a simultaneous non linear model for labour migration and commuting evers g h m and van der veen a 1985 a simultaneous non linear model for labour migration and commuting reg studies 19 217 229 the paper deals with the importance of interregional labour supply mobility as a component of changes in the regional supply of labour after an exploratory analysis of this mobility labour migration and commuting an explanatory framework is developed based on interrelationships between these two types of mobility an aggregated logit model is used to model the several choices involving workplace and residential location where feedbacks are allowed in the decision tree finally empirical results for some branches of the decision tree are presented

optimal commuting and migration decisions under commuting cost uncertainty the aim of this paper is to assess the implications of economic uncertainty on individual mobility behaviour at the local and regional levels focusing especially on uncertainty with respect to the evolution of commuting costs a model is developed that describes the interrelated decisions of residential choice and the appropriate type of mobility connecting workplace and residence results indicate that higher uncertainty about commuting costs increases the number of residentially immobile individuals in that the decision regarding a relocation of residence is accordingly deferred to a later point in time this also means that individuals initially commuting between residence and workplace remain in this mobility mode despite an apparently favourable net present value of moving to the workplace region

the effect of r d services offshoring on skilled employment firm evidence the offshoring of high tech services has greatly increased in recent years with consequences for firms demand for skilled employment in firms this paper specifically analyses the relationship between r d offshoring and the demand for r d employment using firm level data for spanish manufacturing and services companies during the period 2004 11 estimating different specifications with panel data techniques we find that this association is statistically positive in particular for services firms a 1 percentage point increase in r d offshoring raises the demand for researchers by about 11 per cent

reciprocated unilateralism in trade reforms with majority voting this paper shows how unilateral liberalization in one country can increase the voting support for reciprocal reduction in trade barriers in a partner country when trade policies are determined simultaneously in the two countries we show the possibility of multiple political equilibria one in which the countries are both protectionist and another in which they trade freely with each other starting with trade protection in both countries a unilateral reform in one country is shown to bring about a free trade equilibrium that obtains majority support in both countries

outsourcing imports and labour demand this paper examines the effects of purchased services and imported intermediate materials on the labour demand for different skills in german manufacturing sectors we derive and estimate a factor demand system based on the generalised box cox cost function nesting both the normalised quadratic and the translog functional form we find that the impacts of output and capital growth are more important in explaining the demand for heterogeneous labour than substitution effects between labour and non labour inputs similarly the increasing use of both imported materials and purchased services is a consequence of output growth rather than input substitution

do big countries win tariff wars yes it is widely believed that tariffs invite retaliation and that the postretaliation equilibrium l eaves all countries worse off than they would be at free trade the a uthors present a simple pure exchange model with two countries and t wo goods and show which endowment patterns are consistent with this belief they find that if one country is substantially bigger than th e other it can expect to gain from a tariff war despite retaliation the model can be extended to show that the advantage obtained by bei ng part of a large trading unit can help explain the formation of cus toms unions copyright 1988 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

the return of the reciprocitarians us trade policy today we are always willing to be trade partners but never trade patsies president ronald reagan state of the union message washington 1987

unemployment institutions and reform complementarities re assessing the aggregate evidence for oecd countries there is no or limited consensus on the quantitative impact of institutions on unemployment which has led some to question the case for structural reforms recent studies suggest also that institutions interact with each other and cannot be analysed in isolation in this paper we estimate a standard reduced form model to explore the institutional determinants of unemployment and assess its robustness using a large battery of robustness checks we show that although the impact of each individual policy varies across countries due to policy interactions the simple linear model can be used to draw inferences for countries with an average mix of institutions the model is then extended to encompass systemic interactions in which individual policies interact with the overall institutional framework we find relatively robust evidence of broad reform complementarities

the effect of impact fees on the price of new single family housing this paper provides new evidence on the effects of impact fees on housing prices using an inventory of single family housing sale transactions in the 38 cities and towns within king county washington for the period 1991 2000 although the effect of impact fees on housing prices has been examined previously earlier studies have been limited by methodological deficiencies this paper examines the effect of impact fees on new housing and their differential effect on housing price based on the quality of housing and finds that the effect of impact fees on the price of new housing is quite significant and elastic raising new home prices by about 166 per cent of the amount of the fee the increase is 358 per cent for the higher quality homes and is statistically insignificant for the lower quality homes

