the kogut and singh national cultural distance index time to start using it as a springboard rather than a crutch this counterpoint investigates the continued relevance of the 30 year old kogut and singh ks index of cultural distance ks was a seminal contribution highlighting the relevance of cultural differences in ib however since then simplistic replications of the original arguments and index have prevented us from progressing towards a better understanding of how cross national differences matter we discuss the mechanisms underlying the construct and how they relate to the algorithm data and its critiques we call for more theoretically informed approaches highlighting the underlying mechanisms and specifying which data and algorithms best capture those mechanisms in each research context

marriage market divorce legislation and household labor supply this paper provides a theoretical framework for analyzing the impact of the marriage market and divorce legislation on household labor supply in our approach the sex ratio in the marriage market and the rules governing divorce are examples of distribution factors these factors are defined as variables that affect the household members bargaining position but not preferences or the joint budget set we extend the collective labor supply model developed by chiappori to allow for distribution factors we show that our model imposes new restrictions on the labor supply functions and eases the identification of individual preferences and the intrahousehold decision process the model is estimated using psid data for the year 1988 our results do not reject the restrictions imposed by the model also the sex ratio and divorce laws deemed favorable to women are found to affect labor supply behavior and the decision process in the directions predicted by the theory and to have sizable effects

occupational self selection a human capital approach to sex differences in occupational structure a rich and diverse literature exists concerning the distribution of labor incomes one approach namely that of human capital concentrates on lifetime accumulation paths of earnings capacity units human capital individual variations in human capital imply differences in earnings power thereby yielding strong implications concerning earnings distribution within a population despite its explanatory power the human capital model has been widely criticized one criticism centers on its inability to obtain inferences concerning occupational distribution the purpose of this paper is to alleviate at least some such criticism by applying the hedonic price approach so as to embed occupational choice into the human capital framework the significance is that neoclassical economic theory can be used to obtain implications concerning the determinants of occupational structure excerpt

equality employment and budgetary restraint the trilemma of the service economy this article presents an analysis of the postindustrial economy from a political economy perspective it identifies a set of specific distributional trade offs associated with the new role played by the services sector as the chief source of employment growth in advanced democracies over the last three decades it is argued that three core policy objectives budgetary restraint wage equality and expansion of employment constitute a political trilemma that allows only two of the goals to be successfully pursued at the same time using a combination of statistical and case oriented analysis the authors demonstrate the political and economic salience of the trilemma the distributional tensions inherent in each strategy to cope with it and the political institutional constraints under which these strategies are chosen

the political economy of gender explaining cross national variation in the gender division of labor and the gender voting gap mainstream political economy has tended to treat the family as a unit when examining the distributional consequences of labor market institutions and of public policy in a world with high divorce rates we argue that this simplification is more likely to obscure than to instruct we find that labor market opportunities for women which vary systematically with the position of countries in the international division of labor and with the structure of the welfare state affect women s bargaining power within the family and as a result can explain much of the cross country variation in the gender division of labor as well as the gender gap in political preferences

did unilateral divorce laws raise divorce rates a reconciliation and new results application of the coase theorem to marital bargaining suggests that shifting from a consent divorce regime to no fault unilateral divorce laws should not affect divorce rates each iteration of the empirical literature examining the evolution of divorce rates across us states has yielded different conclusions about the effects of divorce law liberalization i show that these results reflect a failure to jointly consider both the political endogeneity of these divorce laws and the dynamic response of divorce rates to a shock to the political regime taking explicit account of the dynamic response of divorce rates to the policy shock i find that liberalized divorce laws caused a discernible rise in divorce rates for about a decade but that this increase was substantially reversed over the next decade that said this increase explains very little of the rise in the divorce rate over the past half century both administrative data on the flow of new divorces and measures of the stock of divorcees from the census support this conclusion these results are suggestive of spouses bargaining within marriage with an eye to their partner s divorce threat

higher education funding the expansion of higher education throughout the oecd and beyond is both necessary and desirable but it is costly and faces competing imperatives for public spending higher education finance is therefore salient to an extent that is not yet fully appreciated in all countries and is also immensely sensitive politically this paper sets out the core lessons for financing higher education deriving from economic theory and puts them alongside lessons from country experience the uk reforms announced in 2004 are assessed against the backdrop of those two elements a concluding section briefly maps out unfinished business

