export and output supply functions with endogenous domestic prices abstract this paper deals with the estimation of export supply functions which has been neglected by the literature in favor of the export demand function reliable estimates of export supply elasticities are essential for the evaluation of trade policy interventions the paper estimates short run export and output price elasticities in cote d ivoire we attempt to improve on previous approaches by modeling exported goods and goods intended for domestic consumption as imperfect substitutes incorporating the domestic demand for domestic output and endogenizing the domestic price this should capture important feedback mechanisms missed by previous models

can the human capital approach explain life cycle wage differentials between races and sexes i introduction the trends in gender and racial wage gaps have continued to receive the attention of researchers and policy makers due to their mounting social significance substantial literature concludes that after world war ii the black white pay gap shrank rapidly until the mid 1970s this trend was reversed in the 1980s card and dinardo 2002 couch and daly 2002 darity and myers 1998 o neill 1990 smith and welch 1989 1 in contrast the gender pay gap persisted for four decades after world war ii only in the 1980s did it start to narrow yet it showed only a little progress in the 1990s blau ferber and winkler 2002 goldin 1990 o neill 2003 although a large number of studies have been purported to investigate the sources of male female and black white pay gaps most have not addressed the issue of whether or not the individuals being observed have changed their economic status over their lifetimes the major problem is that longitudinal data are not available over a long enough period to determine the age earnings profiles 2 by using the national longitudinal survey of youth data 1979 cohort nlsy79 this paper examines gender and racial wage gaps among individuals of the same age in an effort to eliminate major life cycle differences while at the same time tracking the changes in the wage gaps over their life spans in particular we would like to provide answers to the following questions what factors can account for the narrowing widening gender wage gaps among blacks whites as they age can the observed life cycle wage gaps be attributed to different paths of postschool human capital accumulation since today s individuals regardless of race or sex have on average completed similar years of schooling among the youth cohort the observed disparity in wages between races and sexes may simply reflect the differences in the quality of schooling family background and postschool investment 3 given that school quality and family background are essentially fixed for an individual as he or she ages in order to address the questions above this paper attempts to further examine the differences in postschool human capital investment behavior among individuals past estimates of the structural parameters for the model of postschool human capital accumulation have however not been fruitful benporath 1970 brown 1976 haley 1976 heckman 1976a 1976b rosen 1976 the major reasons as heckman 1976b points out are that dynamic models are difficult to solve explicitly and that the proportion of time spent investing in on the job training cannot be measured directly moreover to fulfill the dynamic concepts of human capital accumulation longer period longitudinal data must be used to explore the life cycle view of individual wages 4 the lack of empirical investigation in relation to the continuous time dynamic model using panel data therefore leads us to develop an alternative empirical version for estimating the structural parameters of the wage function over a lifetime in other words the purpose of our study is to estimate a dynamic structural model based on the theory of optimal human capital accumulation in accordance with this theory of human capital the wage and its life path can be viewed as the outcome of an optimal path of human capital investment over an individual s life cycle instead of comparing the differences in the outcome of this optimization process i e wages we estimate the key parameters in determining the life cycle wage path as well as further empirically identifying the sources of the wage gap our empirical results first suggest that the male female wage gap mainly arises from gender difference in the marginal costs of human capital production as men in general spend more time in the labor market and gain more work experience than women they tend to have lower marginal costs in the process of human capital production

the effect of occupational segregation on the relative earnings of black males abstract an earnings model which incorporates racial differences in occupational attainment is employed to investigate sources of the earnings differential between black and white males our results suggest that occupational segregation of black men accounts for nearly half of the observed racial earnings differential

labor costs and manufactured exports in developing countries an econometric analysis abstract policies addressing the effects of labor market distortions on exports have not relied upon empirical evidence on the impact of labor costs using an econometric model this paper analyses the effect of labor costs on manufactured exports in 20 less developed countries concluding that labor costs significantly affect manufactured exports the explanatory power of manufacturing capacity is significant in all the countries and in the majority of them export elasticities with respect to export prices and to the price of imported intermediates are also significant pooling cross section and time series data the effect of labor market distortions on manufactured exports is analyzed the conclusion is that the effect of labor market distortions is significant and negative supporting the idea that deregulating the labor market is essential to promote exports