equilibrium unemployment with outsourcing and wage solidarity under labour market imperfections abstract we evaluate the effects of outsourcing and wage solidarity on wage formation and equilibrium unemployment in a heterogeneous labour market where wages are determined by a monopoly labour union we find that outsourcing promotes the wage dispersion between the high and low skilled workers when the labour union adopts a solidaristic wage policy it will dampen this tendency further higher outsourcing will increase equilibrium unemployment among the high skilled workers whereas it will reduce it among the low skilled workers overall outsourcing will reduce economy wide equilibrium unemployment under the reasonable condition that the proportion of high skilled workers is sufficiently low

intra european imbalances adjustment and growth in the eurozone this paper considers the increase in the euro intra area imbalances since the late 1990s and their role in the current european debt crisis by focusing on the case study of italy and germany we argue that both macroeconomic the functioning of the euro area and microeconomic internationalization of production factors contributed to the creation of such imbalances when sovereign risk and currency risk emerged in the periphery coupled with austerity as a response to these risks both factors made the euro crisis worse the present zero sum game approach is very risky for the stability of the euro area policy coordination of some kind is needed this requires agreeing on well identified economic policy priorities taking full account of the different positions of the members in terms of growth external imbalances and competitiveness new policy priorities are thus required in the euro zone that put more emphasis on cooperative positive sum games in convergence and competitiveness

trade and search generated unemployment we argue that trade economists should begin to seriously consider environments in which unemployment is carefully modeled we introduce such a model derive several results and compare them to results derived in full employment models we argue that some traditional results are probably too narrow the determinants of comparative advantage and that some results do not generalize to models with unemployment the link between trade and income distribution for employed factors we also show that in some important cases results do generalize there is an extended stolper samuelson theorem that links trade to the distribution of income for searching factors and that our model allows us to address issues that traditional models cannot handle the impact of trade on unemployment and the welfare of the unemployed 1999 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

hegemonic stability theory and 19th century tariff levels in europe although the theory of hegemonic stability has attracted an impressive array of adherents current formulations leave many conceptual issues unresolved existing formulations also fail to draw from the theory any implications concerning the process by which a hegemonic state creates and maintains a regime as an example great britain is generally agreed to have been hegemonic in the nineteenth century but britain s behavior was generally inconsistent with that implied by a theory of hegemonic stability i advance an alternative set of explanations for changes in international tariff levels based on the notion of a political business cycle

resistance to reform status quo bias in the presence of individual specific uncertainty comment why do governments so often fail to adopt policies which economists consider to be efficiency enhancing our answer to this question relies on uncertainty regarding the distribution of gains and losses from reform we show that there is a bias towards the status quo and hence against efficiency enhancing reforms whenever some of the individual gainers and losers from reform cannot be identified beforehand there are reforms which once adopted will receive adequate political support but would have failed to carry the day ex ante the argument does not rely on risk aversion irrationality or hysteresis due to sunk costs jel d72 f13 why do governments so often fail to adopt policies that economists consider to be efficiency enhancing this is one of the fundamental questions of political economy the answer usually relies on what may be

protection for sale in a developing country democracy vs dictatorship for a genuine small open economy that has experienced both dictatorship and democracy we find support for the predictions of the grossman helpman 1994 protection for sale model in contrast to previous studies we use various protection measures including tariffs the direct measure of the theoretical model and perform both single year and panel regressions using turkish industry level data the government s weight on welfare is estimated to be much larger than that on contributions more importantly we find that this weight is generally higher for the democratic regime than for dictatorship

international outsourcing and factor prices with multistage production we develop a dual representation of the technology of international fragmentation for an industry using 2 factors in a continuum of stages we then derive a generalised factor price frontier which incorporates an endogenous adjustment of the margin of fragmentation using this frontier in a 2 2 general equilibrium model we investigate the role of outsourcing in the adjustment to a decline in the final output price of the multistage industry and the attendant factor price effects we also explore the implications of an improved technology of international fragmentation on the margin of fragmentation and on domestic factor prices

an empirical estimation of the price effects of development impact fees empirical analysis of the price of vacant lots sold in three toronto suburban municipalities during the 1977 86 period shows that development impact fees directly increased lot prices by approximately 1 2 times the size of the fee the extent of the increase was related to city growth rates in general the faster the rate of growth the lower was the price effect of development impact fees the effects of growth however were not consistent across the three municipalities as one municipality appeared to be lowering its fees in response to reductions in growth rates the policy environment within which fees are implemented and the way fees are adjusted appear to influence their effect on lot prices the estimated model also suggests that increases in expected future construction costs reduce current lot prices general increases in the consumers shelter costs tend to inflate the price of vacant lots the expectation of future increases in the cost of land development whether it is due to increases in ma

