applied econometrics rankings 1989 1995 this paper ranks academic institutions by publication activity in applied econometrics over the period 1989 1995 fourteen leading international journals that publish applied econometrics articles are used to provide the database the rankings are based on standardized page counts of articles published in these journals over the stated period a hall of fame is developed listing the top 100 individual producers of applied econometrics in the fourteen journals considered to control for quality differences among the applied journals separate rankings are provided both for institutions and for individuals according to econometrics publications by journal

patterns of co authorship among economics departments in the usa given the steady increase in co authored papers in economics journals this paper reports a study of the patterns of co authorship between us universities and colleges a majority of institutions produce more co authored than single authored papers contacts with researchers from the same institution are still an important source of co authored papers even though slightly decreasing in frequency the determinants of co authorship outside the own institution are tested in a gravity model and it is found that distance and other geographical variables do not matter however the quality of co authors institutions measured by rankings of institutions has a significant impact on the number of co authored papers in top economics journals

rankings methodology for international comparisons of institutions and individuals an application to economics in australia and new zealand abstract the objectives of this paper are threefold first we critically survey and analyse the different methodologies that have been adopted in the rankings literature second using journal articles included in the econlit database and on the basis of two criteria one based on citations and the other on perceptions of journal quality we rank economics teaching departments in australia and new zealand for 1988 2002 and 1996 2002 and for individual academic economists for the periods 1988 2002 1988 1995 and 1996 2002 furthermore we identify individual star performers and recognize them in a designated hall of fame for 1988 2002 third our methodology enables us to make international comparisons on total and per capita bases previous multi country ranking studies in economics do not rank economics departments they provide rankings based on total publications in economics in universities regardless of whether the economists are in the economics departments or in other departments thus no rankings on per capita bases are provided we correct this shortcoming by providing total and per capita rankings and analysing the correlations between total and per capita rankings this is the first study to examine whether the size of the economics department matters with regard to productivity

the importance of group coverage how tax policy shaped u s health insurance in 1954 the internal revenue service stipulated that employer contributions to the health insurance plans of their employees were to be excluded from employee taxable income today the tax subsidy is major feature of the u s health care market this paper examines the initial effects of the tax subsidy on the demand for health insurance using previously unexamined data from 1953 and 1958 results suggest that the tax subsidy increased the growth of group insurance particularly among union members and employed persons this is a critical effect because group insurance is not only less expensive than individual insurance but it is also easier to obtain and households with access to group health insurance are far more likely to purchase health insurance coverage than those without similar access by increasing access to group insurance the tax subsidy fostered an increase in the purchase of group health insurance by people who may not have purchased individual coverage and generated institutional change as it cemented an employment based system of group health insurance in the united states this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

where are the economists who publish publication concentration and rankings in europe based on cumulative publications we measure the past production of research articles by current members of european economics institutions all econlit journals are used weighted to reflect differences in quality both a long 1971 2000 and a short 1996 2000 time period are considered we also provide production indices that take into account the authors career length the total output of each research center is measured as well as its production per member the focus is on 600 centers from eighteen european countries eu 14 israel norway switzerland and turkey european centers are compared to the top sixty u s economics departments statistics regarding the concentration of article production across researchers institutions and countries are provided as well as on publication habits jel a14 l11 r32

a revisionist perspective of european research in economics abstract the study by kalaitzidakis et al eur econom rev 113 1999a 1150 1168 hereafter kms continues to exert significant influence on the literature that evaluates the relative publication performance of european centres of research in economics the current paper argues that the methodology employed by kms is deficient and that it is not the methodology these authors intended to employ i utilise an improved approach to revise the original rankings that relied on publication output from 1991 to 1996 and to update the relevant findings using 1997 2002 data the revised rankings differ greatly from those reported by kms the results also suggest that there have been dramatic shifts in the relative ranking of the various european institutions over time as expected rankings are sensitive to the choice of journals considered however ranking sensitivity is considerably more pronounced with respect to changes in individual performance over time than to the group of journals used to measure performance

why do low income households not use food stamps evidence from an experiment this paper explores why many low income households do not participate in the food stamp program by analyzing detailed income and asset data from a sample of low income households we find that many households that appear to be eligible for food stamps in fact are not eligible by conducting an experiment designed to investigate the role of information on participation in the food stamp program we observe that ignorance about the program contributes to nonparticipation however there is evidence that knowledge about the program is endogenous households generally avail themselves of information about the program when the anticipated benefits of doing so are large

trend of subjects published in economics journals 1969 2007 i introduction a fundamental question for any academic discipline is what subjects are people researching this question can be asked in several ways which subjects are economists publishing which subjects are economists reading which subjects have the most impact on the literature which subjects are represented in well respected general subject journals how many specialty journals are dedicated to each subject answers to these questions are useful for strategic planning publication strategy and curriculum design through the identification of shifting focus within the economics discipline for instance the research record of an economist who publishes in a widely published subject field that is little published in leading general subject journals should be evaluated differently from an economist whose fields have the opposite properties a liberal arts college that desires to make more of an impact on the literature may find that the subjects that need to be taught at the undergraduate level are in conflict with the subjects that are being published in top journals a subject area with a small percentage of articles published that has had a strong impact when adjusted for citations may be fertile ground for research although the study of economic research has a long history subject area focus has been little studied morin 1966 examined the sales of chamberlin s theory of monopolistic competition schumpeter s theory of economic development samuelson s foundations of economic analysis friedman s essays in positive economics and becket s economics of discrimination to examine the changes in economics from 1933 to 1964 figuring that most copies of these books were being read by researchers he posited that the changes in the sales of these books indicate shifts in interests within economics fusfeld 1956 examined the departments and types of institutions which were represented by papers at the 1950 1954 american economic association meetings he did not rank these departments but viewed the narrow group of represented schools as a flaw in the program selection niemi 1975 created rankings of the top 100 economics departments and the top southern economics departments according to the number of publications and the number of pages published in a group of 24 journals smith and gold 1976 adjusted niemi for the number of faculty members in each department graves marchand and thompson 1982 built on the work by niemi as well as smith and gold by updating their statistics and providing a trend analysis to examine rankings through time scott and mitias 1996 provided updated rankings by pages published using two different sets of economics journals and created a list of the top 50 economists by pages published davis and papanek 1984 first proposed using citations for ranking economics departments laband 1986 ranked departments based upon the productivity of the graduates of the program using both pages published and citations bodenhorn 1997 ranked liberal arts colleges by citations medoff 1989 ranked individual economists based upon citations and ranks schools based upon the number of top economists employed there although these analyses provide important insights into the productivity of economists and provide a benchmark for hiring and promotion to tenure few have discussed the distribution of subject areas within journals harden liano and chan 2006 calculated the percentage of real estate economics articles published mccain 1991 used article subjects in her cocitation analysis durden and ellis 1991 listed the most oft cited articles in the aer broken down by subject area kim morse and zingales 2006 examined all the articles from 1970 to 2005 that received more than 500 citations they used the econlit database to identify the journal of economic literature jel codes associated with each article

