manufacturing gender inequality in the new economy high school training for work in blue collar communities tensions between the demands of the knowledge based economy and remaining blue collar jobs underlie renewed debates about whether schools should emphasize career and technical training or college preparatory curricula we add a gendered lens to this issue given the male dominated nature of blue collar jobs and women s greater returns to college using the els 2002 this study exploits spatial variation in school curricula and jobs to investigate local dynamics that shape gender stratification results suggest a link between high school training and jobs in blue collar communities that structures patterns of gender inequality into early adulthood although high school training in blue collar communities reduced both men s and women s odds of four year college enrollment it had gender divergent labor market consequences men in blue collar communities took more blue collar courses had higher rates of blue collar employment and earned similar wages relative to otherwise comparable men from non blue coll

agents of change or cogs in the machine reexamining the influence of female managers on the gender wage gap do female managers act in ways that narrow or instead act in ways that preserve or even widen the gender wage gap although conceptual arguments exist on both sides of this debate the empirical evidence to date has favored the former view yet this evidence comes primarily from cross establishment surveys which do not provide visibility into individual managers choices using longitudinal personnel records from an information services firm in which managers had considerable discretion over employee salaries we estimate multilevel models that indicate no support for the proposition that female managers reduce the gender wage gap among their subordinates consistent with the theory of value threat we instead find conditional support for the cogs in the machine perspective in the subsample of high performing supervisors and low performing employees women who switched from a male to a female supervisor had a lower salary in the following year than men who made the same switch

measuring returns on investments in collectibles this paper considers the question of how to measure and interpret the financial return to investing in collectibles we review various methodologies for creating priced indexes and then discuss studies that explicitly calculate a rate of return to some set of collectibles while most collectibles appear to yield positive real returns the majority embody more risk and yield lower financial returns than stocks other characteristics of collectibles prices such as covariance with other asset prices are also examined

does marriage really make men more productive this paper presents new descriptive evidence regarding marital pay premiums earned by white males longitudinal data indicate that wages rise after marriage and that cross sectional marriage premiums appear to result from a steepening of the earnings profile data from a company personnelfile that includes information on job grades and supervisor performance ratings reveal large marital status pay differences within a narrow range of occupations managers and professionals and environments a single firm married workers tend to be located in higher paying job grades there are very small pay differentials within grades married men receive higher performance ratings than single men as a result they are much more likely to be promoted controlling for rated performance however eliminates the promotion differential sanders korenman is an assistant professor of economics and public affairs at princeton university and is a faculty associate of the office of population research at princeton university and a research affiliate of the national bureau of economic research nber david neumark is an assistant professor of economics at the university of pennsylvania and a research affiliate of the nber korenman wishes to acknowledge the hewlett foundation and the harvard university center for population studies for financial support the authors are grateful to james medofffor making available an extract from the company personnelfile questions regarding data availability should be directed to professor james

skill biased technological change and rising wage inequality some problems and puzzles the recent rise in wage inequality is usually attributed to skill biased technical change sbtc associated with new computer technologies we review the evidence for this hypothesis focusing on the implications of sbtc for overall wage inequality and for changes in wage differentials between groups a key problem for the sbtc hypothesis is that wage inequality stabilized in the 1990s despite continuing advances in computer technology sbtc also fails to explain the evolution of other dimensions of wage inequality including the gender and racial wage gaps and the age gradient in the return to education

overwork and the slow convergence in the gender gap in wages despite rapid changes in women s educational attainment and continuous labor force experience convergence in the gender gap in wages slowed in the 1990s and stalled in the 2000s using cps data fr

income inequality and class divides in parental investments historic increases in income inequality have coincided with widening class divides in parental investments of money and time in children these widening class gaps are significant because parental investment is one pathway by which advantage is transmitted across generations using over three decades of micro data from the consumer expenditure survey and the american heritage time use survey linked to state year measures of income inequality we test the relationship between income inequality and class gaps in parental investment we find robust evidence of wider class gaps in parental financial investments in children but not parental time investments in children when state level income inequality is higher we explore mechanisms that may drive the relationship between rising income inequality and widening class gaps in parental financial investments in children this relationship is partially explained by the increasing concentration of income at the top of the income distribution in state years with hi