distribution and redistribution in postindustrial democracies this paper analyzes the processes of distribution and redistribution in post industrial democracies we combine a pooled time series data base on welfare state effort and its determinants assembled by huber ragin and stephens 1997 with data on income distribution assembled in the luxembourg income survey lis archive in the case of the lis data we re calculate the micro data in order to remove the distorting influence of pensioners on pre tax pre transfer income distribution we examine the determinants of three dependent variables pre tax pre transfer income inequality post tax post transfer income inequality and the proportional reduction in inequality from pre to post tax and transfer inequality we hypothesized that pre tax pre transfer income inequality would be determined by labor market institutions union density bargaining centralization labor market conditions unemployment and economic structures post industrialism third world imports we hypothesized that the reduction in inequality would be determined by political configurations directly by left government and indirectly via their effect on welfare state generosity by left government and christian democratic government post tax and transfer income inequality was hypothesized to be a product of the combination of labor market variables and political variables the results broadly confirms our hypotheses and the overall fit is very good

centralized collective bargaining and the problem of compliance lessons from the italian experience according to the neo corporatist approach to the problem of compliance worker control over union policy is incompatible with centralized wage regulation because only associations in which national leaders are insulated from their members are capable of delivering rank and file acceptance of wage moderation this analysis of centralized collective bargaining agreements in italy in the 1980s and 1990s provides a critical re examination of the traditional neo corporatist approach the author drawing on archival research and interviews argues that centralization can be entirely compatible with decision making procedures in which rank and file workers have ultimate decision making power in fact the italian labor movement s adoption of more democratic decision making procedures he claims was instrumental in generating and sustaining centralized collective bargaining arrangements in italy in the early 1990s

the family and the state the immaturity of children sometimes precludes efficient arrangements between children and parents or others responsible for child care the difficulty in establishing efficient relations within families provides the point of departure for our interpretation of the heavy state involvement in the family the authors believe that a surprising number of state interventions mimic the agreements that would occur if children were capable of arranging for their care many regulations of the family improve the efficiency of family activities these interventions include subsidies to education and training social security and other old age support subsidies to births laws that limit access to divorce and the sale of children and laws that require parents permission for early marriage and other choices of children families that leave bequests can force children to repay parents for investments in human capital by reducing bequests therefore these families do not underinvest in childrens human capital by contrast families that do not leave bequests often poorer families do underinvest in children the state may subsidize schools and other training facilities to raise investments in children by poorer families to efficient levels authors modified

the sources of business interest in social insurance sectoral versus national differences when and why have employers supported the development of institutions of social insurance that provide benefits to workers during various employment related risks the analysis developed in this article challenges the dominant explanations of welfare state development which are premised on the assumption that business opposes social insurance the article examines the conditions under which self interested profit maximizing firms support the introduction of a new social policy and it specifies the most significant variables explaining the variation in employers social policy preferences the model is tested in three political episodes of welfare state development in france and germany using policy documents submitted by various employers associations to bureaucratic and parliamentary commissions

gendering the varieties of capitalism a study of occupational segregation by sex in advanced industrial societies this article explores the unintended gendered consequences of employment protection and vocational training systems it develops a micrologic of skill investment by workers and employers to identify the mechanism by which specific skills become disadvantageous for women the central claim of the article is that institutions that encourage male investment in specific skills exacerbate occupational sex segregation the article finds that coordinated market economies because of their robust institutional protection of male skill investments are generally more sex segregating than are liberal market economies the empirical section provides cross sectional analyses of advanced industrial countries

the fragmentation of the bargaining society wage setting in the nordic countries 1950 to 1992 it is commonly believed that corporatist bargaining institutions have been in general decline in the 1980s and 1990s the leading explanations of the purported universal trend toward greater decentralization of collective bargaining are the impact of technological change changes in the occupational structure and growing international economic integration decentralization should be particularly visible in the nordic countries because collective bargaining was more centralized in these countries in the 1960s and 1970s than in any others in western europe in this article the authors present data on the changes in the centralization of wage bargaining in the four nordic countries since 1950 they document that a significant decentralization of collective bargaining has occurred in sweden as is well known but not in the other three the article concludes with a review of possible explanations of swedish exceptionalism

employers and the welfare state the political economic organization of firms and social policy in contemporary capitalist democracies the authors argue that the organization of employers shapes social policy support among firms and in turn affects social policy outcomes specifically the authors argue that the centralization and cohesion of employer groups and economic cooperation across enterprises positively affects social welfare provision empirically the authors assess the impacts of business organization on social welfare effort in 15 developed democracies between the 1970s and 1990s the authors also provide analysis of the impact of employer organization on active labor market policy the authors find that the organization of employers is one of the most important determinants of overall social welfare effort the authors also find that employer organization affects the development of active labor market policies and it influences the degree to which social democratic parties pursue active labor market programs the authors conclude with a discussion of the findings implications for theories of social corporatism and the w

occupation segregation a defense of human capital predictions this article examines worker sorting across occupations in response to the risk of death on the job we use family structure as a proxy for willingness to trade safety for wages to test the proposition that workers with strong aversion to this risk sort