on the robustness of alternative rankings methodologies australian and new zealand economics departments 1988 to 2002 just as friendly arguments based on an ignorance of facts eventually led to the creation of the definitive guinness book of world records any argument about university rankings has seemingly been a problem without a solution to state the obvious alternative rankings methodologies can and do lead to different rankings this article evaluates the robustness of rankings of australian and new zealand economics teaching departments for 1988 to 2002 and 1996 to 2002 using alternative rankings methodologies and compares the results with the rankings obtained by macri and sinha 2006 in the overall mean rankings for both 1988 to 2006 and 1996 to 2002 the university of melbourne is ranked first followed by uwa and anu

trends in rankings of economics departments in the u s an update economics departments in the u s are ranked based on 1 the number of pages published in thirty six economics journals 2 publications in five of the top journals 3 output per faculty member and 4 an index of the concentration of research in a department evidence shows that the top twenty departments have generally retained their positions since the 1970s but rather large changes have occurred in departments ranked from 240 to 100 an economists hall of fame is developed listing the top fifty individual producers of research in the thirty six journal set and the top five journals

improving takeup of health insurance program a social experiment in france this paper is based on a randomised social experiment conducted in order to understand the low take up rate of a complementary health insurance voucher program for the poorest in france the aide complementaire sante acs we explore two of the main hypotheses put forward to explain low enrolment a lack of information about the program and a voucher amount considered to be too low a sample of eligible individuals living in an urban area in northern france were randomly split into three groups a control group who benefited from the standard level of financial aid a group benefiting from an increase in the value of the voucher and a third group benefiting from the same increase along with an invitation to an information meeting regarding acs we show that the voucher increase has a small but statistically significant effect on acs take up the invitation to the meeting appears to cancel out the positive effect of the voucher increase using an instrumental variable model to control for potential selection bias we find ambiguous evidence of the meeting attendance on acs take up this study confirms the difficulties that are faced in increasing the health insurance coverage of poor populations via subsidy programs

are overall journal rankings a good mapping for article quality in specialty fields overall journal rankings which are generated with sample articles in different research fields are commonly used to measure the research productivity of academic economists in this article we investigate a growing concern in the profession that the use of the overall journal rankings to evaluate scholars relative research productivity may exhibit a downward bias toward researchers in some specialty fields if their respective field journals are under ranked in the overall journals rankings to address this concern we constructed new journal rankings based on the intellectual influence of research in 8 specialty fields using a sample consisting of 26 401 articles published across 60 economics journals from 1998 to 2007 we made various comparisons between the newly constructed journal rankings in specialty fields and the traditional overall journal ranking our results show that the overall journal ranking provides a considerably good mapping for the article quality in specialty fields supplementary

academic economists behaving badly a survey on three areas of unethical behavior thomas l martin this article measures the degree to which academic economists have engaged in unethical behavior and the degree to which academic economists believe the profession as a whole engages in unethical behavior three main types of unethical behavior are examined 1 falsification of research 2 expropriation of graduate student research or including an undeserving co author on a research paper and 3 exchange of grades for gifts money or sex using a unique data set gathered at the 1998 american economic association aea meetings we find that there is a significant amount of misconduct particularly in the second category jel a11 a13 i introduction both the popular and academic press have noted the existence of falsified research in the hard sciences and in medicine u s nuclear weapons tests conducted in the 1950s came under attack in the 1960s for allegedly using false data and defrauding federal courts concerning the health impact on downwind humans and livestock the discovery of the deception of research subjects and the reporting of fabricated experiments led to a new emphasis in the 1960s and 1970s on the ethics of scientific research shrader frechette 1994 federally funded research in particular came under closer scrutiny of the white house and various executive branch agencies lafollette 1994 recently front page stories in major newspapers have reported that robert p liburdy a cell biologist at lawrence berkeley laboratories resigned after investigators with the office of research integrity of the department of health and human services concluded that he falsified key data tying cancer to electrical power lines schevitz 1999 broad 1999 in economics research with no lives in danger it would seem that such behavior would be easier to rationalize an inflated t ratio here an undeserving co author there who really is hurt by such behavior academic economists after all do not have patients 1 nevertheless most scholars would agree that research is intended to further the pursuit of truth fraudulent or unethical research will poison the well of that scientific truth ethical conduct in research is not a matter of etiquette but a question of the moral principles by which any researcher is guided in the past few decades there have been efforts to examine the ethics of research in the areas of hard science medicine engineering and national security see e g hook 19771 bulmer 1982 sieber 19921 2 a few decades ago our own discipline experienced an unfathomable event the quarterly journal of economics was forced to withdraw a published article after learning that its author had simply copied the work of another economist qje 1984 a similar incident recently occurred in the economics journal kyklos forcing the editors to issue a public apology that included a strong statement plagiarism jeopardizes scientific research kyklos 1999 311 these pieces of evidence suggest that unethical research practices occur within economics but very little nonanecdotal evidence exists to measure the extent of such behavior our study is an attempt to measure the degree to which individual academic economists have engaged in unethical behavior and the degree to which academic economists bel ieve the profession as a whole engages in unethical behavior three main types of behavior are examined 1 falsification of research 2 expropriation of graduate student research or including an undeserving co author and 3 exchange of grades for gifts money or sexual favors we examine the self reported unethical behavior of the profession through anonymous responses because of the extremely sensitive nature of the questions we split the sample by using direct response questions for one group and the added protection of a randomized response technique for the other ii the survey method the ethics surveys were hand delivered to approximately 1 000 academic economists about 20 of the participants attending the january 1998 meetings of the american economic association aea in chicago illinois

