why are there so many long term sick in britain this paper examines the upward trend of numbers in receipt of invalidity benefit the major contributory benefit for the long term sick in britain since 1971 possible explanations include the rising level of unemployment through much of the period the heightened link between ill health and early retirement changes in the real level of benefits and changes in the composition of the workforce these possibilities are examined using a variety of methodologies time series cross section and fixed effects models copyright 1991 by royal economic society

uk labour market policy then and now this article considers the evolution of uk labour market policy during the last 30 years it does this through the lens of the social model the social model encompasses the employment relations system the social welfare system and the education and training system it was changed dramatically by the thatcher and major governments the succeeding labour and coalition governments largely embraced this new model and in some ways increased the pace of change the consequences for labour market performance employment unemployment productivity and inequality are explored

production subsidy and countervailing duties in vertically related markets the hog pork case between canada and the united states this paper analyzes u s countervailing import duties aimed at offsetting the effects of a canadian hog production subsidy approximate countervailing duty formulae for two alternative objectives are derived the permissible range of these duties is illustrated and empirical evidence is provided to restore equilibrium at the presubsidy level in the u s hog market a countervailing duty on hog imports suffices this duty should be less than the unit hog production subsidy to restore equilibrium in both the u s hog and pork markets countervailing duties on both hog and pork imports are required such duties should be less than the unit subsidy and the duty on pork should be less than the duty on hogs

coase lecture human capital inequality and tax reform recent past and future prospects even before the financial crisis many developed economies were facing growing inequality and struggling to maintain employment and earnings this paper addresses two key questions what has happened to inequality where will tax and welfare reforms have most impact the uk is used as a running example the analysis suggests that the pattern of sluggish real wages at the bottom looks set to continue and longer term earnings growth will come mainly from high skilled occupations growing earnings inequality will bring increasing pressure on the tax and welfare system a blueprint for a coherent tax policy reform is presented

pensions and labour market participation in the united kingdom unlike most other european countries the united kingdom s pension system is not well described by an analysis of the social security element for 30 years or more around half the workforce has been covered by private occupational pensions something like half of the income of pensioners comes from non socialsecurity sources and this proportion is growing of the workforce in the mid 1990 s 75 percent are contracted out of the secondtier state earnings related pension scheme serps into private occupational or personal pensions partly as a result of these facts the united kingdom also differs from many other countries in one other important respect its state pension system is solvent tax rates necessary to pay for it are not predicted to rise despite the fact that the number of people over state retirement age is predicted to rise from 15 7 percent of the whole population to over 24 percent in 2050 2 in this paper we begin by describing the labor market behavior of individuals around pension age we also consider the coverage of the various parts of the social security system we go on to explain the structure of state pensions in the united kingdom and compute the incentives for retirement that the structure creates focusing on early retirement and the role of disability benefits which are especially relevant for lower skilled workers we compare these incentives with those facing workers with private occupational schemes who now make up the mnajority of older workers close to retirement the structure of incentives is found to match well with the observed patterns of labor market participation in the data l the labor market behavior of older persons in the united kingdom the labor market behavior of older persons in the united kingdom has been characterized by a severe fall in the participation of men the rate of participation among recent cohorts falls sharply below 80 percent after the age of 50 and declines rapidly thereafter in contrast the secular rise in the participation of women has resulted in a small upward trend in participation among women in the 55 60 age bracket with participation rates approaching those for men

