learning about a new technology pineapple in ghana this paper investigates the role of social learning in the diffusion of a new agri cultural technology in ghana we use unique data on farmers communication patterns to define each individual s information neighborhood conditional on many potentially confounding variables we find evidence that farmers adjust their inputs to align with those of their information neighbors who were surpris ingly successful in previous periods the relationship of these input adjustments to experience further indicates the presence of social learning in addition applying the same method to input choices for another crop of known technol ogy correctly indicates an absence of social learning effects jel d83 013 033 q16

the consequences of doubling the minimum wage the case of indonesia minimum wages in indonesia were tripled in nominal terms and doubled in real terms in the first half of the 1990s the author evaluates the effects of this hike on wage earnings wage employment and investment after describing indonesia s minimum wage policy and surveying the literature on the effects of minimum wages the author applies relatively simple statistical tools to individual and aggregate data he visually inspects the wage distribution for full time laborers and employees to assess the extent of compliance with minimum wages he uses regression analysis involving minimalist specifications and data aggregated by province to estimate the elasticity of wage earnings wage employment and investment with respect to the minimum wage a wide dispersion in the ratio of minimum wages to labor productivity across the 27 indonesian provinces can be used to identify the effects of the minimum wage the results suggest that minimum wages have a moderate effect on outcomes in indonesia s labor market taken at face value these results imply that doubling the minimum wage led to a 10 percent increase in average wages a 2 percent decrease in wage employment and a 5 percent decrease in investment the disemployment effect appears to be considerable in small firms but employment may actually increase in large firms

watchdogs of the invisible hand ngo monitoring and industry equilibrium globalization has been accompanied by rising pressure from advocacy non governmental organizations ngos on multinational firms to act in socially responsible manner we analyze how ngo pressure interacts with industry structure using a simple model of ngo firm interaction embedded in an industry environment with endogenous markups and entry we explain three key empirical patterns in developing country industries under activist pressure the degree of exit under more intense activist pressure the differential response of industries to ngo activism and the general rise of ngo activism following globalization

minimum wages for domestic workers impact evaluation of the indian experience abstract what impact does minimum wage legislation have on wages and employment opportunities in an informal sector in a developing country the paper answers this question in the context of minimum wage legislation for domestic workers in india over the period of 2004 2012 combining matching procedure with difference in difference estimation approach supported by extensive robustness checks the paper estimates both the short run and the long run impact of the legislation on real wages and employment results show a positive impact of the legislation on real wages in the shortrun while there is limited evidence of this effect persisting in the long run further the legislation did not seem to have any impact at the extensive margin on the probability of being employed as a domestic worker over short or long run our analysis further reveals that the wages of majority of workers remain below the minimum wage available evidence from the ground in line with theoretical predictions point towards weak enforcement of the legislation as the potential driving factor of observed results as india recently extended national level minimum wage for all workers the paper provides a cautionary tale on the potential pitfalls of implementation of this legislation in informal sector and suggests some ways to overcome the same

identification and estimation of money demand in most natural sciences physics chemistry biology theories are validated by controlled experiment however in other natural sciences astronomy meteorology and in most social sciences including economics the data are characteristically generated not by experiment but by measurement of uncontrolled systems in economics theories take the form of restrictions on the models assumed to generate the data and statistical methods replace experimental controls in testing these restrictions and here is the difficulty in economics particularly macroeconomics the theory used to derive tests ordinarily does not generate a complete specification of which variables are to be held constant when statistical tests are performed on the relation between the dependent variable and the independent variables of primary interest accordingly in such cases there will be a set of often very different candidate regression based tests each of which has equal status with the others since each is based on a different projection of the same underlying multivariate model except in the unlikely event that the explanatory variables are mutually orthogonal the conditional regression coefficients which generally form the basis for the test statistic will depend on the conditioning set we conclude from this that if a theory which does not generate a complete specification of the regression test is nonetheless to have testable implications these implications must be robust over the permissible alternative specifications if the restrictions indicated by the theory are satisfied in some projections but not in others that have an equal claim to represent implications of the theory one cannot conclude that the theory has been confirmed the fact that the observable implications of valid theories must obtain over a broad but usually incompletely specified set of regressions rather than for a single regression introduces a large and unavoidable element of imprecision into hypothesis testing in macroeconomics generally it appears to be appropriate to weaken the statistical criterion for rejecting theories consider for example the theory of money demand which will engage our attention in this paper the tobin baumol square root formula implies that the elasticity of money demand with respect to the interest rate is exactly one half but which interest rate should wealth be held constant inflation in view of such uncertainties it would be inappropriate to insist in a literal minded fashion on rejecting the tobin baumol model if in some regression the measured interest elasticity differed from one half by more than two standard deviations and only then obviously a more flexible approach is called for the practice has been to conclude that the statistical evidence is consistent with the tobin baumol model as long as the interest rate coefficient is negative if it is negative and significant or negative and insignificantly different from minus one half that would provide somewhat stronger confirmation but a positive coefficient particularly a significantly positive coefficient would be viewed as raising questions about the validity of the theory in macroeconomics generally as in the money demand application the typical response to specification uncertainty has been to regard a theory as supported if the signs of the estimated coefficients agree with those expected from theory and as disconfirmed otherwise there is no theoretical justification for this procedure but it seems to be a reasonable course to follow the point that economic theory ordinarily generates incompletely specified statistical university of california santa barbara we have received helpful comments from andrew abel robert clower michael darby robert engle stephen goldfeld david laidler edward leamer robert lucas frederic mishkin and edward prescott thomas hall provided able research assistance

the ethical and economic case for sweatshop regulation three types of objections have been raised against sweatshops according to their critics sweatshops are 1 exploitative 2 coercive and 3 harmful to workers in the ethical and economic case against sweatshop labor a critical assessment powell and zwolinski critique all three objections and thereby offer what is arguably the most powerful defense of sweatshops in the philosophical literature to date this article demonstrates that whether or not unregulated sweatshops are exploitative or coercive they are pace powell and zwolinski harmful to workers