art investment an empirical inquiry investment in art and especially in paintings by the masters is often considered to be highly profitable particularly in the united states but also in the richer european nations there is an even larger number of investors who believe that buying works of art is not only fun but also a good investment from a purely financial point of view american banks have recently strengthened this trend toward art as an investment by employing art investment counselors thus suggesting that it is a financially rewarding activity to engage in and also suggesting that superior knowledge helps to improve financial success in this market buying and selling art has in fact become an increasingly popular activity since the end of world war ii the auction houses report record turnovers and record prices are paid in increasingly rapid sequence in april 1987 van gogh s sunflowers was sold at christie s london for 39 9 million only to be surpassed in november 1987 by van gogh s irises sold by sotheby s new york for 53 9 million including the auction house s 10 percent commission this last painting had been bought by the seller s mother in 1947 for 84 000 less than 0 5 million in today s money which gives a real rate of return of about 12 percent per year these enormous prices that are paid today for some masterpieces create a widespread belief that the rate of return on such investments is in general and on average very high books devoted to the subject 40 385 27 24 12 215 et seq seem to confirm that the rate of return from investment in paintings at least during the 1950s and 1960s was far greater than the rate obtainable from comparable risky assets in financial markets that the financial profitability in the 1970s and 1980s is believed to be if anything even larger than before is confirmed by many articles in financial and investment newspapers and journals up to now only very few scientific studies of the subject exist but they also have serious limitations the most recent one by baumol 5 covers a period of over 300 years but ends in 1960 two other studies by anderson 1 and stein 42 extend up to the end of the 1960s but do not go any further all three studies are practically limited to transactions by anglo saxon auction

price determination for a collectible good the case of rare united states coins researchers investigating markets for collectible goods such as paintings 1 2 6 12 antique furniture 7 stradivarius violins 14 wine 8 10 and postage stamps 15 often report rates of return to holding collectibles that are both low 2 6 7 8 12 and volatile 6 7 8 12 baumol 2 argues that the market for paintings of noted deceased artists has no long run equilibrium price because the market is characterized by infrequent trades of unique assets which are available in fixed supply his empirical analysis supports the idea that paintings experience unpredictable price changes and highly dispersed rates of return with a mean near zero in contrast anderson 1 reports estimated equations explaining approximately 60 percent of the variation in log prices of paintings based on the size of painting date of sale and a constructed measure of repute of the artist other researchers have examined markets with more frequent transactions and greater substitutability among the goods traded schnitzel 15 finds that year to year changes in prices of postage stamps are predictable based on age of the stamp and quantity printed ross and zondervan 14 report that variations in quality affect prices but not rates of return of stradivarius violins a result which is consistent with user benefits being invariant with respect to quality among markets for collectibles the market for rare u s coins is active and well organized and faces the potential for increased federal regulation annual sales are estimated at 5 billion 16 two wall street brokerages recently have formed multimillion dollar limited partnerships to invest in rare coins and some coins now are traded on electronic exchanges 5 these innovations have come amid calls for increased regulation to guard against fraudulent grading of coins 5 16 a major determinant of the price of a collectible coin is its grade a measure of condition reflecting qualities such as sharpness of features regulators accuse coin dealers of defrauding collectors of millions of dollars annually by assigning higher than warranted grades to the coins dealers sell while downgrading coins they buy for example the federal trade commission ftc

