who would be left behind by enhanced private school choice abstract debate over school choice is central to many discussions of public elementary and secondary educational reform the debate has largely focused on conceptual arguments rather than careful empirical research that attempts to sort out competing claims an important unresolved issue is the question of cream skimming who will move and who will be left behind as a result of enhanced school choice this paper uses data from the national educational longitudinal survey nels 88 to estimate a model of public private school choice which is used to simulate who would likely leave public schools as a result of enhanced private school choice building upon the work of k train et al 1987 the review of economics and statistics 69 383 391 we employ a probit model with latent explanatory variables to account for the unobserved attitudes of parents and their children regarding education the model allows us to consider such latent interests in education as well as the academic and socioeconomic characteristics of those students who would likely switch to private schools our findings indicate that concerns about bright flight or academic cream skimming in response to increased school choice appear to be overstated however we estimate that there would be substantially more economic and racial segregation of students as movers tend to be white and have higher incomes than those who are left behind

fiscal policy expectation traps and child labor i introduction child labor is widespread in the contemporary world in fact the international labor organization ilo estimates that 246 million of the world s children aged 5 17 or 16 are child laborers most living in developing countries 1 recently there has been renewed interest in this topic among economists which has led to a series of theoretical studies with the aim of better understanding the causes and consequences of child labor in order to help guide appropriate policy responses as in grootaert and kanbur 1995 basu 1999 and basu and tzannatos 2003 for useful literature surveys typically theoretical models designed to address the important policy issues surrounding child labor posit that a family s decision to send a child to the labor market is taken only as a last resort in order to escape the dire consequences of poverty for example basu and van 1998 baland and robinson 2000 show that this response on the part of the family may be stronger in a dynamic setting because contracts between children and adults are not self enforcing and capital markets are incomplete 2 in this case an adult decision maker may not only send their children to work to escape poverty in the present but do so to escape poverty in the future as well this decision will hinder a child s ability to accumulate human capital and can lead to persistent cycles of poverty and child labor across generations 3 we begin by showing that a benevolent government can address the incidence of child labor that results from the non enforceability of intergenerational contracts and incomplete capital markets through the appropriate use of fiscal policy and that this policy is pareto improving it is then shown that if society s confidence in their government is incomplete this lack of confidence can render the same fiscal policy ineffective in other words if households do not believe that the government will follow through on their policy promise then in fact it is quite possible that the government will not be able to follow through on their promise as a result of these beliefs 4 this self reinforcing nature of fiscal policy in the presence of uncertainty can leave a country in an expectations trap with a low level of human capital and child labor 5 to formally demonstrate this fiscal policy expectations trap hypothesis we employ a three period overlapping generations model in which child labor exists 6 this stylized setup will keep the dynamics manageable and allow us to highlight the effects of uncertainty also within this framework we introduce a missing intergenerational contracts market in conjunction with a human capital production function that exhibits a threshold with respect to parental human capital which gives rise to two locally stable steady states there is a good equilibrium where there is a relatively high level of parental human capital which results in a high level of income and no child labor and there is a bad equilibrium where there is a relatively low level of parental human capital which results in a low level of income and positive child labor this low income child labor equilibrium is the standard poverty trap scenario that typically exists in a deterministic economy with multiple equilibria it is then shown that a benevolent government can replicate the missing intergenerational contracts market with a pay as you go social security program thereby eliminating this component of child labor in an economy with perfect foresight in addition it is also shown that this policy is pareto improving in the sense that all generations are strictly better off under this policy except the initial old who are no worse off the dynamics of this social security program are intuitive if child labor is one possible mechanism adults can use to redistribute resources from their children then the government can reduce this incentive by announcing a social security program that will begin during the current adults old age an institutional intergenerational contract

state abortion legislation as a public good before and after roe v wade utilization of a theoretical model of the public demand for abortion legislation suggests that should the 1973 roe vs wade ruling be overturned the availability of abortion in the us would not be as limited as it was before this landmark decision the model conceptualized public demand for abortion as a combination of 2 factors 1 external demand measured by voter preference and reflecting the external costs or benefits conferred on the public by the relative availability of abortion and 2 private demand based on the direct effect of abortion access by women of childbearing age the type of abortion legislation in each state prior to roe vs wade prohibited except to save the mothers life or in cases of rape restricted to specific situations such as preserving the mothers health and unrestricted was used as an indicator of public sentiment toward abortion among the factors considered to correlate with sentiment toward abortion availability were income education marital status race and religious affiliation the model predicts that 20 states compared to 30 in 1970 would prohibit abortion and 8 compared to 4 in 1970 would place no restrictions on abortion if each state were to select its own abortion policy omission of the private demand component from the model resulted in even less restrictive access to abortion 11 states with an abortion ban and 11 with unrestricted access these findings are consistent with the national opinion polls indicating support for less restrictive abortion legislation