the effect of wage subsidies on piece rate workers evidence from the penny per pound program in florida abstract this paper studies a fair trade program in which consumers provide a wage subsidy bonus to piece rate tomato pickers the total subsidy determined by sales to participating buyers is divided among workers based on their relative output a worker who produces more gets a larger share of the bonus although seemingly mimicking the existing piece rate pay scheme the mechanism associated with the bonus payment is really a relative performance evaluation as the size of total bonus is exogenous and invariant to workers effort therefore for a given sized subsidy the combined total or per worker average utility gains would become the largest if the workers keep their efforts at the pre program level empirical analysis shows that worker effort and hence productivity increases substantially in response to the program suggesting that currently workers combined gains per dollar of subsidy are not being maximized

the impact of minimum wages on employment in a low income country a quasi natural experiment in indonesia the extensive literature on the employment impact of minimum wages has focused heavily on industrialized nations and very little on the developing world despite the importance of minimum wages in many low income countries one such country indo nesia was the setting for an unusual quasi natural experiment not only did minimum wages in indonesia increase sharply between 1990 and 1996 but the resultant increment in average wages varied markedly across different areas in greater jakarta the authors use household level labor market data to determine the extent of compliance with the legislation then estimate the employment impact in the clothing textiles footwear and leather industries based on a census of all large and medium sized establishments the evidence suggests that there was no negative employment impact for large establish ments either foreign or domestic but that workers in smaller domestic establishments may have suffered job losses as a result of minimum wage increases

credible research designs for minimum wage studies a response to neumark salas and wascher the authors assess the critique by neumark salas and wascher 2014 of minimum wage studies that found small effects on teen employment data from 1979 to 2014 contradict nsw the authors show th

retailing public goods the economics of corporate social responsibility abstract this paper explores the feasibility and desirability of corporate social responsibility csr we identify csr with creation of public goods or curtailment of public bads using a model with profit maximizing firms the paper shows that there is a direct parallel between csr and traditional models of private provision of public goods indeed firms that use csr will produce public goods at exactly the same level as predicted by the standard voluntary contribution equilibrium for public goods we compare csr with government provision and charitable provision discussing when csr by private for profit firms could have a comparative advantage in dealing with public goods provision

minimum wages and compliance the case of trinidad and tobago explores compliance to the national minimum wage in trinidad and tobago potential costs associated with the national minimum wage actual incidence of compliance in terms of employment and wage distribution nature of labor market this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from an this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

money demand revisited an operational subjective approach summary this paper proposes a method of data analysis founded on the philosophy and understanding of uncertain knowledge developed by bruno de finetti specifically the paper investigates the informational content of interest rates for the prediction of ml this empirical application replicates that of cooley and leroy 1981 and mcaleer pagan and volker 1985 but the procedures and their interpretation follow the operational subjective approach the issue of an autocorrelated error structure is recast in the operational subjective context methods are developed to assess the interest sensitivity of the demand for money in this context this paper illustrates an operational method of data analysis in the context of linear models the procedures advocated are founded on the subjective theory of probability originated by bruno definetti 1974 1975 and enhanced by l j savage 1954 this foundational position denies the existence of a true model and its concomitant parameters the function of a model is its assistance in generating predictive distributions of observable unknown quantities a model s performance at prediction is empirically observable this proposed method of econometric analysis is illustrated with an applied example taking advantage of a previous well known application confronting the appropriateness of econometric practices the example concerns money demand as measured by ml with particular emphasis on the informational content of interest rates for the forecasting distribution of ml cooley and leroy 1981 examined the estimation of money demand employing the bayesian method of extreme bounds analysis developed in leamer 1978 although bayesian in approach the method focuses on parameter estimation and retains the conviction of standard techniques in the reality of the model and in the reality of the model parameters mcaleer pagan and volker 1985 re examine the same model and data from a frequentist approach yielding an appropriate example with which to contrast the method presented here and its interpretation

confronting the environmental kuznets curve t he environmental kuznets curve posits an inverted u relationship between pollution and economic development kuznets s name was apparently attached to the curve by grossman and krueger 1993 who noted its resemblance to kuznets s inverted u relationship between income inequality and development in the first stage of industrialization pollution in the environmental kuznets curve world grows rapidly because people are more interested in jobs and income than clean air and water communities are too poor to pay for abatement and environmental regulation is correspondingly weak the balance shifts as income rises leading industrial sectors become cleaner people value the environment more highly and regulatory institutions become more effective along the curve pollution levels off in the middle income range and then falls toward pre industrial levels in wealthy societies the environmental kuznets curve model has elicited conflicting reactions from researchers and policymakers applied econometricians have generally accepted the basic tenets of the model and focused on measuring its parameters their regressions typically fitted to cross sectional observations across countries or regions suggest that air and water pollution increase with development until per capita income reaches a range of 5000 to 8000 when income rises beyond that level pollution starts to decline as shown in the conventional ekc line in figure 1 in developing countries some policymakers have interpreted such results as conveying a message about priorities grow first then clean up numerous critics have challenged the conventional environmental kuznets curve both as a representation of what actually happens in the development process and as a policy prescription some pessimistic critics argue that crosssectional evidence for the environmental kuznets curve is nothing more than a

employment effects of minimum and subminimum wages panel data on state minimum wage laws using panel data on state minimum wage laws and economic conditions for the years 1973 89 the authors reevaluate existing evidence on the effects of a minimum wage on employment their estimates indicate that a 10 increase in the minimum wage causes a decline of 1 2 in employment among teenagers and a decline of 1 5 2 in employment for young adults similar to the ranges suggested by earlier time series studies the authors also find evidence that youth subminimum wage provisions enacted by state legislatures moderate the disemployment effects of minimum wages on teenagers

greenwash vs brownwash exaggeration and undue modesty in corporate sustainability disclosure corporate greenwashing has accelerated in recent years bringing in its wake growing skepticism about corporate green claims although a theory of the drivers and deterrents of greenwashing has begun to emerge it is static in nature and does not incorporate the full range of ways in which firms can misrepresent their environmental performance our contribution is threefold first we extend the theory of organizational information disclosure to incorporate the possibility of undue modesty about a firm s environmental social and governance practices second we hypothesize about the drivers of exaggeration and undue modesty based on which of a firm s stakeholders are salient at a given point in time to do so we place the firm within a dynamic context that has largely been missing in the prior literature third we test our hypotheses using a data set that allows us to directly compare corporate green claims against actual performance results reveal that corporate output growth deregulation and low profits under deregulation significantly affect the choice between greenwashing and brownwashing the effects of growth and profits are mitigated by external scrutiny