u s trade remedy law and agriculture trade diversion and investigation effects we study u s agricultural antidumping and countervailing duty cases from 1980 to 2005 and gauge the effectiveness of trade remedy law as a form of protection the purpose is to measure the resulting investigation and trade diversion effects previous research on trade in manufactured products has shown that the domestic protection offered by ad and cv duties is largely offset by trade diversion in contrast we find that for agriculture trade diversion is relatively unimportant so ad and cvd cases are very effective forms of protection for u s agriculture les auteurs etudient les cas de tarifs antidumping et de tarifs compensatoires dans l agriculture aux etats unis entre 1980 et 2005 et evaluent l efficience de cette forme de protection l objectif est de mesurer les effets resultant des enquetes et de la diversion de commerce des etudes anterieures sur le commerce de produits manufacturiers ont montre que la protection offerte par ces mesures antidumping et compensatoires etait largement contrebalancee par la diversion de commerce a contrario il appert qu en agriculture la diversion de commerce est relativement peu importante voila qui fait que les mesures antidumping et compensatoires sont des formes de protection efficientes pour l agriculture americaine

the effect of immigration along the distribution of wages this paper analyses the effect immigration has on wages of native workers unlike most previous work we estimate wage effects along the distribution of wages we derive a flexible empirical strategy that does not rely on pre allocating immigrants to particular skill groups in our empirical analysis we demonstrate that immigrants downgrade considerably upon arrival as for the effects on native wages we find that immigration depresses wages below the 20th percentile of the wage distribution but leads to slight wage increases in the upper part of the wage distribution the overall wage effect of immigration is slightly positive the positive wage effects we find are although modest too large to be explained by an immigration surplus we suggest alternative explanations based on the idea that immigrants are paid less than the value of what they contribute to production generating therefore a surplus and we assess the magnitude of these effects

the productivity puzzle abstract the productivity puzzle is the unexplained drop in productivity growth rates that began circa 1970 when standard productivity measures are adjusted for employer incentives for labor hoarding approximately 10 of this drop is explained

entry into the market for large transport aircraft abstract european governments have been accused of unfair trading practices in providing subsidies for market entry in the large commercial aircraft industry a capacity game is calibrated for 1987 to 2006 showing that the disadvantage of late entry is overcome only after a long time hence market entry is unlikely without government subsidies the scale and scope effects of production outweigh the output reducing effects of a monopoly government supported market entry as an anti monopoly policy yields higher consumer welfare overall welfare is lower due to large losses in producer surplus

are preferential trading arrangements trade liberalizing or protectionist preferential trade arrangements and especially free trade agreements have mushroomed in importance in the 1990s this has revived research on the effects of these arrangements both on the welfare of the member countries and those excluded and on the momentum for further liberalization of the open multilateral trading system this paper reviews the analyses and evidence to date as to these effects showing that analytically anything can happen and that to date there has been insufficient experience to draw conclusions from empirical evidence

older people s participation in extra cost disability benefits the targeting of an uk extra cost disability benefit for older people attendance allowance is analyzed using longitudinal data from the british household panel survey first a binary model of benefit participation is used to investigate whether receipt is responsive to the onset of disability second matching estimators are used to evaluate the consequences of missed participation on later financial wellbeing results indicate that participation is highly responsive to the onset of disability although the chance of delays in receipt emerges personal characteristics unrelated to eligibility also appear to influence benefit receipt translating into sizeable differences in the amount of cash support received the comparison of recipients with observationally equivalent non recipients confirms that timely participation reduces disabled older people s financial strain

real wages and unemployment in the big squeeze uk real wage growth has slowed down stagnated and recently turned sharply negative we document the nature of real wage changes across the wage distribution over the last three decades showing that recent patterns represent a distinct break of trend that pre dates the onset of recession we explore whether unemployment has become a stronger moderating influence on real wage growth and report using aggregate economy wide and regional panel data that real wage unemployment sensitivities have become stronger in the period from 2003 onwards finally we offer some assessment of possible drivers of this increased sensitivity of real wages to unemployment

transitions in the german labor market structure and crisis abstract since the so called hartz iv reforms around 2005 and during the global crisis of 2008 2009 the german labor market featured mainly declining unemployment rates we develop a search and matching model with heterogeneous skills to explore the role of structural and cyclical policies for this performance calibrating unemployment benefits to approximate legislation before and after the reforms we find a large reduction in unemployment and its duration with the transition concluding after about three years during the crisis the extended use of short time labor subsidies that prevent jobs from being destroyed is likely to have prevented strong increases in unemployment