what s the point of reciprocal trade negotiations exports imports and gains from trade this paper explains why trade policy makers may prefer reciprocal trade negotiations rtn to unilateral tariff reductions utr for economic reasons it answers puzzles like why wto reciprocity and strengthens the unnecessarily weak case made for the wto by those who downplay or dismiss benefits from foreign tariff reductions ftr rtn is superior to utr because it provides economic benefits that utr cannot namely ftr benefits which are clearer than potentially important utr benefits whereas each policy offers efficiency gains any terms of trade effect of utr generally detracts from these gains while any terms of trade effect of ftr is typically beneficial especially for a small price taking country with this benefit augmenting ftr s efficiency gains moreover benefits from reductions in foreign barriers may come from several sources they are not solely the result of terms of trade improvement or economies of scale the two benefits already noted in the literature though often dismissed for example with foreign ntb elimination possible home benefits are shown even with rising costs and terms of trade deterioration rtn is also superior to utr because by eliminating protection in either ntb or tariff form rtn provides an escape from not only a terms of trade prisoners dilemma but many other previously unrecognised prisoners dilemmas including one in international rent transfers and several others with no economies of scale or terms of trade motivation of course if superior rtn is not an option utr may well be desirable if reciprocity is an option but only in a narrower cu or fta form such reciprocity may still be superior to utr or it may be inferior theory cannot unambiguously rank these

a theory of managed trade this paper proposes a theory that predicts low levels of protection during periods of normal trade volume coupled with episodes of special protection when trade volumes surge this dynamic pattern of protection emerges from a model in which countries choose levels of protection in a repeated game facing volatile trade swings high trade volume leads to a greater incentive to defect unilaterally from cooperative tariff levels therefore as the volume of trade expands the level of protection must rise in a cooperative equilibrium to mitigate the rising trade volume and hold the incentive to defect in check copyright 1990 by american economic association

the labour market effects of offshoring of small and medium sized firms micro level evidence for germany small and medium sized enterprises smes are the economic powerhouse of many oecd countries perhaps most prominently so in germany yet the labour market dynamics caused by the internationaliza

why are stabilizations delayed when a stabilization has significant distributional implications e g tax increases to eliminate a large budget deficit socioeconomic groups may attempt to shift the burden of stabilization onto other groups the process leading to stabilization becomes a war of attrition each group attempting to wait the others out and stabilization occurring only when one group concedes and bears a disproportionate share of the burden the authors solve for the expected time of stabilization in a model of rational delay and relate it to several political and economic variables they motivate this approach and its results by comparison to historical and current episodes copyright 1991 by american economic association

offshoring tasks and the skill wage pattern the paper investigates the relationship between offshoring wages and the occupational task profile using rich individual level panel data our main results suggest that when only considering within industry changes in offshoring we identify a moderate wage reduction due to offshoring for low skilled workers though wage effects in relation to the task profile of occupations are not estimated with sufficient precision however when allowing for cross industry effects of offshoring i e allowing for labor mobility across industries negative wage effects of offshoring are quite substantial and depend strongly on the task profile of workers occupations a higher degree of interactivity and in particular non routine content effectively shields workers against the negative wage impact of offshoring

politically realistic objective functions and trade policy profs and tariffs abstract this paper demonstrates a mathematical correspondence between the deus ex machina tariff formation approach and political economy approach the correspondence implies that the tariff chosen by lobbying influenced policy makers will be equivalent to a tariff chosen by a deus ex machina government that gives too much weight to profits this result allows many political economy issues to be addressed in the simple framework of a deus ex machina government which faces a politically realistic objective function prof

conditional versus unconditional trade concessions for developing countries we consider a small open economy that faces a commitment problem in trade liberalization we examine how the relationship with a large trading partner affects the ability of the small countrys government to sustain free trade through a reputational mechanism if the small country s government is patient enough it can overcome its domestic commitment without the help of the large country unconditional liberalization by the large trading partner has an ambiguous effect on the small country s dynamic incentives liberalization through a reciprocal trade agreement in which the large country lowers its tariffs conditionally on the small country doing the same unambiguously dominates unconditional liberalization by the large country as a way of boosting trade reforms and reinforcing policy credibility in the small country however if capacity in the import competing sector can only be reduced gradually a conditional reciprocal agreement may require an asynchronous exchange of concessions with the large country liberalizing before the small country