fishes ponds and productivity student advisor matching and early career publishing success for economics phds i introduction research productivity is an important concern for members of the academe publishing success is important for individual departments because more productive faculty increases the department s research profile which in turn increases the department s professional reputation as evidence thursby 2000 and ehrenberg and hurst 1998 find that a department s reputation in the national research council nrc ratings increases with published research while smyth 1999 finds that pages published in the top 5 journals have a greater impact than pages published in other journals publishing success is important for individual faculty members because peer reviewed publications have long been shown to be economic currency for academic economists bratsberg ragan and warren 2003 moore newman and turnbull 1998 sauer 1988 among others research promise is important for graduate students because students with the greatest promise for productive careers are likely to receive the best initial job placements buchmueller dominitz and hansen 1999 krueger and wu 2000 long 1978 indeed according to a survey of hiring departments carson and navarro 1988 every single top 20 domestic economics program considered the quality of one s research agenda to be of moderate to great importance in the hiring decision an important question then is how to identify which factors are associated with the likelihood of having a more productive research career to date empirical studies have focused on the program from which the student graduated recent examples include collins cox and stango 2000 davis huston and patterson 2001 stock and alston 2000 this focus implicitly assumes that because only the very best students become enrolled in elite programs graduates of highly ranked programs should hold the greatest promise for publishing success 1 in support coupe 2001 and buchmueller dominitz and hansen 1999 find that students graduating from top programs are more likely to publish in core economics journals while hogan 1981 finds that students graduating from programs with more active faculty publish more journal articles before placing total faith in these results however members of the academe should ask whether such findings hold across all points in the graduate distribution or whether they are only accurate predictors on average previously published data clearly suggest the latter for instance buchmueller dominitz and hansen 1999 find that 30 of tier 1 graduates do not publish any academic articles within the first 9 yr after phd receipt while 50 do not publish any top 50 articles as defined by liebowitz and palmer 1984 in other words there is a large amount of unexplained variability in the future success of a program s graduates krueger and wu 2000 93 consequently it is likely that significant overlap exists between the performance of top program graduates and lesser program graduates with significant portions of the latter outperforming significant portions of the former with this in mind the question becomes is there a readily observable factor that is a less noisy predictor of a student s likelihood for publishing success we argue that there is during a student s postgraduate education one of the most significant influences is his or her dissertation advisor we posit that for timing reasons advisors will possess additional insight into a student s true research potential that was not available to the admission committee when deciding whether to admit the student into the program consequently we expect a student s dissertation advisor to be a more informed predictor of his or her early career productivity than the program from which he or she receives the phd 2 in other words we believe that considering the identity of a student s dissertation advisor in addition to the quality of the program from which the student receives the phd should help reduce the uncertainty inherent in predicting the student s position within the early career productivity distribution

european economics an analysis based on publications in the core journals abstract in this paper we provide a ranking of european economics institutions and countries based on publications in a core set of 10 economic journals from 1991 to 1996 we find that the three leading universities in europe are the london school of economics tel aviv university and oxford university while the three top ranked countries are the u k france and israel

how do journal quality co authorship and author order affect agricultural economists salaries utilizing an original data set containing annual salaries and peer reviewed publication histories for 326 faculty members from top ranked ph d granting programs we examine the labor market for academic agricultural economists the results suggest that higher quality publications have a greater impact on annual earnings that sole authored articles have a higher return than multi authored articles and that no wage premium exists for being the lead author of a non alphabetic article

health insurance availability and the retirement decision because individuals aged 55 64 face large and uncertain medical expenditures without the guarantee of public insurance coverage provided by medicare the availability of post retirement health insurance could be an important determinant in the retirement decisions of this group we investigate the effect of health insurance on retirement by focusing on state and federal continuation of coverage mandates which grant the retiree the right to continue purchasing health insurance through a previous employer for a specified number of months after leaving the firm we exploit variation in the timing and generosity of these laws to identify the effect of the availability of continuation coverage on retirement decisions using data on 55 64 year old males from the current population survey and the survey of income and program participation we find a sizeable and significant effect of continuation coverage on retirement one year of mandated continuation benefits raises retirement rates by 20 the effect appears to be uniform at all ages rather that larger near the age of medicare eligibility there is also a large increase in the insurance coverage of individuals who would have retired in the absence of continuation benefits our findings have important implications for policies which change the insurance coverage of early retirees such as national health insurance this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was b this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

a worldwide assessment of scientific production in economics 1992 1997 the aim of this article is to analyse the worldwide production in economics to that end bibliometric indicators are constructed by way of a database made up of 55 international journals covering the period 1992 1997 a ranking of the leading thousand international affiliations is established and quality indices of the first 200 are presented finally a detailed analysis is carried out at country level and with respect to the 12 leading countries