wage adjustment in the great recession and other downturns evidence from the united states and great britain using 1979 2012 cps data for the united states and 1975 2012 nes data for great britain we study wage behavior in both countries with particular attention to the great recession real wages are procyclical in both countries but the procyclicality of real wages varies across recessions and does so differently between the two countries in ways that defy simple explanations we devote particular attention to the hypothesis that downward nominal wage rigidity plays an important role in cyclical employment and unemployment fluctuations we conclude that downward wage rigidity may be less binding and have lesser allocative consequences than is often supposed

panel estimates of the determinants of british regional male incapacity benefits rolls 1998 2006 this article explores the determinants of the proportion of the working age male population claiming incapacity benefits ib across the 11 british government office regions for the period 1998 to 2006 three different approaches are adopted to modelling register dynamics first treating ib stocks as if they were trend stationary albeit with persistence and estimating reduced form models for their logs second treating ib stocks as if they were nonstationary and examining their long run determinants plus short run equilibrium reversion properties third focusing on the determinants of gross inflows and outflows that together drive ib stocks given the nature of the data no approach is ideal yet the models provide reasonably robust evidence that labour market changes specifically falling unemployment rates and rising real earnings have contributed to falling male ib stocks over the period

why have uk disability benefit rolls grown so much abstract over the last 30 years many countries including the uk have seen a dramatic rise in the share of the working age population receiving sickness and disability benefits hereafter disability benefits this is despite health levels that are generally thought to be slowly improving this paper describes the time path of uk disability benefit rolls and explores the existing uk literature together with literature from the usa in search of potential explanations for it since the early 1990s despite a number of detailed descriptive studies surprisingly little attention has been paid to quantifying the importance of the different factors believed to be driving the uk benefit roll growth this is all the more surprising given the continued growth and the level of policy attention recently and currently devoted to disability benefits in the uk

the impact of immigration on the british labour market using data from the british labour force survey this article provides an empirical investigation of the way immigration affects labour market outcomes of native born workers in britain set beside a theoretical discussion of the underlying economic mechanisms we discuss problems arising in empirical estimation and how to address them we show that the overall skill distribution of immigrants is remarkably similar to that of the native born workforce we find no strong evidence that immigration has overall effects on aggregate employment participation unemployment and wages but some differences according to education

disability benefit receipt and reform reconciling trends in the united kingdom the uk has enacted a number of reforms to the structure of disability benefits that has made it a major case study for other countries thinking of reform the introduction of incapacity benefit in 1995 coincided with a strong decline in disability benefit expenditure reversing previous sharp increases from 2008 the replacement of incapacity benefit with employment and support allowance was intended to reduce spending further we bring together administrative and survey data over the period and highlight key differences in receipt of disability benefits by age sex and health these disability benefit reforms and the trends in receipt are also put into the context of broader trends in health and employment by education and sex we document a growing proportion of claimants in any age group with mental and behavioral disorders as their principal health condition we also show the decline in the number of older working age men receiving disability benefits to have been partially offset by growth in the number of younger women receiving these benefits we speculate on the impact of disability reforms on employment

optimal choice of health and retirement in a life cycle model abstract we examine within a life cycle model the simultaneous choice of health care and retirement together with consumption health tends to have an impact on retirement through morbidity determining earnings and the disutility of work and through longevity determining the need to accumulate retirement wealth conversely the age of retirement drives the demand for health care through the value of survival and the value of morbidity reductions we characterise the optimal relationship between health expenditure and retirement and apply our model to analyse the effects of moral hazard in the annuity market while moral hazard always induces excessive health investments and an excessive duration of working life it also triggers an excessive level of consumption if the impact of health on the disutility of work is sufficiently large we examine a transfer scheme and mandatory retirement as policies towards curtailing moral hazard numerical analysis illustrates the role of moral hazard in shaping the life cycle allocation