the role of shocks and institutions in the rise of european unemployment the aggregate evidence two key facts about european unemployment must be explained the rise in unemployment since the 1960s and the heterogeneity of individual country experiences while adverse shocks can potentially explain much of the rise in unemployment there is insufficient heterogeneity in these shocks to explain cross country differences alternatively while explanations focusing on labour market institutions explain current heterogeneity well many of these institutions pre date the rise in unemployment based on a panel of institutions and shocks for 20 oecd nations since 1960 we find that the interaction between shocks and institutions is crucial to explaining both stylised facts

reciprocated unilateralism in trade policy abstract using the menu auction approach to endogenous determination of tariffs and allowing additionally for lobby formation itself to be endogenous this paper analyzes the impact of unilateral trade liberalization by one country on its partner s trade policies we find that such unilateral liberalization may induce reciprocal tariff reductions by the partner country intuitively unilateral liberalization by one country has the effect of increasing the incentives for the export lobby in the partner country to form and to lobby effectively against the import competing lobby there for lower protection

services outsourcing and innovation an empirical investigation we provide a comprehensive empirical analysis of the links between international services outsourcing domestic outsourcing profits and innovation using plant level data we find a positive effect of international outsourcing of services on innovative activity at the plant level such a positive effect can also be observed for domestic outsourcing of services but the magnitude is smaller this makes intuitive sense as international outsourcing allows more scope for exploiting international factor price differentials therefore giving the establishment higher profits and more scope to restructure production activities towards innovation we also find that international outsourcing has a positive effect on profitability as predicted by theory while this is not true for domestic sourcing the results are robust to various specifications and an instrumental variables analysis

trade liberalization and unemployment theory and evidence from india abstract a widely held view among the public is that trade liberalization increases unemployment using state and industry level unemployment and trade protection data from india we find no evidence of any unemployment increasing effect of trade reforms in fact our state level analysis reveals that urban unemployment declines with trade liberalization in states with flexible labor markets and larger employment shares in net exporter industries moreover our industry level analysis indicates that workers in industries experiencing greater reductions in trade protection were less likely to become unemployed especially in net export industries our results can be explained within a theoretical framework incorporating trade and search generated unemployment and some institutional features of the indian economy

the benefit of crises for economic reforms when expenditures consistently outrun revenue the resulting inflation may have the effect of convincing the public and government that taxes must be raised to finance public investment in the advanced industrial countries income taxation and big spurts in taxation generally have become possible only under the impact of major emergency and crisis mostly in wartime in a number of developing countries in

the perversity of preferences gsp and developing country trade policies 1976 2000 industrial countries maintain special tariff preferences namely the generalized system of preferences gsp for imports from developing countries critics have highlighted the underachieving nature of such preferences but developing countries continue to place the gsp at the heart of their agenda in multilateral negotiations what effect do such preferences have on a recipient s own trade policies the authors develop and test a simple theoretical model of a small country s trade policy choice using a dataset of 154 developing countries from 1976 through 2000 they find that countries removed from the gsp adopt more liberal trade policies than those remaining eligible the results corrected for endogeneity and robust to numerous alternative measures of trade policy suggest that developing countries may be best served by full integration into the reciprocity based world trade regime rather than continued gsp style special preferences

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

international trade and unemployment theory and cross national evidence abstract we present a model of trade and search induced unemployment where trade results from heckscher ohlin h o and or ricardian comparative advantage using cross country data on trade policy unemployment and various controls and controlling for endogeneity and measurement error problems we find fairly strong and robust evidence for the ricardian prediction that unemployment and trade openness are negatively related this effect dominates the positive h o effect of trade openness on unemployment for capital abundant countries which turns negative for labor abundant countries using panel data we find an unemployment increasing short run impact of trade liberalization followed by an unemployment reducing effect leading to the new steady state

a theory of trade policy leadership abstract this paper constructs a two country model of bilateral trade negotiations in the presence of political uncertainty to demonstrate that unilateral trade liberalization may be an optimal policy for a large country the political uncertainty is due to producer opposition to trade agreement ratification in the foreign country unilateral liberalization by the home country has a salutary effect on negotiations because it mitigates the pain of potential ratification failure on the foreign country it also promotes foreign ratification because it effectively punishes foreign import competing producers for lobbying against an agreement these benefits are shown to outweigh up to a point the terms of trade cost that the home country must suffer when it actually liberalizes unilaterally in equilibrium therefore we see a pattern in which the home country unilaterally liberalizes for several periods until ratification in the foreign country succeeds at which point foreign country finally reciprocates we also demonstrate that contrary to the standard optimal tariff result there may be an inverse relationship between the home country s monopoly power and its optimal unilateral tariff