econometric analysis of financial trade processes by discrete mixture duration models abstract we propose a new framework for modelling the time dependence in financial duration processes the pioneering autoregressive conditional duration acd model introduced by engle and russell 1998 autoregressive conditional duration a new model for irregularly spaced transaction data econometrica 66 5 1127 1162 will be extended in a way that the duration process is clouded by an unobservable stochastic process the idea will be put into practice by the discrete mixture acd framework which provides us with a flexible methodology it will be established by introducing a discrete valued latent regime variable which can be justified in the light of recent market microstructure theories the empirical application demonstrates its ability to capture specific characteristics of intraday transaction durations while alternative approaches fail

who does more housework rich or poor a comparison of 33 countries this article studies the relationship between household income and housework time across 33 countries in most countries low income individuals do more housework than their high income counterpart

wage dispersion and productive efficiency evidence for sweden the swedish record of enormous compression of relative wages under centralized solidarity bargaining followed by substantial decompression of wages after central bargaining broke down supplies observations well suited to empirical evaluation of arguments about the response of productive efficiency to shifts in wage distribution we obtain no results supporting fairness morale and cohesiveness theories implying that wage leveling within workplaces and industries may enhance productivity reduction of interindustry wage differentials evidently did however contribute positively to aggregate output and productivity growth most likely for the structural reasons first emphasized by swedish trade union economists almost a half century ago

bargaining and distribution in marriage the standard economic model of the family is a common preference model that assumes that a family maximizes a single utility function and implies that family behavior is independent of which individuals receive income or control resources in recent years this model has been challenged by game theoretic models of marriage that do not impose pooling and are therefore consistent with empirical evidence that income controlled by husbands and wives does have different effects on family behavior in this paper the authors review a number of simple bargaining models and relevant empirical evidence and discuss their implications for distribution within marriage

long run cultural divergence evidence from the neolithic revolution this paper investigates the long run influence of the neolithic revolution on contemporary cultural norms as reflected in the dimension of collectivism individualism we present a theory of agricultural origins of cultural divergence where we claim that the advent of farming in a core region was characterized by collectivist values and eventually triggered the out migration of individualistic farmers towards more and more peripheral areas this migration pattern caused the initial cultural divergence which remained persistent over generations using detailed data on the date of adoption of neolithic agriculture among western regions and countries the empirical findings show that the regions which adopted agriculture early also value obedience more and feel less in control of their lives the findings add to the literature by suggesting the possibility of extremely long lasting norms and beliefs influencing today s socioeconomic outcomes

the effect of trade openness on women s welfare and work life summary this study of 134 countries analyzes whether women are generally the losers or winners of globalization the results show that economic integration does not directly improve women s life expectancies women s access to primary and secondary education may improve slightly although women s welfare does not seem to improve more than that of men on the other hand economic integration does influence women s professional lives in developing countries trade openness increases female labor force participation in industrialized states it decreases the share of working women trade openness in developed countries increases the number of women employed in the service sector while in developing states it increases the number of women working in industrial jobs and in agriculture

distribution and redistribution the shadow of the nineteenth century the authors present an alternative to power resource theory as an approach to the study of distribution and redistribution while they agree that partisanship and union power are important they argue that both are endogenous to more fundamental differences in the organization of capitalist democracies specifically center left governments result from pr consensus political systems as opposed to majoritarian systems while strong unions have their origins in coordinated as opposed to liberal capitalism these differences in political representation and in the organization of production developed jointly in the early twentieth century and explain the cross national pattern of distribution and redistribution the clusters have their origins in two distinct political economic conditions in the second half of the nineteenth century one in which locally coordinated economies were coupled with strong guild traditions and heavy investment in cospecific assets and one in which market based economies were coupled with liberal states and more mobile assets

business against markets employer resistance to collective bargaining liberalization during the eurozone crisis employer organizations have been presented as strong promoters of the liberalization of industrial relations in europe this article in contrast argues that the preferences of employers vis a vis

which dimensions of culture matter for long run growth we present empirical evidence that among a variety of cultural dimensions the individualism collectivism dimension based on hofstede s 2001 data is the most important and robustly significant effect of culture on long run growth other dimensions that have a significant effect albeit less robust are generally strongly correlated with individualism and convey similar information we found no significant or robust effect on growth from cultural dimensions that are independent from the individualism collectivism cleavage

globalization and taxation challenges to the swedish welfare state many have argued that the increased international mobility of both capital and labor witnessed in recent years will force advanced capitalist democracies to cut taxes and thus ultimately roll bac

public sector unions corporatism and macroeconomic performance what accounts for the apparent breakdown of the positive relationship between powerful trade union organizations and macroeconomic performance is corporatism a relic of a different age a luxury o

