natural resources curse or blessing are natural resources a curse or a blessing the empirical evidence suggests that either outcome is possible this paper surveys a variety of hypotheses and supporting evidence for why some countries benefit and others lose from the presence of natural resources these include that a resource bonanza induces appreciation of the real exchange rate deindustrialization and bad growth prospects and that these adverse effects are more severe in volatile countries with bad institutions and lack of rule of law corruption presidential democracies and underdeveloped financial systems another hypothesis is that a resource boom reinforces rent grabbing and civil conflict especially if institutions are bad induces corruption especially in nondemocratic countries and keeps in place bad policies finally resource rich developing economies seem unable to successfully convert their depleting exhaustible resources into other productive assets the survey also offers some welfare based fiscal rules for harnessing resource windfalls in developed and developing economies

interrupted work careers depreciation and restoration of human capital the quantitative effects and even the existence of a human capital depreciation phenomenon have been a subject of controversy in the recent literature prior work however was largely cross sectional and the longitudinal dimension if any was retrospective using longitudinal panel data on married women in nls we have now established that real wages at reentry are indeed lower than at the point of labor force withdrawal and the decline in wages is greater the longer the interruption another striking finding is a relatively rapid growth in wages after the return to work this rapid growth appears to reflect the restoration or repair of previously eroded human capital the phenomenon of depreciation and restoration is also visible in data for immigrants to the united states however while immigrants eventually catch up with and often surpass natives returnees from the nonmarket do not fully restore their earnings potential

a study in development by dispossession the paper analyses corporate led jobless growth propelled by development induced displacement caused by land acquisition by the state it shows as its inevitable outcome an expanding informal sector which encroaches upon land related natural resources allocated to the corporate sector this reduces the latter s labour productivity and competitiveness along with negative impact on environment and social cohesion using the example of india as a multiparty democracy the paper points to the emergence of a dangerous developmental politics of mutualism between political parties and corporations over land acquisition which subverts the very democratic process through which political power is wielded

intermittent work activity and earnings patterns of intermittent work activity appear to be more common in the modern labour market at least for younger workers this study extends earlier models of the relationship between labour market intermittency and earnings to include both part time work and nonparticipation to differentiate between past work experience and current job tenure to allow for nonlinear experience effects and to account for selection bias arising from the exclusion of nonworkers the results suggest that the effects of part time work and nonparticipation on earnings are similar moreover some common patterns emerge the effects are larger for women greater for young workers and greater when intermittency replaces current job tenure

gender differences in training capital and wages this paper constructs an equilibrium job matching model where workers differ in their attachment to the labor force the model predicts that workers with weaker attachment to the labor market will receive lower starting wages and lower post training wages and will be placed in jobs that offer less training and use less capital the implications of the model for gender differences in pay and job assignment are tested with the eopp data set ourfindings suggest that while training intensity during the first three months of employment is similar in positions filled by males and females females are employed in positions that have a shorter duration of on the job training and that use less capital these differences in on the job training and capital in positions filled by men and women as well as a lower market value for women s prior labor market experience account for a substantial part of the gap in wages between males and females

welfare regimes family supportive policies and women s employment along the life course this article examines women s employment patterns during thechild rearing period and the consequences of those patterns for earnings later in life in 12 industralized countries this study proposes an analytic framework that combines welfare regime and gender specific policies to explain country differences the findings presented here suggest that institutional arrangements mediate the costs to women s part time and intermittent employment within welfare regimes employment continuity is highest among countries in which the state provides support for working mothers furthermore this study finds that lower support for mothers employment is associated with higher wage penalties to employment discontinuity

learning by doing and investment in training a synthesis of two rival models of the life cycle this paper provides a theoretical synthesis of recent discussions of learning by doing and investment in training as alternative forms of human capital accumulation these theoretical notions relate to essentially different phenomena in particular pace becker and mincer investment in training does not completely encompass learning by doing the paper then develops a model in which human capital accumulation occurs via both training and learning by doing the joint training learning model since it is more general then pure models in which all accumulation occurs via either training or learning avoids certain restrictive and seemingly implausible implications of either kind of pure model however the joint model also has implications that while compatible with stylized facts about the life cycle are sharper than those of either kind of pure model for example the joint model implies that market time and earnings must rise early in the life cycle while neither pure model without corners does so finally the notion of learning by doing provides a rationale for an empirical finding that has recently received attention to the effect that the rate of depreciation of human capital is not constant but rather depends on the extent to which it is used in market activities