buying their votes a study of local tax price discrimination i introduction financial support for public schools in developed countries has recently been declining as governments face increasing pressure to balance their budgets by reducing expenditures on public services public school revenues may be particularly vulnerable in countries where elderly residents will compose a rising share of the population while the percent of united states residents over the age of 65 was 12 4 in 2000 the u s census bureau 2008 predicts this will rise to 16 3 by 2020 and 20 7 by 2050 recent growth in the upper middle aged population ages 55 64 has occurred throughout the united states and if current trends continue communities with the largest growth in the elderly share ages 65 and over over the next 30 years will experience this growth primarily due to aging in place rather than residential migration frey 2007 the typical school district will thus have an increasing share of adults who do not consume public schooling services this trend could have two important implications for school districts 1 decreased political support for school expenditures and 2 a greater tax base per student due to a reduction in the relative size of the school aged population if the former effect dominates the latter then local district revenues per student will decline this dynamic would be consistent with prior u s trends figlio and fletcher 2012 find that most of the within metropolitan area variation in suburbs age distributions in 1980 and 1990 can be traced back to these suburbs age distributions when adults settled there in earlier decades those authors simulate the shares of elderly adults residing in various suburbs based on the aging in place of early residents and their simulated elderly shares are negatively correlated with suburban school expenditures state or federal governments could potentially alter this dynamic by subsidizing local property tax reductions that are targeted toward elderly homeowners elderly homeowners receiving these reductions might support higher levels of local public school spending because they can maintain high property values at a relatively low cost in other words elderly homeowners preferred level of local tax revenues may be sensitive to their marginal local tax price the change in their tax payments required to increase local school district revenues by one dollar by influencing elderly homeowners preferred local tax rates targeted tax price reductions may shift the identity of the local median voter and thus moderate how changes in demographics affect local public revenue this article is the first to empirically examine whether targeted tax price reductions moderate the impact of age demographics on local government revenues prior studies examined how the aging in place of local populations affects public school revenues figlio and fletcher 2012 harris evans and schwab 2001 ladd and murray 2001 and this article tests whether there is important within sample heterogeneity in these effects using similar methods as these prior studies the empirical models below isolate the exogenous component of changes in local age demographics by using lagged population shares as instrumental variables predicting future age demographics to test for heterogeneous effects i assembled a longitudinal data set concerning states property tax reduction policies for elderly homeowners the results confirm earlier studies findings that exogenous increases in the fraction of elderly residents ages 65 and over on average decrease tax revenues in u s school districts however state financed reductions in elderly homeowners marginal local tax prices significantly reduce the negative effect of the local elderly population share this negative effect is only large in communities not offering any targeted local tax price reductions to elderly homeowners significant differences in the effects of the elderly share across state policy regimes are robust to several alternative empirical specifications including comparisons of school districts that are located near each other on opposite sides of state borders

public versus private investment in human capital endogenous growth and income inequality in this paper we present an overlapping generations model with heterogeneous agents in which human capital investment through formal schooling is the engine of growth we use simple functional forms for preferences technologies and income distribution to highlight the distinction between economies with public education and those with private education we find that income inequality declines more quickly under public education on the other hand private education yields greater per capita incomes unless the initial income inequality is sufficiently high we also find that societies will choose public education if a majority of agents have incomes below average

how efficient is the substitution of debt for taxes in influencing demand a 52 country macro theoretic model is developed in order to test the ricardian view that debt and tax finance are equivalent the alternative traditional view is that government expenditures financed by tax revenue affect the economy in profoundly different ways than expenditures financed by bond issuance a rigorous testing of the model indicates that a present value preserving transfer of income from future generations affects the consumption of the current generations in a positive for solvent countries or negative for debt ridden countries way an explanation for this divergence in consumer s behaviour is attempted via the concept of debt illusion

a defense of compulsive measures against child labor abstract this research characterizes policies likely to trigger the onset of a growth enhancing fertility transition even for an economy with initially a low per capita income the environment considered is one where children s time has an economic value and schooling and child labor are the main competing claims on a child s time using a one parent family overlapping generations model i argue that compulsive measures against child labor are justifiable as an integral part of an intervention that combines incentives and regulations in order to eliminate child labor the analysis highlights fertility and child labor dynamics as shaped by the relative cost of children

demand for local public spending evidence from the british social attitudes survey the british social attitudes survey bsas is a uk wide survey that provides a rich source of information on individuals attitudes to a variety of topics including locally provided service in this paper we seek to model answers to questions on attitudes to local authority spending which invite the expression of a private demand for local public spending a convincing picture has emerged of locally provided public goods as imperfectly congested public goods with a price elastic and probably income inelastic demand the view that central government grants may induce voter confusion over tax prices of public services also finds support

a population macroeconomic growth model for currently developing countries abstract this paper constructs a theoretical model that predicts as observed in some currently developing countries that the average school enrollment ratio may fall even when the average fertility rate declines unlike existing models the current analysis indicates that economic growth may slow down when a fertility transition starts asymmetric behavior with respect to fertility and education between households stemming from income inequality plays an important role in generating this result we examine the implications of an education subsidy policy contrary to intuition in some circumstances this policy may decrease the average school enrollment ratio and future economic growth

human capital family planning and their effects on population growth statistical evidence at the household level suggests that fertility and child mortality are related to factors specified by economic models of family resource allocation and behavior several of these factors such as women s education and family planning appear to decrease both fertility and child mortality leaving in doubt what net effects these human capital and social welfare programs have had on the recent slowing of world population growth the specific factors considered here include family planning programs human capital endowments of women and men natural resource wealth other economic structural determinants of the costs and benefits of children and the availability of nutritional inputs cross sectional relationships are reported and changes within countries are analyzed with fixed effect methods using data for 68 lowincome countries for the last two decades

on measuring child costs with applications to poor countries the theoretical basis for measuring child costs is discussed and detailed consideration is given to two straightforward procedures for calculation engel s food share method and rothbarth s adult good method each of these methods embodies different definitions of child costs so that the same empirical evidence can generate quite different estimates depending on the method used it is shown that true costs are generally overstated by engel s method and understated by rothbarth s procedure although the latter unlike the former can provide a sensible starting point for cost measurement our estimates from sri lankan and indonesian data suggest that children cost their parents about 30 40 percent of what they spend on themselves

budgetgames and the private and social demand for mixed public goods we have indicated how budgetgames played by a representative sample of voters can be used to estimate the marginal social demand for mixed public goods a model has been developed that enables us to distinguish between private and social demand considerations of the players information on marginal social demand is obtained by comparing the actual outcome of the game with a simulated game solution based on the optimization of private benefits only this optimization problem is shown to be approximately equivalent to a linear programming problem in which each respondent minimizes the loss of subsidies on his consumption of the mixed public goods considered empirical results show the largest marginal social demand for public services for the elderly followed by mental health care primary and secondary education and higher education a negative marginal social demand is expressed for in patient health care police and justice outpatient health care and culture and recreation the latter service having the smallest social demand an unexpected result is the relatively large marginal social demand for higher education although this service is severly cut in the actual game this outcome mainly derives from small private benefits to the average voter therefore the usual interpretation of budgetgames that identifies heavy budget cuts with small social demand underestimates the social demand for higher education the reverse is true for general in patient health care although this service is moderately cut in the actual game this result mainly derives from the large private benefits to the average voter in this case the usual interpretation of the game overestimates social demand we have also studied the dependence of the marginal social demand pattern on the political orientation of the voters apart from typical pure or almost pure public goods such as defence general government and police and justice services clearly favoured by right wing voters we find no strong dependence on political orientation

