unobserved variables and the elusive added worker effect consistent with recent empirical work this study finds no evidence of the added worker effect among married couples in the u s it is hypothesized that unobserved variables may be obscuring this added worker behavior this hypothesis is rejected the labor supply behavior of married women is influenced by the permanent and not the transitory nature of their spouses unemployment wives with frequently unemployed husbands have lower reservation wages yet apart from their measured human capital these same women face persistently lower wage rates and higher unemployment propensities in the labor market as a result married women with unemployed spouses are no more likely to be in the labor force and are actually less likely to be employed than observationally equivalent married women with employed spouses copyright 1991 by the london school of economics and political science

the added worker effect the term added worker effect usually refers to a temporary increase in the labor supply of married women whose husbands have become unemployed this paper presents a new approach to the empirical study of the added worker effect which emphasizes the role of employment uncertainty and credit constraints in generating short run participation and employment patterns the estimates are based on employment transition probabilities rather than static measures of labor supply and are used in a dynamic simulation of changes in the employment and participation rates of wives following an exogenous increase in unemployment among their husbands the results show a small but significant added worker effect at least for white families and suggest that the apparent disagreement among previous studies may stem from different approaches to measuring responses to a transitory event such as an unemployment spell

income maintenance and labor force participation the paper studies the optimal tax subsidy schedules in an economy where the only decision of the agents is to work or not with an application to the case of france given an income guarantee provided by the welfare state the tax schedule that maximizes government revenue provides a benchmark the laffer bound above which it is inefficient to tax in fact under mild conditions a feasible allocation is second best optimal if and only if the associated taxes are lower than the laffer bound the only restriction that efficiency puts on the shape of the tax scheme is this upper laffer bound the laffer tax scheme itself can be computed from the joint distribution of the agents productivities and work opportunity costs depending on the economy it can take widely different forms and exhibit for instance negative marginal tax rates after estimating the joint distribution of productivities and work opportunity costs on french data i compute the laffer bound for two subpopulations single women and married women with two children or more quite surprisingly the actual incentives to work appear to be very close to the bound

corrigendum on a life cycle model of female labour supply in the empirical work in our article on the intertemporal substitution of leisure time for married women heckman and macurdy 1980 we inadvertently constrained the estimated intertemporal substitution elasticity to be too high since this parameter plays a prominent role in discussions of equilibrium models of the business cycle and since our empirical work has been cited in discussions on this topic e g hall 1980 we would like to present a corrected set of empirical results for our model the period t utility function adopted in this note is in the notation of our original paper equation 15

energy retrofitting of urban buildings a socio spatial analysis of three mid sized italian cities abstract the current paper analyses the issue of energy retrofitting of buildings in italian cities in particular a mixed method approach is used combining the socio spatial analysis of data on the most relevant policy tool namely tax deduction together with qualitative analysis of three case studies of middle sized cities the results show that on the one hand tax deduction has not been very effective in promoting a deep renovation of buildings and it may exacerbate already existing inequalities on the other hand it emerges that progress in eco retrofit of buildings depends mainly on creation of new intermediators and intermediation incentives they are increasingly necessary in an urban panorama that has become inevitably polycentric

the role of intermediaries in low carbon transitions empowering innovations to unlock district heating in the uk abstract the literature on socio technical transitions considers how technological innovations can be established within the context of an incumbent regime that is often resistant or inflexible to change strategic niche management is an approach to catalysing a transition to a new regime using protected niche spaces to enable development and experimentation with an innovation intermediary actors play an important role in establishing these niches as they facilitate knowledge sharing and build the wider networks and systems needed to support an innovation the influence of intermediaries within socio technical transitions and strategic niche management is still an under researched area in this paper we use a decision theatre research process to collect empirical evidence from a range of local stakeholders involved in establishing new district heating projects in the united kingdom uk this method carried out in a group workshop format enables understanding of the interactions between stakeholders throughout the stages of the district heating development process the study suggests that intermediaries can play a role in supporting niche empowering processes the existing institutional framework surrounding intermediary actors and the geographical scale at which they work within that framework are shown to be influential on actors agency to choose their approach to empowering an innovation the work highlights the potential for intermediaries to support the restructuring of this institutional framework to enable more radical stretch and transform empowering activities