a bayesian view of nominal money and real output through a new classical macroeconomic window this study investigates the empirical evidence on the effects of unanticipated changes in nominal money on real output in 47 countries when viewed through a window i e likelihood function that assumes the neutrality of anticipated changes using a bayesian predictivist approach it provides a pedagogical bayesian analysis of generated regressor models in the face of specification uncertainty involving among other things multiple unit roots and trend stationary alternatives

testing the endogenous growth model public expenditure taxation and growth over the long run endogenous growth models such as barro 1990 predict that government expenditure and taxation will have both temporary and permanent effects on growth we test this prediction using panels of annual and period averaged data for oecd countries during 1970 95 isolating long run from short run fiscal effects our results strongly support the endogenous growth model and suggest that long run fiscal effects are not fully captured by period averaging and static panel methods unlike previous investigations our estimates are free from biases associated with incomplete specification of the government budget constraint and do not appear to result from endogeneity of fiscal or investment variables jel classification h30 o40 validation du modele de croissance endogene depenses publiques fiscalite et croissance a long terme des modeles de croissance endogene comme celui de barro 1990 predisent que depenses gouvernementales et fiscalite vont avoir des effets temporaires et permanents sur la croissance on met cette prevision au test a l aide de donnees annuelles et pour certaines moyennes couvrant des sous periodes pour les pays de l ocde 1970 95 dans le but de departager les effets a court et a long terme les resultats valident fortement le modele de croissance endogene et suggerent que les effets fiscaux a long terme ne sont pas pleinement captures par des methodes utilisant des moyennes ou des methodes statiques contrairement aux resultats d enquetes anterieures les resultats proposes ne souffrent pas de distorsions attribuables a une specification incomplete de la contrainte budgetaire du gouvernement et ne semblent pas etre l effet d echo de l endogeneite des variables fiscales et de l investissement

the effect of audit adjustments on earnings quality evidence from china we examine how adjustments to earnings during year end audits affect measures of earnings quality there are four key findings first audit adjustments cause earnings to become smoother and more persistent second the adjustments result in higher accrual quality third audit adjustments have a larger negative effect on signed accruals than absolute accruals fourth the adjustments do not reduce the discontinuity in the earnings distribution around zero these findings are of interest to researchers who use earnings properties as proxies for earnings quality and audit quality however we caution that our findings for china may not generalize to other countries

sweatshops economic analysis and exploitation as unfairness the economic and moral defense of sweatshops given by powell and zwolinski j bus ethics 107 449 472 2012 has been criticized in two recent papers coakley and kates j bus ethics 117 553 558 2013 focus on putative weaknesses in the logic of powell s and zwolinski s argument preiss bus ethics quart 24 1 55 82 2014 argues that even granting the validity of their economic argument powell s and zwolinski s defense is without force when viewed from a kantian republican viewpoint we are concerned that sweatshop critics have misinterpreted the economic literature and overstated the conclusions that follow from their ethical premises we show that the best understanding of the current economic literature supports powell s and zwolinski s conclusions about the negative effects of sweatshop wage regulation and that it is unreasonable to reject economic analysis in moral argument against sweatshops even from a kantian perspective additionally we defend the theory of exploitation as unfairness given by wertheimer exploitation 1996 and show how economic analysis can be applied to that theory to identify cases of sweatshop exploitation

exploiting injustice in mutually beneficial market exchange the case of sweatshop labor mutually beneficial exchanges in markets can be exploitative because one party takes advantage of an underlying injustice for instance employers of sweatshop workers are often accused of exploiting the desperate conditions of their employees although the latter accept the terms of their employment voluntarily a weakness of this account of exploitation is its tendency for over inclusiveness certainly given the prevalence of global and domestic socioeconomic inequalities not all exchanges that take place against background injustices should be considered exploitative this paper offers a framework to identify exploitation in mutually beneficial exchange focusing on the case of sweatshop labor it argues that an employer can be viewed as taking unfair advantage of an underlying injustice if and only if the employer s surplus from the exchange in the unjust state of affairs exceeds the surplus it could maximally obtain in a just state of affairs the paper illustrates the applicability of this framework using three different conceptions of justice and argues that it is superior to microlevel accounts of exploitation that regard background justice as irrelevant the paper concludes by describing some normative implications that follow from judging an exchange exploitative

the impact of minimum wages in mexico and colombia there are diverging views about how minimum wages affect labor markets in developing countries advocates of minimum wages hold that they redistribute resources in a welfare enhancing way and can thus reduce poverty improve productivity and foster growth opponents on the other hand contend that minimum wage interventions result in a misallocation of labor and lead to depressed wages in the very sectors the rural and informal urban sectors where most of the poor are found with the effect of wasting resources and reducing the growth rate data from colombia and mexico for the 1980s provide an opportunity to evaluate the impact of minimum wages in mexico in the 1980s the minimum wage fell in real terms roughly 45 percent by 1990 mexico s minimum wage was about 13 percent of the average unskilled manufacturing wage during the same period the minimum wage in colombia increased at nearly the same rate reaching roughly 53 percent of the average unskilled wage the author charts how the mandated minimum wage affected the demand for skilled and unskilled labor in both countries during that decade findings are as follows in mexico minimum wages have had virtually no effect on wages or employment in the formal sector the main reason the minimum wage is not an effective wage for most firms or workers in the informal sector in turn there is considerable noncompliance with the mandated minimum wage especially among part time and female workers as a result significant numbers of workers are paid at or below minimum wages in colombia minimum wages have a much stronger impact on wages judging from their proximity to the average wage and both cross section and time series estimates the estimates imply that the elasticity of low paid unskilled employment with respect to minimum wages is in the range of 2 to 12 percent