identification of supplier induced demand in the health care sector this paper explores the issues and pitfalls encountered when attempting to test empirically the hypothesis that physician hospital or any other input supply level induces increasing demand for health services in the strict sense of demand shift and through that increased demand for the input in question evidence is presented which suggests that an empirical test of the supplier induced demand sid hypothesis of the type traditionally performed may not in fact be feasible with cross sectional aggregate data such as is usually used

early career work experience and gender wage differentials we estimate a wage model that includes an array of variables measuring the fraction of time worked during each year of the career this array fully characterizes past employment experience regardless of how sporadic it has been our model yields substantially higher estimated returns to experience and lower returns to tenure than do models that measure experience cumulatively and use the standard quadratic functional form we find that the data reject the standard model but fail to reject our model furthermore we find that 12 of the male female wage gap is due to differences in the timing of work experience

postponing maternity in ireland as in many other developed countries ireland has experienced a postponement of maternity whilst a number of authors have commented on this trend suggesting greater female participation in the workforce results in delayed maternity to date little research has tested this proposition we develop a model to consider the main trends related to the phenomenon of maternity postponement considering changes in first and later births separately using retrospective life history data developed from the 1994 living in ireland survey we estimate a hazard model to empirically test the relationship between career planning and the timing of first and subsequent births we incorporate a declining marginal return to experience and thereby provide a human capital career planning explanation for maternity postponement the results of our analysis demonstrate that career planning has an impact on the timing of maternity the findings also establish an income effect that influences the timing of first births copyright the author 2010 published by oxford university press on behalf of the cambridge political economy society all rights reserved oxford university press

individual and opportunity factors influencing job creation in new firms we build on multiple theoretical perspectives to investigate the unique and joint effects of individual and opportunity level factors affecting job creation in new firms we tested hypotheses using survey data from individuals who transitioned from unemployment to self employment under the auspices of a german public policy program our findings reveal that an entrepreneur s breadth of knowledge has a negative influence on the firm s job creation whereas the entrepreneur s leadership experience has a positive influence however as the sector specific labor requirements of a business opportunity increase both breadth of knowledge and leadership experience allow founders to operate their firms with fewer employees

the gender gap in early career wage growth in the uk the gender pay gap on entry to the labour market is approximately zero but ten years after labour market entry there is a gender wage gap of almost 25 log points this article explores the reason for this gender gap in early career wage growth considering three main hypotheses human capital job shopping and psychological theories human capital factors can explain about 11 log points job shopping about 1 5 log points and the psychological theories up to 4 5 log points depending on the specification but a substantial unexplained gap remains women who have continuous full time employment have had no children and express no desire to have them earn about 8 log points less than equivalent men after 10 years in the labour market

the effects of interrupted schooling on wages data from the national longitudinal survey of youth reveal that 35 percent of white men who leave school between 1979 and 1988 return to school by 1989 this paper examines the wage effects of these nontraditional enrollment patterns i estimate a wage model which allows individuals to follow a different wage path before and after their reenrollment and an alternative model which does not account for school and work discontinuities i find that young men who delay their schooling receive wage boosts that are smaller than those received by their continuously schooled counterparts wage models that fail to account for delayed schooling tend to understate the returns to schooling received prior to the start of the career

why do some resource abundant countries succeed while others do not on average resource abundant countries have experienced lower growth over the last four decades than their resource poor counterparts but the most interesting aspect of the paradox of plenty is not the average effect of natural resources but its variation for every nigeria or venezuela there is a norway or a botswana why do natural resources induce prosperity in some countries but stagnation in others this paper gives an overview of the dimensions along which resource abundant winners and losers differ in light of this it then discusses different theory models of the resource curse with a particular emphasis on recent developments