utility profits fiscal illusion and local public expenditures the main purpose of this paper has been to examine theoretically and empirically the effects of internal subsidization by municipal utilities on local public expenditures and tax burdens the hypothesis was deduced that internal subsidization severs the link between public benefits received and taxes paid creating a fiscal illusion that induces consumer taxpayers to underestimate the actual cost of government this in turn would lead to larger expenditure levels than would otherwise be forthcoming this hypothesis was tested statistically with a sample of fifty two municipalities in the state of new york which use utility profits to subsidize the general fund and sixty four other municipalities which do not a reduced form public expenditure model was estimated which included a dummy variable to check for any differences in expenditures ceteris paribus between the subsidy cities and others it was found that subsidy cities had larger expenditure levels all other things equal which adds support for the main hypothesis it was also found that while it is possible that utility profits may be substituted for other local revenue sources in the sample of new york municipalities studied internal subsidization is likely to have stimulated expenditures leading to an increase in local tax collections this result adds further support for the main hypothesis

the economics of child labor if child labor as a mass phenomenon occurs not because of parental selfishness but because of the parents concern for the household s survival the popular argument for banning child labor loses much of its force however this assumption about parental decision making coupled with the assumption of substitutability in production between child and adult labor could result in multiple equilibria in the labor market with one equilibrium where children work and another where adult wage is high and children do not work the paper establishes this result and discusses its policy implications copyright 1998 by american economic association

measuring state dependence in individual poverty histories when there is feedback to employment status and household composition this paper argues that the assumption of strict exogeneity which is usually invoked in estimating models of state dependence with unobserved heterogeneity is violated in the poverty context as important variables determining contemporaneous poverty status in particular employment status and household composition are likely to be influenced by past poverty outcomes therefore a model of state dependence is developed that explicitly allows for possible feedback effects from past poverty to future employment and household composition outcomes empirical results based on data from the german socio economic panel gsoep suggest that there are indeed such feedback effects and that failure to take them into account may lead to biased estimates of the state dependence effect copyright 2009 john wiley sons ltd

simple solutions to the initial conditions problem in dynamic nonlinear panel data models with unobserved heterogeneity i study a simple widely applicable approach to handling the initial conditions problem in dynamic nonlinear unobserved effects models rather than attempting to obtain the joint distribution of all outcomes of the endogenous variables i propose finding the distribution conditional on the initial value and the observed history of strictly exogenous explanatory variables the approach is flexible and results in simple estimation strategies for at least three leading dynamic nonlinear models probit tobit and poisson regression i treat the general problem of estimating average partial effects and show that simple estimators exist for important special cases copyright 2005 john wiley sons ltd

bribing votes a new explanation to the inequality redistribution puzzle in ldc s the recent empirical literature on redistribution and developmentemphasizes two main evidences i more redistribution generallyinduces higher growth rates and ii more inequality does notnecessarily increase the political demand for redistribution these stylized facts are at odds with the correlations observedin developed countries several theoretical arguments can beadvanced to explain these puzzles in this paper it is shownthat vote purchases may be seen as an additional argument toexplain puzzle ii we formalize this idea and examine theconditions under which vote bribes may be an obstacle toredistribution and thus to growth in a developing economy

entrepreneurship social mobility and income redistribution in south india development economists have been preoccupied with the problem of increasing the size of the gnp pie to the relative neglect of its distribution despite the recent disenchantment with the viewpoint that all classes share in the benefits of industrial growth empirical data on the distribution of income business opportunity and economic power are in short supply many of the studies on entrepreneurship and economic development when they are not apologetics for ruthless capitalist exploitation as paul baran suggests extol the achievements of the capitalist entrepreneur without examining class origins and monopoly advantage joseph schumpeter sees entrepreneurs irrespective of class origin as heroic figures with the dream and will to found a private kingdom to conquer adversity to achieve success for its own sake and to experience the joy of creation for gustav papanek 1967 the private entrepreneur who is frugal diligent far sighted remarkably able and willing to take political risks is in large part responsible for the success of pakistan in achieving rapid industrialization

child labor school attendance and intrahousehold gender bias in brazil an extensive survey data set of brazilian households is used to test whether intrahousehold gender bias affects the decisions of mothers and fathers to send their sons and daughters to work and to school an intrahousehold allocation model is examined in which fathers and mothers may affect the education investment and the child labor participation of their sons and daughters differently because of differences in parental preferences or differences in how additional schooling affects son s and daughter s acquisition of human capital brazilian household survey data for 1998 are used to estimate the impact of each parent s education on the labor market participation and school attendance of their sons and daughters for labor market participation the father s education has a greater negative impact than the mother s education on the labor status of sons the father s education also has a greater impact on son s labor status than on daughter s for schooling decisions the mother s education has a greater positive impact than the father s education on daughter s school attendance but fathers have a greater positive impact on sons school attendance than on daughter s

political deadlocks and distributional information the value of the veil contractarian normative theory relies on the veil of ignorance construct to generate the political consensus required for its theories of justice by eliminating distributional information the veil is presumed to facilite consensus building by reducing conflict over the distributional effects of proposed constitutional rules or institutions this paper explores the extent to which excessive distributional information might also impede the ordinary day to day decision making of democratic institutions our analysis suggests that distributive information makes political deadlocks under majority rule more likely statistical evidence suggests that the efficacy of the u s congress has been reduced by the dramatic increase in distributional information made available to it over the past twenty five years

subsidised training and youth employment distinguishing unobserved heterogeneity from state dependence in labour market histories using the 1990 2 wave of the french labour force survey to study the employment histories of young people i consider transitions between six labour market states employment contracts whether permanent or temporary unemployment training education and non participation i use a fixed effect estimator in a dynamic multinomial logit model which can accommodate any form of unobserved heterogeneity in levels this analysis can be extended to markov processes of any order i relate heterogeneity components to individual and family characteristics by using simulated maximum likelihood methods these procedures allow evaluation of the effects training schemes have on youth employment histories