tax incentives and the decision to purchase health insurance evidence from the self employed the tax reform act of 1986 introduced a new tax subsidy for health insurance purchases by the self employed we analyze the changing patterns of insurance demand before and after tax reform to generate new estimates of how the after tax price of insurance affects the discrete choice of whether to buy insurance we employ both traditional regression models and difference in difference methods that compare changes in insurance coverage across groups around tra86 the results from our most carefully controlled comparison suggest that a 1 percent increase in the cost of insurance coverage reduces the probability that a self employed single person will be insured by 1 8 percentage points

dynamic inefficiencies in an employment based health insurance system theory and evidence we investigate the effects of the institutional settings of the us health care system on individuals life cycle medical expenditures health is a form of general human capital labor turnover and labor market frictions prevent an employer employee pair from capturing the entire surplus from investment in an employee s health thus the pair underinvests in health during working years thereby increasing medical expenditures during retirement we provide empirical evidence consistent with the comparative statics predictions of our model using the medical expenditure panel survey meps and the health and retirement study hrs our estimates suggest significant inefficiencies in health investment in the united states

unraveling the academic productivity of economists the opportunity costs of teaching and service this study investigates the relationships among research productivity teaching and service on the basis of individual specific information involving approximately 715 academic economists responding to an online survey these economists provided information regarding their teaching and service commitments as well as personal and institutional information the publication record of each respondent was then obtained from econlit together these data constitute a rich field for the systematic study of research productivity results of a tobit analysis reveal much about the nature of research productivity underscoring for instance the importance of gender coauthorship presen tations at conferences and peers who publish among the more important findings from this analysis is that both teaching and service commitments have a significantly negative impact on the research productivity of academic economists these relations hold across types of academic employer though to varying degrees taken together the results provide interesting insights into the roles of academic scholars teachers and colleagues

determinants of research output in economics departments in british universities abstract the research output of economics departments in british universities is estimated by means of an analysis of publications in 20 major journals it is shown that most of the variation in research output between departments can be explained by differences in inputs a regression analysis enables the effect on output of changes in inputs to be quantified the results obtained here are compared with the ugc ratings

health insurance and the demand for medical care evidence from a randomized experiment we estimate how cost sharing the portion of the bill the patient pays affects the demand for medical services the data come from a randomized experiment a catastrophic insurance plan reduces expenditures 31 percent relative to zero out of pocket price the price elasticity is approximately 0 2 we reject the hypothesis that less favorable coverage of outpatient services increases total expenditure for example by deterring preventive care or inducing hospitalization

is there job lock evidence from the pre hipaa era we estimate discrete time hazard models of employment duration and standard logarithmic wage equations using the 1987 and 1990 panels of the survey of income and program participation sipp to examine the phenomenon of job lock we test for job lock using differences in differences approaches among those with and without employer provided health insurance and family members with and without health problems we find no statistically significant evidence of job lock on employment duration or wages using this approach we do find some evidence of shorter employment spells for those with employer provided health insurance and spouse provided health insurance and longer employment spells for those with employer provided health insurance and large families others have interpreted these findings as evidence of job lock however the wage equation results using these measures are not consistent with job lock although anecdotal evidence makes it clear that some workers have been locked into less than optimal jobs because of the combination of health problems and employer provided health insurance our results do not suggest that this phenomenon is pervasive in the u s economy

revealed performances worldwide rankings of economists and economics departments 1990 2000 in this paper i study the production of academic research by economics departments and economists worldwide rankings are provided based on both citations and publications these rankings reveal a dominant position of the united states in the production of economics literature over time however the extent of this dominance is decreasing jel a10 a14

journals preferences and publishing in agricultural and environmental economics research quality is an increasingly important metric for determining funding allocations promotion and tenure and professional prestige a key metric often used as a proxy for research quality is the ranking of the journal in which a manuscript appears while citation based measures of journal quality are commonly used less is known about other dimensions of journal quality and prestige we report results from an international study using best worst scaling to investigate researchers journal preferences respondents used two criteria to assess journals the impact a paper in the journal would have on career progression and the impact beyond academia of papers in the journal among the sample of journals studied the american journal of agricultural economics is ranked at the top for career progression for the aggregate sample while science was rated at the top for broader impact we find no significant correlation between the journal scores based on the two criteria nor between them and the journals impact factors these results suggest that impact beyond academia is poorly aligned with career incentives and that citation measures reflect poorly if at all peers esteem of journals heteroscedastic scale adjusted latent class models reveal marked heterogeneity in journal preferences related to researchers institutional affiliation and geographic region we find significant differences in error variance over people and choices people were less consistent when choosing their least as opposed to their most preferred journal this finding has broader implications given the burgeoning use of best worst surveys

general interest versus specialty journals using intellectual influence of econometrics research to rank economics journals and articles this paper demonstrates the potential problem in using existing economics journal rankings to evaluate the research productivity of scholars by constructing a new ranking of economics journals and articles based on 2142 econometrics sample articles published from 2000 to 2005 our ranking results show that the intellectual influence of an econometrics article published in several econometrics statistics journals is much higher than if it were published in the most prestigious general interest journal given that a study s potential influence is integrated into the submission decision this suggests a substantial downward bias toward econometricians when existing rankings are used to evaluate their research productivity copyright 2009 john wiley sons ltd

