and empirical aspects related to participation elasticity with regard to child care costs paying special attention to sample characteristics methodological aspects and macro level factors we conclude by providing a meta regression using control variables based on our review of the literature to explain some of the differences between the estimates as research builds on and improves the methods and assumptions in prior works elasticity estimates have become smaller over time this decline might also be partially explained by changes in labor market characteristics in countries with high rates of part time work and very high or very low rates of female labor force participation we find elasticity rates to be smaller

a structural model of labor supply and child care demand this paper specifies and estimates a structural model in which the decision to purchase market child care and the quality purchased is made simultaneously with the employment decision of the mother separate analyses are performed for married mothers and single mothers the structural estimates are used to simulate the effects and costs of changes in the federal child care tax credit the simulations indicate that a refundable child care tax credit would distribute child care benefits more equally across the population by increasing the shares of subsidies received by low income families and would induce a considerable increase in expenditures on market child care labor supply also increases but by considerably less than child care expenditures a surprising result is that despite large increases in child care

pure strategy nash equilibrium in a group formation game with positive externalities abstract this paper identifies a domain of payoff functions in no spillover noncooperative games with positive externality which admit a pure strategy nash equilibrium since in general a nash equilibrium may fail to exist in order to guarantee the existence of an equilibrium we impose two additional assumptions anonymity and order preservation the proof of our main result is carried out by constructing for a given game g a potential function over the set of strategy profiles in such a way that the maximum of yields a nash equilibrium in pure strategies of g journal of economics literature classification numbers c72 d62 h73

labor supply responses and welfare effects of tax reforms during the late 1 980s and early 1 990s taxation of wage income has undergone a change towards a proportional tax regime in many countries our analysis shows that gradual tax reforms in norway may have removed some of the distortions on worker behavior moreover we find that proportional taxes may reduce the inequality in the distribution of disposable household income yet when the distributional consequences are related to changes in individual welfare we find that rich households may benefit far more than households at the other tail of the income distribution because they earn more without any significant increase in effort

second best taxation as a game second best theory usually lies in the realm of normative analysis it focuses attention on the best solutions which still can be obtained in problems where constraints of various natures forbid the attainment of first best pareto optimal situations its central concern is the characterization of such second best solutions and a large part of the literature concentrates on the optimal design of taxes or of policies of public firms taking a second best problem we try in this paper to shift the emphasis from normative to positive considerations the solution we are interested in is not optimal with respect to some a priori given social welfare function embodying justice objectives but it is supposed to reflect the power of the different agents in a negotiation process clearly the conceptual tools required for such an analysis are to be found in game theory and it is actually a game theoretical approach that we follow here the model we are looking at is presented in section ii it formalizes one of the simplest second best problems that can be imagined we have a twogood economy with one private good and one public good agents have different wealth in private good and the public good is financed through a wealth tax this latter fiscal system is clearly not flexible enough to adjust contributions with marginal willingnesses to pay so that we actually face a second best situation there is one decision variable in the society the tax rate which determines the public good production about which the agents have conflicting desires to this problem we associate a game which provides a precise framework for the analysis of the power of the agents the positive outcomes of the negotiation process are supposed to belong to the core of this game sections iii and iv concentrate on the analysis of the core the results strongly contrast with those obtained in the classical studies of the core of 67 0022 053 l 81 040067 25 02 00 o

is universal child care leveling the playing field abstract we assess the case for universal child care programs in the context of a norwegian reform which led to a large scale expansion of subsidized child care we use non linear difference in differences methods to estimate the quantile treatment effects of the reform we find that the effects of the child care expansion were positive in the lower and middle parts of the earnings distribution of exposed children as adults and negative in the uppermost part we complement this analysis with local linear regressions of the child care effects by family income we find that most of the gains in earnings associated with the universal child care program relate to children of low income parents whereas upper class children actually experience a loss in earnings in line with the differential effects by family income we estimate that the universal child care program substantially increased intergenerational income mobility to interpret the estimated heterogeneity in child care effects we examine the mediating role of educational attainment and cognitive test scores and show that our estimates are consistent with a simple model where parents make a tradeoff between current family consumption and investment in children taken together our findings could have important implications for the policy debate over universal child care programs suggesting that the benefits of providing subsidized child care to middle and upper class children are unlikely to exceed the costs our study also points to the importance of universal child care programs in explaining differences in earnings inequality and income mobility across countries and over time