child labor cause consequence and cure with remarks on international labor standards although the literature on child labor is enormous it lacks a common theoretical foundation in this paper analytical survey of this field is provided keeping in mind that this is an area where the primary reason for theorizing is ultimately to influence policy overall it is noted that the literature on child labor is an illustration of abundance and anarchy although empirical writings on child labor are numerous they are not usually founded on theory it is argued that there is much that can be done in curbing the issue of child labor several theories were studied in this paper including collaborative intervention such efforts include public action which alters the economic environment such that the parents of their own accord prefer to withdraw the child from labor force another strategy involves the government a legal intervention is enforcing a total ban on the subject although such interventions have good intentions some of them may not be feasible in general it is better to take economy wide measures against child labor and if there is to be a sector specific ban it should be based on the working conditions of that sector rather than the destination of the goods

demographic change intergenerational linkages and public education in this brief paper i explore several issues related to u s demographic change and the political economy of public education i describe the existing empirical evidence that suggests that older and childless voters are less likely to support public school spending than younger voters with children i then note several unresolved issues about the degree to which rational self interest should lead older voters to vote for low levels of public school spending excerpt

why is child labor illegal abstract we present a theory of the emergence of laws restricting child labor or imposing mandatory education that is consistent with the fact that poor parents tend to oppose such laws we find that if altruistic parents are unable to commit to educating their children child labor laws can increase the welfare of higher income parents in an ex ante sense on the basis of an empirical analysis of latin american household surveys we demonstrate that per capita income in the country of residence has the predicted effect on child labor supply even after controlling for other household characteristics

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

heterogeneity of preferences for local public goods the case of private expenditure on public education abstract revealed preference techniques are used to investigate the degree of heterogeneity of local public good preferences by testing the hypothesis that demographic characteristics are correlated with preferences for expenditure on public education the test relies on a goodness of fit index which is on an estimation of wasted consumer expenditure we use bootstrap techniques to estimate the distribution of the test statistic preference heterogeneity is found to be common however democrat protestant households are found to have similar tastes and to a lesser extent so are households with school age children where at least one other trait is held in common republicans exhibit the greatest degree of preference heterogeneity

state dependence individual heterogeneity and the choice of employment status evidence from korea abstractfocusing on the individual heterogeneity this article examines the causes of an individual s employment status choice and the extent of state dependence in the korean labour market we estimate a dynamic multinomial logit model using the panel data drawn from the first to fifteenth wave of the korean labour and income panel study the results suggest the presence of state dependence individual characteristics and growth background have a significant effect on the choice of employment status gender is still an important employment factor males are more likely to be employed and this gender effect is highest for regular employment re one s educational attainment and age operate in opposite directions that is educational attainment age has a positive negative impact on the choice of a regular job and a negative positive impact on the choice of a non regular job contrary to our expectations a wealthy family background reduces the probability of individuals being wage workers and rais

state dependence serial correlation and heterogeneity in intertemporal labor force participation of married women a dynamic search framework is developed to analyze the intertemporal labor force participation behavior of married women using longitudinal data to allow for a rich dynamic structure the sensitivity to alternative distributional assumptions is evaluated using linear probability and probit models the dynamic probit models are estimated using maximum simulated likelihood msl estimation to overcome the computational difficulties inherent in maximum likelihood estimation of models with nontrivial error structures the results find that participation decisions are characterized by significant state dependence unobserved heterogeneity and negative serial correlation in the error component the hypothesis that fertility decisions are exogenous to women s participation decisions is rejected when dynamics are ignored however there is no evidence against this hypothesis in dynamic model specifications women s participation response is stronger to permanent than current nonlabor income reflecting unobserved taste factors

municipal utilities and local public finance a simultaneous model our results confirm the existence of a positive direct effect of cross subsidies from municipally owned water utilities on city spending while the results are consistent with the hypothesis that internal subsidization creates a fiscal illusion they are also consistent with vote maximizing behavior that is the demand for cross subsidies is found to depend on factors that reflect the city s fiscal position including its spending level in the absence of a contribution the results of the logit estimation suggest that annual contributions are discretionary and explained primarily by a city s fiscal health our results also confirm the existence of a simultaneous relationship between municipal spending and utility contributions and the need for a simultaneous estimation technique this bias affects all prior studies of the interaction between utility revenue contributions and local public finance variables and future studies must be aware of the simultaneous nature of the underlying relationship

fiscal illusion budget maximizers and dynamic equilibrium this paper extends previous work in grant induced fiscal illusion in two ways while previous models have focused on the existence of rational comparative static equilibria in the presence of illusion this work focuses on the dynamic process by which steady state equilibria can be achieved furthermore endogeneity in grants is incorporated which necessitates the use of a budget maximizing hypothesis however it is shown that a broader interpretation of the budget maximizing assumption is necessary in order for this characterization to make sense in a grantor recipient framework

school attendance and child labor a model of collective behavior this paper theoretically investigates how community approval or disap proval aects school attendance and child labor and how aggregate behavior of the community feeds back towards the formation and persistence of an anti or pro schooling norm the proposed community model continues to take aggregate and idiosyncratic poverty into account as an important driver of low school attendance and child labor but it provides also an explanation for why equally poor villages or regions can display dierent attitudes towards schooling distinguishing between three dierent modes of child time allocation school attendance work and leisure the paper shows how the time costs of schooling and child labor productivity con tribute to the existence of a locally stable anti schooling norm it proposes policies that eectively exploit the social dynamics and initiate a permanent escape from the anti schooling equilibrium an extension of the model explores how an education contingent subsidy paid to the poorest families of a community manages to initiate a bandwagon eect towards education for all the optimal mechanism design of