does raiding explain the negative returns to faculty seniority i introduction economists have studied various aspects of faculty mobility research shows that turnover is greater among nonunion faculty rees 1994 female faculty average slightly more employers than male faculty barbezat and hughes 2001 ginther and kahn 2004 1 the responsiveness of turnover to relative pay diminishes with rank ehrenberg kasper and rees 1991 and research productivity enhances prospects for upward mobility ault rutman and stevenson 1979 1982 coupe smeets and warzynski 2005 still questions remain unanswered where do faculty go when they leave a university how does faculty turnover vary with time at a university what percentage of faculty move upward and what percentage move downward because of tenure denials or the prospect of being turned down for tenure the present article contributes to our understanding of these issues but its primary objective was to use data on faculty mobility to provide insights on another issue returns to academic seniority the negative returns to seniority that many studies find are commonly attributed to one of two factors 2 the first view is that negative returns reflect monopsony power on the part of universities faculty with high mobility costs acquire high seniority and because they are unlikely to move they are paid less than equally productive faculty that employers view as more likely to leave a competing explanation is that highly productive faculty are raided according to this story returns to seniority are biased negatively because faculty with high seniority tend to have low unmeasured productivity the best faculty are bid away moving on to better jobs those who remain are the faculty without outside offers and the negative returns estimated for senior faculty actually reflect a penalty for low unmeasured productivity rather than a true penalty for seniority the raiding story has several implications first estimated returns to seniority should become less negative the more fully the productivity is measured second estimated returns should be less negative once we control for faculty who are bid away finally and of particular importance estimated returns to seniority should not be negative for faculty who are bid away the faculty for whom unmeasured productivity is presumably high with the right data set these hypotheses can be tested rejection of the raiding hypothesis would provide tacit evidence of monoposony in academic markets 3 this article contributes to the literature in several ways it is the first research to directly test the raiding hypothesis it provides a detailed look at faculty mobility in one segment of the academic labor market it extends and improves bratsberg ragan and warren 2003 in the following ways it expands the sample to cover three decades of faculty pay records it includes additional controls for productivity number and types of books recent and prospective articles and so forth resulting in the most complete specification of research productivity to date and it allows for heterogeneity in the seniority penalty via phd pedigree and direction of move finally it tests for the possibility that the academic job market does a better job of matching faculty and universities in recent years as might be expected because of the information revolution the sample consists of five public phd granting universities in the midwest we track all tenure track economics faculty employed in these universities over a 30 yr period we measure their productivity their pay and their mobility as such the study provides a rich and detailed investigation of one subset of economics programs it is possible that mobility may be greater in urban areas where faculty can more readily obtain alternative employment without relocating and prior research indicates that pay structures depend on the university s stature and its relative emphasis on research and teaching

does price framing affect the consumer price sensitivity of health plan choice this paper provides field evidence on how price framing affects consumers decision to switch health plans in 2009 german federal regulation required insurers to express premium differences between standardized health plans in absolute euro values relative to a federal reference price rather than in percentage point payroll tax differences representative individual level panel data and aggregated health plan level panel data on the universe of health plans show that the reform strongly increased enrollees willingness to switch plans with demand elasticities increasing fourfold the salience of premium differences and the default premium are obviously key driving forces in the decision to switch insurers

leading institutional contributors to the elite economic journals given the prestige enjoyed by several economic departments there is a natural curiosity regarding their contributions to the economic literature this article analyses the appearance of all academic institutions worldwide in the eight leading economic journals the blue ribbon eight from 1991 to 2005 we cite those institutions who appear the most and analyse the composition of appearances across all eight journals to assess their degree of diversity while it is tempting to use these measures as a ranking of institutions the analysis is meant to be purely an historical appreciation of the contributions of these admirable institutions

reputational capital and academic pay geoffrey k turnbull i introduction economists continue to have a strong interest in academic labor markets as the steady stream of earnings studies over the past several decades readily attests the academic labor market draws the attention of economists not only because it is a topic of direct personal interest but also because it presents an opportunity to examine general theories of labor markets in a context with which the researcher has intimate experience nonetheless important questions about how the market values research teaching and service remain unanswered to what extent does the market reward quality versus quantity of published research or team production in the form of co authorship furthermore how durable is reputational capital for individuals whose research productivity diminishes during their career ultimately these questions relate in one way or another to the nature of the incentive structure faced by academic economists we provide new evidence concerning the role of research quality co authorship administrative service and teaching performance in the production of reputational capital in addition we explore the question of the durability of reputational capital once some of these activities cease we assume that the quantity and quality of published research largely determines an individual s reputational capital in the external market to help us sort out the separate effects on reputational capital of both the quality and quantity of research activity we measure research quality by both journal quality and career citations employing an interactive quantity quality term a related question concerns the role of team production in building an individual s reputational capital do individuals receive differential returns to publishing single authored versus co authored research papers this is an interesting question in light of the substantial increase in co authorship over the last few decades 1 one explanation of this trend is that the academic market has presented scholars with increasing opportunities for specialization in the production of knowledge and that team production involves the combination of complementary skilled researchers if team production reflects complementarities in the production of research we should observe little difference in the returns to single versus co authored work another explanation is that co authorship involves the combination of substitute skilled researchers so that co authorship presents a way for individuals to reduce their research efforts without reducing their individual measured research output to the extent that co authorshi p represents such substitution the market should fully discount the returns to multiple authored papers in this article we also move beyond identifying the factors that enhance an individual s reputation in the market to study the question of the durability of reputational capital some individuals quit publishing once they are tenured or promoted while others experience lengthy but temporary breaks in their flow of research output we examine the potential penalties associated with gaps in research output providing the first empirical evidence concerning the durability of reputational capital for academic economists in order to ensure that our analysis deals with these issues in a way that is most relevant to a large portion of the market for academic economists we use data from several research universities but restrict the sample frame to a single discipline economics much of the previous work estimating how publications or other factors affect academic salaries typically use data from a single university with earnings equations estimated across disciplines restricting the sample to a single discipline has the additional advantage of reducing potential heterogeneity problems associated with measuring productivity across disciplines in addition our data enable us more thoroughly to explore the empirical issues in the debate since they permit more precise measures of the past and current productivity of individuals engaged in comparable work