secular and cyclical responses of u s trade to income an evaluation of traditional models in the three decades since guy orcutt s 1950 classic paper evaluating empirical research on international trade flows most trade research has focused on the influence of prices in the decade since the benchmark study by houthakker and magee 1969 examination of the role of prices has accelerated although income is consistently the most significant explanatory variable in these studies it is typically introduced only as a background control variable rather than as a variable of central interest the few explicit studies of the link from income to trade either use proxies such as delivery lags and inventory ratios to investigate the dynamics of the link e g gregory 1971 and artus 1973 or decompose income into trend deviation from trend and in one instance change in deviation from trend in an attempt to separate the secular and business cycle components e g ball eaton and steuer 1966 khan and ross 1975 and dunlevy 1980 stephen magee 1975 pp 188 193 211 214 provides a persuasive rationale for at least the spirit of the second line of research arguing that trade flows respond differently to secular and business cycle income changes and that regression estimates with income in level form mix these effects time domain decomposition is now an established practice with the trend response identified with secular forces like comparative advantage hence could be positive or negative in either demand or supply the deviation from trend response with a business cycle keynesian mechanism hence is likely to be positive in demand and negative in supply and the change in deviation from trend response with a sneed of adjustment constraint hence is likely to be negative the most recent evidence bearing on these issues is provided by dunlevy 1980 who finds that the effect of the business cycle income proxy deviation fromtrend income on the supply of exports for the united states and the united kingdom is positive rather than negative evidence contradicting both theory and evidence in earlier capacity pressure studies in this paper we first evaluate traditional regression estimates of income elasticities of demand and supply for u s imports and exports from 1955 to 1979 then compare these estimates to cross spectral estimates of the secular and business cycle responses of trade to income the spectral technique is used because by definition the approach estimates separately the secular and business cycle links between trade and income if the response of trade to movements in income does differ over cycles regression estimates of income elasticities may reflect bias and instability due to cycle varying parameters regression elasticity estimates with income in trend and deviation from trend forms do provide separate estimates but the decomposition is useful only to the degree that the two variables are accurate proxies for secular and business cycle movements in income it should be emphasized that we are not using spectral analysis to detect lead lag properties since these are more directly obtained in the time domain and are relatively trivial for our sample the unique advantage of spectral analysis is that it isolates secular and business cycle components directly even when the time domain link is only contemporaneous the paper is organized as follows section ii presents and evaluates time domain estimates of standard demand and supply equations for u s imports and exports and presents caveats regarding interpretation of the trend and deviationfrom trend income variables section iii proreceived for publication march 4 1981 revision accepted for publication may 12 1982 university of oregon an earlier draft of this paper was presented at the fall 1980 north american meeting of the econometric society we acknowledge helpful comments from s y kwack john mutti and two anonymous referees we also thank john pippenger for supplying the spectral program specx68 and the university of oregon for a faculty research grant remaining errors are solely ours i application of spectral methods to investigate trade income links was first suggested by ball eaton and steuer 1966 p 503 they were unable to use the technique however because the data series available at that time were too short

moving up the processing ladder in primary product exports sri lanka s value added tea industry governments in many developing countries influenced by the experience of the east asian newly industrialized countries have adopted policies to enhance domestic processing of primary commodities as a tool for accelerating employment growth export revenues and development sri lanka has traditionally exported tea in the form of bulk commodity teas but value added teas such as packaged teas tea bags etc have expanded in recent years this article examines factors affecting the processing of value added tea products in sri lanka by modeling export supply behavior estimates of the long run relationship and short run dynamics of export supply are presented and discussed the price of value added tea relative to bulk tea and industry capacity are identified as the main determinants of export supply while exchange rate changes have no discernible effect the policy implications of the analysis for enhancing further expansion of such value added teas are presented these are of interest for both policy makers and development analysts in particular the reasons that undermine the effectiveness of exchange rate policy as an instrument to stimulate value addition of primary products have much relevance for similar developing countries

monetary policy homeostasis and the transmission mechanism philip howrey 1967 william poole 1970 and john kareken 1970 initiated a formal debate over monetary policy using some variant of an is lm model thomas sargent and neil wallace 1975 extend this work by incorporating a lucas type aggregate supply function and rational expectations in spite of the effort spent in following up on the seminal work by howrey poole and kareken little progress has been made in resolving the debate the central theme of this paper is that the lack of progress is the result of ignoring homeostasis and the nature of the transmission mechanism in order to illustrate the importance of homeostasis and the transmission mechanism this paper extends the standard is lm framework in two ways first it introduces a homeostatic mechanism that generates shortrun responses which correspond to standard is lm behavior and long run responses which reflect full employment second it provides for alternative transmission mechanisms by dropping the assumption that markets clear continuously the paper is organized as follows the model is developed in the next section the following section examines the role of homeostasis and the transmission mechanism in the debate over policy the final section presents the conclusions

neglected method of separating demand and supply in time series regression this article argues that in many markets quantity is demand determined in the short run but price is supply determined and that the dynamic restrictions between price and quantity implied by the model have been widely neglected in empirical research two examples illustrate our point the demand and supply relationships between inflation and unemployment and between the terms of trade and the trade balance in both specifying quantity as a function of lagged prices in demand and price as a function of lagged quantities in supply rather than concentrating on exogenous shift determinants is sufficient to separate demand and supply

schooling choices and demographic cycles this paper examines the effect of demographic cycles on schooling choices and the timing of school completion utilizing data from the u s national longitudinal surveys of labor market experience and from the panel study of income dynamics we find that men and women born during the upswing of a demographic cycle obtain more schooling and take longer to finish a year of schooling than comparable individuals born during the downswing of a demographic cycle the patterns that we document are more complex than would be predicted by any of the theoretical models of educational responses to demographic cycles that have been presented in the literature excerpt

identification of interest rates and international capital flows the conventional paradigm that capital movements respond to differences in interest rates between countries and simultaneously reduce interest rate differentials has been difficult to demonstrate empirically this paper argues that such a demonstrati on may be feasible if a simultaneous model is specified that describe s the dynamics of adjustment and if a data interval is chosen that re veals the dynamics examination of u s and canadian data from the 19 60s supports the argument with monthly observations that paradigm is strongly supported with quarterly observations capital flows and i nterest rates are not significantly related copyright 1988 by mit press