the gender gap in earnings at career entry we propose a new approach to analyzing gender differences in wages this approach identifies several alternative explanatory mechanisms to account for the sorting of women and men into different types of jobs that offer different levels of reward because labor market rewards derive from labor market positions we study matching processes operating at the micro level that sort workers into existing slots in a given macro level structure of jobs and associated wages we focus on the explanation of gender differences in wages at career entry analyzing data from the national longitudinal survey of youth collected between 1979 and 1991 we find that at career entry women earn 84 cents for every dollar men earn gender differences in worker characteristics account for only about 30 percent of this wage gap gender differences in occupational aspirations have the most important effect accounting for 16 percent of the wage gap and gender differences in job related skills and credentials account for about 14 percent of the wage gap gender differences in adult family roles have little direct effect our analysis further suggests that the external influences of employing organizations and network processes on gender differences in occupational and industrial placement at career entry account for another 42 percent of the wage gap t is well established that in the united states on average women s wages are lower than those of men data on the 1992 annual earnings of full time year round workers ages 16 and older indicate that on average women earned 71 cents for every dollar earned by men u s bureau of the census 1993 we analyze gender differences in wages at career entry when market con

the impact of surplus schooling on productivity and earnings this article examines the impact of surplus schooling on individual productivity and earnings it proposes a model that divides workers education into two components education that is required and thus fully utilized in the job and education that exceeds the amount required and thus may be underutilized in the job the model is tested with data from the 1969 1973 and 1977 quality of working life surveys quinn and staines 1979 required schooling for each occupation is derived from estimates by job incumbents and by the dictionary of occupational titles the results show thqt surplus or underutilized education is rewarded at a lower rate than required education with the actual return dependent on the type of job

in and out of the labour market long term income consequences of child related interruptions to women s paid work why do canadian mothers have lower incomes than women who have never had children microdata from the 1995 gss allow examination of two hypotheses 1 mothers have spent more time out of the labour force thus acquiring less human capital 2 higher levels of unpaid work lead to fatigue and or scheduling difficulties measuring work history does little to account for the family gap the estimated child penalty is reduced by allowing for human capital depreciation and controlling for unpaid work hours but the two hypotheses together cannot entirely explain the gap jel classification j0 j3 entrees et sorties marche du travail et consequences a long terme des interruptions dans l experience sur le marche du travail a cause des enfants ce memoire se demande pourquoi les femmes canadiennes qui ont eu des enfants ont des revenus plus bas que ceux des femmes qui n en ont pas eus les microdonnees de l enquete sociale generale de 1995 de statistiques canada permettent d examiner deux hypotheses 1 les meres ont passe plus de temps en dehors de la main d oeuvre active et donc ont accumule moins de capital humain ou 2 des niveaux plus eleves de travail non remunere peuvent entrainer fatigue ou difficultes d organisation du temps des efforts pour construire une meilleure image de l experience de travail des femmes ne permettent pas d expliquer cet ecart familial meme si la possibilite qu il y ait depreciation du capital humain reduit la penalisation attachee au fait d avoir un enfant en particulier si l interruption dans l experience sur le marche du travail est suivie d un changement d emploi le nombre hebdomadaire d heures de travail non paye est relie negativement aux revenus et si l on normalise pour tenir compte des heures de travail non paye cela reduit la penalisation attachee au fait d avoir un enfant cependant les deux hypotheses combinees ne suffisent pas pour expliquer l ecart

why do some oil producing countries succeed in democracy while others fail summary empirical studies examining the effect of oil on democracy have shown contradictory results this paper offers an explanation in measuring the number of years between the beginning of oil production and the attainment of political independence in oil producing countries we found that the greater the number of years the higher the level of democracy ceteris paribus the types of resources exploited in the colonial period were shown to have influenced institutions nature and the formation of elite which acts to prevent subsequent political reforms this pattern is mitigated in countries that started producing oil far away from their independence

resource intensity institutions and development summary we examine the relationship between resource abundance and several indicators of human welfare consistent with the existing literature on the relationship between resource abundance and economic growth we find that given an initial income level resource intensive countries tend to suffer lower levels of human development while we find only weak support for a direct link between resources and welfare there is an indirect link that operates through institutional quality there are also significant differences in the effects that resources have on different measures of institutional quality these results imply that the resource curse is a more encompassing phenomenon than previously considered and that key differences exist between the effects of different resource types on various aspects of governance and human welfare 2005 elsevier ltd all rights reserved