are there gender differences in the job mobility patterns of academic economists labor economic theory posits that job mobil ity should affect worker salaries the degree to which this holds for academic faculty has received considerable attention prior empirical studies have estimated log wage regressions that control for both years of total work experience and years of seniority at the current institution in an effort to determine whether negative returns to seniority exist in academic labor markets for example bernt bratsberg james ragan and jim warren 2003 and william moore robert turnbull and geoffrey newman 1998 for aca demic economists michael ransom 1993 kevin hallock 1995 and emily hoffman 1976 for specific institutions debra a barbezat and michael r donihue 1998 and barbezat 1989 for

the oregon health insurance experiment evidence from the first year in 2008 a group of uninsured low income adults in oregon was selected by lottery to be given the chance to apply for medicaid this lottery provides an opportunity to gauge the effects of expanding access to public health insurance on the health care use financial strain and health of low income adults using a randomized controlled design in the year after random assignment the treatment group selected by the lottery was about 25 percentage points more likely to have insurance than the control group that was not selected we find that in this first year the treatment group had substantively and statistically significantly higher health care utilization including primary and preventive care as well as hospitalizations lower out of pocket medical expenditures and medical debt including fewer bills sent to collection and better self reported physical and mental health than the control group

entitled to work urban property rights and labor supply in peru this brief summarizes the results of a gender impact evaluation study entitled entitled to work urban property rights and labor supply in peru new legal rights were issued in 1996 project teams providing titling service through 2003 in peru the study observed that between 1996 and 2003 the peruvian government issued property titles to over 1 2 million urban households the largest titling program targeted at urban squatters in the developing world this paper examines the labor market effects of increases in tenure security resulting from the program pre program squatters in program neighborhoods were significantly more likely to report improved tenure security by 60 percent similarly program participants were 18 8 percentage points less likely to report a high likelihood of eviction or invasion and 18 8 percentage points more likely to report that their dwelling was currently very secure from eviction or invasion the likelihood of working inside the home significantly falls by 11 6 percentage points for the average squatter family with two program periods

modeling informality formally households and firms i introduction recent estimates indicate that around 10 of gross domestic product gdp in the united states is produced by individuals or firms that evade taxes schneider and enste 2000 in latin america approximately 50 of all salaried employees work informally an important question is therefore what are the determinants of informality unfortunately three decades of research have not yet yielded a consensus opinion on this point the traditional explanation initiated with the work of lewis 1954 assumes the existence of segmented labor markets in which some workers do not have access to jobs in the regulated formal sector these workers are forced to accept lower paying informal sector jobs that usually involve inferior working conditions while this view has become prevalent in the development literature direct empirical tests of the premise that informal workers would expect higher wages in the formal sector yield mixed results for instance magnac 1991 maloney 2004 and pratap and quintin 2004 do not find compelling evidence of segmentation between the formal and the informal sectors using data from colombia mexico and argentina respectively it is nonetheless certainly plausible that the presence of unions might segment the labor market layard et al 1991 however even if we believe that unionization has been an important factor in determining labor market segmentation in the past the pronounced decline of unionization throughout latin america over the last two decades seems to be a less satisfactory explanation of the phenomenon at the present time especially since informality increased in most countries in latin america during the same period gasparini and tornarolli 2006 another approach emphasizes the role of labor market regulation and taxation as the main cause of informality a pioneering study by de soto 1989 describes how informal workers develop their own laws and institutions to make up for the shortcomings of the official legal system it is certainly true that the size of the shadow economy is affected by the burden of taxes and social security contributions as well as by the many other regulations governing the official economy the problem with adopting this explanation of informality unreservedly however is that it overlooks the fact that workers have nonpecuniary preferences for the sector they work for and these preferences play a role in determining the equilibrium level of formality of an economy in particular workers in the informal sector are not eligible for socially mandated benefits three stylized facts characterize informality 1 small firms tend to operate informally while large firms tend to operate formally 2 unskilled workers tend to be informal while skilled ones have formal jobs 3 ceteris paribus secondary workers a worker other than the household head are less likely to operate formally than primary workers in this paper we present a model of an economy in which the sizes and wages of the formal and informal sectors are endogenously determined that accounts for these three facts our model entails a continuum of types on both sides of the labor market i e firms and workers firms choose whether to operate formally or informally and workers choose in what sector they work in equilibrium managerial talent determines size dualism at the firm level and human capital is the factor that determines whether workers are employed in the formal or informal sector in our model both heterogeneous firms and workers have preferences over the sectors they operate and choose optimally whether to function formally or informally by contrast a prominent feature of the preexisting literature is the idea that workers decisions play no role in determining the equilibrium of the economy thus our model is the first one in which policies that affect workers preferences as well of course as firm preferences over the formal or the informal sector such as pension plans public health issues and unemployment and any social benefits will affect the sizes and wages of the formal and the informal sectors

negative returns to seniority and job mobility across the program quality distribution are top public phd granting programs different we analyze a unique data set containing annual salary and detailed job and publication histories for a sample of 1 009 faculty members drawn from 53 public ph d granting economics departments empirical results suggest that all else equal 1 statistically significant negative returns to seniority exist within lower ranked but not top 15 programs 2 more frequent movers observe statistically higher annual salaries in lower ranked but not top 15 programs and 3 for each level of seniority faculty in top 15 programs are more likely to move at any point in the career than faculty in lower ranked programs