to save or savor the rate of return to storing wine for 28 000 one can buy a jaguar xj6 308 shares of mcdonnell douglas stock a one tenth interest in an oklahoma gas well 4i years of undergraduate life at stanford or one bottle of chateau lafite vintage 1806 that s 1 166 67 an ounce at this moment gold is worth only 275 an ounce and you can t smell or drink it saturday review of literature 1979 p 38 nine years ago 70 could persuade a paris restaurant to part with this same bottle of liquid gold goldwyn 1979 p 4 but for balance admire the growth of a slightly more pedestrian vintage a 1959 beaulieu estate bottled cabernet today a case of it may be purchased for 1 200 for the more modest budget 950 will buy a case of 1970 beaulieu george latour private reserve cabernet all this goes to show that wine the right wine in the last 10 years has provided the prudently daring investor with a spectacular return the virtues of wine as a liquid asset have been tested recently by krasker 1979 krasker cannot reject a hypothesis that wine offers no extraordinary rate of return the wine investor can expect no greater return than that which accrues to riskless assets while krasker finds the concept that an investment in wine outperforms treasury bills in nominal return incompatible with the way economists believe most assets are priced his result seems counter to intuition wine as a subcategory of riskless assets seems contrary to wine s very nature wine is a living substance its maturation process extends well beyond the bottling day lasting as long as 20 40 years in the case of some reds while a few others refuse to retire at 65 but the proper age

capital gains and the rate of return on a stradivarius capital gains and the rate of return on a stradivarius i introduction no name in the annals of violin making has evoked more interest and sense of mystery than that of antonio stradivari during his long lifetime 1644 1737 stradivari probably made about 1 100 instruments with about 700 violins being accounted for currently stradivariuses have been sold in 1986 at auction for over 300 000 fakes are everywhere in spite of the wealth of price data on stradivariuses no systematic economic analysis of this data has been made the central question for this paper is what is the rate of return on a stradivarius rate of return means the annual percentage increase in the price of a stradivarius as in the case of collectables after converting all prices into dollars with 1967 purchasing power the following equation is applied p sub t p sub 0 e sup rt where p sub t is the most recent price and p sub 0 is the preceding transaction price r is the rate of return and t is the number of years elapsing between transaction dates of p sub t and p sub 0 in section ii the rate of return on individual violins for four different periods is determined stradivari developed his skills over time so that each violin is not an identical product regression analysis is used to show how these differences in quality are reflected in differences in price but not in differences in rates of return section iii in section iv the rate of return on a stradivarius from 1803 to 1986 is determined finally in section v other factors are considered that may influence the rate of return on a stradivarius ii the rate of return on individual violins here data on sale prices of individual violins are examined where there is more than one transaction over time in addition each of the sales is assigned to one of four periods periods generally accepted by musicologists such as henley 1961 15 16 as encapsulating stages in stradivari s development data are shown in tables i to iv the amati period 1665 90 stradivari was apprenticed at the age of fourteen in the workshop of the famous nicolo amati where he received on the job training all creations during this period are worked on the pattern of amati table i shows three violins having at least two sales to understand the table consider the first row labeled soames the violin was made by stradivari in 1684 transactions took place in 1907 and 1973 for 8 571 and 15 778 respectively all prices are in 1967 dollars the equation discussed above yields 15 778 8 571e sup r 66 based on this r the rate of return is 0 92 percent in other words the price of the soames violin increased annually at a rate of 0 92 percent typically there is a brokerage fee of 10 percent for individuals 6 percent for dealers to sell a violin at sotheby s or christie s auction house this of course reduces the rate of return on a violin for example to determine the rate of return on the soames after brokerage costs 10 percent was deducted from the 1973 price changing it from 15 778 to 14 201 after eliminating brokerage costs the price increases by 0 77 percent annually the nachez and mercury violins were similarly analyzed the mercury had three different sales so that there are two rates of return the long period 1691 1700 during this period stradivari made numerous changes in his art the scroll is worked in more detail and the varnish is golden yellow stradivari modified the pattern by making the violin a little longer and slightly more narrow table ii shows data on four violins except for the 1933 36 period the falmouth had similar rates of return even though the interval between sales varied significantly seventy four six and forty six years for the first second and fourth transactions respectively