race and human capital while human capital has been used with some success to analyze recent changes in racial income differences scholars have repeatedly pointed to a major empirical problem that appears to severely limit the historical relevanlce and scope of skill based theories as applied to racial questions the challenge they raise is legitimate put simply if measured skill disparities between the races narrowed throughout the twentieth century why did income ratios first begin to converge in the 1960 s in this paper i address this question relying on some unexploited census data by race on education literacy occupations and income using these data that begin with the 1890 census i present new estimates of agespecific relative income positions of black men for all postslavery birth cohorts in addition to reconciling the apparently inconsistent skill and income series these income ratios offer a very different historical record than many economists believe to have been the case to cite a prominent example gunnar myrdal s classic work 1944 saw the economic position of his contemporary black america not only as dismal but made even more so by its sense of hopelessness given the absence of any hint of progress or change while myrdal s pessimism is understandable it appears that even in his day seeds had long been sown that were already permanently altering and improving the relative economic status of black men

white discrimination in provision of black education plantations and towns abstract we present a model of public provision of education for blacks in two discriminatory regimes white plantation controlled and white yeoman town controlled we show that the ability to migrate to a non discriminating district constrains the ability of both types of regimes to discriminate the model produces time series of educational outcomes for whites and blacks that mimic the behavior seen in post reconstruction south carolina to the onset of the civil rights act it also fits the post world war ii black white income differentials

impact of the terms of trade on the u s trade balance a reexamination the right conclusion could be that there is a strong connection between the spectral components with specified periods a possible economic interpretation could identify a strong long term in the sense of the specified periods connection between both series but that would still not allow us to say anything concerning the size and direction of the time delay between the two series for such an analysis we would have to at least consider the phase angles between the components because of the ambivalent meaning of the phase angle in relation to the direction and number of periods the final answer could come only from the time domain analysis however the fact that only spectral components with longer periods i e smaller frequencies show coherency suggests something else in order to influence the balance of trade the changes in the terms of trade should be durable enough mathematical formalization of this concept of durability would therefore be helpful i would propose that further research be done in this respect

continuous and feasible implementation of rational expectations lindahl allocations abstract in this paper we consider bayesian implementation of rational expectations lindahl allocations for economic environments with public goods when agents are incompletely informed about environments we construct a continuous and feasible mechanism whose bayesian equilibrium allocations coincide with rational expectations lindahl allocations we not only allow the types of individuals to be unknown but also allow both the preferences and the initial endowments to be unknown to the designer in addition we allow some types of boundary equilibrium allocations and a continuous information structure journal of economic literatureclassification number c72 d71 d82 h41

racial segregation in the public schools and adult labor market outcomes the case of black americans residential segregation has played a central role in theories of minority entrepreneurship and in the diversification of the u s labor market racial diversity in public accommodations including schools has been an issue of continuous public policy debate at least since the u s supreme court s plessy versus ferguson decision 1896 this study applies theory from the literature on social capital to an examination of the role of racial segregation in the public schools of blacks during childhood on their adult likelihood to become self employed and their level of occupational status the model results indicate that after controlling for a number of individual household and metropolitan area factors lower rates of segregation during public schooling results in higher likelihood of wage salary employment and self employment among a cohort of black americans that attended public schools during the 1960s

supply and demand factors for organic produce although the organic produce industry is growing dramatically little is known about market structure we estimate a system of reduced form equations to evaluate supply and demand factors that influence equilibrium farm price and quantity in wholesale markets for organic broccoli carrots and lettuce in the long run demand factors dominate supply factors reduced wholesaling costs increased margins by which organic wholesale price exceeds nonorganic price and higher consumer income stimulate both farm price and output increasing the nonorganic farm price decreases equilibrium quantity of organics market expansion strategies should target consumers and wholesalers

initial conditions at emancipation the long run effect on black white wealth and earnings inequality abstract black white wealth inequality is much greater than black white earnings inequality in the united states the existing empirical literature has not been able to fully explain the wealth gap this paper investigates how much of current black white income and wealth inequality can be explained by initial conditions at emancipation and nearly 100 years of segregated schools a two sector model with group specific human capital accumulation and school expenditure differences can explain the path of black white convergence in earnings over the past 130 years the model also reproduces the fact that black white wealth ratios remain much lower than black white earnings ratios

the j curve a literature review due to lag structure currency devaluation is said to worsen the trade balance first and improve it later resulting in a pattern that resemble the letter j hence the j curve phenomenon since its introduction by magee in 1973 brooking papers on economic activity 1 pp 303 25 a large number of studies have attempted to test the phenomenon using different techniques and different model specifications the results are at best ambiguous and deserve to be collected together for the future generation of researchers and graduate students this paper fills such a vacuum in the literature by reviewing the j curve related empirical papers

ratio lindahl equilibria and an informationally efficient and implementable mixed ownership system abstract in this paper we formalize an informationally efficient and implementable mixed ownership economic institutional framework by using the ratio lindahl equilibrium that yields pareto efficient and individually rational allocations for public goods economies with general variable returns we consider the incentive aspects of the system by giving an incentive compatible informationally efficient and privacy preserving mechanism whose nash allocations coincide with ratio lindahl allocations moreover the mechanism is well behaved in the sense that it uses an individually feasible balanced and continuous outcome function and further has a message space of minimal dimension

comment on a neglected method of separating demand and supply in time series regression by stephen e haynes and joe a stone this article examines some difficulties associated with the haynes stone model and attempts to clarify how the model can be justified as representing the hypothesis that quantity is demand determined and price is supply determined it also argues that the applications of such a model as was done by haynes and stone might not have resolved the controversies related to the phillips curve and the supply function of exports or imports