employment based health insurance and job mobility is there evidence of job lock the majority of privately insured americans obtain their health insurance through their own or a family member s employment the rationale for employers to provide health insurance is straightforward by pooling the risks of individuals employers can reduce adverse selection and lower administrative expenses in addition they benefit from tax laws allowing businesses to deduct their health insurance costs these advantages of employer provision however must be weighed against the distortions they may generate in individual labor market decisions in particular health insurance may distort job mobility if employees decide to keep jobs they would rather leave for fear of losing coverage for preexisting conditions a possibility that has been termed job lock this paper attempts to quantify the effect of employer provided health insurance on the labor market mobility of individuals the link between employer provided health insurance and

environmental and ecological economics a citation analysis this study looks at two distinct questions dwhat have been the most influential journal articles in environmental economics and ecological economics over the 10 year period 1994 2003 t and dhow much overlap is there between the fields of environmental and ecological economics t we examine the references in all articles published in jeem and ecological economics ee over this period for each of these two fields a list of the top articles and top journals cited by articles published in jeem and ee is presented we also present some results based on our study of the isi journal citation reports we find that there is a significant overlap between the two fields at the journal level the two journals cite similar journals there is a correlation of 0 34 between the number of citations received by the journals that are most cited and the correlation is even higher if journal self citation is excluded the main differences are that ecological economics tends to cite but not be cited by general natural science journals more often than environmental economics does environmental economics cites more heavily from journals rather than other publications and citations in environmental economics are more concentrated on particular journals and individual publications however there is much less similarity at the level of individual articles nonmarket valuation articles dominate the most cited articles in jeem while green accounting sustainability and the environmental kuznets curve are all prominent topics in ee d 2005 elsevier b v all rights reserved

health insurance and job mobility theoryand evidence it is widely hypothesized that health insurance deters job mobility because of imperfections in the labor and health insurance markets this paper describes the nature of the welfare loss attributable to such job lock and reviews several studies that empirically test the job lock hypothesis the authors find that estimates of the magnitude and importance of job lock vary studies that support the job lock hypothesis typically report a 20 to 40 reduction in mobility rates depending on worker marital status and gender their own estimates suggest that although job lock is present in the labor market the proportion of workers affected and the magnitude of the welfare loss are less than generally supposed

fame and the fortune of academic economists how the market rewards influential research in economics we analyze the pay and position of 1 009 faculty members who teach in doctoral granting economics departments at fifty three large public universities in the united states using the web of science we have identified the journal articles published by these scholars and the number of times each of these articles has been subsequently cited in published research articles we find that research influence as measured by various measures of total citations is a surprisingly strong predictor of the salary and the prestige of the department in which professors are employed we also examine how coauthorship is rewarded by the market

meat meets meta a quantitative review of the price elasticity of meat the price elasticity of meat has been estimated in numerous studies that utilize a variety of disparate modeling procedures in light of differences in the literature a meta analysis is performed to assess the sensitivity of the meat price elasticity to a number of characteristics including the type of meat specification of demand nature of data estimation method characteristics of the publication outlet and location of demand the results from estimating linear and box cox meta regressions coupled with different panel data treatments reveal that these characteristics have differing influence on the reported price elasticity

academic pay in the united kingdom and the united states the differential returns to productivity and the lifetime earnings gap this paper estimates earnings functions for two samples of u k and u s academic economists despite significant differences in compensation schemes a comparably specified human capital earnings model does a good job explaining earnings variations for academic economists in both countries our estimates suggest that rewards for research are more immediate and direct in the united states because of the national salary scale the payoffs to experience and seniority are greater and the payoffs to research are lower in the united kingdom than in the united states after adjusting for productivity and demographic factors we find that u s economists are paid approximately 40 more than otherwise equivalent economists in the united kingdom simulating career age earnings profiles for both markets we find that the earnings gap widens with experience for relatively productive research economists and may even narrow with age for relatively less productive research economists nevertheless the cumulative lifetime earnings foregone are substantial for research and nonresearch economists in the united kingdom

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

an equilibrium model of health insurance provision and wage determination we investigate the effect of employer provided health insurance on job mobility rates and economic welfare using a search matching and bargaining framework in our model health insurance coverage decisions are made in a cooperative manner that recognizes the productivity effects of health insurance as well as its nonpecuniary value to the employee the resulting equilibrium is one in which not all employment matches are covered by health insurance wages at jobs providing health insurance are larger in a stochastic sense than those at jobs without health insurance and workers at jobs with health insurance are less likely to leave those jobs even after conditioning on the wage rate we estimate the model using the 1996 panel of the survey of income and program participation and find that the employer provided health insurance system does not lead to any serious inefficiencies in mobility decisions

cracks in the glass ceiling gender and promotion in the economics profession gender differences in promotion within the economics profession have long been a concern of the committee on the status of women in the economics profession cswep in a descriptive analysis of the aea universal academic questionnaire rebecca blank 1996 finds that hires and promotions to the associateand fullprofessor levels have averaged 4 2 and 2 7 percentage points below the share of female assistants and associates professors respectively thus women appear to be underrepresented in senior positions suggesting they may face a glass ceiling this paper uses unique panel data for american economic association aea members to examine formally whether there are differences across gender in promotion probabilities an academic labor market beyond its direct interest to economists is well suited to study possible gender differences in promotion because departments can be ranked within the profession and because professors can be ranked within a department by a welldefined promotion hierarchy a focus on academic economists offers an additional advantage in that on the job productivity can be measured directly by research output other promotion studies have had limited controls for productivity and have used cross sectional data which do not permit controls for unobserved ability e g rudolf winter ebmer and josef zweimuller 1997 failure to account for gender differences in unobserved productivity could produce biased inference prior promotion studies also have generally relied on job advancement indexes that limit the distinction between initial job assignment i e an

employment separation and health insurance coverage abstract we study the interrelationship between employment separation and insurance coverage we first document that employment separation is associated with large reductions in insurance coverage even conditioning on underlying tastes for insurance we then show that reducing the cost of insurance through state laws mandating continued access to employer provided health insurance for the non employed increases the likelihood of having insurance after separating from a job by 6 7 these mandates also increase the number of individuals who separate and the total amount of time spent jobless finally at least some of this increased non employment appears to be spent in productive job search as the availability of continuation coverage is related to significant wage gains among those who separate from their jobs