micro and macro elasticities in a life cycle model with taxes we build a life cycle model of labor supply that incorporates changes along both the intensive and extensive margin and use it to assess the consequences of changes in tax and transfer policies on equilibrium hours of work we find that changes in taxes have large aggregate effects on hours of work moreover we find that there is no inconsistency between this result and the empirical finding of small labor elasticities for prime age workers in our model micro and macro elasticities are effectively unrelated our model is also consistent with other cross country patterns

the added worker effect in the spanish case this study estimates several equations of labour participation for married women to check if the added worker hypothesis is fulfilled in the spanish case to test this hypothesis a subsample of married women are used obtained from the survey of structure conscience and biography of class of the year 1991 scbc 91 the main outcome is that women s labour participation in spain is still conditioned by their husbands labour status specifically women s labour participation is stimulated when their husbands are unemployed

labor supply and the extensive margin forty years ago the french and british used to work more than the americans they now work less the aim of this paper is to provide a coher ent picture of these changes to do so we split the overall level of work activity into the number of individuals in work and the intensity of work supplied by those in work this reflects the dis tinction between whether to work and how much to work at the individual level this is referred to respectively as the extensive and intensive mar gin of labor supply the difference between the extensive and intensive margins has been highlighted in recent research attempting to resolve differ

the soft underbelly of development demographic transition in conditions of limited economic change population policy is driven by two sets of theories which are examined here the first demographic transition theory proclaims the inevitability of a global transition from high to low birth and death rates as a world society and economy develop experience to date supports this generalization but researchers have had little success in identifying threshold socioeconomic or demographic indexes that would predict the onset of fertility decline the second demographic economic theory predicts that slower population growth rates will lead to faster rises in per capita income the historical evidence does not confirm these predictions however this paper examines the case of sub saharan africa where mortality has been falling consistently although often driven more by educational and other social changes than by rising incomes or enhanced medical care and halted only by war and civil disorder however declining fertility in sub saharan africa is not a certainty despite population projections by international organizations that assume that widespread decline is imminent evidence indicates that african fertility is peculiarly sensitive to infant and child mortality levels and therefore amenable to decline through service intensive combined health and family planning programs but it is not clear that governments can implement such programs on a national scale on the demographic economic nexus some evidence suggests that in sub saharan africa high levels of natural population increase do slow growth in per capita income family planning programs might also catalyze changes in family social and economic structures that would contribute to faster economic growth finally as the full scale of the african aids epidemic becomes clearer it will come to dominate all other population related concerns creating a compelling case for huge expenditures on comprehensive health family planning and social services aimed at reducing mortality curing sexually transmitted diseases detecting hiv infection and providing follow up services

consumption inequality and family labor supply we examine the link between wage and consumption inequality using a life cycle model incorporating consumption and family labor supply decisions we derive analytical expressions for the dynamics of consumption hours and earnings of two earners in the presence of correlated wage shocks nonseparability progressive taxation and asset accumulation the model is estimated using panel data for hours earnings assets and consumption we focus on family labor supply as an insurance mechanism and find strong evidence of smoothing of permanent wage shocks once family labor supply assets and taxes are properly accounted for there is little evidence of additional insurance jel d12 d14 d91 j22 j31

estimating labour supply responses using tax reforms the 1980 s tax reforms and the changing dispersion of wages offer one of the best opportunities yet to estimate labor supply effects nevertheless changing sample composition aggregate shocks the changing composition of the tax paying population and discontinuities in the tax system create serious identification and estimation problems we develop grouping estimators that address these issues our results reveal positive and moderately sized wage elasticities we also find negative income effects for women with children