individualism and stock price crash risk employing a sample of 26 473 firms across 42 countries from 1990 to 2013 we find that firms located in countries with higher individualism have higher stock price crash risk furthermore individualism can be transmitted by foreign investors from overseas markets to influence local firms crash risk and can exacerbate the impact of firm risk taking and earnings management on crash risk moreover the positive relation between individualism and crash risk is amplified during the global financial crisis and attenuated by enhanced country level financial information transparency and the adoption of international financial reporting standards

are individualistic societies less equal evidence from the parasite stress theory of values it is widely believed that individualistic societies which emphasize personal freedom award social status for accomplishment and favor minimal government intervention are more prone to higher levels of income inequality compared to more collectivist societies which value conformity loyalty and tradition and favor more interventionist policies the results in this paper however challenge this conventional view drawing on a rich literature in biology and evolutionary psychology we test the provocative parasite stress theory of values which suggests a possible link between the historical prevalence of infectious diseases the cultural dimension of individualism collectivism and differences in income inequality across countries specifically in a two stage least squares analysis we use the historical prevalence of infectious diseases as an instrument for individualistic values which in the next stage predict the level of income inequality measured by the net gini coefficient from the standardized world income inequality database swiid our findings suggest that societies with more individualistic values have significantly lower net income inequality the results are robust even after controlling for a number of confounding factors such as economic development legal origins religion human capital other cultural values economic institutions and geographical controls

economic growth and individualism the role of informal institutions abstract this paper shows that the degree of ancestral individualism is positively related to annual earnings across second generation us immigrants this provides evidence in favor of gorodnichenko and roland s 2011b hypothesis that the individualistic dimension of culture is important for long term economic growth

why the poor do not expropriate the rich an old argument in new garb we consider a political economy with two partisan parties each party represents a given constituency of voters if one party labour represents poor voters and the other christian democrats rich voters if a redistributive tax policy is the only issue and if there are no incentive considerations then in equilibrium the party representing the poor will propose a tax rate of unity if however there are two issues tax policy and religion for instance then this is not generally the case the analysis shows that if a simple condition on the distribution of voter preferences holds then as the salience of the non economic issue increases the tax rate proposed by labour in equilibrium will fall possibly even to zero even though a majority of the population may have an ideal tax rate of unity 1998 elsevier science s a all rights reserved

social policy by popular demand why are unemployment benefits more generous in some countries this article argues that citizens trade off the redistributive and insuring effect of social insurance as a result the distribution of risk in a society has important consequences via popular demand for social policy making at the microlevel the article shows that in addition to income the risk of unemployment is a key predictor of individual level preferences for unemployment benefits based on the microlevel findings the article argues that at the macrolevel the homogeneity of the risk pool is an important determinant of benefit generosity the more equally unemployment risk is distributed the higher unemployment replacement rates are empirical testing at both levels finds support for this account of social policy by popular demand

the limit of equality projects public sector expansion sectoral conflicts and income inequality in postindustrial economies in this study we investigate how structural economic changes constrain an equality project the public sector expansion strategy first we describe a three stage process in which a growing produc

law enforcement and political participation italy 1861 65 abstract does tougher law enforcement positively affect political participation this paper addresses this question which hinges upon the causal impact of formal institutions on informal ones by using a historical event from 19th century italy this event was the pica law which was introduced in 1863 to fight a surge of criminal violence in southern italy and to ensure a safer environment for wealthy people the only ones allowed to vote at that time our main finding obtained using a spatial regression discontinuity technique in a diff in diffs framework is that voter turnout greatly increased in those areas where the pica law was applied compared with bordering and otherwise similar areas this result is confirmed by a number of robustness checks and placebo exercises and turns out to be persistent over time

cultural differences and institutional integration if citizens of different countries belonging to an economic union adhere to different and deeply rooted cultural norms when these countries interact they may find it impossible to agree on efficient policies especially in hard times political leaders are bound to follow policies that do not violate their country s cultural norms this paper provides a simple positive theory and a compelling case study of the euro area crisis to highlight the importance of cultural clashes when economies integrate we also provide a normative argument about the desirability of institutional integration a political union with a common enforcement agency is the more beneficial the greater is cultural diversity in an economic union

a review of the recent literature on the institutional economics analysis of the long run performance of nations this paper reviews the recent post 2000 literature which assesses the importance of institutions as a factor determining cross country differences in growth rates or in the contemporary level of prosperity it first sketches how institutional economics has evolved it then examines critically the methods of analysis employed in the recent literature the paper finds that this literature has made a major contribution to the analysis of the causes of economic growth but the relative importance of institutions as a determinant of long run growth and prosperity is still a wide open question

evaluating density forecasts with applications to financial risk management density forecasting is increasingly more important and commonplace for example in financial risk management yet little attention has been given to the evaluation of density forecasts the authors develop a simple and operational framework for density forecast evaluation they illustrate the framework with a detailed application to density forecasting of asset returns in environments with time varying volatility finally the authors discuss several extensions copyright 1998 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