reinforcing separate spheres the effect of spousal overwork on men s and women s employment in dual earner households this study examines whether long work hours exacerbate gender inequality as working long hours becomes increasingly common a normative conception of gender that prioritizes men s careers over women s careers in dual earner households may pressure women to quit their jobs i apply multilevel models to longitudinal data from the survey of income and program participation to show that having a husband who works long hours significantly increases a woman s likelihood of quitting whereas having a wife who works long hours does not appear to increase a man s likelihood of quitting this gendered pattern is more prominent among workers in professional and managerial occupations where the norm of overwork and the culture of intensive parenting are strong furthermore the effect is stronger among workers who have children findings suggest that overwork can reintroduce the separate spheres arrangement consisting of breadwinning men and homemaking women to many formerly dual earner households

stamp returns and economic factors in the last two decades a number of prominent financial economists have considered the extent to which assets provide hedges against inflation and or other sources of systematic risk motivated by the high inflation rates of the 1970s fama and schwert 5 conducted the seminal analysis on asset returns and inflation investigating the extent to which the returns to various assets including common stock government bonds treasury bills real estate and human capital were hedges against anticipated and unanticipated inflation fama and schwert found that bonds bills and real estate provided effective hedges against anticipated inflation for the period 1953 1971 but only real estate provided a hedge against unanticipated inflation in fact most of the assets had a negative sensitivity to unanticipated inflation with common stock showing a negative relationship to both sources of inflation

from wage regulation to wage gap how wage setting institutions and structures shape the gender wage gap across three industries in 24 european countries and germany whilst a common and persisting feature of advanced market economies the gender wage gap nevertheless varies across countries amongst the factors affecting this wage gap industrial relations and industry differences still require further research using data from eu silc in 25 european countries this article analyses how national wage setting institutions impact wage differences between male and female full time employees in three distinct industries complementing the country comparison is an in depth study of the german case using data from the german linked employer employee database shedding light on the interaction of industry specific wage setting regulations and gender equity in living wages findings from the international comparison suggest a substantial gender wage gap for full time employees across industries with specific country patterns country patterns seem to be due to the overall influence of trade unions and the relationship between pay bargaining strategies and specific minimum wage policies the german case adds to these findings by analysing the impact of sectoral models of wage bargaining for industry specific gender wage gaps focussing on living wages for skilled full time employees

the rate of return on investment in wine joyce p jacobsen is wine an investment alternative to stocks and bonds first we review prior studies regarding the pecuniary rate of return to wine and other alternatives to financial assets next we calculate the rate of return to holding red bordeaux wine from 1986 to 1996 using a repeat sale regression finally we contrast the financial performance of wine both on an aggregate basis and for various portfolios to that of other asset classes we conclude that wine does not yield greater returns than financial assets especially when the volatility of returns and transaction costs are taken into account jel d44 g12 c43 investments in art and other collectibles are generally deemed profitable but empirical examinations of the relative attractiveness of noncapital good tangible assets relative to financial instruments have shown that art and other collectibles are not sound investments from a financial point of view there is a large body of literature that calculates the rate of return on alternative asset classes and concludes with few exceptions that nonfinancial assets are not good financial investments however in the case of wine the evidence is mixed collectors often maintain that the pecuniary rate of return on investments in wine is comparable to or exceeds investments in stocks and bonds and economists have not reached a consensus vis a vis the relative attractiveness of wine in this article we consider 1 how investment grade wine compares to other alternative asset classes and 2 whether wine might be a viable investment alternative to stocks or bonds first we consider the results drawn from empirical investigations regarding the relative attractiveness of paintings and other collectibles as investments next we review prior econometric evidence regarding the pecuniary rate of return to wine finally we calculate the return on wine from 1986 to 1996 using a repeat sale regression and contrast wine s financial performance both for an aggregate portfolio and for selected submarkets to that of other asset classes i most investments in collectibles cannot be justified as purely monetary there is a virtual consensus in the economic literature of the arts that financial assets dominate less traditional tangible assets as investments because art and other collectibles embody a compensating differential in the form of a user benefit burton and jacobsen 1999 offer a survey of this literature that finds that most quantitative examinations of the markets for art and other collectibles have concluded that the high risk low return characteristics of noncapital good tangible assets effectively proscribe retaining them as financial investments a seminal study by baumol 1986 for example estimated the real annual rate of return on paintings over the period 1652 to 1961 to be only 0 55 frey and pommerehne 1989 who subsequently extended baumol s data set up through 1987 and expanded it by including sales from more countries also concluded that paintings were relatively unattractive investment instruments yielding only about 1 4 between 1635 and 1949 and 1 6 between 1950 and 1987 on an annual inflation adjusted basis more recent studies have only confirmed that investments in other forms of art and collectibles compare unfavorably to investments in traditional financial assets especially when the rate of return is risk adjusted 1 pesando 1993 for example constructed a price index of modem prints over 1977 to 1992 and estimated that the average real annual rate of return on an aggregate print portfolio was only 1 51 well below the concomitant real return on stocks moreover pesando noted that the risk as measured by the standard deviation of real returns associated with investing in prints was comparable to or even exceeded investments in stocks or long term bonds ii but what about wine