earnings management and accounting income aggregation quarterly earnings allow aggregation into annual earnings in four different ways fiscal year earnings is one measure of annual earnings the others being earnings for annual periods ending at interim quarter ends we investigate earnings management in fiscal year earnings relative to these alternative measures of firms annual earnings we confirm prior findings in burgstahler and dichev 1997 earnings management to avoid earnings decreases and losses journal of accounting and economics 24 99 126 of discontinuities around zero and prior year earnings in histograms of earnings subsequent research questions whether these discontinuities are evidence of earnings management using histograms of our alternative annual earnings measures we offer evidence suggesting earnings management is responsible for the discontinuities

evidence that the zero earnings discontinuity has disappeared abstract discontinuities in earnings distributions at zero have been widely cited as evidence of earnings management but not without controversy recent research suggests discontinuities may be mere artifacts of certain research design choices we find that the well known zero earnings discontinuity disappears soon after passage of the sarbanes oxley act sox and has not returned we also find that neither the discontinuity nor its disappearance require the effects of widely cited alternative non earnings management explanations for the zero earnings discontinuity

the information content of losses abstract this study hypothesizes that because shareholders have a liquidation option losses are not expected to perpetuate they are thus less informative than profits about the firm s future prospects the results are consistent with the hypothesis they also show that the documented increase in the earnings response coefficent as the cumulation period increases appears to be due exclusively to the effect of losses the liquidation option effect extends to profitable cases where earnings are low enough to make the option attractive alternating explanations for the low informativeness of losses such as mean reversal of earnings are not supported by the tests

rounding up in reported eps behavioral thresholds and earnings management abstract reported earnings per share eps are frequently rounded to the nearest cent this paper provides evidence that firms manipulate earnings so that they can round up and report one more cent of eps specifically we examine the digit immediately right of the decimal in the calculated eps number expressed in cents evidence is presented that firms are more likely to round up when managers ex ante expect rounding up to meet analysts forecasts report positive profits or sustain recent performance further investigation provides evidence that working capital accruals are used to round up eps

wages and foreign ownership a comparative study of mexico venezuela and the united states abstract this paper explores the relationship between wages and foreign investment in mexico venezuela and the united states despite very different economic conditions and levels of development we find one fact that is robust across all three countries higher levels of foreign investment are associated with higher wages however in mexico and venezuela foreign investment is associated with higher wages only for foreign owned firms there is no evidence of wage spillovers leading to higher wages for domestic firms the lack of spillovers in mexico and venezuela is consistent with significant wage differentials between foreign and domestic enterprises in the united states where the evidence suggests some wage spillovers from foreign to domestic enterprises wage differentials are smaller

management by the numbers a formal approach to deriving informational and distributional properties of unmanaged earnings we explore the theoretical relation between earnings and market returns as well as the properties of earnings frequency distributions under the assumption that managers use unbiased accounting information to sequentially decide on real options their firms have and report generated earnings truthfully with the market pricing the firm based on those reported earnings we generate benchmarks against which empirically observed earnings returns relations and aggregate earnings distributions can be evaluated this parsimonious model shows a coherent set of results reported losses are less persistent than reported gains decision making diminishes the s shaped market response to earnings and earnings relate to returns asymmetrically in the way documented by basu 1997 furthermore the implied frequency distribution of aggregate earnings is neither symmetric nor necessarily single peaked instead it may exhibit a kink at zero and look similar to the plots reported by burgstahler and dichev 1997 however within our model none of these phenomena are due to reporting noise bias or some undesirable strategic managerial behavior they are the natural consequences of using past earnings as the basis for value increasing managerial decision making that in turn generates the future earnings on which future decisions will be based

discontinuous distributions and missing persons the minimum wage and unemployed youth the employment and earnings effects of the minimum wage on youth are analyzed by parameterizing the relationship between the distribution of market wage rates individuals would receive in the absence of the minimum and the observed distribution with the minimum estimates are based on individual data most econometric analysis rests on the assumption that random variables have continuous distributions but government programs and legislation often impose constraints on individual choice so that empirically observed distributions are discontinuous the minimum wage has such an effect on the distribution of observed wage rates most analysis of the effect on the minimum however is based on inferences from aggregate employment data and disregards these effects to evaluate the results of the minimum wage it is necessary to take account if its effect on employment and its effect on wage rates our analysis accounts explicitly for the effects of the minimum on observed distributions of employment and wage rates and makes these effects an integral part of the process by which the employment and wage impacts of the minimum are estimated the effect of the minimum is commonly presumed to be greater the higher it is relative to the distribution of wages that would be paid in absence of a minimum indeed most time series and cross section analysis of the effects of the minimum are based on relationships between employment and the ratio of the minimum wage to an average or median wage often an average adult wage but sometimes the average wage paid to employed youth 2 our analysis differs from these approaches in at least two respects first it is based on individual wage and

earnings management erroneous inferences based on earnings frequency distributions a vast literature following hayn 1995 and burgstahler and dichev 1997 attributed the so called discontinuities in earnings distributions around zero to earnings management despite recent evidence that these discontinuities are likely caused by other factors researchers and teachers continue to point to the shapes of these distributions as evidence of earnings management we provide three sets of further evidence that these discontinuities are likely caused by factors other than earnings management 1 we provide as an example a detailed analysis of the severe effects of sample selection in a recent study this study erroneously concludes that the shape of an earnings distribution is evidence of earnings management 2 we provide a simple explanation for the shape of the earnings distribution that is most often cited as evidence of earnings management the relation between earnings and prices differs with the magnitude and the sign of earnings and 3 we provide further examples that support the main point of our paper evidence beyond the mere shape of a distribution must be brought to bear before researchers can draw conclusions regarding the presence absence of earnings management

enforcement and compliance with labor regulations in argentina the author analyzes the effect of government enforcement on compliance with labor regulations in argentina a country where only half of the workforce receives all the benefits to which they are legally entitled constructing panel data for the period 1995 2002 across provinces and using the number of labor inspectors per capita as a proxy for enforcement he estimates the effect of enforcement on compliance with six employment and social security regulations minimum wage maximum hours paid vacation time annual extra monthly wage workers compensation insurance and health insurance because of potential simultaneity between enforcement and compliance the author explores instrumenting enforcement by electoral years two stage least squares estimates suggest enforcement increases compliance