the gap between male and female pay in the spanish tourism industry abstract this paper analyzes wage differentials between male and female workers in the spanish tourism industry using a large administratively matched employer employee data set obtained from a representative sample of companies this allows us to control for unobserved firm specific factors likely to affect the magnitude of the gender wage gap our findings indicate that male workers earn on average 6 7 higher monthly wages than their socially comparable female counterparts in particular the type of contract held the qualifications required for the job and the specific sub sector of employment are very important variables in explaining this gender wage difference we also find that only around 12 of the mean wage difference in the tourism industry cannot be explained by differences in observable characteristics which is well below the average for the rest of the industries in spain 87 our interpretation is that minimum wage legislation provides a particularly effective protection to women in the tourism industry which is characterized by a large number of low wage earners

investment and interruption effects of the us experience on the earnings of return migrants in mexico migration is widely viewed as an investment in human capital however due to the imperfect transferability of skills and knowledge across countries migration trips are also career interruptions especially for return migrants who may meanwhile experience depreciation of home country specific skills this article demonstrates that migration experience increases return migrants earnings in the home country on the condition that the migration stay is sufficiently long and mostly uninterrupted employing the revised human capital earnings function the empirical study shows that only a barely interrupted us experience longer than five years regardless of the legal status of the migration trips predicts higher earnings of male return migrants in mexico than comparable non migrants robust findings emerge controlling for unobserved individual acteristics or using instrumental variables to deal with the self selection and endogeneity short migration stays in the us and frequent traveling provide

do natural resources fuel authoritarianism a reappraisal of the resource curse a large body of scholarship finds a negative relationship between natural resources and democracy extant cross country regressions however assume random effects and are run on panel datasets with relatively short time dimensions because natural resource reliance is not an exogenous variable this is not an effective strategy for uncovering causal relationships numerous sources of bias may be driving the results the most serious of which is omitted variable bias induced by unobserved country specific and time invariant heterogeneity to address these problems we develop unique historical datasets employ time series centric techniques and operationalize explicitly specified counterfactuals we test to see if there is a long run relationship between resource reliance and regime type within countries over time both on a country by country basis and across several different panels we find that increases in resource reliance are not associated with authoritarianism in fact in many specifications we generate results that suggest a resource blessing

why the gender gap in wages narrowed in the 1980s since 1976 the gender gap in wages on average declined by about 1 per year this article focuses on identifying the factors underlying this trend three data sets are analyzed the current population survey the panel study of income dynamics and the national longitudinal survey we find that convergence in measurable work related characteristics schooling and work experience explains one third to one half the narrowing the remainder is attributable to a relative increase in women s returns to experience as well as to declining wages in blue collar work and other factors

the voracity effect abstract we analyze an economy that lacks a strong legal political institutional infrastructure and is populated by multiple powerful groups powerful groups dynamically interact via a fiscal process that effectively allows open access to the aggregate capital stock in equilibrium this leads to slow economic growth and a voracity effect by which a shock such as a terms of trade windfall perversely generates a more than proportionate increase in fiscal redistribution and reduces growth we also show that a dilution in the concentration of power leads to faster growth and a less procyclical response to shocks jel f43 o10 o23 o40