equilibrium in a finite local public goods economy abstract this paper examines the existence of a noncooperative equilibrium in a finite local public goods economy where consumers have quasi linear preferences jurisdictions consist of consumers who chose the same public project and finance the cost of production of public goods through either a proportional income tax or a poll tax we show that under a proportional income tax scheme a nash equilibria may fail to exist under a poll tax scheme an equilibrium always exists but in general nash equilibria violate a very weak efficiency condition we conclude by commenting on the stabilizing effect of zoning policies journal of economic literatureclassification number c71

tax policy reform the role of empirical evidence to understand the role of evidence in tax policy design this paper organizes the empirical analysis of reform under five loosely related headings i key margins of adjustment ii measurement of effective tax rates iii the importance of information and complexity iv evidence on the size of responses and v implications from theory for tax design the context for the discussion is the recently published mirrlees review of tax reform although the review focused on all aspects of tax reform this paper highlights the taxation of earnings it also comments on earnings taxation in the context of vat base broadening reforms and the taxation of capital

network externality an uncommon tragedy economists have defined network externality and have examined putative inframarginal market failures associated with it this paper distinguishes between network effects and network externalities where the latter are market failures the authors argue that while network effects are important network externalities are theoretically fragile and empirically undocumented some network externalities are merely pecuniary network ownership or transactions among network participants can internalize some network effects the type of market failure that has been associated with these externalities is a transition problem that has little to do with externality

child care choices and children s cognitive achievement the case of single mothers we evaluate the effect of child care versus maternal time inputs on child cognitive development using single mothers from the nlsy79 to deal with nonrandom selection of children into child care we exploit the exogenous variation in welfare policy rules facing single mothers in particular the 1996 welfare reform and earlier state level policy changes generated substantial increases in their work child care use we construct a comprehensive set of welfare policy variables and use them as instruments to estimate child cognitive ability production functions in our baseline specification we estimate that a year of child care reduces child test scores by 2 1

theoretical and practical arguments for modeling labor supply as a choice among latent jobs models of labor supply derived from stochastic utility representations and discretized sets of feasible hours of work have gained popularity because they are more practical than standard approaches based on marginal calculus in this paper we argue that practicality is not the only feature that can be addressed by means of stochastic choice theory this theory also offers a powerful framework for developing a more realistic model for labor supply choices founded on individuals having preferences over jobs and facing restrictions on the choice of jobs and hours of work we discuss and clarify how this modeling framework deviates from both the conventional discrete approach van soest 1995 as well as the standard textbook approach based on marginal calculus hausman 1985 we furthermore discuss how the model based on job choice offers the possibility of conducting a richer set of simulations of alternative policies

causal effects of paternity leave on children and parents reserving a share of the parental leave period for fathers is considered necessary in order to induce fathers to take leave and to increase men s participation in child rearing we investigate how a parental leave reform directed towards fathers affected leave taking and in turn children s and parents long term outcomes a paternal leave quota greatly increases the share of men taking paternity leave we find evidence that children s school performance improves as a result particularly in families where the father has higher education than the mother we find no evidence that paternity leave counters the traditional allocation of parents labor supply

joint labor supply and childcare choice decisions of married mothers this paper examines the impact of childcare prices and wage rates on the joint employment and childcare mode center sitter relative and husband choice decisions of married mothers by estimating both a mixed logit and universal logit choice model data are drawn from the 1988 canadian national child care survey and the 1988 labour market activity survey the estimation results show that wages have a positive impact on the probability of choosing any of the working states and that childcare prices for center sitter and relative care reduce the probability of working and using each respective mode of care sensitivity analyses reveal that the wage elasticity for employment is fairly robust across model specifications while the own price elasticity of childcare is sensitive to model specification differing identifying assumptions in the estimation of childcare price equations and sample selection the simulation results show that differences exist in the degree to which government subsidies in the form of wage subsidies targeted childcare subsidies or unconditional childcare subsidies impact on labor supply decisions and decisions to substitute across different modes of care by those mothers already in the labor market

an up to date joint labor supply and child care choice model abstract norwegian parents of preschool children base their care choices on a completely different choice set from their predecessor now there is essentially only one type of nonparental care center based care and on the parental side fathers take a more pivotal role in early childhood care in the present paper we develop and estimate a joint labor supply and child care choice model that takes account of these new characteristics on the assumption that this model points to current and future modeling directions for several other economies too estimations suggest that the average wage elasticity for mothers is 0 25 0 30