the effect of minimum wages on actual wages in formal and informal sectors in costa rica summary as in many economies wage gaps between formal and informal sectors have been persistent in costa rica using 12 years of microdata we test whether increases in minimum wages raise actual wages we find they not only raise wages in large urban and rural enterprises traditionally referred to as formal but they also raise wages of workers covered by minimum wage legislation in what are traditionally regarded as informal sectors where the legislation is often considered not to be enforced small urban and small rural enterprises furthermore minimum wages raise wages in these informal sectors more than in larger firms and hence work to reduce wage differentials between the larger and smaller firms however minimum wages have no significant impact on wages in the informal sector not covered by minimum wage legislation the self employed

the consequences of child market work on the growth of human capital summary the paper measures the effect of child market work on the long term growth of human capital focusing on the output of the human capital production mathematics skills cognitive skills pulmonary function and educational attainment our full sample is drawn from a rich longitudinal dataset indonesia family life survey ifls we address endogeneity of child market work using provincial legislated minimum wage as the instrument our instrumental variable estimation shows that child labor negatively affects mathematics skills and pulmonary function but not cognitive skills and educational attainment we find heterogeneities in type of work those who work outside of family business have lower educational attainment than those working for family business

turning a blind eye costly enforcement credible commitment and minimum wage laws in many countries non compliance with minimum wage legislation is widespread and authorities may be seen as having turned a blind eye to a legislation that they have themselves passed but if enforcement is imperfect how effective can a minimum wage be and if non compliance is widespread why not revise the minimum wage this paper examines a minimum wage policy in a model with imperfect competition imperfect enforcement and imperfect commitment and argues that it is the combination of all three that produces results which are consistent with a wide range of stylized facts that would otherwise be difficult to explain within a single framework we demonstrate that turning a blind eye can indeed be an equilibrium phenomenon with rational expectations subject to an ex post credibility constraint since credible enforcement requires in effect a credible promise to execute ex post a costly transfer of income from employers to workers a government with an objective function giving full weight to efficiency but none to distribution is shown paradoxically to be unable to credibly elicit efficiency improvements via a minimum wage reform

multinationals and anti sweatshop activism during the 1990s anti sweatshop activists campaigned to improve conditions for workers in developing countries this paper analyzes the impact of antisweatshop campaigns in indonesia on wages and employment identification is based on comparing the wage growth of workers in foreign owned and exporting firms in targeted regions or sectors before and after the initiation of antisweatshop campaigns we find the campaigns led to large real wage increases for targeted enterprises there were some costs in terms of reduced investment falling profits and increased probability of closure for smaller plants but we fail to find significant effects on employment jel f23 j31 j81 l67 o14 o15

environmental degradation in developing countries households and the reverse environmental kuznets curve abstract we propose an alternative explanation for the inverted u shape relationship between income and environmental degradation in developing countries production and consumption patterns of rural households are the main cause of environmental damage with a conventional household model we demonstrate that the so called environmental kuznets curve may arise when the restrictive assumption of a set of perfect markets for factors and commodities is relaxed depending on the criterion or indicator that is used to represent environmental pressure however we demonstrate that the reverse may also hold this finding highlights the importance of selecting the appropriate dependent variable in regression analyses

micro finance competition motivated micro lenders double dipping and default abstract we develop a tractable model of competition among socially motivated mfis so that the objective functions of the mfis put some weight on their own clients utility we find that the equilibrium involves double dipping i e borrowers taking multiple loans from different mfis whenever the mfis are relatively profit oriented further double dipping necessarily leads to default and inefficiency and moreover borrowers who face relatively higher transactions costs optimally decide to double dip interestingly an increase in mfi competition can increase the extent of double dipping and default further the interest rates may go either way with the interest rate likely to increase with more competition if the mfis are very socially motivated

the profits of power land rights and agricultural investment in ghana we examine the impact of ambiguous and contested land rights on investment and productivity in agriculture in akwapim ghana we show that individuals who hold powerful positions in a local political hierarchy have more secure tenure rights and that as a consequence they invest more in land fertility and have substantially higher output the intensity of investments on different plots cultivated by a given individual corresponds to that individual s security of tenure over those specific plots and in turn to the individual s position in the political hierarchy relevant to those specific plots

did henry ford pay efficiency wages we examine henry ford s introduction of the five dollar day in 1914 in an effort to evaluate the relevance of efficiency wage theories of wage and employment determination we conclude that the ford experience strongly supports the relevance of these theories ford s decision to increase wages dramatically is most plausibly the consequence of labor problems of the kind efficiency wage theorists stress the structure of the five dollar day program is consistent with the predictions of efficiency wage theories there is vivid evidence that the introduction of the five dollar day resulted in substantial queues for ford jobs significant increases in ford productivity and profits accompanied the new regime

multinational corporations economic and human rights impacts on developing countries a review and research agenda developing countries are attracting a significant portion of global foreign direct investments governments of such countries often compete fiercely for attracting multinational corporations mncs in the expectation of the advantages they will bring to their economies often prioritising economic goals over fundamental human rights for a long time economists have analysed the economic impacts of mncs while a parallel strand of work in political science business ethics and international law investigates the repercussions of mnc operations on human rights despite the significant relatedness and complementarities these two bodies of literature have so far poorly interacted this paper addresses this limitation and systematically analyses and integrates existing micro level empirical evidence on the economic and human rights impacts of mncs on developing countries it provides a critical analysis of what is known and highlights what we do not know about the factors that mediate the positive and or negative impacts of mnc operations on host developing countries based on a critical analysis of the literature it discusses avenues for future research in this field and sets the grounds for a new interdisciplinary research agenda on this subject

when ngos go global competition on international markets for development donations why are many large non governmental organizations ngos becoming multinational entities what are the welfare implications of this integration of markets for development donations to answer these questions we build a simple two country model with horizontally differentiated ngos competing in fundraising we find that ngos become multinational if the economies of scale in fundraising are sufficiently large in that case national ngos in the smaller country disappear while some national ngos remain in the larger country only if country sizes are sufficiently different social welfare is higher in the regime with multinationals than under autarky