slavery education and inequality abstract we investigate the effect of slavery on the current level of income inequality across us counties we find that a larger proportion of slaves over population in 1860 persistently increases inequality and in particular inequality across races we also show that a crucial channel of transmission from slavery to racial inequality is human capital accumulation i e current inequality is primarily influenced by slavery through the unequal educational attainment of blacks and whites finally we provide suggestive evidence that the underlying links run through the political exclusion of former slaves and the resulting negative influence on the local provision of education

feasible and continuous implementation there has been a great deal of research in recent years investigating the question of whether or not there exist institutions game forms for which the set of equilibria will coincide with the set of walrasian equilibria in this paper we show the existence of a game form that is feasible both for equilibrium and disequilibrium strategies continuous and for which the set of nash equilibria coincides with the set of constrained walrasian equilibria for all pure exchange economies the game form allows agents to behave strategically both with respect to their preferences and their initial endowments

black white earnings ratios the role of cohort size effects abstract while black white earning ratios have been rising over time across cohorts there is some evidence that they have been dropping over time within cohorts of recent entrants to the labor market this has coincided with the entry of the large baby boom cohorts into the labor market this paper examines the role of race differences in cohort size effects on black white earnings ratios for male high school graduates using current population survey data in larger cohorts the black white earnings ratio is lower at entry and falls as the cohort progresses through the career consistent with recent evidence

the human capital approach to black white earnings inequality some unsettled questions the persistence of earnings differences between blacks and whites in the united states has been a topic that has received a substantial amount of attention in both theoretical and empirical research in economics the differential in earnings typically is tied to racial differences in human capital accumulation this paper advances a systematic critique of the human capital approach to black white inequality inadequacies are identified in human capital theory as a general theory of inequality as well as a specific theory of racial inequality the critique suggests that a serious analysis of the black white earnings gap will require an entirely new approach to the study of racial income inequality

assimilation across the latino generations there is concern that hispanics have not mimicked the european immigrant experience of great generational advance jeffrey grogger and stephen trejo 2002 reasons for concern vary but a theme is that latino immigrants and their offspring are less committed to assimilation than europeans were discrimination adherence to spanish and frequent trips home due to proximity are said to be reasons i examine two aspects of generational mobility of hispanic and mexican men education and wages a major problem in studying this assimilation is ambiguity in defining generations and ethnicity across census and current population survey cps files generations are defined as follows 1st generation born outside the united states 2nd generation at least one parent born outside the united states 3rd generation or more both parents born in the united states while reference is made for convenience to the 3rd generation it includes all generations beyond the second since no distinction was made between the 2nd and subsequent generations in the 1980 and 1990 censuses or the march cps s until 1994 i use data from four decennial censuses between 1940 and 1970 four special cps supplements on language and immigration 1979 1983 1986 1988 to cover the 1980 s and four successive march cps s starting in 1994 to represent the 1990 s ethnicity is straightforward to define for the 1st and 2nd generation where place or birth or self reported ethnicity can be used to define hispanic ethnicity the problem is the 3rd generation where information available for hispanic descent and specific ethnicity differs across the censuses and cps s details of the rules adopted to define specific hispanic ethnicity are available in smith 2001

the j curve effect and us agricultural and industrial trade this paper examines the j curve hypothesis for us agricultural and manufactured goods using the shiller lag model the results support the j curve effect for agricultural goods but not for manufactured goods these findings explain why many studies in the literature fail to support the j curve phenomenon there are two explanations for these findings 1 the aggregation bias of data that combine both agricultural and manufactured goods and 2 the country under study is often an industrial nation like the us or japan with a high proportion of manufactured goods in both exports and imports

implementation of lindahl allocations with nontotal nontransitive preferences abstract the purpose of this paper is to present a mechanism the nash allocations of which coincide with the lindahl allocations even when preferences are nontransitive or nontotal this extension to include nontotal nontransitive preferences is potentially very important since preferences of agents are nontransitive nontotal in many cases in particular in the case where the players are groups of individuals besides the mechanism presented here uses outcome functions that are individually feasible balanced not merely weakly balanced continuous differentiable around nash equilibria and furthermore almost everywhere differentiable moreover the mechanism has a message space of minimal dimension

the supply and demand for imports and exports in a simultaneous model previous studies on the behaviour of aggregate exports and imports have tended to ignore the simultaneous relationship between quantity and price this paper investigates the price responsiveness of export and import demand and supply in eight african countries the results indicate that export demand price elasticities are smaller when the sample is african the import supply and demand elasticities were found to be generally large the marshall lerner condition of balance of payment stability is found to be easily satisfied a positively sloped function of export supply is found to exist for a majority of countries in the sample the average time lag of export supply is found to be about a year the disequilibrium model is found to be more appropriate for import demand import supply and export supply

a natural experiment for identifying the impact of natural trade barriers on exports abstract the paper investigates the relative importance of trade policy and natural sources of export taxation in malawi a landlocked african economy these sources of export taxation are in turn used to explore how export supply would respond to trade liberalisation as opposed to measures which lower other international trade costs the findings indicate that trade policy barriers are now only a limited source of true export taxation and that trade policy reform needs to be complemented with reforms to reduce international trade including transport costs

exchange rate of the us dollar and the j curve the case of oil exporting countries abstract this study examines the effects of changes in the exchange rate of the us dollar on the trade balances of three oil exporting countries namely iran venezuela and saudi arabia an exchange rate pass through model is applied to allow changes in the exchange rate of the dollar to affect prices of traded goods then the impact of changes in prices on the quantities of imports and exports of these economies is estimated the results suggest a partial exchange rate pass through to these countries import and export prices in terms of the us dollar while the three countries raise the price of their primary export namely crude oil in response to a depreciation of the dollar saudi arabia s long run pricing strategy in securing a larger market share stands in contrast to that of the two other opec members the sum of the estimated long run price elasticities of demand for imports and exports is found to exceed unity for iran and venezuela but less than unity for saudi arabia