women s rising market opportunities and increased labor force participation i introduction this paper examines the secular increase in the labor market activity of married women in the united states from 1975 to 1991 overall the female employment rate increased from 49 in 1975 to 67 in 1991 not surprisingly the employment gains of married women the primary focus of this study largely accounted for this increase 1 in particular the employment rate of married women climbed from 44 in 1975 to 64 in 1991 analysis of the dramatic increase in female labor force participation is certainly not new for example smith and ward 1985 document the time series growth in female labor force participation from the beginning of this century to 1980 goldin s work 1977 1989 stresses that women s role in the labor market began changing well before world war ii most broad based studies of female labor force participation end their analyses around 1980 thus this research updates earlier work and provides a glimpse of what happened to women during the 1980s more importantly the present research places special emphasis on the degree of married women s attachment to the labor force conventional wisdom suggests that women particularly married women or women with children are not as productive or as attached to their jobs as their male or other female counterparts my findings combat this view and demonstrate a strengthening in married female labor force attachment over the period studied regardless of children s presence 2 this paper finds that the fraction of the married female population who worked a full year significantly increased from the 1977 1981 time period to the 1987 1991 time period this coincided with a decrease of equal magnitude in the fraction who did not work at all during the calendar year moreover although the absolute number of married women who work part time has increased in prevalence their representation among the population of working married women has declined in fact the fraction of married women who work part time has increased only among those who work part of the year a shrinking category of women even more interesting this study shows that the increase in married female employment from 1975 to 1991 stems primarily from a substantial decline in their exit rates from employment this holds for the sub population of married women with young children as well these results suggest that an increase in the duration of married women s employment spells was the most significant contributor to the increase in their employment rates over this time period not only did married women s employment increase but so did their wages during the period studied however the wages of higher and lesser skilled women diverged a story that has already become familiar for men in the case of women the higher skilled have made significant wage gains while the wages of the least skilled have stagnated with this in mind this research links women s employment increases to their changing market opportunities the findings suggest that women work more primarily because of their willingness to work more at the same wage supply shift and not because of their rising potential wage demand shift 3 in fact less than 15 of the increase in employment can be explained by rising wages regardless of skill category i interpret these results to reinforce the hypothesis of increased labor market attachment among married women the remainder of this paper is organized as follows section ii describes the current population survey cps data set used for the empirical work section iii documents the secular increase in married women s labor market participation from 1975 to 1991 in particular the employment increase for married women is disaggregated by race presence of children education group and own skill group section iv disentangles the effects of women who work more because of their rising potential wage from the effects of women who work more at the same wage because of either a possible decline in their non market opportunities or changes in behavior arising from possible changes in preferences

the politics of progressive income taxation with incentive effects this paper studies majority voting over quadratic taxation and investigates under which conditions marginal progressivity emerges as a voting outcome in our model with endogenous income there is no majority condorcet winning tax schedule we then investigate less demanding political equilibrium concepts in order to see under which conditions the set of equilibria is composed only of progressive tax functions we follow three strategies i reduction of the policy space to the tax functions that are ideal for some voter ii elimination of weakly dominated strategies and the use of mixed strategies in a standard downsian two party competition game iii assumption that political parties interact repeatedly and care about the size of their majority although each approach captures a different aspect of political behavior they point to the same simulation based conclusion that progressivity is more likely to emerge for most distributions of abilities and that it is actually the only possible voting outcome if the distribution is sufficiently concentrated at the middle

the decentralization of collective bargaining a literature review and comparative analysis the author reviews evidence that the bargaining structure is becoming more decentralized in sweden australia the former west germany italy the united kingdom and the united states although in

labor markets production strategies and wage bargaining institutions the swedish employer offensive in comparative perspective transformed patterns of labor market governance occupy a central place in the study of contemporary west european political economies here detailed analysis of the dramatic decentralization of wa

growth in the labor force attachment of married women accounting for changes in the 1970s the sustained and marked increase in the labor force participation of married women characterized by some as a subtle revolution has been widely documented 22 increased labor force attachment has been manifested by adult women in all age groups up to age 65 and the most dramatic increases have been manifested by women in their mid 20s to mid 30s particularly white married women using data from the national longitudinal surveys of work experience nls this paper examines the growth between the late 1960s and late 1970s in labor force participation and hours worked among white married women aged 30 to 34 our purpose is to determine to what extent this growth can be attributed to changes in characteristics of women in this age range and to what extent important behavioral changes have occurred the data and methods of analysis are described in section ii while empirical estimates of the determinants of married women s work activity are presented in section iii analysis of the importance of the past decade s changes in these determinants characteristics in accounting for the observed growth in labor supply is provided in section iv concluding observations along with some speculation concerning the future course of married women s labor force attachment are in section v