heterogeneous effects of imperfectly enforced minimum wages in low wage labor markets abstract we present minimum wage effects across different enforcement regimes exploiting state time variation and policy discontinuities at contiguous districts across state borders in india we show that the effect of minimum wages on wages and employment significantly increases with an increase in enforcement in weak enforcement regimes estimated wage effects are negligible and employment effects are negative or null in stricter regimes wage effects are positive and strong and employment effects are positive or null in most specifications these results are consistent with theories on imperfect enforcement in monopsonistic labor markets and are robust to alternative definitions of enforcement and employment and employing instrumental variables for enforcement

gdp management to meet or beat growth targets abstract we apply the discontinuity methodology from the accounting literature to a political economy setting of gdp reporting and examine whether chinese local governments manage regional gdp numbers we find strong evidence of discontinuities around zero in the distribution of actual minus target gdp growth rates the frequencies of just meeting or beating gdp growth targets are about five four times the frequencies of just missing targets at the prefecture province level the results are stronger for governors with longer tenures and those without political connections to higher level officials as well as for local governments with more resources under their control

does entry regulation hinder job creation evidence from the french retail industry are product market and entry regulation key sources of low employment growth in many european countries we investigate this question in the context of the french retail trade industry since 1974 approval by regional zoning boards has been required for the creation or extension of any large retain store in france we exploit a unique database that provides time and region specific variation in boards approval decisions we show that stronger deterrence of entry by the boards increased retailer concentration and slowed down employment growth in france

contractual dualism market power and informality we develop a search theoretic model of contractual dualism in formal and informal labour markets the model i provides the micro underpinnings for endogenous determination of employer market power in the formal and informal sectors ii offers a unified and coherent set up whereby a host of salient features of developing country labour markets can be explained together and iii places for the first time the stiglerian prescription of the optimal unemployment minimising minimum wage in the broader context of labour markets where formal job creation is costly where employer market power is endogenous and where formal employment informal employment and unemployment coexist

what will take the con out of econometrics the paper begins with the question of whether leamer s extreme bounds analysis eba really does take the con out of econometrics by analytically demonstrating that the extreme bounds are simply functions of the f statistic for the deletion of variables from a regression we conclude that the information provided by eba represents no advance over that available from traditional methods furthermore there is a degree of arbitrariness in eba which exactly parallels the selective reporting of regressions it was designed to supplant the last part of the paper attempts a positive response to its title by following a well defined series of modelling steps we maintain that cooley and le roy s eba derived conclusions concerning the interest elasticity of money demand owe more to a faulty methodology than to the data this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

earnings quality evidence from the field abstract we provide insights into earnings quality from a survey of 169 cfos of public companies and in depth interviews of 12 cfos and two standard setters cfos believe that i above all high quality earnings are sustainable and repeatable specific characteristics include consistent reporting choices backing by actual cash flows and absence of one time items and long term estimates ii about 50 of earnings quality is driven by non discretionary factors such as industry and macro economic conditions iii in any given period about 20 of firms manage earnings to misrepresent economic performance and for such firms 10 of eps is typically managed iv earnings manipulation is hard to unravel from the outside but peer comparisons and lack of correspondence between earnings and cash flows provide helpful red flags in addition cfos disagree with current standard setting on a number of issues including the sheer number of promulgated rules the top down approach to rule making the neglect of the matching principle and the emphasis on fair value accounting they indicate that a rules based culture makes the audit function centralized and mechanical and hinders the development of audit professionals a summary impression from our work is that cfos view earnings quality as more of a single and unconditional characteristic in contrast to current research where measures of earnings quality are strongly conditional on the decision setting this cfo view is related to their idea of one number a single earnings metric that shapes both their interactions with external stakeholders and internal decision making

higher wages for sustainable development employment and carbon effects of paying a living wage in global apparel supply chains abstract in this paper we explore how paying a living wage in global supply chains might affect employment and carbon emissions sustainable development goals 8 and 13 previous work has advocated using wage increases for poorer workers to increase prices for wealthier consumers thereby reducing consumption and associated environmental damage however the likely effects of such an approach remain unclear using an input output framework extended with income and demand elasticities we estimate the employment and carbon effects of paying a living wage to brazilian russian indian and chinese bric workers in the western european clothing supply chain we find negligible effects on carbon emissions but a substantial increase in bric employment under 3 scenarios of consumer behaviour changes in western european consumption lead to small decreases in global carbon emissions and bric employment however the increase in bric wages increases demand in bric this increased demand increases production which largely cancels out the carbon savings and generates net increases in bric employment we conclude by arguing that paying higher wages in global supply chains represents a good but not sufficient step toward achieving the sustainable development goals

gender biased redistribution and intra household distribution abstract this paper examines the implications of income redistribution from men to women for the welfare of married women and children we develop a cournot model of a two person household where agents provide market labor and allocate their spending between a private consumption good and goods for children we show that under plausible restrictions on individual preferences small redistributions to married women reduce their welfare this happens because the income redistribution induces men to reduce their own spending on children by more than the amount redistributed a relative increase in women s independent earnings may however improve children s welfare

the demand side of social protection lessons from cambodia s labour rights experience summary in fragile states recent efforts to advance the social protection agenda have focused primarily on loosening supply side constraints but the resulting kaleidoscope of donor driven projects has often overlooked the need to create a sense of ownership by beneficiaries in part this is because it is unclear what political and social structures effectively facilitate activism in situations where state society relations are contentious we use cambodia s unusual success creating and sustaining a labor rights regime to illustrate the dynamics behind one type of social regime change that has opened up governance over worker protections in a sustainable and potentially replicable way

do scaling and selection explain earnings discontinuities abstract earnings distributions commonly exhibit statistically significant discontinuities at zero earnings which are widely interpreted as evidence of earnings management to avoid a loss in contrast durtschi and easton 2005 durtschi and easton 2009 assert that discontinuities are instead explained by some combination of prior researchers choice s of scaling and sample selection as well as a scaling related effect due to a systematic relation between the sign of earnings and market prices resolution of the conflicting interpretations of discontinuities is important because 1 it affects how investors regulators and scholars view earnings management and 2 it demonstrates the importance of a close linkage between theory and research design choices we point out that de provide no evidence that scaling or selection create discontinuities but only evidence showing that changes in scaling or selection eliminate discontinuities we demonstrate why the research designs used by de eliminate discontinuities and why alternative designs using the same data yield statistically significant discontinuities that cannot be attributed to either scaling or selection