aging growth and the allocation of public expenditures on health and education in this paper i develop an overlapping generations endogenous growth model in which both public education and health are sources of growth by affecting the accumulation rate of the human capital stock and the savings rate over life expectancy i first find that dynamic complementarities of public expenditures lead to minimum threshold levels of public education and health expenditures that ensure sustainable growth i then show how governments can use the allocation of public expenditures as an alternative policy instrument to maximize growth without increasing the tax rate or the retirement age as usually happens in aging economies resume vieillissement croissance et l allocation des depenses publiques en sante et en education dans ce texte l auteur developpe un modele de croissance endogene avec des generations qui se chevauchent dans lequel les services publics en sante et en education sont des sources de croissance en raison du fait qu ils affectent le taux d accumulation du stock de capital humain et le taux d epargne au cours du cycle de vie on decouvre que les complementarites dynamiques des depenses publiques determinent des seuils minimaux de depenses publiques en sante et en education qui assurent une croissance durable on montre comment les gouvernements peuvent utiliser l allocation des depenses publiques comme un instrument de politique publique de rechange pour maximiser la croissance sans accroitre le taux d imposition ou l ge de la retraite comme cela se fait d habitude dans les economies vieillissantes

public goods an exercise in calibration this paper considers a measure of the publicness of goods and services implicit in responses that individuals make when asked about public sector spending at the limit all consumers consume equal amounts of a public good thus any differences between an individual s self interest preferences and public interest preferences cannot be based on differential provision but only on differences in the individual s public and self interest utility functions if we rule out the latter self interest and public interest preferences for a pure public good are identical using sample survey data it is possible to calibrate the public good content of different public goods

what happens after working part time integration maintenance or exclusionary transitions in britain and western germany we address the issues raised by gunther schmid s proposal to develop transitional labour markets by examining theoretical explanations and empirical evidence affecting transitions through part time work by analysing british and german household panel data we outline the changing characteristics of part time employment and employees in the early 1990s we show that only a tiny number of women were able to use part time work as a bridge back into a full time job a substantial proportion ends up dropping out of employment especially in germany having previous employment experience is more likely to hinder exclusionary transition patterns whereas the presence of more than one child especially in germany is associated with dropping out we conclude by assessing the implication of these findings for both policy reform and theoretical developments

the empirical analysis of fiscal illusion this paper examines the empirical analysis of the five main hypotheses subsumed under the generic term fiscal illusion after placing these hypotheses within a common theoretical framework the paper attempts to evaluate empirical research into the revenue complexity hypothesis the revenue elasticity hypothesis the flypaper effect renter illusion and debt illusion

demographic change human capital accumulation and r d based growth employing an overlapping generations model of r d based growth with endogenous fertility and education decisions we examine how demographic changes induced by an increase in life expectancy influence the long run growth rate of the economy we demonstrate that life expectancy when relatively low high positively negatively affects economic growth this paper also compares the growth implications of child education subsidy policies i e policies for enhancing basic education and child rearing subsidy policies i e pro natal policies and demonstrate that while the child education subsidies consistently foster economic growth child rearing subsidies may negatively affect economic growth

geography health and the pace of demo economic development abstract this paper investigates the impact of subsistence consumption and extrinsic and intrinsic causes of child mortality on fertility and child expenditure it offers a theory for why mankind multiplies at higher rates at geographically unfavorable tropical locations placed into a macroeconomic framework this behavior creates an indirect channel through which geography shapes economic performance it is explained why it are countries of low absolute latitude where we observe exceedingly slow if not stalled economic development and demographic transition

mortality risks education and child labor in this paper we investigate the role of young adult mortality on child labor and educational decisions we argue that mortality risks are a major source of risks in returns to education in developing countries we show that in the absence of appropriate insurance mechanisms the level of child labor is inefficient but it can be too high or too low it is too high when parents are not very altruistic and anticipate positive transfers from their children in the future uncertain returns to education endogenous mortality or imperfect capital markets unambiguously increase child labor when the level of child labor is inefficiently high we also show that a cash transfer conditional on child s schooling can always restore efficiency regarding child labor c 2006 elsevier b v all rights reserved

parental choice of human capital investment abstract in this paper we present a model in which parents make schooling decisions for their children we compare two educational regimes public and private education in the private education regime all human capital investment decisions are made by individuals under public education the government uses income tax revenue to finance one input to schooling in the private education regime cycles may occur even though there are constant returns to scale in the augmentable factors in the public education regime there are no cycles but poverty traps may occur

property taxes tax cost illusion and desired education expenditures the extensive tax cost illusion found in the marshall survey is interesting both in terms of its magnitude and the direction of its impact counter to the common view that tax illusion will result in higher expenditures there appears to be at least one case where the overestimation of tax cost has the potential of leading to lower expenditure levels

fiscal incidence at the local level this paper represents an attempt to make aaron and mcguire s 1 approach to incidence operational 2 the tax paid by any individual is interpreted by aaron and mcguire as the sum of two components the first is a lindahl tax equal to the individual s marginal rate of substitution between the public good and income times the amount of the public good provided the second component is a negative or positive transfer equal to the lindahl tax minus the tax the individual has actually paid this second component is used to measure the incidence or redistributional impact of a particular budget program empirically aaron and mcguire found that the computation of lindahl taxes is highly sensitive to the choice of individual utility functions under certain assumptions that sensitivity is reflected in the value of a coefficient related to the marginal rate of substitution between the public good and income maital 16 later on used three separate identical estimates of this coefficient to reduce the ambiguity in the computation of lindahl taxes this paper offers an alternative computational approach to aaron and mcguire s the key information on lindahl tax prices or marginal rates of substitution is obtained from individual demand curves for public goods which are estimated using the median voter model see 5 an advantage of this approach over aaron and mcguire s is that it does not assume separability of the public good and income in taxpayers preferences the present approach also permits the study of the incidence of a budget policy on groups defined by socio demographic characteristics other than income on the other hand and because of empirical reasons which will become apparent below the present approach is useful for the study of incidence at the local level only section 1 of the paper restates the measure for the simultaneous incidence of taxes and one public good henceforth called fiscal incidence in the context of a formalized political process this section also discusses some of the theoretical difficulties involved in extending the case with one public good to the multi