structural models of family labor supply a discrete choice approach a static neoclassical structural model is presented explaining labor supply of both spouses in two adult households in the netherlands family preferences are described with a direct translog utility function with the husbands leisure the wifes leisure and family income as its arguments we assume that the choice set of each family is finite account is taken of the dutch tax and benefits system we allow for hours restrictions and random preferences and account for unobserved wages of nonworkers the models are estimated using smooth simulated maximum likelihood results based upon dutch cross section data from 1987 are illustrated by confidence intervals for elasticities and by several policy simulations excerpt

an energy reference bus independent lmp decomposition algorithm the volatility of the price of electricity in a locational marginal price lmp market makes it necessary to introduce financial price risk hedging instruments the congestion related and marginal loss related revenue surpluses collected by the regional transmission operator rto are proposed to be redistributed to market players it is important to be able to correctly decompose the lmp into its congestion and marginal loss components which are critical for the valuation and settlement of these financial instruments a new energy reference bus independent lmp decomposition model using an ac optimal power flow opf model is presented to overcome the reference bus dependency disadvantage of the conventional approach the marginal effect of the generators output variation with respect to load variation are used as the basis of this decomposition model the theoretical derivation and a proof are given the new model achieves a set of reference bus independent results an example is presented comparing the new model with the conventional model

taxation and the household abstract previous analyses of demand systems and the welfare effects of taxing male and female labour supplies suppress the analysis of household resource allocation by assuming a household utility function to analyse the implications of assuming this is not the case we construct a simple but fairly general model of household resource allocation and use the properties of the equilibrium of this model to characterise the effects of tax policy on individual utilities as determined by the household resource allocation process

the effect of marginal tax rates on taxable income a panel study of the 1986 tax reform act this paper uses a treasury department panel of more than 4 000 taxpayers to estimate the sensitivity of taxable income to changes in tax rates on the basis of a comparison of the tax returns of the same individual taxpayers before and after the 1986 tax reform the analysis emphasizes that the response of taxable income involves much more than a change in the traditional measures of labor supply the evidence shows an elasticity of taxable income with respect to the marginal net of tax rate that is at least one and could be substantially higher the implications for recent tax rate changes are discussed

spending time and money within the household we consider both theoretically and empirically the allocation of time and money within the household the research question is whether a married person who enjoys more leisure than their partner also receives more consumption which seems to indicate the outcome of power within the household or receives less consumption which seems to indicate differing intrahousehold preferences we develop a simple parametric structural model with household production that is tested on survey data we find that relative wages have an impact on power for leisure this effect is dominated by a conventional wage effect in which the partner who has the higher wage takes less leisure

collective labor supply and welfare the paper develops a general collective model of household labor supply in which agents are characterized by their own possibly altruistic preferences and household decisions are only assumed to be pareto efficient an alternative interpretation is that there are two stages in the internal decision process agents first share nonlabor income according to some given sharing rule then each one optimally chooses his or her own labor supply and consumption this setting is shown to generate testable restrictions on labor supplies moreover the observation of labor supply behavior is sufficient for recovering individual preferences and the sharing rule up to a constant finally the traditional tools of welfare analysis can be adapted to the new setting

labor supply as a choice among latent jobs unobserved heterogeneity and identification this paper discusses aspects of a framework for modeling labor supply where the notion of job choice is fundamental in this framework workers are assumed to have preferences over latent job opportunities belonging to worker specific choice sets from which they choose their preferred job the observed hours of work and wage is interpreted as the job specific hours and wage of the chosen job the main contribution of this paper is an analysis of the identification problem of this framework under various conditions when conventional cross section micro data are applied

strong tiebout equilibrium under restricted preferences domain abstract we investigate the existence and give a partial characterization of a strong tiebout equilibrium which consists of an endogenously formed partition of the individuals into disjoint jurisdictions with each jurisdiction producing and financing its own public goods and moreover there exists no group of individuals who can all benefit by establishing their own community in particular no single individual finds it desirable to migrate from his equilibrium jurisdiction the existence proof makes use of the notion of consecutive games which we introduce and show that for such games there always exists a partition with a nonempty core