does unemployment insurance crowd out spousal labor supply previous research on unemployment insurance ui has emphasized the program s effect on individual search behavior this state contingent income may also reduce the labor supply of family members during the unemployment spell we investigate this question within the context of wives labor supply responses to their husbands unemployment spells we find strong crowdout of this form of family self insurance our estimates imply that for each dollar of ui receipt wives earn up to 73 cents less the reduction in spousal hours of work is over 40 as large as previous estimates of the effect of ui on search time of husbands

labour force transitions among low wage married couples a simultaneous probability model interdependence in the labour force transitions of low income married couples is studied it utilizes a simultaneous probability model in which each person s job exit depends in part on the job transitions of their spouse estimates are based on data from the seattle denver income maintenance experiments the evidence appears to indicate that wives emulate the nonwork status of their husbands wives of exit prone husbands are themsleves more exit prone and less likely to enter employment evidence in favour of reverse dependence of husbands status on wives exits appears to be weak and imprecise

when married men lose jobs income replacement within the family using matched file data from the january and march 1986 current population surveys the author estimates a model of earnings reduction and family income replacement in 1985 for a group of married men displaced from full time nonagricultural jobs the displacements which occurred between 1981 and 1984 resulted in substantial earnings losses for a large fraction of the sample husbands with earnings losses had higher levels of spouse earnings and income transfers in 1985 than the control group of non displaced husbands but the fraction of lost earnings replaced was not large on average the author concludes that long term trends in both the nature of the experience of displaced workers and the structure of the family economy call for reconsideration of traditional family adjustment mechanisms

borrowing during unemployment unsecured debt as a safety net this paper examines whether unsecured credit markets help disadvantaged households supplement temporary shortfalls in earnings by investigating how unsecured debt responds to unemployment induced earnings losses results indicate that very low asset households those in the bottom decile of total assets do not borrow in response to these shortfalls however other low asset households do borrow increasing unsecured debt by more than 11 cents per dollar of earnings lost in contrast wealthy households do not increase unsecured debt during unemployment the evidence suggests that very low asset households do not have sufficient access to unsecured credit to smooth consumption over transitory unemployment spells

reexamining the added worker effect i introduction the added worker effect refers to a wife entering the labor force when her employed husband becomes unemployed this labor supply response is a transitory method of intertemporally smoothing family income and consumption and is of interest to labor economists and to macroeconomists concerned with the labor force participation of married women over the business cycle the added worker effect is familiar in terms of the income and substitution framework of the labor supply model when family earnings fall as a result of the husband s unemployment the income effect influences the wife to increase her labor supply similarly the wife s reservation wage for market work falls when the husband s increased nonemployment time provides a substitute for her home production and she is more likely to join the labor force as an added worker the wife s reservation wage is also influenced by the degree of complementarity or substitutability of leisure time between the husband and the wife observing the net result of these three factors the existence and the magnitude of the added worker effect is an empirical question this paper expands on the conventional income and substitution explanations in order to emphasize how employment uncertainty and liquidity constraints influence the added worker effect in the context of a dynamic model of family labor supply an unanticipated unemployment spell by the husband and the resulting shift in the budget constraint will alter expectations of future unemployment probabilities which will cause the wife to revise her life cycle profile of current and future labor supplies the explanation of liquidity constraints as a cause of the added worker effect is discussed in much of the literature see mincer 1962 1966 killingsworth and heckman 1986 and rosen 1992 as stressed by lundberg 1985 anticipated unemployment should not produce an added worker effect unless credit constraints limit access to borrowing against future income explaining how the timing of labor supply could be affected by variations in family income mincer 1962 cites capital market imperfections as a reason why a transitory increase in labor force participation of the wife may well be an alternative to dissaving asset decumulation or increasing debt while the added worker effect is easily explained by theoretical models of family labor supply such as those sketched above or that presented by ashenfelter 1980 empirical work has failed to reach a consensus regarding its magnitude or even whether it exists 1 although heckman and macurdy 1982 and lundberg 1985 have shown that the added worker effect is small yet significant pencavel 1982 does not find an added worker effect once he controls for individual specific fixed effects and maloney 1987 1991 does not find any evidence of an added worker effect it is interesting to note the wide variety of data used in this literature heckman and macurdy use annual panel data lundberg uses monthly panel data constructed from quarterly interviews pencavel uses annual panel data constructed from quarterly interviews and maloney uses annual cross sectional data this paper is motivated both by the conflicting empirical work regarding whether or not the added worker effect exists and by the view that the added worker effect should be analyzed using panel data with a short recall period cross sectional microdata cannot adequately capture the intertemporal decisions of wives joining the labor force when their husbands become unemployed annual measures of labor supply are less than ideal for examining the added worker effect since short spells of unemployment by the husband in the preceding year are often forgotten see horvath 1982 and akerlof and yellen 1985 my purpose is to document the magnitude of the added worker effect using monthly longitudinal microdata from the current population survey cps