separate and unequal in the labor market human capital and the jim crow wage gap competing explanations for the long standing gap between black and white earnings attribute different weight to wage discrimination and human capital differences using new data on local school quality we find that human capital played a predominant role in determining 1940 wage and occupational status gaps in the south despite entrenched racial discrimination in civic life and the lack of federal employment protections the resulting wage gap coincides with the higher end of the range of estimates from the post civil rights era we estimate that truly separate but equal schools would have reduced wage inequality by 29 48

employment and unemployment in the 1930s the great depression is to economics what the big bang is to physics as an event the depression is largely synonymous with the birth of modern macroeconomics and it continues to haunt successive generations of economists with respect to labor and labor markets these facts evidently include wage rigidity persistently high unemployment rates and long term joblessness traditionally aggregate time series have provided the econometric grist for distinguishing explanations of the great depression recent research on labor markets in the 1930s however has shifted attention from aggregate to disaggregate time series and towards microeconomic evidence this shift in focus is motivated by two factors first disaggregated data provide many more degrees of freedom than the decade or so of annual observations associated with the depression and thus may prove helpful in distinguishin g macroeconomic explanations second disaggregation has revealed aspects of economic behavior hidden in the time series that may be essential to their proper interpretation and in any case are worthy of study in their own right although the substantive findings of recent research are too new to judge their permanent significance i believe that the shift towards disaggregated analysis is an important contribution the paper begins by reviewing the conventional statistics of the united states labor market during the great depression and the paradigms to explain them it then turns to recent studies of employment and unemployment using disaggregated data of various types the paper concludes with discussions of

the effect on black white wage differences of differences in the quantity and quality of education using data from the national longitudinal survey of youth for the years 1979 88 the author examines the extent to which black white differences in educational attainment educational quality and unmeasured individual ability can explain black white wage differences an analysis that corrects for both selectivity and ability biases inherent in estimating the education wage relationship shows that the main source of the black white wage differential is the racial difference in the quality rather than quantity of schooling in fact the author concludes closing the racial gap in the basic skills learned in school could reduce the wage differential by two thirds

is there a long run relation between the trade balance and the real effective exchange rate of ldcs abstract using quarterly data over 1973 1988 period the cointegration analysis is used and it is shown that the trade balance and the real effective exchange rate of some ldcs are cointegrated in the long run this approach is argued to be a close substitute for testing the marshall lerner condition

specification of supply behavior in international trade supply behavior in international trade has been notoriously difficult to capture empirically indeed so few published supply studies exist that stern francis and schumacher s 1976 bibliographical survey of price elasticities in international trade devotes over 350 pages to demand estimates but barely 10 pages to supply estimates in recent years only goldstein and khan 1978 and dunlevy 1980 using simultaneous equation estimation techniques have reported estimates of supply behavior in international trade exogenous shocks to demand and supply for traded goods in general influence both quantity and price for supply estimates it is unclear a priori whether the response is more appropriately specified with quantity or price as the dependent variable however if supplying firms in an uncertain world pursue pricing strategies based on past market performance as in zabel 1981 the appropriate specification is a supply price equation in this case prices respond to lagged quantities which implies that the traditional supply quantity specification with present and past prices as explanatory variables cannot capture the dynamic supply behavior in this study we explore the hypothesis that previous attempts to estimate supply behavior have generally failed not only because of the well known problem of simultaneity bias but also because quantity rather than price was specified as the dependent variable section ii presents and discusses traditional supply quantity equations based on quarterly data for aggregate exports and imports for the united kingdom and the united states from 1947 to 1979 section iii briefly discusses the theoretical rationale of a supply price specification and presents estimates of supply price equations based on the same data section iv evaluates the empirical evidence to determine whether a supply quantity or supply price formulation is more appropriate and compares estimates of long run price elasticities of supply based on the two approaches a final section summarizes the conclusions

production of public safety are socioeconomic characteristics of local communities important factors this paper uses the translog cost function and cross section data from florida to investigate the importance of socioeconomic characteristics sec of local communities in the production of public safety the approach used is noteworthy in four respects 1 the underlying production function is specified as an agem production function 2 sec are treated as non purchased fixed inputs 3 two variables are used to proxy sec in estimation and 4 the paper test for the existence of endogenous quality differences in safety it is shown that exclusion of sec from the production cost function of safety leads to misspecification and hence they provide a misleading guide to policy

the southern wage gap human capital and the quality of education this suggests that school quality can play an important role in explaining the racial wage gap welch 28 and smith 19 both provide anecdotal evidence that relates the narrowing of school quality to the falling racial gap in earnings the rising rate of return for black workers on years of school documented by weiss and williamson 27 welch 28 and smith and welch 20 also is consistent with the improving quality of their education nevertheless school quality has not been incorporated into systematic statistical analysis of the racial wage gap this is the main focus of this paper i examine 15 southern states which had data on the segregated white and black school systems i have attempted to link the demonstrated lower quality of education during segregation in the south to the persistent southern wage gap in addition i have tried to