minimum wages and labor market prospects of women in recent years the field of labor economics has witnessed growth of interest in causes and consequences of female labor force participation principal areas of research include determinants of female wages and labor supply many empirical issues remain unresolved and research continues to focus on the likely ranges of such parameters as the own wage elasticity of hours supplied the cross elasticity with respect to spouse s income the rate of return to female schooling and the issue of self selection in observed earnings of working women one area which remains relatively unexplored is the impact of minimum wage legislation on employment prospects of females the issue of minimum wages is of special interest in the case of women first the proportion of labor force nonparticipation by females exceeds that of males consequently institution of an effective minimum wage plays to a larger audience of nonparticipating females than males it is likely that a significant portion of the positive labor supply response to minimum wages is in the form of previously nonparticipating females second as is well known female wages tend to be lower than those of males owing in part to 1 lower levels of female schooling and experience 2 intermittent life cycle patterns of labor supply and human capital accumulation 3 sorting of females into occupations that are conducive to intermittent behavior and 4 as several researchers suggest gender discrimination consequently women are more likely than men to experience wages that fall short of the legal minimum this study examines the consequences of minimum wages on female employment prospects of special interest is the likelihood of successful job search for women whose wages in the absence of legislation would be below the minimum it is commonly argued that minimum wages in competitive labor markets have the effect of hindering employment prospects of low wage workers this study based on a sample of microdata from the public use sample of the 1980 census proposes a simple framework in which this issue can be addressed in the context of a conventional model of labor supply

child related transfers household labour supply and welfare what are the macroeconomic effects of transfers to households with children how do alternative policies fare in welfare terms we answer these questions in an equilibrium life cycle model with household labour supply decisions skill losses of females associated to non participation and heterogeneity in terms of fertility childcare expenditures and access to informal care calibrating our model to the u s economy we first provide a roadmap for policy evaluation by contrasting transfers that are conditional on market work childcare subsidies and childcare credits with those that are not child credits when both types can be means tested or universal we then evaluate expansions of current arrangements for the u s and find that expansions of conditional transfers have substantial positive effects on female labour supply that are largest at the bottom of the skill distribution expanding childcare credits leads to long run increases in the participation of married females of 10 6 while an equivalent expansion of child credits leads to the opposite 2 4 expanding existing programs generates substantial welfare gains for newborn households which are largest for less skilled households expanding childcare credits leads to the largest welfare gains for newborns and achieves majority support

v goods and the role of the urban informal sector in development this paper analyzes the role of the urban informal sector in a developing country in relation to the performance of agriculture and other rural activities on the one hand and that of urban formal sector activities on the other it decomposes the sectors into traditional and modernizing components traceable to production and consumption linkages with the rest of the economy as well as the character of government interventions over time the paper contrasts success cases a la taiwan in which the overall size of the urban informal sector remains modest the modernizing sub sector grows in relative importance and the end of overall labor surplus is reached rather early with non success cases a la the philippines in which rapid rural urban migration enhances the overall size of the urban informal sector the traditional sub sector grows relatively and the end of the labor surplus condition is substantially delayed authors

women s earnings reexamined since a discussion of details may obscure important general issues we start by restating what we consider to be the two major contributions of our 1974 study 5 1 the methodological contribution lies in the specification of an earnings function when human capital investment occurs at different rates including zero over various segments of the life cycle such specifications are appropriate for persons when market work does not continue throughout the usual working age or for analyses of continuous work histories segmented by some relevant criteria such as job change and occupational or geographic mobility applied work on these subjects continues 1 and specifications are undergoing refinement in retrospect the model we used to analyze earnings of women is not the best but it is serviceable which permits us to refrain from injecting new matters into the present discussion 2 the substantive interest in our study of earnings of women focuses on several propositions a even with identical current characteristics women whose past experience was shorter have currently lower wages as their total job investments were smaller b total investments are smaller not only because they are spread over fewer years of work experience but also because persons who spend less time in market work invest less per year worked than persons with longer work experience c if work experience is interrupted for any significant length of time job skills tend to erode so the human capital stock is reduced by depreciation or atrophy the relevance of these propositions to the analysis of the sexual wage gap is obvious in part women s wages are lower than men s because their labor force attachment is shorter and often discontinuous also the gap widens over the life cycle since initial differences in experience are necessarily small

human capital formation and business cycle persistence abstract in this paper we examine the role of the formation of human capital in propagating shocks over the business cycle we show that a two sector equilibrium business cycle model with human capital is able to generate persistence in the growth of output and other aggregate variables comparable to that observed in the post war us data a key feature is the relatively low elasticity of substitution between skilled and unskilled labor in the production of human capital

underpaid and overworked measuring the effect of imperfect information on wages this paper investigates the degree of shortfall between the wages workers earn and what they could earn assuming perfect or costless information in the labor market we use the stochastic frontier regression technique to estimate the degree of shortfall found in wages on an individual basis the paper tests in addition a number of hypotheses supplied by search theory in this context the results generally confirm the propositions from search theory and indicate that on the average worker wages fall short of worker potential wages by approximately 10 percent