human capital risk contract enforcement and the macroeconomy we use data from the survey of consumer finance and survey of income program participation to show that young households with children are under insured against the risk that an adult member of the household dies we develop a tractable macroeconomic model with human capital risk age dependent returns to human capital investment and endogenous borrowing constraints due to the limited pledgeability of human capital limited contract enforcement we show analytically that consistent with the life insurance data in equilibrium young households are borrowing constrained and under insured against human capital risk a calibrated version of the model can quantitatively account for the life cycle variation of life insurance holdings financial wealth earnings and consumption inequality observed in the us data our analysis implies that a reform that makes consumer bankruptcy more costly like the bankruptcy abuse prevention and consumer protection act of 2005 leads to a substantial increase in the volume of both credit and insurance

towards alternative trajectories reconfigurations in the dutch electricity regime abstract in the early 2000s dutch electricity companies are increasingly investing in technologies that enable them to replace coal with biomass replacing large amounts of coal up to 40 requires the companies to invest in technological trajectories alternative to the ones they have supported over the past decades this paper aims to understand why these incumbent firms in the dutch electricity regime are developing alternatives the second aim of the paper is to provide a way for assessing the potential of innovations the paper does so by bringing together insights from literature on socio technical regimes and insights from literature on technological and market niches strategic niche management the main conclusion is that both niche processes at the level of experimenting with alternatives and changes in the incumbent regime are necessary for understanding the innovation journey of a new technology a two by two matrix is developed that can be used for both analysis and governance purposes

innovation processes in large technical systems market liberalization as a driver for radical change abstract electricity supply is a large technical system which exhibits strong path dependencies and high barriers for radical innovations recent market liberalization however has initiated a fundamental restructuring the paper analyzes how liberalization has altered innovation processes in the field of electricity supply we examine three radical innovations under monopoly conditions and contrast the findings with the results from a survey on the innovation behavior of electric utilities in liberalized markets we argue that the selection environment for innovations has changed in various respects in our sample new options open to innovation activities have emerged at the level of the firm and utility strategies turn out to be more heterogeneous this may be interpreted as an increase in the variety of search processes which may lead to a mid term decrease of path dependencies

benefits and the labour supply of women married to unemployed men this paper seeks to explain the low labor force participation rates of women married to unemployed men in the reducing the net increment to household income that would result from the wife s employment simple probit models of the participation and part time full time decisions are estimated using a large cross sectional data set the results confirm the importance of severe disincentive effects controlling for labor market conditions income related benefits are found to create worse problems than national insurance benefits both types impede part time work in particular copyright 1990 by royal economic society

female labor supply why is the united states falling behind abstract in 1990 the us had the sixth highest female labor participation rate among 22 oecd countries by 2010 its rank had fallen to seventeenth we find that the expansion of family friendly p

husband s unemployment and wife s labor supply the added worker effect across europe this article investigates the responsiveness of women s labor supply to their husband s job loss the so called added worker effect the authors contribute to the literature by taking an explicit internationally comparative perspective in analyzing the variation of the added worker effect across welfare regimes using longitudinal data from the european union statistics on income and living conditions eu silc survey covering 28 european countries from 2004 to 2013 they find evidence of an added worker effect which however varies over both the business cycle and the different welfare regimes in europe the latter result might be explained in part by differences in the design of the unemployment benefit system across countries which create different incentives for the labor supply of wives of unemployed men