race and home ownership from the end of the civil war to the present we present new estimates of home ownership for black and white households from 1870 to 2007 black ownership increased by 46 percentage points whereas white ownership increased by 20 points remarkably 25 of the 26 point narrowing occurred between 1870 and 1910 part of this early convergence is accounted for by falling white ownership due to movement out of agriculture but most is accounted for by post emancipation gains among blacks after 1910 white and black households increased ownership but the racial gap barely changed we discuss the influence of residential segregation public policy and permanent income on the ownership gap

race and human capital comment according to human capital theory changes in the racial schooling gap are a key factor in the historical evolution of blackwhite male income ratios in a recent paper in this review 1984 james smith points out a basic paradox in the human capital explanation race differences in years of schooling have diminished sharply and continuously for male cohorts born in the twentieth century black white male income ratios however rose only slightly in the aggregate before 1960 after 1960 the ratios increased appreciably smith resolves the paradox by constructing new estimates of the racial schooling gap for cohorts stretching back to the civil war based on retrospective educational attainment data from the 1940 and subsequent censuses race differences in years of schooling widened among males born from 1886 to 1910 additionally the quality of black schooling fell relative to the quality of white schooling since these cohorts dominate the census occupation and income statistics until 1960 smith claims the relative constancy of black white income ratios until 1960 is consistent with the human capital model this comment challenges one of smith s conclusions the increase in the racial schooling gap is shown to be spurious scholars often interpret census attainment data as a measure of years of schooling but the data refer to highest grade completed historically the average black pupil took longer than a single school year to complete a grade retention alone would not bias the census attainment data most blacks born in the late nineteenth century however were educated in ungraded schools for them census attainment data measure years of schooling not grades the shift from ungraded to graded schools took place throughout the period of educational retrogression identified by smith it is the change from years to grades that causes black schooling levels to appear to lag behind white schooling levels consistent data show a continuously decreasing racial schooling gap whatever the merit of smith s explanation it cannot rest on census attainment data beginning in 1890 the u s bureau of the census reported school attendance rates for narrow age groups for example ages 5 to 9 1 i use these data to construct new estimates of average years of schooling in the following manner let p j proportion of children of age j at school a e minimum age at entering school and a l maximum age at leaving school i assume that a e 5 and a l 20 since attendance rates before age 5 or after age 20 were negligible for the period because data are unavailable for single years of age i also assume the agespecific attendance rates are equal to the average attendance rate for the relevant age 2 j a l group the sum ej a e p j estimates average years of schooling 3 empirically the number of students who skip a grade is less than the number who fail the grade hence average years of schooling should exceed average highest grade completed table 1 presents the cohort specific estimates of years of schooling according to my calculations the racial schooling gap fell from 3 8 years among 1886 90 cohorts to 2 5 years among 1906 10 cohorts according

race and human capital reply to arrive at a tenable interpretation of black history it is important to resolve the conflict between my measure retrospective years of schooling completed and robert margo s measure prospective accumulation across ages of cohort specific attendance rates my series reconciled the apparent inconsistency between the stagnant pre 1940 black white income ratios and what scholars had previously thought was a steady narrowing of racial education differences margo s series not only would restore that incon

competitive firm behavior under risk in disequilibrium trading the objective of this paper is to study the behavior of the purely competitive firm in a market in which traders plans may not be realized each period the emphasis of the study is motivated by a desire to introduce explicit price makers into the theory of competitive markets the method of introducing price makers may lead to situations in which markets are not cleared each period and shortages may arise with the realization of plans being in doubt in this environment traders learn to adjust decisions to offset periodic disappointment multiperiod models are introduced to analyze the decision process of the competitive firm in the market and stochastic dynamic programming methods are used to obtain characteristics of optimal plans results are compared to the situation in which plans are always realized

education achievement in segregated school systems the effects of separate but equal educational achievement in segregated school systems was considerably lower in the black schools than in the white schools economic historians have argued that the racial achievement gap reflected the discriminatory funding of the black schools this paper assesses counterfactually the historical effects of a separate but equal policy of educational finance using cross sectional data from 1930 and 1940 i estimate race specific educational production functions eliminating race differences in inputs supplied by school boards explains 40 50 percent of the racial achievement gap depending on how achievement is measured the remainder appears to reflect the impact of family background on achievement of which the most important effect was adult black illiteracy a legacy of slavery and educational backwardness in the late 19th century the paper also shows how school boards marginal valuation of black achievement can be recovered from the production function estimates compared to preferences that would have led them to voluntarily practice equality southern school boards judged black achievement to be worth roughly half the value they placed on white achievement this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

export supply capacity and relative prices in the neoclassical approach to specifying an export supply equation relative prices and capacity are assumed to play a crucial role in domestic firms decisions to supply exports in the keynesian approach the willingness of domestic firms to supply foreign markets is considered to be largely a function of domestic demand pressure keynesian analyses do not allow for the impact of relative prices this paper blends the two approaches in a model in which a firm is assumed to choose first the level of productive capacity and then one period later to determine production and allocation between foreign and domestic markets on the basis of realized prices demand conditions and installed capacity the conclusion both prices and capacity are significant determinants of export supply

u s bilateral trade balances and the dollar abstract u s bilateral export and import values with seven large trading partners are tested for real exchange rate effects over 1975 1985 the results suggest that dollar devaluation would have the most favorable impact on the u s trade balance in the case of japan and the least favorable in the case of canada