the choices for scandinavian social democracy in comparative perspective scandinavian social democracy represents one of the most systematic attempts to shape economic institu tions and policies in pursuit of equality and full employment increasingly however these goals haveeluded governments and their institutional supports have eroded this paper seeks to understand this shiftthrough a comparative analysis that places particular emphasis on the interaction between macroeco nomic policies and wage bargaining institutions it is argued that the nature of this interaction and theassociated economic effects have been changed by new technology capital market integration andservice sector expansion as a result centralized wage bargaining institutions and accommodatingmacroeconomic policy regimes have been undermined and social democracy increasingly faces a choicebetween the promotion of equality and employment for all

the dual transformation of social protection and human capital comparing britain and germany britain and germany have been experiencing significant changes in the nature of work and welfare since the 1990s although important differences have remained there have been compelling indication

small states and skill specificity austria switzerland and interemployer cleavages in coordinated capitalism the varieties of capitalism literature has put skill systems at the center of comparative politics yet its claims about skill specificity are driven by two large coordinated economies germany and

media freedom and gender equality a cross national instrumental variable quantile analysis we investigate the impact of media freedom on gender equality in education for a sample of 63 countries taken over the period 1995 2004 our analysis is motivated by the idea that the impact of media freedom on gender equality may differ over the conditional distribution of the response variable using instrumental variable quantile regression to control for endogeneity in per capita income we find that greater freedom of the media improves gender equality only in the 0 25 and 0 50 quantiles of the conditional distribution countries with the greatest disparities in gender outcomes experience no significant impact of media freedom

university challenges explaining institutional change in higher education higher education policy has been subject to considerable reform in oecd states over the past two decades some states have introduced tuition fees others have massively increased public funding for higher education and still others remain in stasis retaining the elitist model with which they began the postwar era this article develops the argument that higher education policy in the oecd is driven by a set of partisan choices within a trilemma between the level of enrollment the degree of subsidization and the overall public cost of higher education the author develops a formal model of the micromechanisms underlying movements within this trilemma noting the importance of partisan politics existing enrollment tax structure and access these propositions are tested statistically on a sample of twenty two oecd countries and through case histories of higher education reform in england sweden and germany

wage setting institutions and pay inequality in advanced industrial societies the distribution of pay differs significantly across countries and over time among advanced industrial societies in this paper institutional and political determinants of pay inequality are studied in sixteen countries from 1980 to 1992 the most important factor in explaining pay dispersion is the level of wage setting i e whether wages are set at the level of the individual the plant the industry or the entire private sector the impact of centralization is the same whether centralization occurs via collective bargaining or via government involvement in private sector wage setting the concentration of unions and the share of the labor force covered by collective bargaining agreements also matter after controlling for wage setting institutions other variables such as the governing coalition the size of government international openness and the supply of highly educated workers have little impact economic political and norm based explanations for the association of centralization with egalitarian outcomes are discussed

governmental structure trustee selection and public university prices and spending multiple means to similar ends estimate the effects of multiple instruments for exercising political control over public university prices and spending i find that public universities located in states with governmental structures that enhance political control and universities whose trustees are selected by nonacademic stakeholders charge significantly lower prices than universities located in states with decentralized systems

national culture and the choice of exchange rate regime abstract based on the social analysis framework of williamson we argue that national culture especially the individualism collectivism dimension located in the social embeddedness level can guide behaviors and decisions in a country including the choice of exchange rate regime we argue that individualistic societies are more likely to choose floating regimes because their economic agents are independent overconfident and have higher levels of risk tolerance individualistic societies are also associated with better financial development fewer capital controls and more democratic institutions which are all tied to a higher probability of choosing a floating exchange rate regime we use data on 78 countries over the 1976 2014 period and we control for common determinants of exchange rate regimes we find that individualistic countries have a significantly higher probability of implementing a floating regime than a fixed regime our evidence is robust to using an instrumental variables approach an alternative estimation technique an alternative regime classification alternative proxies for culture a subsample analysis and additional controls we also find that other cultural dimensions uncertainty avoidance power distance and masculinity can influence the choice of exchange rate regime but their effect is weaker than that of individualism

the politics of retrenchment in a social democratic welfare state reform of swedish pensions and unemployment insurance what explains the origins and pattern of retrenchment dynamics in swedish old age pensions and unemployment insurance during the 1990s although the economic crisis created pressure to scale back both programs the author argues that retrenchment only occurred when and where the social democratic party and some segments of the labor movement supported change this finding suggests that the political importance of organized labor in retrenchment politics depends on the relationship between welfare state programs and interest group structure when interest group structure is characterized by solidaristic centralized encompassing organizations the old class based power resource model has more explanatory bite than pierson s new politics of the welfare state approach