public policy as a part of transforming energy systems framing bioenergy in finnish energy policy abstract government interventions have been identified as important for energy systems change because they can either facilitate or hinder transitions toward more sustainable energy systems this article analyses how bioenergy options have been framed in finnish policy strategies and how the framing has changed over time the empirical material includes the content of 15 government programmes and nine national energy climate strategies on the basis of this assessment both the link between bioenergy framings in strategies and the actual transformation of finnish bioenergy systems are explored on the basis of bioenergy framings the development of energy policy can be divided into three phases support for domestic energy sources in 1979 1991 support for wood and industry based bioenergy in 1992 1998 and diversified bioenergy in the context of climate change in 1999 2010 for two decades primarily wood based bioenergy was supported despite alternative technological developments occurring elsewhere after the turn of the millennium the importance of climate policy increased and alternative bioenergy sources were raised on the government policy agenda also resulting in some new policy instruments rather than adopting a visionary outlook to guide system transformation climate and energy policy has strengthened those technological options that have been selected elsewhere if public policies are to enhance the shift toward low carbon sustainable energy systems they would need to be more comprehensive be more consistent over time and emphasise energy use more

creative destruction or mere niche support innovation policy mixes for sustainability transitions recently there has been an increasing interest in policy mixes in innovation studies while it has long been acknowledged that the stimulation of innovation and technological change involves different types of policy instruments how such instruments form policy mixes has only recently become of interest we argue that an area in which policy mixes are particularly important is the field of sustainability transitions transitions imply not only the development of disruptive innovations but also of policies aiming for wider change in socio technical systems we propose that ideally policy mixes for transitions include elements of creative destruction involving both policies aiming for the creation of new and for destabilising the old we develop a novel analytical framework including the two policy mix dimensions creation and destruction by broadening the technological innovation system functions approach and specifically by expanding the concept of motors of innovation to motors of creative destruction we test this framework by analysing low energy policy mixes in finland and the uk we find that both countries have diverse policy mixes to support energy efficiency and reduce energy demand with instruments to cover all functions on the creation side despite the demonstrated need for such policies unsurprisingly destabilising functions are addressed by fewer policies but there are empirical examples of such policies in both countries the concept of motors of creative destruction is introduced to expand innovation and technology policy debates to go beyond policy mixes consisting of technology push and demand pull instruments and to consider a wider range of policy instruments combined in a suitable mix which may contribute to sustainability transitions

how important is intra household risk sharing for savings and labor supply abstract while it is recognized that the family is a risk sharing institution little is known about the quantitative effects of this source of insurance on savings and labor supply in this paper we present a model where workers females and males are subject to idiosyncratic employment risk and where capital markets are incomplete a household is formed by a female and a male who decide on consumption savings and labor supplies in a calibrated version of our model we find that intra household risk sharing has its largest impact among wealth poor households while the wealth rich use mainly savings to smooth consumption across unemployment spells wealth poor households rely on spousal labor supply for instance for low wealth households average hours worked by wives of unemployed husbands are 8 higher than those worked by wives of employed husbands this response in wives hours makes up 9 of lost family income we also study consumption losses upon an unemployment spell precautionary savings and the crowding out effects of the public unemployment insurance program on the extent of risk sharing within the household

constrained geographical mobility and gendered labor market outcomes under structural adjustment evidence from egypt summary we examine in this paper the evolution of gender gaps in labor market outcomes during structural adjustment and explore the extent to which widening gaps can be attributed to women s more limited geographical mobility using comparable household surveys carried out in 1988 and 1998 we show that gender gaps in access to wage and salary employment and in earnings have widened during this period especially in the nongovernmental sector we attribute these changes at least in part to women s more limited geographical mobility we show that women s commuting rates are not only much lower than those of men but also have remained stagnant in a period where males were having to travel significantly more to obtain jobs outside the government