the impact of immigration on the structure of wages theory and evidence from britain immigration to the uk particularly among more educated workers has risen appreciably over the past 30 years and as such has raised labor supply however studies of the impact of immigration have failed to find any significant effect on the wages of native born workers in the uk this is potentially puzzling since there is evidence that changes in the supply of educated natives have had significant effects on their wages using a pooled time series of british cross sectional micro data on male wages and employment from the mid 1970s to the mid 2000s this paper offers one possible resolution to this puzzle namely that in the uk natives and foreign born workers are imperfect substitutes we show that immigration has primarily reduced the wages of immigrants and in particular of university educated immigrants with little discernable effect on the wages of the native born

four case studies of agri food cvds and a proposal for reforming national administered protection agencies abstract this paper reviews the role of national administered protection agencies whose primary responsibility is the enforcement of national trade remedy laws after reviewing four recent cases of trade disputes between canada and the united states it is argued that the role of national administered protection agencies should be changed the growth of regional trading blocks the increasing use of anti dumping and countervailing duty actions against fairly traded imports and the additional responsibilities assumed by the wto in administering the agreement on agriculture strongly suggest that all trade disputes should be taken to the wto for settlement the role of national administered protection agencies should be changed to make them agents for trade liberalization this would involve these agencies taking on three primary functions i as transparency agents ii as investigatory agents and iii as advocacy agents

job changes and hours changes understanding the path of labor supply adjustment we use british panel data to investigate single women s labor supply changes in response to three reforms that affected individuals work incentives we use these reforms to identify changes in labor supply there is evidence of small hours of work effects for two of such reforms a third reform in 1999 instead led to a significant increase in single mothers hours of work the mechanism by which the labor supply adjustments were made occurred largely through job changes rather than hours changes with the same employer this is little overall effect of the reforms on wages

disability capacity for work and the business cycle an international perspective important policy issues arise from the high and growing number of people claiming disability benefits for reasons of incapacity for work in oecd countries economic conditions play an important part in explaining both the stock of disability benefit claimants and inflows to and outflows from that stock employing a variety of cross country and country specific household panel data sets as well as administrative data we find strong evidence that local variations in unemployment have an important explanatory role for disability benefit receipt with higher total enrolments lower outflows from rolls and often higher inflows into disability rolls in regions and periods of above average unemployment in understanding the nature of the cyclical fluctuations and trends in disability it is important to distinguish between work disability and health disability the former is likely to be influenced by economic conditions and welfare programmes while the latter evolves in a slower fashion with medical technology and demographic changes there is little evidence of health disability being related to the business cycle so cyclical variations are driven by work disability the rise in unemployment due to the current global economic crisis is expected to increase the number of disability insurance claimants

debt and depression we examine the effect of household financial indebtedness on psychological well being using a large household survey of families with children in britain existing studies that find a link between debt and depression tend to utilise small and highly selective samples of people and only self reported measures of financial stress responses to which are likely to correlate with subjective measures of health from additional household data we can construct a variety of objective quantitative measures of financial stress in order to validate self reported measures we show that although there is a positive association between subjective measures of financial well being and psychological well being individuals differ in their psychological response to objective household financial situations we also examine how the potential simultaneity of financial and psychological health might be handled

the labour supply effect of the abolition of the earnings rule for older workers in the united kingdom high effective tax rates on work at and around state pension age deter participation an example is the earnings test operating in several oecd countries the united states abolished its test for the 65 age group in 2000 the united kingdom offers a natural experiment of this reform as it abolished its test known as the earnings rule in 1989 we examine the effect of this change taking account of the opportunity to defer pension rights abolition of the rule raised working hours of older male workers by around 4 hours a week with a lesser impact on women s behaviour