social articulation as a condition for equitable growth abstract a formal model is developed to establish the structural conditions that result in growth being progressive or regressive on the personal distribution of income these conditions include 1 intersectoral investment priorities between wage goods and luxuries and 2 the state of the levels and distribution of incomes which determines the social origin of demand for different sectors of the economy the particular combinations of investment and income structures that result in equalizing social articulation or unequalizing growth social disarticulation are derived we show empirically that the structural conditions that allowed rapid but unequalizing growth in brazil between 1968 and 1977 were those of social disarticulation

the effects of social security taxes and minimum wages on employment evidence from turkey using worker level panel data for the period from 2002 to 2005 the author analyzes the separate employment effects of increases in the social security taxes paid by employers and increases in the

earnings management to avoid earnings decreases and losses this paper provides evidence that firms manage reported earnings to avoid earnings decreases and losses specifically in cross sectional distributions of earnings changes and earnings we lind unusually low frequencies of small decreases in earnings and small losscs and unusually high frequencies of small increases in earnings and small positive income we find evidence that two components of earnings cash flow from operations and changes in working capital are used to achieve increases in earnings we present two theories based on stakeholder use of information processing heuristics and prospect theory about the motivation for avoidance of earnings decreases and losses

the un framework on business and human rights a workers rights critique the protect respect remedy framework along with the un guiding principles on business and human rights is the current global standard regarding corporate conduct this article analyses the un framework from the vantage point of labour rights in india by looking at the garment supply chain it argues that it can do little to induce states and businesses to bring substantive improvements to working conditions in a largely informal economy like india without the state performing its duty to protect human rights the secondary responsibility of corporations can do very little in realising the rights of workers nonetheless its tallest contribution is that it has given a platform for civil society to push for better conduct from all businesses and marks the beginning of a unified international business and human rights agenda

competition and incentives with motivated agents a unifying theme in the literature on organizations such as public bureaucracies and private nonprofits is the importance of mission as opposed to profit as an organizational goal such mission oriented organizations are frequently staffed by motivated agents who subscribe to the mission this paper studies incentives in such contexts and emphasizes the role of matching the mission preferences of principals and agents in increasing organizational efficiency matching economizes on the need for high powered incentives it can also however entrench bureaucratic conservatism and resistance to innovations the framework developed in this paper is applied to school competition incentives in the public sector and in private nonprofits and the interdependence of incentives and productivity between the private for profit sector and the mission oriented sector through occupational choice jel d23 d73 h41 l31 the late twentieth century witnessed a historic high in the march of market capitalism with unbridled optimism in the role of the profit motive in promoting welfare in the production of private goods moreover this generated a broad consensus on the optimal organization of private good production through privately owned competitive firms when it comes to the provision of collective goods no such consensus has emerged debates about the relative merits of public and private provision still dominate this paper suggests a contracting approach to the provision of collective goods it focuses on two key issues how to structure incentives and the role of competition between providers at its heart is the idea that organizations that provide collective goods cohere around a mission 2 thus production of collective goods can be viewed as mission oriented

declining public pensions in an era of demographic ageing will private provision fill the gap abstract demographic crisis and imprudent commitments have induced a crisis in public pension programmes in oecd countries will present and prospective cutbacks lead to greater private saving either in the form of private pension provision or in other forms of saving the paper surveys existing evidence and provides new results on three questions do individuals substitute private for public provision of savings when public pension programmes are cut back voluntarily do individuals respond to incentives to join sponsored or tax subsidised arrangements if encouraged by the government and if individuals are prepared to make such arrangements and where saving is voluntary do they save enough to replace previous prospective public pension flows

labour market responses to immigration evidence from internal migration driven by weather shocks we study the labour market impact of internal migration in indonesia by instrumenting migrant flows with rainfall shocks at the origin area estimates reveal that a one percentage point increase in the share of migrants decreases income by 0 97 and reduces employment by 0 24 percentage points these effects are different across sectors employment reductions are concentrated in the formal sector while income reduction occurs in the informal sector negative consequences are most pronounced for low skilled natives even though migrants are systematically highly skilled we suggest that the two sector nature of the labour market may explain this pattern

tracing the impact of large minimum wage changes on household welfare in indonesia abstract minimum wage legislation has been introduced and expanded in many developed and developing countries in the hope that it would improve the living standards of the poor and reduce inequality this study examines the impact of large minimum wage changes in indonesia the results indicate serious limitations of the minimum wage for improving living standards and reducing inequality

the consequences of increased enforcement of legal minimum wages in a developing country an evaluation of the impact of the campana nacional de salarios minimos in costa rica in august 2010 the costa rican government implemented a comprehensive program to increase compliance with legal minimum wages the campana nacional de salarios minimos national campaign for minimum wages to evaluate the impact of the campaign the authors use a regression discontinuity rd approach which compares what happened to workers who before the campaign had been earning below the minimum wage to those who before the campaign had been earning above the minimum wage they analyze a panel data set with information on workers from before the campaign began july 2010 and after the campaign had been in operation for some time july 2011 the evidence supports the conclusion that the campaign led to an increase in compliance with minimum wage laws in costa rica the mean earnings of those being paid less than the minimum wage in 2010 increased by approximately 10 more than the earnings of those being paid more than the minimum wage the campaign led to the largest increases in the wages of wome