employment time and the cyclicality of earnings growth abstract we study how the distribution of earnings growth evolves over the business cycle in italy we distinguish between two sources of annual earnings growth changes in employment time number of weeks of employment within a year and changes in weekly earnings changes in employment time generate the tails of the earnings growth distribution and account for its procyclical skewness in contrast the distribution of weekly earnings growth is close to symmetric and stable over the cycle this suggests that studies of earnings risk should carefully model the employment margin to avoid erroneous conclusions on the nature and magnitude of risks underlying individual earnings we show that the combination of simple employment and wage processes is enough to capture the complex features of the earnings growth distribution

the entry of the wife into the labor force in response to the husband s unemployment a study of the added worker effect in brazilian metropolitan areas abstract the temporary participation in the labor force of wives whose husbands have become unemployed has been referred to in the literature as the added worker effect awe previous research conducted using data from the united states has found only a small awe a result that accords with life cycle models with perfect capital markets the current article uses panel data obtained using a short recall period to evaluate the awe in the six major brazilian metropolitan areas our results show a positive awe that is much more substantial than those found for the u s economy the finding of an important awe for brazil suggests that liquidity constraints may prevent brazilian households from sufficiently smoothing income and consumption in periods when the male head of the family is unemployed alternatively the significant awe may indicate that the husband s unemployment signals household members that there may be a substantial reduction in future income flow

innovation intermediaries accelerating environmental sustainability transitions abstract institutions in the united states are undergoing modifications that present direct challenges for the environment and society and may result in institutional uncertainty and instability this article explores whether innovation intermediaries can be employed as a key component of a strategy to create a window of opportunity for green job creation infrastructure changes and technological innovation in response to these types of institutional modifications based on a systematic literature review this article outlines a framework that combines institutional modifications with technological innovation and infrastructure development as part of an economic development strategy important findings are that connections between innovation intermediaries such as incubator and accelerator centers niche actors such as green champions and regime actors such as policy entrepreneurs show potential to contribute to a green economic development strategy but require further examination for the specific roles played by policy entrepreneurs to help create the conditions for scaling niche experiments and simultaneously disrupting the regime the key contribution is in defining the role of sustainability oriented innovation intermediaries at linking local state and business actions in order to scale up and influence green economic development in a politically feasible manner during times of institutional uncertainty and instability

the economics of poverty in poor countries this paper which examines recently studied links between 1 poverty high fertility and undernourishment and 2 environmental degradation and civic disconnection in developing countries opens by reviewing the limitations of orthodox discussions of economic institutions and property rights and the orthodox dichotomy that has located the cause of poverty in the suppression of markets the introduction also notes that much of the analysis in this paper is based on data from sub saharan africa and india the next section of the paper summarizes evidence on the magnitude and extent of world poverty section 3 exposes the connection between undernourishment and a persons capacity to work as one of the pathways to the poverty trap sections 4 and 5 consider the dependence of impoverished rural populations on common property resources and how the conventional process of economic growth can break down this system and make certain sections of the population especially vulnerable to economic shocks the next two sections explore the possibility that links between poverty high fertility and environmental degradation may constitute another pathway to the poverty trap the eighth section reviews the methodology of using net national product which includes resource depletion and environmental deterioration as an evaluation criterion and argues that mainstream development economists may have neglected environmental and population problems because they have been relying on the wrong economic indices the final section concludes that a number of policies must be used to improve options for people

household labor supply and the gains from social insurance the marginal gains from social income insurance programs are captured by the gap in the marginal utility of consumption across states of nature to identify this gap in the context of the household this paper offers a new labor supply based approach that leverages household level economic interactions and optimality conditions we demonstrate that in frameworks of efficient household allocations spousal labor supply responses to shocks have direct implications for the gains from more generous government benefits to households we show that this holds for both intensive and extensive margin responses under fairly general conditions our analysis illustrates how labor market data can be used for assessing marginal welfare gains in a general class of social insurance schemes including the large and important programs of disability insurance and survivors benefits hence household labor supply behavior and responses to shocks which are widely studied in theoretical and empirical work hold valuable information for the optimal design of social insurance