the interrelated dynamics of unemployment and low wage employment this paper examines the extent of state dependence in unemployment and the role played in this by intervening low wage employment a range of dynamic random and fixed effects estimators are compared low wage employment is found to have almost as large an adverse effect as unemployment on future prospects and the difference in their effects is found to be insignificant evidence is presented that low wage jobs act as the main conduit for repeat unemployment and considerably increases its probability obtaining a higher wage job reduces the increased risk of repeat unemployment to insignificance

mobility in the urban labor market a panel data analysis for mexico abstract we analyze mobility in urban mexico between three labor market states working in the formal sector working in the informal sector and not working a dynamic multinomial logit panel data model with random effects is used explaining the labor market state of each individual during each time period the data are drawn from mexico s urban employment survey a quarterly household survey for urban mexico while some of the descriptive statistics suggest that informal sector jobs are inferior to formal sector jobs formal tests cannot reject the null hypothesis of equal transition rates between formal and informal sector jobs for homogeneous groups of workers looking at entry and exit into and out of nonemployment we find that transitions from formal sector jobs to nonemployment were less likely than transitions from informal sector jobs to nonemployment in 1992 but not in 1999 suggesting that employment protection in the formal sector has been reduced

on the distributional consequences of child labor legislation this article studies the effects of child labor legislation on human capital accumulation and the distribution of wealth and welfare we calibrate our model to u s data circa 1880 and find that the consequences of restricting child labor or providing tax financed education depend on the main source of individual household income households with significant financial assets unambiguously lose from government intervention whereas high wage workers benefit most from a child labor ban and low wage workers benefit most from free education introducing free education results in substantial welfare gains whereas a child labor ban induces small welfare losses

the tax versus debt controversy in a multivariate cointegrating system the empirical literature is replete with evidence that budget deficits and government debt affect traditional view or do not appreciably affect ricardian equivalence private consumption however the validity of the relative empirical estimates can be questioned to the extent that they do not adequately distinguish among countries with varying levels of indebtedness the present paper attempts to address this problem by using johansen s cointegration technique and by sorting the sample countries into groups according to the ratio of debt to gdp the empirical evidence generated finds support for the debt illusion hypothesis as a means of expounding variations in consumers behaviour among countries with varying degrees of indebtedness

the effects of child mortality changes on fertility choice and parental welfare empirical studies have overwhelmingly shown that a lower child mortality rate leads to lower fertility yet it has not been possible to satisfactorily analyze this relationship in even the simplest theoretical models this paper attempts to bridge this gap between theory and the empirical literature the paper also presents results on the effects of child mortality changes on parental welfare the analysis captures the dynamic stochastic feature of fertility choice subsumes other endogeneous choices e g the quality of the children and treats the number of children as a discrete variable this added realism is important for the analysis

household labor supply in urban areas of bolivia we analyze labor supply behavior and the choice between formal and informal sector work of the two spouses in families in urban areas of a developing country using cross section data from bolivia drawn in 1989 the model generalizes the neoclassical family labor supply model nonmonetary returns of formal sector employment capture the fact that the choice between sectors is not exclusively based on wage differentials wage equations nonmonetary returns equations and labor supply equations are estimated jointly by smooth simulated maximum likelihood we find substantial cross wage elasticities of working hours of both partners and large substitution elasticities between the two sectors

intergenerational trade longevity and economic growth we develop an overlapping generations model of endogenous growth in which human capital is the engine of growth and the generations are linked through material and emotional interdependencies within the family parents invest in their children to achieve both old age support care and emotional gratification and material support from children is determined through self enforcing implicit contracts we show that optimal intergenerational trade can then lead to maximization of growth opportunities our model produces a theory of the demographic transition linking longevity fertility and economic growth we also show that while population aging may raise the growth rate an increase in young age longevity is likely to produce a greater increase in the growth rate and a reduction in the fertility rate in a growth equilibrium these predictions and the model s implications concerning the behavior of private savings during the takeoff period appear consistent with empirical evidence

duration dependence and labor market conditions evidence from a field experiment this article studies the role of employer behavior in generating negative duration dependence the adverse effect of a longer unemployment spell by sending fictitious resumes to real job postings in 100 u s cities our results indicate that the likelihood of receiving a callback for an interview significantly decreases with the length of a worker s unemployment spell with the majority of this decline occurring during the first eight months we explore how this effect varies with local labor market conditions and find that duration de pendence is stronger when the local labor market is tighter this result is consistent with the prediction of a broad class of screening models in which employers use the unemployment spell length as a signal of unobserved productivity and recognize that this signal is less informative in weak labor markets jel code j64

corruption tax evasion and social values we provide a theoretical explanation for the vicious circle of political corruption and tax evasion in which countries often fall into we address this issue in the context of a model with two distinct groups of agents citizens and politicians citizens decide the fraction of their income for which they evade taxes politicians decide the fraction of the public budget that they peculate we show that multiple self fulfilling equilibria with different levels of corruption can emerge based on the existence of strategic complementarities indicating that corruption may corrupt furthermore we find that standard deterrence policies cannot eliminate the multiplicity of equilibria instead policies that impose a strong moral cost on tax evaders and corrupt politicians can lead to a unique equilibrium

what is benefit taxation abstract benefit taxation is a system in which individuals are taxed according to the benefits they receive from public expenditures this paper describes an alternative to the standard lindahl method of determining the distribution of individual benefits from government provided public goods and uses this alternative to calculate benefit taxes this alternative avoids some of the paradoxial features of lindahl pricing and generates outcomes in which all consumers benefit from reduced costs of providing public goods an illustrative calculation shows that benefit taxes defined in this way may be quite regressive