institutions and the resource curse countries rich in natural resources constitute both growth losers and growth winners we claim that the main reason for these diverging experiences is differences in the quality of institutions more natural resources push aggregate income down when institutions are grabber friendly while more resources raise income when institutions are producer friendly we test this theory building on sachs and warner s influential works on the resource curse our main hypothesis that institutions are decisive for the resource curse is confirmed our results contrast the claims of sachs and warner that institutions do not play a role

empirical age earnings profiles the human capital earnings function in which earnings are expressed as a quadratic in potential experience is probably the most widely accepted empirical specification in economics in spite of its widespread acceptance the human capital earnings function provides a very poor approximation of the true empirical relationship between earnings and experience the standard formulation understates early career earnings growth by about 30 50 and overstates midcareer growth by 20 50 however simple alternative specifications that fit the data are available

booming sector and de industrialisation in a small open economy this paper presents a theoretical analysis of the dutch disease the phenomenon whereby a boom in one traded goods sector squeezes porfitability in other traded goods sectors both by directly bi

the varieties of resource experience natural resource export structures and the political economy of economic growth many oil mineral and plantation crop based economies experienced a substantial deceleration in growth following the commodity boom and bust of the 1970s and early 1980s this article illustrates how countries dependent on point source natural resources those extracted from a narrow geographic or economic base such as oil and minerals and plantation crops are predisposed to heightened economic and social divisions and weakened institutional capacity this in turn impedes their ability to respond effectively to shocks which previous studies have shown to be essential for sustaining rising levels of prosperity analysis of data on classifications of export structure controlling for a wide array of other potential determinants of governance shows that point source and coffee and cocoa exporting countries do relatively poorly across an array of governance indicators these governance effects are not associated simply with being a natural resource exporter countries with natural resource exports that are diffuse relying primarily on livestock and agricultural produce from small family farms do not show the same strong effects and have had more robust growth recoveries

thick market effects and churning in the labor market evidence from u s cities using u s census microdata we show that on average workers change occupation and industry less in more densely populated areas the result is robust to standard demographic controls as well as to including aggregate measures of human capital and sectoral mix analysis of the displaced worker surveys shows that this effect is present in cases of involuntary separation as well on the other hand we actually find the opposite result higher rates of occupational and industrial switching for the subsample of younger workers these results provide evidence in favor of increasing returns to scale matching in labor markets results from a back of the envelope calibration suggest that this mechanism has an important role in raising both wages and returns to experience in denser areas

urban effects on participation and wages are there gender differences abstract this paper estimates participation and wage equations using panel data from the united kingdom to explore gender differences in urban wage and participation premiums the results suggest a small but economically significant urban participation premium for women but none for men results from the wage estimations suggest that after controlling for sample selectivity observed and unobserved heterogeneity the urban premium is larger for women this wage premium is also larger for married or cohabiting women relative to others there is also evidence of higher urban returns to experience for men and lower urban wage depreciation for both men and women

explaining african economic performance africa has had slow growth and a massive exodus of capital in many respects it has been the most capital hostile region we review and interpret the aggregate level and microeconomic literatures to identify the key explanations for this performance there is a reasonable correspondence of the two sets of evidence pointing to four factors as being important these are a lack of openness to international trade a high risk environment a low level of social capital and poor infrastructure these problems are to a substantial extent attributable to government behaviour and the paper includes a review of the political economy literature which addresses that behaviour

the rate of return to investments in on the job training in this paper we use the overtaking method to calculate marginal rates of return to on the job training as we have no prior information on who invests in ojt and who does not we use a switching regression model with unknown regimes to obtain parameter estimates of the wage profiles the estimation results show that lower intercepts are associated with steeper wage profiles this confirms the prediction that those who invest in ojt have lower initial wages but higher wage growth we further find that the marginal rate of return to ojt is high and increases with education