measuring the effect of disability on labor force participation this paper estimates the effect of disability on labor force participation by using symptoms or diseases as instruments in a simultaneous equations model of endogenous reported disability and labor force participation the results show that each measure of disability explains a significant amount of variation in labor force participation though the two are not perfect substitutes there is only weak evidence of endogeneity of the disability variables for cases where there is evidence of endogeneity the bias it causes has the opposite effect of that hypothesized in the literatute i e stress causes health to deteriorate with labor force participation furthermore it has only insignificant effects on the coefficients for other variables

cyclical labor costs within jobs abstract using uk employer employee panel data we present novel facts on how wages and working hours respond to the business cycle within jobs firms reacted to the great recession with substantial real wage cuts and by recruiting more part time workers a one percentage point increase in the unemployment rate led to an average decline in real hourly wages of 2 6 for new hires as well as for job stayers hiring hours worked were substantially procyclical while job stayer hours were acyclical these results show that real wages are not rigid and that the labor costs of new hires are especially flexible

do retirement dreams come true the effect of unanticipated events on retirement plans analyzing data from the retirement history study the authors find that the retirement plans of male workers aged 58 63 in 1969 were significantly affected by unanticipated events over the next decade specifically unanticipated increases in social security wealth induced retirement earlier than originally planned as did deterioration in personal health whereas the recession of the 1970s tended to delay retirement this evidence that policy changes do affect retirement behavior in systematic ways provides support for the decision by congress to defer until the turn of the century the application of several important provisions of the 1983 amendments to the social security act

plant closure in britain since the great recession one of the suggested explanations for the uk productivity puzzle is that since the onset of the great recession low productivity plants that would normally have closed have continued operating this paper therefore investigates whether there has been a change in the relationship between productivity and closure since the recession we find that for a number of sectors the negative association between tfp and closure that existed prior to the recession has been offset or even reversed since the recession

why do disability benefit rolls vary between regions a review of the evidence from the usa and the uk mcvicar d 2006 why do disability benefit rolls vary between regions a review of the evidence from the usa and the uk regional studies 40 519 533 over the last 30 years many organization for economic co operation and development oecd countries have seen a dramatic rise in the share of the working age population receiving earnings replacement sickness and disability benefits the reasons behind this growth particularly for the usa but also to a lesser extent elsewhere have been extensively researched in the economics literature what have been less well researched are the large spatial differences in the size of disability benefit rolls that have emerged in some countries over this period the uk displays a distinct regional pattern where working age men and women in the north are considerably more likely to be claiming disability benefits than those in the south the usa has its own version of the north south divide with many southern states displaying disproportionately large disabilit

trade remedy actions in nafta agriculture and agri food industries the economic rationale for trade remedy law while always weak is undermined by the formation of free trade areas however due to political pressure first cusfta and then nafta have continued the use of domestic antidumping and countervailing duty laws with the lowering of border protection it was feared that there would be an explosion of trade remedy law as nafta was implemented this article examines data on the use of anti dumping and countervailing duty investigations in agriculture and analyses the incidence between nafta partners before and after the implementation of free trade and compared to the incidence with other countries given the cost of current ad and cvd suits options are explored for alternative methods to resolve ad and cvd suits evaluation of options hinges on goals held for dispute resolution within nafta given continued political opposition to eliminating ad and cvd processes increasing the options for resolving these suits may reduce their overall costs

rich and healthy better than poor and sick an empirical analysis of income health and the duration of the pension benefit spell i analyze the relationship between duration of the pension benefit spell and pension benefit claims from the german public pension system with a special emphasis on differential results with respect to health this relationship is crucial for a potential structural pattern of redistribution between different income and health groups induced by the public pension system evidence for such redistribution from poor to rich is present for most of the specifications in my analysis the most adequate specification is partially linear does therefore not impose any parametrical restrictions between duration and benefit claims and allows for potential endogeneity the relationship i extract is clearly positive i also find that redistribution from low income individuals to individuals with high income is more pronounced the worse the health status is despite longer benefit spells for pensioners in ill health