the publicness of local public goods evidence from ontario municipalities recent studies of local public good provision report publicness parameter estimates of about one indicating private good characteristics this empirical investigation of a wider range of communities obtains parameter estimates of significantly less than one indicating a high degree of publicness exists in smaller municipalities and within the service areas of individual public facilities comprising the supply network in larger centres it is argued that the observed values of the publicness parameters have no normative significance as to the merits of public versus private provision la materialite publique d usage des biens publics locaux resultats d une etude de municipalites ontariennes les etudes recentes sur l approvisionnement de biens publics locaux indiquent des coefficients de materialite publique d usage autour de l unite c est a dire que les biens publics locaux ont de fortes caracteristiques semblables aux biens prives ce memoire presente les resultats d un enquete empirique d un large eventail de communaut6s locales et en arrive a des valeurs pour le coefficient de materialite publique d usage qui sont bien moins que l unite et qui donc indiquent un haut degre de materialite publique d usage dans les petites municipalites mais aussi dans les zones de service d infrastructures particulieres parc bibliotheque poste de pompier etc qui forment le reseau d approvisionnement de biens publics dans les grands centres les auteurs suggerent que les valeurs observees de ces coefficients de materialite publique d usage n ont aucune portee normative et donc ne sauraient arbitrer les merites relatifs d un approvisionnement prive ou public de certains biens

the nonexcludable publicness of primary and secondary public education abstract existing theoretical models of education as with most practical applications of public good theory suggest some form of joint public private financing empirical work has only rarely addressed these theoretical considerations employing individual level observations we model and estimate the private and social demands for public education in a community an ordered probit model with known thresholds is used to obtain unique parameter estimates the individual private and social demands are then employed to construct a measure of the publicness of education at various quantities

is there a child labor trap intergenerational persistence of child labor in brazil this article examines the intergenerational persistence of child labor empirically by looking at household survey data from brazil previous empirical work on child labor has focused primarily on isolating the determinants of child labor using survey data we take a different approach by asking does the child labor status of parents affect the child labor incidence of their children we look at this question in two ways our working assumption is that financial need creates this generational link but we also ask if there exists an intergenerational link over and above that which is transmitted through the production of income perhaps through norms we find strong evidence that this link exists and that it appears to persist even when income is held constant moreover we find that children who did not work as child laborers command higher salaries later in life which suggests that the potential human capital gains through apprenticeship as children are outweighed by the human capital gains children receive through schooling excerpt

voluntary income redistribution with migration abstract this paper examines theoretically the welfare magnet problem brought about by income redistribution in a small area where disparities across jurisdictions in transfer policies may induce both recipient and resource migration we show that the level of redistribution determined by majority rule may either rise or decline as household mobility increases and that this level will be either higher or lower than the efficient level to an extent that depends on local market conditions the social value of migrants and the mobility of both the rich and the poor in particular an economy may benefit from the immigration of transfer recipients we also derive the form of an efficient community specific subsidy to transfers which in some cases will be negative

the u s demographic transition between 1800 and 1940 the u s went through a dramatic demographic transition in 1800 the average woman had 7 children and 94 percent of the population lived in rural areas by 1940 the average woman birthed just 2 kids and only 43 percent of populace lived in the country the question is what accounted for this shift in the demographic landscape the answer given here is that technological progress in agriculture and manufacturing explains these facts

when does the stepping stone work fixed term contracts versus temporary agency work in changing economic conditions summary this paper emphasizes differences among short term contracts in terms of career prospects using french data over the 2002 2010 period we rely on a dynamic model with fixed effects to disentangle state dependence from unobserved heterogeneity although fixed term contracts may provide a stepping stone to permanent positions temporary agency work is hardly better than unemployment in this regard the great recession of 2008 has changed the dynamics on the labor market and amplified the difference between fixed term contracts and temporary agency work for both types of temporary workers providing overtime work does not significantly increase the transition to permanent employment copyright 2014 john wiley sons ltd

modeling employment dynamics with state dependence and unobserved heterogeneity this study extends existing work on the dynamics of labor force participation by distinguishing between full time and part time employment and by allowing unobserved heterogeneity in the effects of previous employment outcomes children and education on labor supply behavior in addition unobserved heterogeneity may feature autocorrelation and correlated random effects the results reveal significant variation in the effects of children and education on labor supply behavior moreover the omission of random coefficients and autocorrelation biases estimates of state dependencies on average temporary shocks that increase the rate of part time employment lead subsequently to lower rates of nonemployment than do shocks that temporarily increase the rate of full time work the article has additional online supplementary material

population technology and growth from malthusian stagnation to the demographic transition and beyond this paper develops a unied growth model that captures the historical evolution of population technology and output it encompasses theendogenous transitionbetween three regimes that have characterized economic development the economy evolves from amalthusianregime wheretechnologicalprogressis slow andpopulationgrowthprevents anysustainedriseinincomepercapita intoapost malthusianregime wheretechnological progress rises and population growth absorbs only part of output growth ultimately a demographic transition reverses the positive relationship between income and population growth andtheeconomyentersamoderngrowthregimewithreducedpopulationgrowth

beliefs and errors in voting choices a restatement of the theory of fiscal illusion this paper reformulates the theory of fiscal illusion to make it more compatible with the median voter model of collective choice it emphasizes the requirement that misperceptions about marginal tax costs and benefits must be permanent to have any significant effect on the level of public expenditures the lancaster becker model of consumer demand is then used to demonstrate the peculiar effects of permanent misperceptions on consumer demand it can be shown for example that other things being the same a republican who underestimates continuously the marginal benefits of public activities may demand more public goods than a democrat who overestimates those same benefits in a permanent fashion

selfishness versus public regardingness in voting behavior abstract the selfishness hypothesis in voting behavior is formalized and tested for the first time individual net benefits from a bond proposal computed using the median voter model are used to explain voting behavior it was found that taxpayers in general voted according to their self interest as defined by net benefits however high income groups voted in favor of proposals that would have redistributed income to the poor their behavior is consistent with either the public regardingness hypothesis or with an extension of the selfishness hypothesis which includes real estate speculation