foreign capital and gender differences in promotions evidence from large brazilian manufacturing firms proquest denotes formulae omitted widespread consensus asserts that occupational segmentation is the chief determinant for gender differences in wages in the brazilian labor market see for example oliveira 2001 although women represent 39 percent of the formal workforce in brazil they amount to only 23 percent of the employees in the sectors that pay relatively higher wages in 2004 as well the predominance of segmentation increases if one restricts attention to managerial positions of which women hold only 14 percent this suggests that limited promotion prospects for women in the brazilian job market may present barriers to their promotion to the upper rungs of the corporate ladder this paper contributes to the literature by examining data from the larg est firms of the brazilian manufacturing industry in particular our goal is to determine whether obstacles to women s ascension exist by tracking the amount of time it takes for a woman to get a promotion to a managerial posi tion the aim is to complement the literature on gender differences in promo tions whose papers mainly focus on computing the promotion rates time to promotion offers a different angle in that samples with a large time span could well present similar likelihoods of promotion for both genders even if the promotion durations are different we construct the duration variable by following from january 1996 to december 2005 every individual who enters the annual report of social information rais database between january 1991 and december 1995 we denote as nonpromoted the individuals who do not obtain a promotion to a managerial position within the sample that is the right censored observations whereas we assign duration zero to the workers who already are in managerial positions in january 1996 accordingly we label as promoted the individuals within our sample who rise to a managerial position that is those with uncensored positive durations investigating dif ferences in promotions is particularly difficult because observationally simi lar male and female workers may display equal promotion rates and durations even in the presence of gender differences for example promotions may differ in quality as far as we know this is the first study to examine gender differences in promotions using microdata from a developing country apart from the obvious interest in finding whether the main stylized facts hold in a latin american country we were also motivated by the quality and availability of the brazilian data in contrast to the many studies that employ data from individual firms see for example cabral ferber and green 1981 gerhart and milkovich 1989 baker gibbs and holmstrom 1994 our study relies on a homogeneous sample of recently hired workers from the brazilian manufac turing industry in the period from 1996 to 2005 our data set is particularly convenient first the data include a wide array of controls for worker and firm characteristics second unlike blau and devaro 2007 we observe multiple workers per establishment at different occupations and hierarchical levels as well as their career paths in terms of occupation and wage a potential limi tation is that our data set does not include any direct measure of on the job productivity and hence we must come up with indirect controls interestingly we find that there are significantly fewer gender differences in the time to promotion within foreign owned firms than within domestic firms in the brazilian manufacturing industry our findings complement to some extent the literature on the differences between multinationals and domestic firms doms and jensen 2006 greene and others 2009 as well as the evidence that gender differences may depend on the nature of the firm 1 we argue that such gender differences are consistent with statistical discrimi nation and self selection we reason as follows suppose there are relatively more women than men who prefer to dedicate more time to their family than to their careers

more oil less democracy evidence from worldwide crude oil discoveries this article exploits variations in the timing and size of oil discoveries to identify the impact of oil wealth on democracy i find that discovering 100 billion barrels of oil approximately the initial endowment of iraq pushes a country s democracy level almost 20 percentage points below trend after three decades the estimated effect is larger for oilfields with higher quality oil and lower exploration and extraction costs however the estimates become less precise when oil abundance is measured by oil discovery per capita suggesting politicians may care about the level instead of the per capita value of oil wealth

sex segregation and sectors an analysis of gender differences in returns from employer changes sweet james 1973 women in the labor force new york seminar press vanek joann 1974 time spent in housework scientific american 231 116 20 1980 household work wage work and sexual equality pp 275 91 in sarah f berk ed women and household labor beverly hills ca sage walker k and m woods 1976 time use a measure of household production of family goods and services washington d c american home economics association