offshoring along the production chain recent contributions on offshoring often assume that firms can freely split their production process into separate steps which can be ranked according to the cost savings from producing abroad we replace this assumption by the notion of a technologically determined sequence of production steps in our model cost savings from offshoring fluctuate along the production chain and moving unfinished goods across borders causes transport costs we show that in such a setting firms may refrain from offshoring even if relocating individual steps would be advantageous conversely small variations in model parameters may lead to a large increase in offshoring activities

welfare effects of british free trade debate and evidence from the 1840s the classical economists engaged in a vigorous debate over whether britain s tariff reductions in the 1840s should be made contingent on tariff liberalization abroad some notably robert torrens believed that a unilateral tariff reduction would so deteriorate british terms of trade as to outweigh efficiency gains and make the country worse off in this paper britain s foreign trade elasticities are estimated for this period in a simultaneous equation model they are used in a simple general equilibrium model that explicitly takes the terms of trade into account to assess the welfare impact of tariff reductions the results indicate that britain would have been made worse off from a unilateral tariff reduction however foreign tariff reductions mitigated the terms of trade deterioration and could easily have made britain better off

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

reputation and equilibrium characterization in repeated games with conflicting interests a two person game is of conflicting interests if the strategy to which player one would most like to commit herself holds player two down to his minimax payoff suppose there is a positive prior probability that player one is a commitme nt type who will always play this strategy then player one will get a t least her commitment payoff in any nash equilibrium of the repeated game if her discount factor approaches one this result is robust against further perturbations of the informational structure and in striking contrast to the message of the folk theorem for games with incomplete information copyright 1993 by the econometric society

geographical labour mobility migration or commuting eliasson k lindgren u and westerlund o 2003 geographical labour mobility migration or commuting reg studies 37 827 837 in this paper we examine how individual labour market status and spatial variations in employment opportunities influence interregional job search behaviour and mobility decisions in sweden the econometric analysis is based on 290 000 individual observations and refers to the years 1994 95 the empirical results show that the probability of interregional labour mobility unexpectedly decreases with the accessibility to employment opportunities in neighbouring regions as expected the findings reveal that accessibility to job openings in surrounding regions significantly increases the likelihood of choosing commuting as the mobility mode moreover the empirical findings indicate that individual unemployment experience increases the likelihood of mobility as well as migration eliasson k lindgren u et westerlund o 2003 la mobilite geographique du travail la migration

post unification wage growth in east germany following monetary union with west germany in 1990 the real wage of east german workers rose 83 i use the german socio economic panel data to investigate the determinants of wage growth and assess whether they are consistent with efficient restructuring although job changing rates were initially high the share of wage growth that accrued to movers was little higher than in the west suggesting that the incentives to move were too low for 1990 to 1991 the biggest gainers were low wage workers generally and women and the less educated specifically for 1991 to 1996 the biggest gainers were women and the better educated

outsourcing and optimal nonlinear taxation a note this paper concerns optimal taxation and outsourcing if the government has a direct instrument for taxing outsourcing the policy rules for marginal income taxation remain as in the standard model

the size of trading blocs market power and world welfare effects abstract we construct an n country n commodity trade model to analyze the implications of bloc size for nash equilibrium tariffs and welfare the relationship between the absolute size of symmetric trading blocs and their market power is ambiguous and we illustrate how this relationship varies with model parameters in contrast sufficiently large increases in the relative size of a bloc enhance its relative market power and cause the welfare of its country members to rise above the free trade level we establish the existence of an optimal bloc size and study the dependence of optimal size on the parameters of the model

infrastructure financing and urban development abstract historically additions to public infrastructure necessitated by urban growth have been financed under a cost sharing approach in the last several decades however financing of growth has increasingly relied on land use exactions where new residents pay for the cost of incremental infrastructure despite the emergence of a formal growth control literature there has been virtually no formal analysis of the connection between infrastructure financing and urban development to provide such an analysis this paper investigates three different schemes for financing incremental infrastructure within an urban growth model the analysis compares an impact fee scheme to two types of cost sharing schemes deriving the effects on urban growth and land values of switching to the impact fee scheme the efficient financing scheme is also identified