the effect of the financial crisis on the retirement plans of older workers in england this letter revisits the question of how wealth shocks influence retirement behaviour exploiting the dramatic changes in uk asset prices between 2008 and 2009 as a source of such shocks we find no evidence that the wealth shocks arising from this recent financial crisis affected the retirement plans of older workers in england

house prices wealth effects and labour supply we examine the impact of house prices on labour supply decisions using uk microdata we combine household survey data with local level house price measures and controls for local labour demand our microdata also allow us to control for individual level income expectations we find significant house price effects on labour supply consistent with leisure being a normal good labour supply responses to house prices are concentrated among young married female owners and older owners this finding suggests that house prices affect the decisions of marginal workers in the economy our estimates imply that house prices are economically important in the participation decisions for these workers

economic determinants of workers retirement decisions economic determinants of workers retirement decisions the landscape for older workers has changed dramatically in recent decades governments have made cuts to public pension programs private pensions have shifted from defined benefit to defined contribution plans equity and housing markets have been unusually volatile and workers have experienced declining morbidity and mortality at the same time the labor force participation rate for older men and women has been rising over the past two decades implying later retirement are these phenomena related this paper reviews the large and growing body of literature exploring the economic determinants of workers retirement decisions including public and private pensions wealth and savings health and health insurance and labor demand

what can wages and employment tell us about the uk s productivity puzzle as in many european countries labour productivity in the uk has been stagnant since the start of the great recession this article uses individual data on employment and wages to try to understand whether real wage flexibility can help shed light on the uk s productivity puzzle it finds perhaps unsurprisingly that workforce composition cannot explain the reduction in wages and hence productivity that we observe even compared to previous recessions instead real wages have fallen significantly within jobs this time round why one possibility we investigate is that the labour supply in the uk is higher compared to previous recessions

changes in the distribution of male and female wages accounting for employment composition using bounds this paper examines changes in the distribution of wages using bounds to allow for the impact of nonrandom selection into work we show that worst case bounds can be informative however because employment rates in the united kingdom are often low they are not informative about changes in educational or gender wage differentials thus we explore ways to tighten these bounds using restrictions motivated from economic theory with these assumptions we find convincing evidence of an increase in inequality within education groups changes in educational differentials and increases in the relative wages of women

pension incentives and the pattern of early retirement this mix of state and private pension provision in the united kingdom provides a rare degree of variation in pension incentives for retirement using a sample of individuals from the uk retirement survey the paper models the probability of retirement in terms of the incentives underlying the individual s pension plan as well as other socio economic factors it follows an option value approach and allows a separate role for pension wealth for spouse s economic characteristics and for demographic characteristics it distinguishes between serps and private schemes and models eligibility to disability the results point to significant retirement incentive effects from the pension system

ill health and retirement in britain a panel data based analysis we examine the effect of ill health on retirement decisions in britain using the british household panel survey 1991 1998 as self reported health status is likely to be endogenous to the retirement decision we instrument self reported health by a constructed health stock measure using a set of health indicator variables and personal characteristics as suggested by bound et al bound j schoenbaum m stinebrickner t m waidmann m 1999 the dynamic effects of health on the labor force transitions of older workers labour economics 6 179 202 using a range of econometric techniques we show that adverse shocks to individual health stocks predict individual retirement behaviour among workers aged from 50 until state pension age we compare responses of economic activity to constructed health measures with that arising using direct indicators of functional limitations and specific health problems we also examine the dynamics of health shocks and whether adverse and positive health shocks have symmetric effects on transitions in and out of economic activity