optimal income transfer programs intensive versus extensive labor supply responses this paper analyzes optimal income transfers for low incomes labor supply responses are modeled along the intensive margin intensity of work on the job and along the extensive margin participation into the labor force when behavioral responses are concentrated along the intensive margin the optimal transfer program is a classical negative income tax program with a substantial guaranteed income support and a large phasing out tax rate however when behavioral responses are concentrated along the extensive margin the optimal transfer program is similar to the earned income tax credit with negative marginal tax rates at low income levels and a small guaranteed income carefully calibrated numerical simulations are provided

reproductive externalities and fertility behaviour abstract this article studies reproductive externalities within rural communities in poor countries it is shown that such externalities create a link between household poverty household size and the local natural resource base each of which is viewed as being endogenous the models presented here offer an explanation for the fact that in recent decades large groups of people in various parts of the world have been unable to lift themselves out of acute poverty even while their national economies have on average enjoyed economic growth implications for policy and institutional changes are drawn

worker displacement and the added worker effect this article examines the added worker effect which is the labor supply response of wives to their husbands job losses unlike past studies which focused on the husbands current unemployment status this article analyzes wives responses before and after job losses to examine the life cycle labor supply adjustments using panel study of income dynamics data reveals small predisplacement effects and large persistent postdisplacement effects the timing of the responses differs with type of displacement possibly because of differences in the information acquired before job loss long run labor supply increases compensate for over 25 of the husbands lost income

government affiliated intermediary organisations as actors in system level transitions the article draws from two theoretical fields innovation intermediation and sustainability transitions to examine the role of government affiliated intermediary organisations in system level transitions the role of intermediaries working between actors producers and users entrepreneurs and adopters idea generators and funders has seldom been specifically addressed in the transitions literature thus the role of intermediary organisations in enacting change in socio technical regimes particularly of intermediaries falling between traditional public sector and private sector actors is of interest in this article empirical analyses of two finnish organisations sitra and motiva show that government affiliated intermediaries are likely to engage in strategic niche management processes in diverse ways each organisation having its own distinct characteristics the analysis also points out that to get from niches to transition sustained systemic intermediaries are crucial in articulating new visions and expectations government affiliated intermediaries may make an important contribution to sustainability transitions by initiating and managing new policy or market processes and by acting as an impartial contact point or voice for new networks of actors while independence from public administration is likely to facilitate networking too neutral a stance or limited temporal engagement may reduce the transition facilitating effects

regime destabilisation as the flipside of energy transitions lessons from the history of the british coal industry 1913 1997 this paper investigates a neglected aspect of the transitions literature the destabilisation of existing regimes and industries it presents an analytical perspective that integrates four existing views on destabilisation and conceptualizes the process as a multi dimensional and enacted phenomenon involving technical economic political and cultural processes this perspective is illustrated with two historical cases of the british coal industry 1913 1967 1967 1997 these cases are also used to articulate five lessons regarding the overall destabilisation process and five lessons regarding the economic and socio political environments of industries the conclusion section translates the historical lessons into insights with relevance for the contemporary challenge of climate change and transitions to low carbon energy systems

identifying the influencing factors of the sustainable energy transitions in china abstract this paper aims to explore the influencing factors that facilitate sustainable energy transitions in china for this purpose this paper assumes that the impact of the energy transition is from three main factors energy technology innovations the energy market and socio technical regimes which can be subdivided into 11 subfactors to empirically test the proposed hypotheses questionnaire survey data collected from chinese energy enterprises are statistically analysed by structural equation models sems the results show that first energy technology innovations the energy market and socio technical regimes are the major forces in the transition to sustainable energy in china second the effects of the three main factors on the energy transition vary according to 11 different subfactors some subfactors i e innovation strategy innovation factors innovation policy innovation network and new energy competitiveness have very important positive effects on the energy transition some subfactors i e competitiveness of the coal industry customer habits and coal based infrastructure have negative effects on the transition to sustainable energy in china third the influence of the subfactors on the transition performance is diminished as a result of the joint intermediate effects of transition behaviours