childcare subsidies wages and employment of single mothers this paper develops and estimates a model for the choice of part time and full time employment and the decision to pay for childcare among single mothers the results indicate that a lower childcare price and a higher full time wage rate both lead to an increase in overall employment and the use of paid childcare the part time wage effects are found to be too small to have significant behavioral implications an analysis of cost effectiveness indicates that the additional hours of work generated per dollar of government expenditure is larger for a childcare subsidy than a wage subsidy

a general formulation for lmp evaluation the evaluation of locational marginal prices or lmps which constitute the basis of the new generation of market design in the u s is a critical need in the side by side operation of electricity markets and power systems their use in various applications such as congestion management and hedging requires specific lmp components in the computations we provide a general formulation for the evaluation of the lmp components by making explicit use of the important role played by the nodes with generators with free capacity on the other hand the lmps of the nodes without generation or with the generators at their limits are a function of the lmps at the marginal nodes and the impacts of the network constraints including the losses in the network in the formulation we pay special attention to the importance of the assumptions and specifications the so called policy specification in the determination of the components we obtain a very general formulation that brings under a single framework the different decomposition approaches that exist the formulation s comprehensiveness brings numerous insights into the various decompositions provides a platform for their comparative analysis and allows us to understand the direct implications and the role of the policy specified moreover the formulation reveals the limitations of any decomposition into the components due to the underlying structural interdependencies among them which is clearly shown in this paper we provide an example to illustrate the capabilities and the insights obtainable with the use of this formulation

assessing the impact of a school subsidy program in mexico using a social experiment to validate a dynamic behavioral model of child schooling and fertility this paper uses data from a randomized social experiment in mexico to estimate and validate a dynamic behavioral model of parental decisions about fertility and child schooling to evaluate the effects of the progresa school subsidy program and to perform a variety of counterfactual experiments of policy alternatives our method of validation estimates the model without using post program data and then compares the model s predictions about program impacts to the experimental impact estimates the results show that the model s predicted program impacts track the experimental results our analysis of counterfactual policies reveals an alternative subsidy schedule that would induce a greater impact on average school attainment at similar cost to the existing program

the demand for quality in child care we estimate a model of demand for quality related attributes of child care group size staff child ratio and provider training the model is estimated jointly with equations for mode expenditure on and hours of care and the mother s labor supply the results show that a lower price of child care in a particular mode leads to substitution toward that mode and an increase in the use of paid child care a decrease in the price of care causes an increase in hours of care demanded and a decrease in the demand for qualityrelated attributes income effects on demand for quality are small

proportional taxation nonexistence of stable structures in an economy with a public good abstract guesnerie and oddou j econom theory 25 1981 67 91 raised the open question whether an economy in which the production of a public good is financed via proportional taxation has a stable structure by means of the first example a negative answer to this question is provided the second example shows that a stable structure may fail to exist even if all the individuals have the same initial endowments in private good

weighted congestion games with separable preferences abstract players in a congestion game may differ from one another in their intrinsic preferences e g the benefit they get from using a specific resource their contribution to congestion or both in many cases of interest intrinsic preferences and the negative effect of congestion are additively or multiplicatively separable this paper considers the implications of separability for the existence of pure strategy nash equilibrium and the prospects of spontaneous convergence to equilibrium it is shown that these properties may or may not be guaranteed depending on the exact nature of player heterogeneity

on the existence of a pure strategy nash equilibrium in group formation games abstract this paper provides sufficient conditions for the existence of pure strategy nash equilibrium in a class of games of group formation the use of potentials allows for a characterization of such an equilibrium

pseudo tie generator model implementation for california iso operations and lmp markets a pseudo tie resource model is a means by which a resource i e generation unit or load is operationally transferred from one balancing authority ba area in which the resource is physically located i e native ba to another i e attaining ba area the attaining ba has responsibility for operational control of the pseudo tie resource for both system reliability and electricity market purposes by implementing a pseudo tie the california in dependent system operator corporation iso ba is able to attain control of resources physically located external to its jurisdiction for its ba area services this paper discusses the implementation of a pseudo tie generator ptg with primary focus on its modeling in the iso full network model fnm and participation in the nodal based lmp electricity markets namely the integrated forward market ifm and real time market rtm the ptg has also been discussed in the context of system reliability and market operational principles resource scheduling and bidding outage reporting 5 min real time economic dispatch and pricing furthermore the paper highlights some of the key operational characteristics and differences between pseudo tie and conventional dynamically scheduled resources