democratic limits to redistribution inclusionary versus exclusionary coalitions in the knowledge economy the knowledge economy deindustrialization and the decline of fordism have undermined the economic complementarities that once existed between skilled and semiskilled workers the result has everywhere been a decline in coordinated wage bargaining and unionization and a notable rise in labor market inequality yet the political responses have been very different across advanced democracies while labor markets for part time and temporary employment have been deregulated across the board some countries have compensated losers through increased cash transfers and active labor market programs and others have allowed inequality and insider outsider divisions to grow deeper the article argues that the divergent government responses reflect differences in underlying electoral coalitions and that these in turn mirror the structure of party and electoral systems the authors support their argument with evidence for government responses to economic shocks in the period 1980 to 2010

institutional change in contemporary capitalism coordinated financial systems since 1990 what happens when the unstoppable force of liberalization collides with the immovable object of national financial institutions in the advanced industrial democracies to answer this question and evaluate alternative mechanisms to explain institutional change this article examines the cases of the three large european economies with concentrated share ownership france germany and italy in the formal legal mechanism interest coalitions adopt new laws leading actors to deviate from formerly stable patterns of behavior in shareholding in the joint belief shift mechanism collective actors use a triggering event to jointly reevaluate their views of how the world works and thus how their interests can best be pursued using the metric of patient capital this article shows that institutional change took place in france but not in germany or italy despite the fact that germany and italy experienced significant regulatory change in the area of corporate governance while france did not this evidence fits joint belief shift and is inconsistent with the formal legal mechanism it is likely that the importance of the two mechanisms of institutional change depends on the degree of strategic interdependence among institutional actors where it is high the joint belief shift mechanism is likely to precipitate change and where it is low the formal legal mechanism is likely to precipitate change

economic man social woman the case of the gender gap in support for the canada united states free trade agreement do differences in basic values and concerns underlie differences in the issue positions of women and men this article uses a decomposition approach to assess the contribution of male female differ

labor supply and marital separation panel data are used to estimate the effect of marital separation on labor supply female labor supply increases substantially and male labor supply declines marginally lending support to the theory of specialization within the household the most interesting finding is that women began to increase their labor supply well before the actualsplit occurs suggesting either that shocks to labor supply change divorce probabilities or that women with a higher likelihood of divorcework more this argument is pursued by constructing and estimating a simultaneous model of labor supply and divorce risk copyright 1986 by american economic association

the structure of inequality and the politics of redistribution against the current consensus among comparative political economists we argue that inequality matters for redistributive politics in advanced capitalist societies but it is the structure of inequality not the level of inequality that matters our theory posits that middle income voters will be inclined to ally with low income voters and support redistributive policies when the distance between the middle and the poor is small relative to the distance between the middle and the rich we test this proposition with data from 15 to 18 advanced democracies and find that both redistribution and nonelderly social spending increase as the dispersion of earnings in the upper half of the distribution increases relative to the dispersion of earnings in the lower half of the distribution in addition we present survey evidence on preferences for redistribution among middle income voters that is consistent with our theory and regression results indicating that the left parties are more likely to participate in government when the structure of inequality is characterized by skew

a semiparametric conditional duration model we propose a new semiparametric autoregressive duration sacd model which incorporates the parametric and nonparametric estimators of the conditional duration in a multiplicative way asymptotic properties for this combined estimator are presented the empirical application to the transaction duration of the us 2 year treasury note shows the outperformance of our sacd models over parametric acd models

presidential address institutions and culture how and why does distant political and economic history shape the functioning of current institutions this paper argues that individual values and convictions about the scope of application of norms of good conduct provide the missing link evidence from a variety of sources points to two main findings first individual values consistent with generalized as opposed to limited morality are widespread in societies that were ruled by non despotic political institutions in the distant past second well functioning institutions are often observed in countries or regions where individual values are consistent with generalized morality and under different identifying assumptions this suggests a causal effect from values to institutional outcomes the paper ends with a discussion of the implications for future research jel a10 d7 e00

the paradox of globalization labor relations in germany and beyond what is the impact of globalization on labor in the advanced industrial countries one body of work holds that globalization pushes all countries toward neoliberalism another argues that the impact of globalization will vary according to prevailing institutional arrangements and predicts continued divergence between the so called liberal and coordinated market economies in an analysis of the german case that combines case study and formal modeling methods we refute the first neoliberal convergence theory showing that globalization in some ways empowers unions by rendering employers extremely vulnerable to industrial unrest furthermore we suggest some revisions to the second varieties of capitalism perspective we show that in germany employers increased vulnerability to conflict has shored up centralized bargaining arrangements in the short run but at the same time has also set in motion feedback effects that are deeply destabilizing to the system in the longer term