making it experimental in several ways the work of intermediaries in raising the ambition level in local climate initiatives abstract local climate experimentation is a topical issue as cities and rural municipalities are increasingly engaging in various local energy experiments in order to act against climate change there are high expectations toward experimentation among the policy makers funders and local actors intermediary organisations have an important role as facilitators brokers instigators and network builders in low energy and low carbon experiments however there is still limited understanding of exactly what is the work of an innovation intermediary in contributing to local experiments our paper focuses on how intermediaries aggregate lessons and transfer knowledge across experiments we study how the intermediary activities also help in going beyond existing practice and make a difference beyond the experimental context our analysis is based on three empirical case studies in finland smart kalasatama in helsinki skaftkarr in porvoo and hinku with a focus on joint purchase of solar panels our research shows how intermediaries balance diverse demands such as immediate benefits vs radical change or societal learning in order to render local climate initiatives more experimental

the changing nature of gender selection into employment europe over the great recession the aim of this paper is to evaluate the role played by selectivity issues induced by nonemployment in explaining gender wage gap patterns in the eu since the onset of the great recession we show that male selection into the labour market traditionally disregarded has increased this is particularly the case in peripheral european countries where dramatic drops in male unskilled jobs have taken place during the crisis as regards female selection traditionally positive we document mixed findings while it has declined in some countries as a result of increasing female lfp due to an added worker effect it has become even more positive in other countries this is due to adverse labour demand shifts in industries which are intensive in temporary work where women are over represented these adverse shifts may have more than offset the rise in unskilled female labour supply

female labor supply as insurance against idiosyncratic risk in this paper we explore the role of female labor supply as an insurance mechanism against idiosyncratic earnings risk within the family we use a life cycle model in which a unitary family makes consumption saving and labor supply decisions additional uncertainty increases female participation rates this effect on participation is greatest when the ability to borrow and hence to smooth consumption is limited we calculate the welfare cost of increases in uncertainty and show that the welfare cost is greater when households are unable to adjust female labor supply jel j22 d91

employment constraints and the labor supply of married women a reexamination of the added worker effect little evidence is found to support the conventional notion of the added worker effect the husband s unemployment has no measurable impact on the wife s actual hours of work however the constraint on his ability to supply hours of work to the labor market and not simply his unemployment influences his wife s labor supply furthermore the observed hours of work of the wife may not accurately reflect her desired hours of work with these considerations the wife s labor supply is found to be positively associated with the unemployment and underemployment of her husband and this added worker effect is estimated to be quite substantial

income after job loss the role of the family and the welfare state that displaced workers suffer long lasting earnings losses is a stylized fact raising the question whether these losses are replaced by other means for married men increased labour supply by the wife may be one way another possibility is that the public welfare system offsets the same losses i used a swedish longitudinal data set containing married couples where the husband was either employed or made redundant in 1987 by an establishment closure there was no evidence that husbands job loss positively affected wives annual earnings although husbands utilization of unemployment insurance increased significantly government transfers including also sickness insurance disability insurance and means tested social benefits did not fully replace husbands long run earnings losses hence displaced workers seem to suffer also from long lasting losses in family income which in many respects is a better measure of economic welfare than individual earnings or wages

estimation of a labour supply model with censoring due to unemployment and underemployment this study proposes and implements a method of labour supply estimation which is appropriate when the sample contains unemployed and underemployed workers the estimation method consists of excluding unemployed and underemployed workers from the sample and then using to avoid selection bias an extension of heckman s approach to the case where two correlated selection rules generate the sample hausman s specification test is then used to determine whether ignoring constrained workers has led to biases in traditional labour supply estimates and the empirical results suggest that previous estimates of several important parameters are biased since the biases go in the direction that would be predicted by the hypothesis that the unemployed and underemployed are constrained the results support this hypothesis