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

a structural model of child care and the labor supply of married women this article empirically examines married women s labor supply and child care expenditures the article uses winter 1984 85 data from the survey of income and program participation to estimate a fu

child care costs and family labor supply this paper presents a theoretical and empirical analysis of the effects of child care costs on family labor supply and the demand for market child care the model is a framework for cross section estimation of the effects of child care costs on labor supply and child care use it applies to households having young children requiring continuous care and in which both the mother and 1 other potential child care provider are present the 3 potential sources of child care are the mother the potential informal provider and the market using data from the 1980 baseline household survey of the employment opportunity pilot projects this empirical analysis uses a subsample of 6170 households in which there is a married woman under age 45 with her spouse present at the time of the survey at least 1 child under age 14 and nonmissing data on key variables results show that 1 higher market child care costs discourage women from working even when an informal source of care is available indicating that such informal care is an imperfect substitute for market care 2 a higher wage rate for the mother encourages her to work thus a higher wage rate increases the probability of using market child care 3 the number of children requiring care has a negative impact on the probability of the women working with the largest impact caused by younger children 4 nonwage income has a negative impact on the probability of the woman working and 5 black women are more likely to work than whites and are statistically more likely than whites to use market child care if they do work this family labor supply model predicts that the cost of market child care will affect household decisions on labor supply and child care use estimates of a qualitative choice model provide strong confirmation that child care costs affect such decisions the responsiveness of the labor supply of mothers to child care costs demonstrated in this study indicate that such subsidies do have their intended effect of encouraging labor supply the fact that a large proportion of current child care subsidies benefit primarily middle and upper income families via the income tax credit suggests that the labor supply effets of such subsidies may in practice be stronger for less needy families than for low income families employer subsidized child care may become an increasingly popular tool for attracting mothers into the labor force

stable coalition structures with a unidimensional set of alternatives abstract we identify a class of economic and political environments that admit an s equilibrium where both free mobility and free entry are allowed we further study the relationship between the set of s equilibria and the sets of strong and coalition proof nash equilibria in the noncooperative coalition formation game which is closely related to the one originally studied by j von neumann and o morgenstern theory of games and economic behaviour princeton univ press princeton nj 1944 we also show that the set of s equilibria induces a proper subset of the coalition structure core of the corresponding characteristic function form journal of economic literature classification numbers c71 c72

correlated equilibria incomplete information and coalitional deviations this paper proposes new concepts of strong and coalition proof correlated equilibria where agents form coalitions at the interim stage and share information about their recommendations in a credible way when players deviate at the interim stage coalition proof correlated equilibria may fail to exist for two player games however coalition proof correlated equilibria always exist in dominance solvable games and in games with positive externalities and binary actions c 2008 elsevier inc all rights reserved

sectoral labour supply choice restrictions and functional form this is the authors submitted article version which is the pre peer reviewed version of the article the article changed title in the peer reviewing process from analyzing labor supply behavior with latent job opportunity sets and institutional choice constraints later published as discussion paper no 399 http brage bibsys no ssb handle urn nbn no bibsys brage 21006

household childcare choices and women s work behavior in russia the author models mothers participation in the labor force their working hours and household demand for childcare in russia the model estimates the effects of the price of childcare mothers wages and household income on household behavior and well being the theoretical model yields several predictions to test these reduced form equations of the discrete and continuous household choices are estimated jointly using the method of semi parametric full information maximum likelihood this method controls for the correlation of error terms across outcomes and the correlation of error terms that can result when panel data are used the results of this analysis indicate that the extent to which mothers participate in the labor force and for how many hours depends on the costs of childcare and on what level of hourly wage is available to them and to other members of the household the author s simulations show that family allowances intended to reduce poverty do not significantly affect the household choice of childcare arrangements replacing family allowances with childcare subsidies might have a strong positive effect on women s participation in the labor force and thus could be effective in reducing poverty

strategic groups and rent dissipation we consider a rent seeking contest in which players can form strategic groups before expending their outlays we examine the profitability of endogenous group formation and the effect of such group formation on rent dissipation we show the following when just one strategic group is formed in equilibrium group formation is beneficial both to the group members and to the nonmembers and rent dissipation is smaller than with usual individual rent seeking however when more than two strategic groups are formed in equilibrium group formation is never profitable to any players and rent dissipation is greater than with individual rent seeking jel