you can t always get what you need organizational determinants of diversity programs while some u s corporations have adopted a host of diversity management programs many have done little or nothing we explore the forces promoting six diversity programs in a national sample of 816 firms over 23 years institutional theory suggests that external pressure for innovation reinforces internal advocacy we argue that external pressure and internal advocacy serve as alternatives such that when external pressure is already high increases in internal advocacy will not alter the likelihood of program adoption moreover institutional theory points to functional need as a driver of innovation we argue that in the case of innovations designed to achieve new societal goals functional need as defined in this case by the absence of workforce diversity or the presence of regulatory oversight is less important than corporate culture our findings help explain the spotty coverage of diversity programs firms that lack workforce diversity are no more likely than others to adopt programs but firms with large contingents of women managers are more likely to do so pro diversity industry and corporate cultures promote diversity programs the findings carry implications for public policy

bias corrected estimates of ged returns using three sources of data this article examines the direct economic return to general educational development ged certification for both native and immigrant high school dropouts one data source the current population survey cps is plagued by nonresponse and allocation bias from the hot deck procedure that biases the estimated return to the ged upward correcting for allocation bias and ability bias there is no direct economic return to ged certification an apparent return to ged certification with age found in the raw cps data is due to dropouts becoming more skilled over time these results apply to both native born and immigrant populations

the effect of unions on wage inequality in the u s labor market this study uses current population survey micro data for 1973 74 and 1993 to evaluate the effect of changing union membership on trends in male and female wage inequality unionization rates of men fell between the two sample periods with bigger declines among lower skill groups these trends account for 15 20 of the rise in male wage inequality union membership rates of low wage women also declined while unionization increased among higher wage women on balance shifting unionization accounts for very little of the rise in female wage inequality economy wide trends in unionization mask a sharp divergence between the private sector where unionism was declining and the public sector where it was rising comparisons across sectors suggest that unionization substantially slowed the growth in wage inequality in the public sector

specialization then and now marriage children and the gender earnings gap across cohorts in this paper we examine the evolution of the gender gap associated with marriage and parental status comparing cohorts born between 1936 and 1985 the model of household specialization and division of labor introduced by becker posits that when forming households couples will exploit the gains from trade by having one spouse specialize in market work while the other specializes in household work given the historical advantage of men in the labor market the model predicts specialization by gender and therefore an earnings advantage for married men and an earnings disadvantage for married women is this model of specialization useful for understanding the evolution of the gender gap across generations of women and what about children academic papers have shown that wages of mothers are significantly lower than those of non mothers with similar human capital characteristics we do not attempt to build a structural model here but rather document how changing associations between marriage and earnings and between children and earnings have contributed to the gender gap in an accounting sense