how well are women doing female non employment across uk regions discussions of the uk s recent labour market performance commonly mention the contrasting trends in the unemployment rate down the employment rate up and the inactivity rate flat these same commentaries also notice that the flatness of the overall inactivity rate masks contrasting trends by sex with male rates slowly rising and female rates slowly falling and then proceed to discuss male inactivity in some detail before concluding bypassing the composition of female inactivity these commentaries fail to notice that the male and the female proportions of the population not working by reason of sickness or disability are quite similar equally they have rarely noticed that male and female non employment rates display a very similar regional hierarchy with female rates in the north as much as 50 higher than those in the south and that there is an even steeper north south gradient in some of the components of non employment for example sickness and disability rates for females in the

unemployment insurance and unemployment spells this paper tests the effects of the level and length of unemployment insurance benefits on unemployment durations the paper particularly studies individual behavior during the weeks just prior to when benefits lapse higher unemployment insurance benefits are found to have a strong negative effect on the probability of leaving unemployment however the probability of leaving unemployment rises dramatically just prior to when benefits lapse individual data are used with accurate information of spell durations and the level and length of benefits the semiparametric estimation techniques used in the paper yield more plausible estimates than conventional approaches and provide useful diagnostics copyright 1990 by the econometric society

hidden male unemployment in northern ireland armstrong d 1999 hidden male unemployment in northern ireland reg studies 33 499 511 in recent years there has been growing research evidence in the uk to suggest that official unemployment figures do not accurately reflect the true extent of joblessness mainly because they ignore aspects of economic inactivity such as long term sickness early retirement and participation on government employment and training schemes this paper examines the nature and extent of hidden unemployment in northern ireland and in different local areas within northern ireland the paper shows that there are large numbers of people who do not appear in official unemployment figures but who under plausible assumptions ought to be considered to be part of the stock of unemployed the results show that if the hidden component of joblessness is accounted for total male unemployment in northern ireland is more than one third higher than official figures suggest armstrong d 1999 le chomage masculin deguise en irlande

unemployment duration and individual heterogeneity a regional study this paper investigates the impact of individual heterogeneity and regional influences on unemployment duration utilizing cross section microeconomic data drawn from a representative random survey of individual job seekers for the english county of kent these individual level data are unique in that they provide information concerning the personal characteristics of job seekers alongside direct observations of both their reservation wages and job search behaviour such data are rare and to the authors knowledge have never before been utilized in a regional context thus the paper contributes to the empirical literature by analysing the extent to which individual heterogeneity and intra regional variation in labour market opportunities impact upon the observed distribution of unemployment duration s in particular the paper analyses the extent to which the duration of unemployment is determined by individual choice this is an important issue for the formation and evaluation of policy these result

trade policy issues and empirical analysis interest in u s trade policy has been stimulated in recent years by the massive american trade deficit by the belief that intervention by foreign governments in international markets has given other countries a competitive edge over the united states and by concern about the increase in protectionism among industrial countries in turn major analytical developments in international economics have revolutionized trade theory broadening its scope both by introducing in a more formal manner such concepts as imperfect competition increasing returns product differentiation and learning effects and by including the study of political and economic factors that shape trade policy decisions this collection of papers the result of a conference held by the nber applies these new trade theories to existing world cases and also presents complementary empirical studies that are grounded in more traditional trade theories the volume is divided into four parts the papers in part 1 consider the problem of imperfect competition empirically assessing the economic effect of various trade policies introduced in industries in which the new trade theory seems to apply those in part 2 isolate the effects of protection from the influences of the many economic changes that accompany actual periods of protection and also examine how the effects from exogenous changes in economic conditions vary with the form of protection part 3 provides new empirical evidence on the effect of foreign production by a country s firms on the home country s exports finally in part 4 two key bilateral issues are analyzed recent u s japanese trade tensions and the incident involving the threat of the imposition of countervailing duties by the united states on canadian softwood lumber