economic backwardness in political perspective government policies and institutions shape economic incentives and via this channel have a first order impact on economic development why then do many societies adopt policies that discourage investment and maintain institutions that cause economic backwardness perhaps politically powerful groups elites are not in favor of economic growth but why it would appear that economic growth would provide more resources for these groups to take over or tax increasing their economic returns so why don t powerful groups always support economic development in this paper we develop a theory of inefficient government policies and institutions all else equal politically powerful groups would welcome superior institutions and technologies but in practice all else is not equal because superior institutions and technologies may reduce their political power and make it more likely that they will be replaced at the center of our theory is therefore the idea that changes in institutions or the introduction of new technologies often create turbulence eroding the political advantages and future economic rents of incumbent elites alternatively new technologies may enrich competing groups increasing their threat to incumbents these considerations make politically powerful groups fear losing power and oppose economic and political change even when such change will benefit society as a whole to understand the mechanism at work and its potential applications consider a concrete example industrialization in the nineteenth century bairoch 1982 estimates that between 1830 and 1913 world manufacturing output increased by a factor of 5 see table 1 panel a nevertheless this process was highly uneven across regions and countries bairoch also calculates that over the same period manufacturing output in developed countries europe and north america increasedbyafactorofover10 whereasitdeclinedinthe third world among developed countries there were

nonemployment stigma as rational herding a field experiment abstract long spells of unemployment are known to reduce the likelihood of re employment but it is difficult to discern the reasons for this observation using an experimental method that controls for search intensity and possible discouragement of job applicants i document that job market opportunities for the nonemployed diminish rapidly over time in this experiment duration dependence is solely due to firm perceptions why do firms view long spells of nonemployment as negative signals rational herding is one important factor managers believe that unemployed applicants were previously interviewed and if the applicants were productive they would have been hired

the consequences of long term unemployment evidence from linked survey and administrative data that the long term unemployed fare worse in the labor market than do the short term unemployed is well known but why one potential explanation is that the long term unemployed are bad apples wh

welfare losses due to low employment rates an exploratory analysis for the netherlands this article aims at measuring the individual and national welfare losses due to low employment rates the calculations are made from a microeconomic point of view and based on assumptions of the human capital theory welfare losses are measured as the hypothetical loss of production resulting from one additional year of interruption or postponement of the working career depreciation of human capital due to non use in the interruption period and foregone experience are taken into account the welfare losses are estimated for individual cases with specific characteristics with respect to age educational level and length of interruption spell and multiplication factors are used to calculate the national welfare losses

returns to human capital under the communist wage grid and during the transition to a market economy we estimate returns to human capital during communism and the transition using data on 2 284 men in the czech republic we show a extremely low and constant rates of return to education under the communist wage grid and dramatic increases in transition which do not differ by firm ownership b radical changes in returns to several fields of study and sheepskin effects in both regimes c identical wage experience profile in both regimes d similar 1996 returns to human capital obtained in communism and in transition and e changes in the interindustry wage structure a decomposition of the variance of wages finds individuals unobservable effects from communism to persist into transition but most of the variance is due to unobservable effects introduced in the transition

home production with endogenous growth abstract benhabib et al 1991 and greenwood and hercowitz 1991 demonstrate that general equilibrium beckerian home production models that incorporate separate technology shocks to the home and market production functions are able to explain either the comovements in employment across consumption and investment sectors of the economy or the comovement in output across market and home investment sectors but not both simultaneously this paper demonstrates that these comovements can be resolved by introducing endogenous growth into the model while retaining only a single technology shock to market production the additional margin for allocating time between formal training and market activities is sufficient to bring about the observed positive comovements in employment and output across sectors

work power and earnings of women and men numerous studies have established that part of the very substantial male female earnings gap is explained by differences in the amount of human capital workers have accumulated see for example jacob mincer and haim ofek 1983 institutional factors have also been found to play a role in determining wages david gordon et al 1982 occupation further helped to explain the remaining gap but several researchers have shown that introducing dimensions of work authority by taking into account the individual s position in the work hierarchy explains more of the variation in earnings than does occupation martha hill 1980 last two recent studies ferber and spaeth 1984 spaeth 1985 also included control over monetary resources this variable added substantially to the explanatory power of earnings regressions even after human capital variables institutional factors and several other measures of work authority had been entered like the other studies ferber and spaeth also found that reward structures for men and women are quite different suggesting the possible existence of discrimination the question whether women may also be at a disadvantage in achieving control over monetary resources was not investigated when hill examined the process of achievement of work authority she found substantial differences between male and female workers in this paper we examine whether the same is true for attaining financial control i data and analysis