the relative effects of demand and supply on output growth and price change this study demonstrates an analytical model for evaluating the relative importance of demand and supply factors in determining output growth and price change empirical analysis of the 1947 80 data shows that for most industry groups demand effects are more dominant in determining output growth whereas supply effects are more dominant in determining price change the conclusion remains the same when the effects of uncontrollable variables such as taste and technology are excluded the study provides useful information for analyzing the effectiveness of demand and supply management policies in affecting output growth and price change introduction recently the stability and validity of the phillips curve and the effectiveness of demand management policies to deal with stagflation have been questioned by many economists evidence has been accumulated e g eckstein 1984 to suggest that variations in aggregate supply price were the predominant influences on the general price level of the u s economy but little is known about whether demand or supply factors were more dominant in determining economic growth studies on the relative importance of demand and supply factors at the industry level have been very few but the recent studies by houthakker 1979 and 1981 suggested the importance of supply shifts and or economies of

discrimination human capital and black white unemployment evidence from cities neither human capital theory nor the declining discrimination hypothesis can account for the failure of the black white employment gap to fall along with the wage gap however the weakness of the labor market since 1970 suggests that sustained employment discrimination in the context of restrictions on compensatory wage discrimination can explain these trends this hypothesis is assessed with a cross sectional model employing 1980 census summary data on smsas the innovative feature of this model is the use of complaints of job discrimination received by the equal employment opportunity commission as proxies for actual discrimination results support the contention that the forms of discrimination have undergone a compositional shift and that employment discrimination reduces the probability of black employment

implementation of the lindahl correspondence by a single valued feasible and continuous mechanism this paper considers the problem of designing mechanisms whose nash allocations coincide with the lindahl allocations for public goods economies with more than one private good unlike previous mechanisms the mechanism presented here has a single valued feasible and continuous outcome function furthermore when there are no public goods in economies feasible and continuous implementation of the constrained walrasian correspondence can be obtained as a corollary of our theorem 1

political models of the business cycle should be revived political models of the business cycle have typically been ignored because they appear inconsistent with rational behavior and because empirical evidence is inconclusive this paper addresses the second issue demonstrating for u s real gnp unemployment and inflation that electoral cycles persistent patterns across electoral terms are significant but apparently only for republican incumbents and that partisan cycles persistent differences between parties are also significant these findings are consistent with the conjecture that a minority party is more constrained by electoral concerns whereas a majority party is freer to pursue partisan objectives

black men s relative earnings are the gains illusory this study investigates the hypothesis that the increase in the median earnings of black men relative to those of white men after 1964 in the united states largely reflects the labor force withdrawal of high proportions of low wage black men who availed themselves of government transfers analyzing current population survey and social security administration data through 1985 the author finds little empirical support for three direct implications of the sample censoring hypothesis of the total measured gain in relative earnings between 1964 and 1985 from 531 to 663 or 13 2 percentage points he finds that only 14 or 1 8 percentage points can be attributed to sample selection

explaining black white wage convergence 1940 1950 during the 1940s racial differences in wages narrowed at an unusually rapid pace using a decomposition technique different from that of previous studies the author shows that wage compression be

understanding black white wage differentials 1960 1990 understanding black white wage differentials 1960 1990 author s james j heckman thomas m lyons petra e todd source the american economic review vol 90 no 2 papers and proceedings of the one hundred twelfth annual meeting of the american economic association may 2000 pp 344 349 published by american economic association stable url http www jstor org stable 117248 accessed 16 08 2008 00 56

the role of human capital in earnings differences between black and white men d uring the past 50 years the earnings of black men have increased substantially both in absolute terms and relative to those of white men as shown in figure 1 in 1940 the black white weekly earnings ratio among men ages 25 34 was 49 percent by 1980 it had increased to 79 percent during the 1980s however the overall black white earnings gap did not narrow and at younger ages the gap actually widened although the 1980s is not the first decade since 1940 in which black men made little or no gains in relative earnings the 1950s was another the lack of progress in the 1980s is nevertheless puzzling and a source of concern this article examines the factors underlying the differential in earnings between black men and white men with a focus on the role of human capital since 1940 successive generations of black men entering the labor force have been increasingly more educated relative to white men both in terms of years of school completed and in the quality of schooling obtained as the education and income levels of black parents increased racial differences in the transmission of human capital in the home were also likely to have narrowed this convergence in educational differences combined with the migration of blacks out of the south contributed to the narrowing in the racial gap in earnings over the 1940 80 period particularly in the first half of the period but human capital factors education and migration were not the only source of convergence in black white differences in earnings the patterns of change in the earnings gap support the contention that declining labor market discrimination against blacks has also contributed to the rise in the black white earnings ratio moreover the acquisition of human capital itself has been strongly affected by societal and governmental discrimination since blacks were long provided with greatly inferior schooling resources

nominal and real effective exchange rates of middle eastern countries and their trade performance indexes of real and nominal effective exchange rates that are published by the imf are mostly for industrial countries none of the middle eastern countries have received any attention on this regard this paper tries to close the gap by constructing such indexes for 11 middle eastern countries over 1971 i 1994 iv period as an application long run response of their trade balance to devaluation is also investigated