can helping the sick hurt the able incentives information and disruption in a welfare reform the uk jobcentre plus reform sharpened bureaucratic incentives to help disability benefit recipients relative to unemployment insurance recipients into jobs in the long run the policy raised exits off diasability benefits by 10 and left unemployment outflows roughly unchanged consistent with i beneficial effects of reorganising welfare offices for both groups and ii a shift in bureaucrats efforts towards getting disability benefit recipients into jobs relative to those on unemployment benefit the policy accounted for about 30 of the decline in the aggregate disability rolls between 2003 and 2008 in the short run however we detect a reduction in unemployment exits and no effect on disability exits suggesting important initial disruption effects from the big reorganisation this highlights the difficulty of welfare reform as policymakers may focus on the short run political costs rather than the long run economic benefits

is free trade passe abstract if there were an economist s creed it would surely contain the affirmations i understand the principle of comparative advantage and i advocate free trade yet the case for free trade is currently more in doubt than at any time since the 1817 publication of ricardo s principles of political economy and this is due to changes that have recently taken place in the theory of international trade while new developments in international trade theory may not yet be familiar to the profession at large they have been substantial and radical in the last ten years the traditional constant returns perfect competition models of international trade have been supplemented and to some extent supplanted by a new breed of models that emphasizes increasing returns and imperfect competition these new models call into doubt the extent to which actual trade can be explained by comparative advantage they also open the possibility that government intervention in trade via import restrictions export subsidies

household unemployment and the labour supply of married women a recent reform to the uk unemployment insurance ui system has reduced the duration of entitlement from 12 to six months the ui and welfare systems interact in the uk in such a way that exhaustion of ut for married individuals has potentially large disincentive effects on the labour supply of spouses a model of labour supply is estimated for married women allowing for endogenous unemployment durations of husbands and wives we distinguish between transfer programme induced incentive effects correlation between labour supply and wages within couples complementarity between the leisure times of spouses and a discouraged worker effect

real wage cyclicality in the eurozone before and during the great recession evidence from micro data we study the response of real wages to the business cycle in eight major eurozone countries before and during the great recession average real wages are found to be acyclical but this reflects in large part the effect of changes in the composition of the labour force related to unemployment variations over the cycle using longitudinal micro data from the echp and silc panels to control for composition effects we estimate the elasticities of real wage growth to unemployment increases between 0 6 and 1 over the period 1994 2011 composition effects have been particularly large since 2008 and they explain most of the stagnation or increase in the average wage observed in some countries from 2008 to 2011 in contrast at a constant labour force composition in terms of education and experience the figures indicate a significant decrease in average wages during the downturn particularly in countries most affected by the crisis overall there is no evidence of downward nominal wage rigidity during the great recession in most countries in our sample

revising our thinking about the relationship between maternal labor supply and preschool many argue that childcare costs limit the labor supply of mothers though existing evidence has been mixed using a child s eligibility for public kindergarten in a regression discontinuity instrumental variables framework i estimate how use of a particular subsidy public school affects maternal labor supply i find public school enrollment increases only the employment of single mothers without additional young children i compare this result to previous work focusing on striking increases in a similar setting but earlier period gelabch 2002 differences in the population of mothers labor supply and patterns of lifecycle events likely drive the discrepancy in results

chronic diseases and labour force participation in australia we examine the impact of several chronic diseases on the probability of labour force participation using data from the australian national health surveys an endogenous multivariate probit model is used to account for the potential endogeneity of the incidence of chronic conditions such as diabetes cardiovascular diseases and mental illnesses the cross equation correlations are significant rejecting the exogeneity of the chronic illnesses marginal effects of exogenous socio demographic and lifestyle variables are estimated through their direct effects on labour market participation and indirect effects via the chronic diseases the treatment effects of chronic diseases on labour force participation are estimated via conditional probabilities using five dimensional normal distributions the estimated effects differ by gender and age groups although computationally more demanding these treatment effects are compared with results from a univariate model treating the chronic conditions exogenous and the structural effects from the multivariate probit model both significantly overestimate the effects