rethinking economic development i provide a summary reflection and assessment of the current state of economic development in both the policy and academic worlds in terms of development policy currently the primary focus is on policy interventions namely foreign aid aimed at fixing the deficiencies of developing countries academic research also has a similar focus except with an emphasis in rigorous evaluation of interventions to estimate causal effects a standard set of versatile quantitative tools is used e g experimental and quasi experimental methods which can be easily applied in a range of settings to estimate the causal effects of policies which are typically presumed to be similar across contexts in this article i take a step back and ask whether the current practices are the best that we can do are foreign aid and policy interventions the best options we have for poverty alleviation what else can be done is our current research strategy characterized by rigorous but a lack of context specific analysis the best method of analysis is there a role for other research methods for a deeper understanding of the local context and for more collaboration with local scholars repenser le developpement economiquee dans cet article je propose un apercu une reflexion et une evaluation de l etat actuel du developpement economique a la fois dans les spheres politiques et universitaires en matiere de developpement economique l attention est principalement portee sur l intervention politique c est a dire l aide exterieure visant a corriger les defaillances des pays en developpement les recherches universitaires y portent une attention similaire mais en mettant davantage l accent sur l evaluation rigoureuse de ces memes interventions pour en mesurer les effets de causalite a cette fin un ensemble d outils quantitatifs et modulables standard sont utilises notamment par l entremise de methodes experimentales et quasi experimentales pouvant facilement s appliquer a une vaste gamme de situations et ce aux fins d evaluations des liens de causalite engendres par ces politiques liens habituellement consideres comme similaires d un contexte a l autre dans cet article je prends un peu de recul pour m interroger sur la pertinence des pratiques actuelles les interventions politiques et l aide exterieure offrent elles les meilleures options pour reduire la pauvrete que pouvons nous faire d autre notre strategie de recherche actuelle caracterisee par des analyses rigoureuses mais peu adaptees a des contextes specifiques est elle la meilleure d autres methodes de recherche peuvent elles permettre de mieux comprendre les contextes regionaux et favoriser une meilleure collaboration avec les intellectuels locaux

goodwill bazaar ngo competition and giving to development this paper builds a model of competition through fundraising between horizontally differentiated ngos ngos allocate their time resource between working on the project and fundraising which attracts private donations if the market size is fixed the fundraising levels increase with the number of ngos and the free entry equilibrium number of ngos can be larger or smaller than the socially optimal number depending on the efficiency of the fundraising technology if the market size is endogenous and ngos cooperate in attracting new donors fundraising levels decrease with the number of ngos and the free entry equilibrium number of ngos is smaller than the one that maximizes the welfare of donors and beneficiaries if ngos can divert funds for private use multiple equilibria with high diversion and no diversion of funds appear

offshoring with endogenous ngo activism the process of globalization is characterized by an impressive growth of global value chains as well as the proliferation of non governmental organizations ngos interacting with multinational firms this paper presents a model of offshoring and ngo firm interactions in which offshoring to a low regulation country allows a monopolist to implement a dirty technology undesired by consumers consumers can reduce the incentive for dirty production by financing an ngo monitoring the firm ngo emergence and offshoring can arise as joint and interacting outcomes for a range of trade costs ngo emergence allows firms to capture gains from globalization which would otherwise be unattainable somewhat paradoxically ngo emergence can be at the expense of consumers possibly leading to welfare losses through offshoring

can minimum wages cause a big push evidence from indonesia big push models suggest that local product demand can create multiple labor market equilibria one featuring high wages formalization and high demand and one with low wages informality and low demand i demonstrate that minimum wages may coordinate development at the high wage equilibrium using data from 1990s indonesia where minimum wages increased in a varied way i develop a difference in spatial differences estimator which weakens the common trend assumption of difference in differences estimation reveals strong trends in support of a big push formal employment increases and informal employment decreases in response to the minimum wage local product demand also increases and this formalization occurs only in the non tradable industrializable industries suggested by the model while employment in tradable and non industrializable industries also conforms to model predictions

sweatshop regulation tradeoffs and welfare judgements the standard economic and ethical case in defense of sweatshops employs the standard of the welfare of their workers and potential workers to argue that sweatshop regulations harm the very people they intend to help scholars have recently contended that once the benefits and costs are balanced regulations do in fact raise worker welfare this paper describes the short and long run tradeoffs associated with sweatshop regulation and then examines how reasonable constructions of measures of worker welfare would evaluate these tradeoffs finding that the standard economic and ethical case against sweatshop regulations is well supported

aid and growth regressions this paper examines the relationship between foreign aid and growth in real gdp per capita as it emerges from simple augmentations of popular cross country growth specifications it is shown that aid in all likelihood increases the growth rate and this result is not conditional on good policy there are however decreasing returns to aid and the estimated effectiveness of aid is highly sensitive to the choice of estimator and the set of control variables when investment and human capital are controlled for no positive effect of aid is found yet aid continues to impact on growth via investment we conclude by stressing the need for more theoretical work before this kind of cross country regressions are used for policy purposes

does final market demand elasticity influence the location of export processing evidence from multinational decisions in china given the importance many developing countries attach to attracting foreign investors engaged in export processing activities surprisingly little is known about the sensitivity of these investors to local wage differences and the role played by final product market conditions using data on 2 884 foreign invested manufacturing projects in china we estimate the importance of host province wages to firm s location choice and investigate how this sensitivity varies with demand conditions facing the industry in china s largest export market the united states we use the profit function to show theoretically that firms ability to pass wage costs through to final markets matters for location choice and we test the implications of the theory using a control function technique for conditional logit developed by petrin and train as predicted we find that investors facing more elastic demand in the us market are more sensitive to wages across export processing locations taking both the factor intensity of the activity and final market demand elasticity into account we find that investors producing homogenous goods such as metals chemicals and food processing are more likely to be attracted by relatively low wages than those producing differentiated goods we also find that while oecd investors are more responsive to wage differences than are investors from hong kong taiwan and macau they are less likely to choose a location that has received a large share of prior foreign investment

earnings management the shapes of the frequency distributions of earnings metrics are not evidence ipso facto we provide evidence that the shapes particularly around zero of the frequency distributions of earnings metrics examined in the extant earnings management literature are affected by 1 deflation using for example price or market capitalization 2 sample selection criteria that lead to differential inclusion exclusion of observations to the left of zero versus observations to the right of zero implicit in studies focusing on firms followed by i b e s and explicit in studies partitioning on a variable differing between loss observations and profit observations 3 differences between the characteristics of observations to the left of zero and observations to the right of zero such as market pricing and analyst optimism pessimism or 4 a combination of these factors since the shapes of the frequency distributions of earnings metrics at zero are likely due to one of the above effects we conclude that the shapes cannot be used as ipso facto evidence of earnings management