ranking unemployment duration and wages it explores the implication of one central assumption when firms receive multiple acceptable applications they hire the worker who has been unemployed for the least amount of time this assumption ranking is contrasted with the assumption of random hiring no ranking by embodying this assumption in a model of the labour market with job creation destruction and matching the joint behaviour of unemployment the distribution of unemployment durations and wages are characterized the implication that the re employment prospects of employed workers were they to become unemployed are better than those of the currently unemployed appears to have been an important feature of european unemployment experience in the 1980 s this paper examines the effects of the composition of unemployment on wage determination it explores one central assumption when firms receive multiple acceptable applications they hire the worker who has been unemployed for the least amount of time we refer to this assumption as ranking and contrast it throughout to the assumption of random hiring or no ranking by embodying this assumption in a model of the labour market with job creation destruction and matching we characterize the joint behaviour of unemployment the distribution of unemployment durations and wages ranking has a number of important implications first in addition to the obvious result that the exit rate from unemployment is a decreasing function of duration we show that the effect of duration is stronger the higher the rate of unemployment second with the wage depending on the distributions of prospective unemployment durations the presence of long term unemployed per se has little effect on wages third looking at the relation between the wage and the aggregate level of unemployment and comparing ranking to the case of no ranking the wage moves less with the level of unemployment but more with the change in unemployment put simply ranking and no ranking models show exactly the same aggregate unemployment slightly different long run responses of wages to unemployment and sharply different wage dynamics the paper is organized as follows section i characterizes the matching process and derives a matching function based on an urn ball process with vacancies as urns and applications by unemployed workers as balls thus the distribution of applications per vacancy depends on aggregate unemployment and vacancies vacancies with at least one acceptable application are filled when a vacancy receives more than one acceptable application firms use a rule to choose among applicants thus the rule determines who is hired but does not affect the number of hires section ii uses this matching function in a model of the labour market with continual job creation and destruction and characterizes the equilibrium values of unemployment vacancies and hires

population growth and human capital investments theory and evidence this paper presents evidence from empirical studies that test hypotheses derived from models of household behavior pertaining to the interrelationships among population growth human capital and economic development these studies have exploited quasi natural experiments embodied in the cross area variability in the wage rates of children in a number of low income countries the intercouple variation in the biological propensity to conceive and the geographically selective introduction of new high yielding seed varieties in india in the period 1961 71 the different varieties of evidence support the hypotheses that alterations in the returns to human capital associated with exogenous technical change lead simultaneously to increases in human capital investments and to reductions in fertility and that the costliness of fertility control is a significant but modest factor in inhibiting human capital investments

child mortality child labour and economic development the paper presents a model where the interplay between fertility child labour and education can explain economic stagnation when parents live in an environment of high child mortality if in contrast child mortality is low the solution of the parental decision problem leads to perpetual economic growth the two long run states are connected by a path of demographic transition and economic take off along which the incidence of child labour disappears the paper also discusses alternative policies to escape from the low income equilibrium

location and education in south african cities under and after apartheid we model a south african city during apartheid in which both schooling and mobility are restricted on the basis of race and after apartheid in which no restrictions are imposed we first show that the inequality between blacks and whites decreases when apartheid laws are removed indeed blacks are better off because of human capital externalities due to the possibility of mixing with white students whereas whites are worse off due to negative human capital externalities and intensified land market competition after apartheid we also show that reducing the commuting costs of black children always increases the utility of black families and may even increase that of whites

explaining cross country differences in policy response to child labour we develop a model of child labour where poverty and inequality combine to determine policy response to child labour if there are strategic complementarities between parents decisions to educate their children and firms technology choice multiple school enrolment equilibria arise only rich countries and those that are not too poor and have a low wealth inequality benefit from adopting child labour laws this is because such laws commit an economy with either of those initial conditions to the full school enrolment equilibrium which pareto dominates all other equilibria moreover wealth redistribution is not sufficient to eliminate child labour jel classification i20 o33 une explication des differences d un pays a l autre dans la reaction des politiques au phenomene du travail des enfants les auteurs developpent un modele de travail des enfants dans lequel les niveaux de pauvrete et d inegalite se combinent pour determiner les politiques si des complementarites strategiques existent entre les decisions des parents d eduquer leurs enfants et le choix de technologie des entreprises de nombreux equilibres impliquant divers niveaux d inscription a l ecole sont possibles seuls les pays riches et ceux qui ne sont pas trop pauvres ou qui ont un degre d inegalite de la richesse relativement bas tirent profit de lois reglementant le travail des enfants c est le cas parce que de telles lois engagent une economie qui a ces caracteristiques a se diriger vers un equilibre d inscription totale des enfants a l ecole dans ces cas il s agit d un equilibre qui domine au sens de pareto tous les autres equilibres on note de plus que la redistribution de la richesse ne suffit pas pour eliminer le travail des enfants

educational systems growth and income distribution a quantitative study this study sets out to develop a dynamic model within an economy characterized by the coexistence of public and private schools under imperfect credit market conditions in an attempt to provide a clearer understanding of the evolution of economic growth and income inequality we find that any government wishing to reduce income inequality should adopt policies aimed at increasing the enrollment rate in public schools however whilst high enrollment rates can be sustained in private schools and thus create enhanced economic growth this can only occur if accompanied by the liberalization of the credit markets

imperfect knowledge and the new theory of demand in the conventional simple analysis of demand theory a consumer is confronted with the task of maximizing his utility in consuming two or more goods subject to a budget restraint it is usually assumed that the consumer has perfect knowledge concerning the qualities of characteristics of the goods he chooses to purchase when knowledge about one or more goods is lacking the conclusions about consumer welfare must be qualified suppose for example that a consumer maximizes his utility in consuming goods given limited information about the goods if additional information is made available the pattern of his consumption is likely to change and this change in preference can be illustrated by a new indifference map it is not possible however to compare the two sets of indifference maps for the purpose of making a decision about the change in welfare recent developments in the new theory of demand suggest a possible solution to this problem lancaster 1966a 1966b in the new framework emphasis is placed upon the characteristics of the goods which the consumer receives when he purchases goods or services the consumer s utility function is thus based upon these characteristics not the physical goods or services themselves for the purpose of analyzing the effect of changing information on consumer behavior we shall assume that the consumer spends his budget on two goods if and f2 each good possesses two characteristics designated by el and e2 the first characteristic yields positive utility while the second imposes a negative utility 2 the basic model is illustrated in figure 1 the