the transformation of the swedish model economic ideas distributional conflict and institutional change this article examines the transformation of the swedish model of economic regulation from an ideational perspective while the majority of arguments about the decline of the swedish model have focused on the role of structural factors this article looks to illuminate the ideational factors that made possible both the emergence and the transformation of the swedish model the article details how during the 1930s and 1940s economic ideas provided the swedish state and its trade union allies with the means to construct the institutions of the swedish model by the 1970s however swedish business suffered diminishing returns to continued participation within these institutions and responded to labor s challenges by adopting a two pronged strategy of withdrawal from and ideological contestation of labor s supporting institutions the politics of ideas was key in this regard during the 1980s swedish business marshaled alternative economic ideas to contest and thus delegitimate existing institutions and the patterns of distribution they made possible swedish business thus began the process of overturning the swedish model long before capital mobility or domestic inflation was ever a problem by highlighting these factors the article offers an explanation of the transformation of the swedish model that stresses the centrality of ideational contestation for understanding institutional change in general

collectivism and corruption in bank lending this paper examines how national culture and collectivism in particular influences corruption in bank lending we hypothesize that interdependent self construal and particularist norms in collectivist countries lead to a higher level of lending corruption through their influence both on the interactions between bank officers and bank customers and on the dynamics among bank colleagues using a sample covering 3835 firms across 38 countries we find strong evidence that firms domiciled in collectivist countries perceive a higher level of lending corruption than firms domiciled in individualist countries in terms of economic magnitude the effect of collectivism is substantially larger than the effects of other cultural dimensions uncertainty avoidance masculinity and power distance and institutional factors identified in prior studies bank supervision bank competition information sharing and media monitoring we further find that the positive relationship between collectivism and lending corruption is not driven by endogeneity and that it is robust to different measures of bank corruption different measures of collectivism and different estimation methods finally we find that the link between collectivism and lending corruption cannot be explained by the role of the government in the economy political connections biased responses from disgruntled borrowers or relationship lending

the danish miracle luck pluck or stuck the 1980s and 1990s saw employment miracles in denmark australia and the netherlands this article analyzes the dynamics and substance of danish policy responses to poor export employment and fiscal performance to see whether remediation should be attributed to pluck intentional strategic remediation of dysfunctional institutions to make them conform with the external environment luck environmental change that makes formerly dysfunctional institutions suddenly functional or just being stuck endogenous not entirely strategic change that leaves institutions in conformity with the environment it addresses these issues to remedy biases in the literature toward sweden as model toward pessimism about the welfare state s survivability and toward privileging intentional action the analysis finds that stuck endogenous dynamics probably explains as much as pluck strategic choice suggesting only limited transferability for policy lessons from the miracles

unions employers associations and wage setting institutions in northern and central europe 1950 1992 the eight countries examined in this study austria belgium denmark finland germany the netherlands norway and sweden have long been viewed as exemplifying corporatist industrial relations

why have women become left wing the political gender gap and the decline in marriage the last three decades have witnessed the rise of a pohtical gender gap in the united states wherein more women than men favor the democratic party we trace this development to the decline in marriage which we posit has made men richer and women poorer data for the united states support this argument first there is a strong positive correlation between state divorce prevalence and the political gender gap higher divorce prevalence reduces support for the democrats among men but not women second longitudinal data show that following marriage divorce women are less more likely to support the democratic party

electoral institutions and the politics of coalitions why some democracies redistribute more than others standard political economy models of redistribution notably that of meltzer and richard 1981 fail to account for the remarkable variance in government redistribution across democracies we develop a general model of redistribution that explains why some democratic governments are more prone to redistribute than others we show that the electoral system plays a key role because it shapes the nature of political parties and the composition of governing coalitions hence redistribution our argument implies 1 that center left governments dominate under pr systems whereas center right governments dominate under majoritarian systems and 2 that pr systems redistribute more than majoritarian systems we test our argument on panel data for redistribution government partisanship and electoral system in advanced democracies w hy do some countries redistribute more than others most work on the politics of redistribution starts from the premise that democratic institutions empower those who stand to benefit from redistribution the basic logic is succinctly captured in the meltzer richard 1981 model where the voter with the median income is also the decisive voter with a typical right skewed distribution of income the median voter will push for redistributive spending up to the point where the benefit of such spending to the median voter is outweighed by the efficiency costs of distortionary taxation this argument implies that redistibution is much greater in democracies than in nondemocracies at least of the right authoritarian variety and that among the latter inegalitarian societies redistribute more than egalitarian ones there is some evidence to supportthefirstimplication althoughitisdisputed see ross 2005 but most of the variance in redistribution is probably within the same regime type according to datafromtheluxembourgincomestudy forexample the reduction in the poverty rate in united states as a result of taxation and transfers was 13 in 1994 whereas the comparable figure for sweden was 82 thepovertyrateisthepercentageofhouseholdsbelow 50 of the median income to explain this variance we have to look at political and economic differences