on and off the hot seat an analysis of entry into and out of university administration the authors investigate economists decisions to enter and exit department chair positions in research intensive economics departments of elite universities during the postwar era 1948 1989 they use the american economic association survey of members as well as phone surveys to determine which and at what point in their careers faculty assume administrative positions the theoretical model predicts and empirical results confirm that a faster rate of knowledge depreciation in an economist s field of study reduces the entry and exit rates for the chair position moreover among those who have exited the position of chair longer terms of past chair service and faster knowledge depreciation accelerate the timing of movements into upper level administration the findings suggest that administrators are to some extent made and not born and that the growing specialization and technical nature of many professions could affect who chooses administrative careers and at what point in their careers they choose

do academic salaries decline with seniority this article reexamines the negative seniority earnings relationship for academic economists the empirical results show that the anomalous negative seniority effect found in earlier academic market studies holds in the absence of direct measures of research productivity the negative effect however eventually disappears as more comprehensive measures of publishing citations and other productivity measures are included in the wage equation to control for the quantity and quality of faculty productivity faculty with greater seniority appear to be rewarded relatively less simply because many have been relatively less productive than their colleagues with less seniority at similar stages in their careers

assessing editorial preferences towards industrial organization articles in order to evaluate the relative importance of articles on industrial organization published in major generalist or specialized scientific journals this empirical study has used the new 1991 jel classification system by regrouping contributions according to the type of article theoretical analysis industrial policy or industry studies a rate of multiple reference index has been introduced to examine the degree of relation between these three categories and used as a proxy for editorial preferences towards the type of treatment of the subject usually expected by the journal the article contents of nine generalist and five specialized journals are analysed for the two periods 1991 1995 and 1996 2000

research productivity of the economics profession in east asia i introduction research productivity is often ranked for economics departments based on page counts of journal publications for example graves marchand and thompson 1982 while others rate the departments by the number of citations attributed to their faculty for example davis and papanek 1984 recently scott and mitias 1996 used flow and stock concepts in their departmental rankings while the flow of research can be counted to give credit to the department where authors are affiliated at the time of publication the stock ranking counts a currently affiliated faculty s stock of past and current research the alternative rankings also use different sets of journals as well as varied weighting schemes to standardize the length of journal pages and to adjust for journal quality while several different methods have been used to rank economics departments in the united states no such assessment has been done for east asian universities this article aims to fill this gap by ranking economics professions in east asia based solely on research productivity for the purpose of comparison with u s universities our methodology closely follows that of scott and mitias 1996 with some variations in the sample length first the ranking counts the stock of past and current research for example hogan 1984 laband 1985 conroy and dusansky 1995 scott and mitias 1996 and dusansky and vernon 1998 fine research scholars move from one university to another a phenomenon that sometimes leads to dramatic changes in school performance however labor mobility depends to some extent on the degree of importance of research to which a university is attached more open and research oriented schools often hire researchers and their accompanying stock of published research from other institutions in the region or more often from abroad while others more or less insulate themselves from inflows of new research a more accurate reflection of current reality is therefore to know who is at a particular university today not who was at it in the past thus economics faculty affiliated with east asian universities during the autumn 1997 semester are counted for the stock ranking in east asia the economics faculty include all economists in business schools as well as all in economics departments 1 faculty names were obtained directly from department chairs and each school s home page on the internet second the basic ranking relies on page counts of articles published in a set of 36 quality journals over the period 1990 96 page counts are employed to capture many variations in the length of articles across journals the econlit cd rom september 1997 includes all international journals that have appeared in the journal of economic literature the choice of a set of quality journals is however open to question graves marchand and thompson 1982 for example examined publications in a set of 24 journals hogan 1984 looked at a set of 4 laband 1985 a set of 27 bairam 1994 a set of 5 and conroy and dusansky 1995 and dusansky and vernon 1998 each a set of 8 journals the criterion employed here for top 36 journals relies on the choice in scott and mitias 1996 in which the original set of top 24 journals in graves marchand and thompson 1982 was updated 2 to check the sensitivity of our findings with alternative sets of journals we ranked these schools based on top 24 and top 42 journals the list of 42 top journals was provided to us by dusansky and vernon 1998 3 third standardized page counts are employed for example graves marchand and thompson 1982 hirsch austin brooks and moore 1984 conroy and dusansky 1995 scott and mitias 1996 and dusansky and vernon 1998 the scott mitias 1996 conversion factors are used for the basic ranking in which the number of pages published in 36 journals were standardized to the average length of a page in the aer

are workers permanently scarred by job displacements this paper investigates whether workers suffer lasting scars following job displacements using david t ellwood s 1982 terminology scars represent persistent effects whereas blemishes are transitory adjustments which dissipate over time more precisely dislocated individuals are defined as scarred if they continue to earn less or to be unemployed more than their nondisplaced counterparts even after the conclusion of a several year adjustment period

public health insurance labor supply and employment lock we study the effect of public health insurance on labor supply by exploiting a large public health insurance disenrollment in 2005 approximately 170 000 tennessee residents abruptly lost medicaid coverage using both across and within state variation in exposure to the disenrollment we estimate large increases in labor supply primarily along the extensive margin the increased employment is concentrated among individuals working at least 20 hours a week and receiving private employer provided health insurance we explore the dynamic effects of the disenrollment and find an immediate increase in job search behavior and a steady rise in both employment and health insurance coverage following the disenrollment our results are consistent with a significant degree of employment lock workers who are employed primarily to secure private health insurance coverage jel codes i1 j22 h75