the market value of rarity abstract most theories of demand assume that consumers value the characteristics of products but are unconcerned with how many other consumers also consume the product however several theories of demand argue that consumers can value the exclusivity of possessing a rare object we test this implication on a particular collectible rare coins our paper examines the case of coins of a given type and identical quality that have mintages in different quantities this allows us to exclude the common case in which rarity or price itself is an indicator of quality for our sample rarer coins command higher prices rarity in the form of original mintage more strongly influences the market price than does collectibility as represented by the rarest coins of each mint mark or year we also point out that here may be other goods such as automobiles for which rarity may influence market demand

refitting the kuznets curve using a gender specific threshold model abstractprevious studies have reached mixed conclusions regarding the relationship between inequality and per capita income these studies however fail to consider gender differences in income inequality and how these may impact on the relationship between income inequality and per capita income using australian taxation statistics we derive three sets of gini coefficients i e female male and total for the period 1950 2013 we then examine the relationship between inequality and real per capita income and find that a gender specific threshold panel regression outperforms three other conventional models our findings suggest that one set of coefficients does not fit all in that the use of aggregate and constant coefficients may mask variations within and between gender inequality over time

mean reversion in equilibrium asset prices this paper demonstrates that negative serial correlation in long horizon stock returns is consistent with an equilibrium model of asset pricing when investors display only a moderate desire to smooth their consumption commonly used measures of mean reversion in stock prices calculated from historical returns data nearly always lie within a 60 percent confidence interval of the median of the monte carlo distributions implied by the authors equilibrium model from this evidence the authors conclude that the degree of serial correlation in the data could plausibly have been generated by their model copyright 1990 by american economic association

separate and unequal occupation establishment sex segregation and the gender wage gap the authors report the first large scale empirical investigation of within job wage differences between men and women in the same occupation and establishment using data first on blue collar and clerical employees from 16 u s industries in 1974 83 and second on employees in 10 professional and administrative occupations the authors report three findings first wage differences at the occupation establishment level were small even without controls for individual level characteristics hence within job wage discrimination was much less important than occupation establishment segregation for observed wage differences second establishment segregation was an important cause although not as important as occupational segregation of wage differences third establishment segregation was extensive as was occupational segregation

from opt out to blocked out the challenges for labor market re entry after family related employment lapses in today s labor market the majority of individuals experience a lapse in employment at some point in their careers most commonly due to unemployment from job loss or leaving work to care for fam

match bias in wage gap estimates due to earnings imputation about 30 of workers in the current population survey have earnings imputed wage gap estimates are biased toward zero when the attribute being studied e g union status is not a criterion used to match donors to nonrespondents an expression for match bias is derived in which attenuation equals the sum of match error rates attenuation can be approximated by the proportion with imputed earnings union wage gap estimates with match bias removed are presented for 1973 2001 estimates for recent years are biased downward 5 percentage points bias in gap estimates accompanying other non match criteria public sector industry etc is examined

large firms and within firm occupational reallocation abstract this paper considers the equilibrium interaction between within firm and across firm reallocation in the presence of labor market frictions while a sizable literature has investigated frictional labor markets it has ignored within firm mobility nonetheless every year a sizable fraction of workers switch occupations without changing firms employees in large firms can sample from a larger selection and across firm mobility is replaced by within firm mobility bringing together within and across firm reallocation along with labor market frictions naturally accounts for the observed differences in worker flows and wages across firms of different sizes

swimming upstream trends in the gender wage differential in the 1980s using michigan panel study of income dynamics data for 1979 and 1988 we analyze how a falling gender wage gap occurred despite changes in wage structure unfavorable to low wage workers the decrease is traced to gender specific factors which more than counterbalanced changes in measured and unmeasured prices working against women supply shifts net of demand were unfavorable for women generally and hurt high skilled more than middle and low skilled women by analyzing wages we find support for the notion of a gender twist in supply and demand having its largest negative effect on high skilled women