whose job goes abroad international outsourcing and individual job separations this paper focuses on the adjustment costs of globalisation by studying the effects of international outsourcing on individual transitions out of jobs in the danish manufacturing sector for the period 1990 2003 a competing risks duration model that distinguishes between jobto job and job to unemployment transitions is estimated outsourcing is found to increase the unemployment risk of low skilled workers but the quantitative impact is modest outsourcing is also found to reduce the job change hazard rate for all education groups thus the paper provides evidence for small adjustment costs of globalisation

differences and changes in wage structures preface introduction and summary richard b freeman lawrence f katz 1 a comparison of changes in the structure of wages in four oecd countries lawrence f katz gary w loveman david g blanchflower 2 international differences in executive and managerial compensation john m abowd michael l bognanno 3 the gender earnings gap some international evidence francine d blau lawrence m kahn 4 international wage curves david g blanchflower andrew j oswald 5 the changing structure of male earnings in britain 1974 1988 john schmitt 6 real wages employment and wage dispersion in u s and australian labor markets robert g gregory francis vella 7 labor markets and economic growth lessons from korea s industrialization 1970 1990 dae il kim robert h topel 8 wage differentials in italy market forces institutions and inflation christopher l erickson andrea c ichino 9 the swedish wage structure the rise and fall of solidarity wage policy per anders edin bertil holmlund 10 getting together and breaking apart the decline of centralized collective bargaining richard b freeman robert s gibbons 11 earnings inequality in germany katharine g abraham susan n houseman 12 a comparative analysis of east and west german labor markets before and after unification alan b krueger jorn steffen pischke contributors author index subject index

job moving residential moving and commuting a search perspective abstract we address the interrelationships between residential mobility labor market mobility and commuting the paper takes its starting point in recent findings in economic research which emphasise that job and residence relocation decisions imply forward looking decision making we examine job and residential mobility by means of bivariate models and interpret the outcomes in light of the search model

commuting in search of jobs and residences abstract this paper introduces a model which includes residential job moving and commuting behavior when labor and housing markets are characterized by market imperfections imperfect information and moving costs we examine the consequences of these market imperfections on commuting behavior an empirical analysis of commuting behavior indicates that workers commute less if they receive more job offers

work characteristics firm size and wages a positive wage firm size relationship is well documented in the empirical literature in industrial organization and labor economics firm size seems to proxy various unobserved determinants such as job satisfaction monitoring costs more complex technologies and worker participation in monopoly profits it is generally argued that the greater the possibility of controlling for these latent factors the less likely that a significant size effect will appear this paper attempts to distinguish firm size from other wage determinants for a rich data source for west germany and demonstrates the persistence of the size premium

globalization outsourcing and wage inequality there is considerable debate over whether international trade has contributed to the declining economic fortunes of less skilled workers one issue that has become lost in the current discussion is how firms respond to import competition and how these responses in turn are transmitted to the labor market in previous work we have argued that outsourcing by which we mean the import of intermediate inputs by domestic firms has contributed to an increase in the relative demand for skilled labor in the united states if firms respond to import competition from low wage countries by moving non skill intensive activities abroad then trade will shift employment towards skilled workers within industries in this paper we extend our previous work by combining new import data from the revised nber trade database with disaggregated data on input purchases from the census of manufactures we construct industry by industry estimates of outsourcing for the period 1972 1990 and reexamine whether outsourcing has contributed to an increase in relative demand for skilled labor our main finding is that outsourcing can account for 31 51 of the increase in the relative demand for skilled labor that occurred in u s manufacturing industries during the 1980s compared to our previous estimate of 15 33 this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

structural reforms and labor market outcomes international panel data evidence this paper explores the impact of structural reforms on a comprehensive set of macro level labor market outcomes including the unemployment rate the average wage index and overall and female employment levels and labor force participation rates together these outcome variables capture the overall health of the labor market and the aggregate welfare of workers yet there seems to be no other comprehensive empirical investigation in the existing literature of the impact of structural reforms at the cross country macro level on labor market outcomes other than the unemployment rate data were collected from a variety of sources including the world bank world development indicators the international monetary fund international financial statistics and the international labor organization key indicators of the labor market the resulting dataset covers up to 88 countries the majority being developing for 10 years on either side of structural reforms that took place between 1960 and 2001 after documenting the average trends across countries in the labor market outcomes up to 10 years on either side of each country s structural reform year the authors run fixed effects ordinary least squares as well as instrumental variables regressions to account for the likely endogeneity of structural reforms to labor market outcomes overall the results suggest that structural reforms lead to positive outcomes for labor unlike related literature the paper does not find conclusive evidence on unemployment redistributive effects in favor of workers along the lines of the stolper samuelson effect may be at work