political parties and the variable duration of business cycles a number of recent studies explore how political factors influence real economic activity with electoral models economic performance peaks near the election as in the retrospective model of nordhaus 30 electoral cycles also emerge at least in fiscal policy in the rational expectations model of rogoff and sibert 34 and rogoff 33 with partisan models economic activity differs systematically by party as in both the ideological model of hibbs 26 and the rationalexpectations model of alesina 1 economic activity surges after election of democratic presidents and recedes after election of republican presidents although recent tests of the electoral approach are supportive 21 22 24 25 the partisan approach enjoys the more compelling support 2 3 9 10 23 26 27 the electoral and partisan views are not mutually exclusive as the possibility of conflict between ideology and the desire to be reelected as the election approaches is well recognized indeed our evidence here is consistent with a combined electoralpartisan model the macroeconomic literature at large however has been slow to absorb accumulating evidence that the party affiliation of the incumbent president together with the timing of the electoral period are linked to real economic activity in this study we gauge the significance of these links for the united states and relate them to two important strands of the macroeconomic literature one strand the time series literature investigates the statistical properties of measures of real economic activity finding that these measures often exhibit nonconstant means and heteroscedastic variances in autoregressive integrated moving average arima models the conditional mean is a function of past innovations while the conditional variance is constant applications of arima and related models beginning with nelson and plosser 29 suggest that real economic activity for the united states exhibits near random walk behavior in autoregressive conditional heteroscedastic arch models the conditional variance is a function of past squared innovations while the conditional mean is constant applications of arch and related models beginning with engle 17 suggest that real activity exhibits heteroscedastic variances

disequilibrium dynamics an empirical study despite the amount of attention devoted in economics to the study of equilibria the process by which an equilibrium can be attained is not well understood stephen smale 1977 called this the fundamental problem of economic theory this paper explores the microeconomics of the adjustment process by examining empirically the disequilibrium behavior of firms implications for the microeconomic foundations of macroeconomics are stressed the data from german industry describe the month by month price and output changes of individual firms as well as the firms own assessments of the levels of their inventories and unfilled orders because the data are qualitative use is made of the multivariate conditional logit model developed by marc nerlove and s james press 1973 1976 and extended by kawasaki and zimmermann section i discusses the underlying model of firm behavior and the significance of the inquiry for macroeconomics in section ii the econometric techniques are briefly described in section iii the empirical results are summarized and interpretations of the results are offered in section iv

school quality and black white relative earnings a direct assessment the wage differential between black and white men fell from 40 percent in 1960 to 25 percent in 1980 it has been argued that this convergence reflects improvements in the relative quality of black schools to test this hypothesis we assembled data on pupil teacher ratios annual teacher pay and term length for black and white schools in the eighteen segregated states from 1915 to 1966 these data are linked to estimated returns to education for southern born men from different cohorts and states in 1960 1970 and 1980 improvements in the relative quality of black schools explain 20 percent of the narrowing of the black white earnings gap between 1960 and 1980

inventories and sticky prices more on the microfoundations of macroeconomics the role of inventories in making prices sticky is studied by analyzing a dynamic linear quadratic model of a monopoly firm facing stochastic demand but able to store its finished goods in inventory it is shown that in contrast to the usual presumption firms that exhibit the smallest output responses to demand fluctuations may also exhibit the smallest price fluctuations specifically firms which have very flexible inventory storage facilities or are subjected to very transitory demand shocks will rely on inventories as buffers and will change neither production nor price very much on the other hand firms which have very inflexible storage facilities or whose demand shocks are quite permanent will display large swings in both price and output the standard assumption about inventory carrying costs that has been used in the literature that they are linear is shown to imply that production is impervious to fluctuations in demand it is also established that prices may respond more strongly to positive demand shocks than to negative ones if it is impossible to hold negative inventories i e to have unfilled orders the model offers an explanation for stickiness in relative prices however under certain circumstances it may help explain the persistence of inflation this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

biased screening and discrimination in the labor market the traditional economic analysis of discrimination is based on gary becker s study of taste discrimination by employers employees and consumers more recent work by kenneth arrow 1972 1973 has attempted to interpret intergroup wage differences in an alternative framework as a rational reaction to uncertainty in labor markets his model of statistical discrimination demonstrates that when the screening process used to determine a worker s qualifications is costly and prior expectations of productivity differ across race or sex groups then wage differentials may arise between workers of identical productivity by implicitly assuming a perfect screening process arrow ignores a potentially important source of wage differentials namely the fact that the screening process might be a more reliable predictor of productivity for one group than for another our paper generalizes the arrow model in two ways first in contrast to arrow we assume that all groups have identical distributions of productivity secondly the screening process used by the firm to determine an applicant s productivity is biased in the sense that a members of various groups may pass the test in different proportions despite their identical productivity distributions and b the predictive power of the test might vary across groups our objective is to analyze the effects of these types of biases in the screening process on the wage differentials between different population groups

estimation of j curves united states and canada delayed reactions to exchange rate changes in trade on current account balances are known to exist in both the united states and canada a model has been constructed to estimate relative price effects for trade with major partners in order to determine the quantitative magnitudes and relevant time delays for both countries adjustments in trade accounts there is a distinct tendency for balances to worsen when exchange depreciation first occurs and then to improve after several quarters have passed there is also a tendency for the balances to worsen again the u s and canadian time profiles of adjustment are found to be similar

unemployment inflation and monetarism the council s report provides a look at the 1969 71 game plan to disinflate by means of retarding aggregate demand the president elect s task force on inflation recommended as a first interim step that aggregate demand be slowed so as to bring the unemployment rate back to some equilibrium region around 4 5 percent what happened was that under the cover of the expectation and acceptance of such a limited step towards re equilibration the administration gradually tightened monetary and fiscal policy so severely as gradually to send the unemployment rate whizzing past the equilibrium zone to around 6 percent to my knowledge the theory of how and how well this medicine would act to cure the patient of his inflation was never spelled out by the council of economic advisers pp 533 34