what has happened to the bottom of the us housing market housing quality has improved dramatically for most low income households but they are paying much larger shares of their income for it many discussions of the bottom of the market focus on either the rising costs the bad news or the rising quality the good news both points of view have some merit this paper takes a positivist approach to the question what s happening to the bottom of the housing market we use a variety of indicators to look at whether the supply of low cost units has fallen we then focus on whether this dwindling supply reflects a market failure if the market for low income housing is indeed failing we would observe relatively high prices per unit of housing services provided by low quality housing obstructions to the supply of low cost housing which arises largely from filtering and high vacancy rates we find evidence of market failure in some markets but not in others finally we focus on one possible source of market failure excessive regulation to see whether it

reputation and equilibrium selection in games with a patient player a single long run player plays a simultaneous move stage game against a sequence of opponents who play only once but observe all previous play let the stackelberg strategy be the pure strategy to which the long run player would most like to commit himself if there is positive prior probability that the long run player will always play the stackelberg strategy then his payoff in any nash equilibrium exceeds a bound that converges to the stackelberg payoff as his discount factor approaches one when the stage game is not simultaneous move this result must be modified to account for the possibility that distinct strategies of the long run player are observationally equivalent

winners and losers a micro level analysis of international outsourcing and wages our paper investigates the link between international outsourcing and wages utilizing a large household panel and combining it with industry level information on industries outsourcing activities from input output tables this approach avoids prob lems such as aggregation bias potential endogeneity bias and poor skill definitions that commonly hamper industry level studies we find that outsourcing has had a marked impact on wages applying two alternative skill classifications we find evidence that a 1 percentage point increase in outsourcing reduced the wage for workers in the lowest skill categories by up to 1 5 while it increased wages for high skilled workers by up to 2 6 this result is robust to a number of different specifications jel classification f16 j31 gagnants et perdants une analyse micro economique de la sous traitance internationale et des salaires ce memoire etudie le lien entre la sous traitance internationale et les salaires a l aide de donnees d un grand panel de menages qu on combine avec des donnees au niveau des industries sur les activites de sous traitance de celles qui en font obtenues des tableaux interindustriels cette approche evite les problemes qui habituellement polluent les etudes au niveau de l industrie biais d agregation biais d endogeneite potentielle mauvaises definitions des habiletes on decouvre que la sous traitance a un effet sur les salaires a l aide de differentes formes de classification des habiletes il appert qu un point de pourcentage d augmentation dans la sous traitance reduit les salaires des travailleurs dans les categories d habilete les plus basses de 1 5 alors qu il accroit les salaires de travailleurs specialises de 2 6 ce resultat est robuste et avere meme quand on utilise diverses specifications

regionalism in a multilateral world recent regional initiatives have been addressed from a vinerian perspective of trade creation and trade diversion this is true of both policy oriented economists who tend to be critical of the initiatives and theorists who have added dynamic and gametheoretic elements to the vinerian structure this paper describes the stylized facts of much recent regional integration and develops an alternative model the analysis suggests that regional integration far from threatening multilateral liberalism may in fact be a direct consequence of the success of past multilateralism and an added guarantee for its survival

outsourcing and the skilled unskilled wage gap abstract within the context of a product variety model this paper examines the impact of outsourcing of skill intensive tasks on the skilled unskilled wage gap outsourcing affects the wage gap through direct as well as indirect channels while outsourcing decreases the effective wage of skilled workers in the services sector owing to inter sectoral labour mobility its overall impact on the equilibrium skilled wage is positive through an increase in the size of external economies in the industrial sector outsourcing can reduce the unskilled wage in overall terms outsourcing of skill intensive tasks increases the skilled unskilled wage gap

commuting migration housing and labour markets complex interactions commuting migration housing and labour markets are important for the overall economy and for the everyday life of many people commuting makes up a large part of all journeys world wide and many resourcedemanding transport investment projects are initiated to cope with this type of travelling in a range of countries increasing flows of national and international migration are central determinants of demographic developments in industrialised countries the working age population or those aspiring to be part of the economically active population constitute a large proportion of the total population consequently income earned through working represents a major component of total earnings in these economies cahuc and zylberberg 2004 in order to obtain an efficient labour market workers should locate and relocate to where the relevant jobs are to be found from an economic point of view commuting and migration are essential elements for obtaining a well functioning labour market fischer et al 1996 lux and sunega 2012 zabel 2012 finally housing is a basic good and for many people rents or loan repayments make up a relatively large proportion of their overall budget oecd 2011 moreover housing represents a dominating element of homeowners wealth or equity due to its central role during the financial and economic crisis starting around 2007 it has become clear that housing prices are important for the development of the overall economy in many countries for example muellbauer and murphy 2008 zabel 2012 housing and labour markets are linked in many ways when explaining these links it is useful to start with some of the distinguished features of housing markets as already mentioned houses frequently constitute a major part of households wealth moreover earned income from employment is a major

silver bullet or trojan horse the effects of inclusionary zoning on local housing markets in the united states many local governments are adopting inclusionary zoning iz as a means of producing affordable housing without direct public subsidies in this paper panel data on iz in the san francisco metropolitan area and suburban boston are used to analyse how much affordable housing the programmes produce and how iz affects the prices and production of market rate housing the amount of affordable housing produced under iz has been modest and depends primarily on how long iz has been in place results from suburban boston suggest that iz has contributed to increased housing prices and lower rates of production during periods of regional house price appreciation in the san francisco area iz also appears to increase housing prices in times of regional price appreciation but to decrease prices during cooler regional markets there is no evidence of a statistically significant effect of iz on new housing development in the bay area

external trade diversion exclusion incentives and the nature of preferential trade agreements in a game of endogenous trade agreements between three countries we show that while the pursuit of customs unions cus prevents global free trade from emerging as a coalition proof nash equilibrium the pursuit of free trade agreements ftas does not this result reflects the relatively flexible nature of ftas whereas each fta member can independently undertake further trade liberalization with respect to the non member cu members must do so as a group due to their common external tariff by diverting members exports away from the non member both types of trade agreements induce the non member to voluntarily lower its import tariffs

redistributive income taxation under outsourcing and foreign direct investment this paper deals with optimal income taxation under international outsourcing and fdi we show how the joint effect of outsourcing and fdi on the optimal marginal income tax rates depends on whethe

trade wages and the political economy of trade protection evidence from the colombian trade reforms abstract worker industry affiliation plays a crucial role in how trade policy affects wages in many trade models yet most research has focused on how trade policy affects wages by altering the economy wide returns to a specific worker characteristic i e skill or education rather than through worker industry affiliation this paper exploits drastic trade liberalizations in colombia in the 1980s and 1990s to investigate the relationship between protection and industry wage premiums we relate wage premiums to trade policy in an empirical framework that accounts for the political economy of trade protection accounting for time invariant political economy factors is critical when we do not control for unobserved time invariant industry characteristics we find that workers in protected sectors earn less than workers with similar observable characteristics in unprotected sectors allowing for industry fixed effects reverses the result trade protection increases relative wages this positive relationship persists when we instrument for tariff changes our results are in line with short and medium run models of trade where labor is immobile across sectors or alternatively with the existence of industry rents that are reduced by trade liberalization in the context of the current debate on the rising income inequality in developing countries our findings point to a source of disparity beyond the well documented rise in the economy wide skill premium because tariff reductions were proportionately larger in sectors employing a high fraction of less skilled workers the decrease in the wage premiums in these sectors affected such workers disproportionately

offshoring the nature of tasks and occupational stability empirical evidence for germany using a large administrative data set of individual employment histories for germany this paper studies the relationship between offshoring and the individual risk of leaving the occupation moreover a rich data set on tasks performed in occupations is used to better characterise the sources of worker vulnerability both material and service offshoring are on average not associated with an increase in occupational outflow rates however this association depends on the nature of tasks performed in the occupation higher intensities of interactive and in particular non routine tasks are associated with a larger decrease or a smaller increase in the occupational hazard rate

the interjurisdictional effects of growth controls on housing prices institute of university of i 39 business and california at i economic research berkeley fisher center for real estate and urban economics working paper series working paper no 84 83 the interjurisdictional effects of growth controls on housing prices l by these papers are preliminary in nature their purpose is to stimulate discussion and lawrence katz comment therefore they kenneth t rosen are not to be cited or quoted in any publication without the ex press permission of the author walter a haas school of business