the demand elasticity impacts on the strategic bidding behavior of the electricity producers due to the oligopoly structure of the electricity markets and to the constraints imposed by the transmission network the producers may exert market power by strategically bidding higher than their marginal costs this brings market performance far from the perfect competition equilibrium with higher market clearing price and extra surpluses obtained by the producers demand elasticity can significantly affect the market performance contributing to mitigate the strategic bidding behavior of the producers compared to other commodity markets demand elasticity in the electricity markets is low but even a small increase can result in appreciable improvement of the market performance the network constraints of the power system play a specific role in determining the oligopoly equilibrium of the gaming behavior of the electricity producers the model of supply function equilibrium is first applied to a simple three bus test system for a conceptual analysis and then to a standard ieee 30 bus test system the effects of an increase of demand elasticity are assessed resorting to a set of proper quantitative indexes

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

mill political economy and women s work the sexual division of labor and the social and economic value of women s work in the home has been a problem that scholars have struggled with at least since the advent of the second wave women s movement but it has never entered into the primary discourses of political science this paper argues that john stuart mill s political economy provides innovative and useful arguments that address this thorny problem productive labor is essential to mill s conception of property and property was vital to women s independence in mill s view yet since mill thought most women would choose the career of wife and mother rather than working for wages then granting that work productive status would provide a radical and inventive foundation for women s equality mill however is ambiguous about the productive status of domestic labor and is thereby representative of a crucial failure in political economic thought as well as in egalitarian liberal thought on gender but because mill at the same time develops a conception of production that goes well beyond the narrow limits offered by other prominent political economists he offers contemporary political scientists and theorists a way to rethink the relationship of reproductive to productive labor the requirements for gender equality and the accepted categories of political economy

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

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

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

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

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

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

quality improvements and the incentive to leapfrog abstract in a model of an uncovered market of vertically differentiated products incentives of non identical duopolists to improve the technological maximum quality are analyzed it is assumed that initially firms offer products with different qualities and that the r d cost function changes exogenously this induces a reconsideration of firms quality decisions both firms have the same r d costs for improving the maximum quality quality changes within the existing quality range are assumed to incur only fixed adjustment costs it is shown that the firm which initially is in the low quality position always has a higher incentive to improve industry s quality than its rival if adjustments costs are sufficiently high persistence of dominance may occur for a low degree of initial differentiation low adjustment costs and r d cost functions with a high slope

economic development and gender equality is there a gender kuznets curve this research note examines the relationship between economic development and gender equality drawing on the concept of the kuznets curve the authors hypothesize that the relationship between economic development and gender inequality is curvilinear s shaped with three distinct stages in the first stage economic development improves gender equality because it enables greater female labor force participation an independent income stream increases women s intrahousehold bargaining power the opportunity to develop human capital confers greater political and social recognition in the second stage labor force stratification and gender discrimination encourage divergent male female income trajectories which decrease the opportunity costs of female labor force withdrawal and lend traction to social resistance against burgeoning gender norms consequently there is a deceleration in initial equality gains in the final stage gender equality again improves as greater educational participation and technological advancement provide new employment opportunities for women increase the opportunity costs of staying home and encourage the evolution of new social institutions and norms that overcome prior discriminatory practices the authors find support for this argument in statistical tests of the relationship between economic development and gender equality on a panel of 146 developing countries for the period 1980 2005 they employ four indicators that reflect distinct dimensions of women s political social and economic status they find economic development positively influences gender equality when per capita incomes are below 8 000 10 000 these equality gains level off or decline slightly in the second stage from 8 000 10 000 to about 25 000 30 000 beyond this level economic development is again associated with improvements in gender equality the key implication is that the effect of economic development on gender equality is contingent on the level of development policymakers and social activists should develop policy correctives to ensure that economic development confers improvements in gender equality across phases of development

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

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

distinguished fellow houthakker s contributions to economics h t endrik houthakker s contributions to economics defy capsule description a better strategy than providing abstracts of the books and articles on his long and impressive vita is discussing one or two topics in detail placing at least some of his contributions in perspective and discussing their relevance for current research the first topic i have chosen revealed preference needs no justification houthakker made his professional reputation with his 1950 economica article on revealed preference theory the article that introduced the strong axiom of revealed preference the second topic is the dynamics of demand a more idiosyncratic choice which reflects both the importance of houthakker s contributions and my own interests the dynamics of demand is an appropriate choice not only because demand analysis has been a major recurrent theme in houthakker s work but also because like so much of his work it is at the interface between theoretical and empirical analysis houthakker has coauthored two important and influential books on demand analysis the analysis of family budgets 1955 1971 with s j prais and consumer demand in the united states 1966 1970 with lester d taylor and has written as they say numerous articles his 1961 econometrica survey article the present state of consumption theory is a classic a durable and prescient article that foresaw and influenced the developments in demand analysis during the next decades other economists would have chosen different topics thereby revealing different preferences some would choose his work in international economics energy eco

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

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

perpetual leapfrogging in bertrand duopoly we consider different patterns of infinite technological adoption choices by firms in a bertrand duopoly every period technological progress provides a sequence of cost reducing innovations the equilibrium concept is markov perfect equilibrium we analyze conditions for which equilibrium adoption leads to persistent leadership and those where firms alternate in adoption inducing leapfrogging only leapfrogging leads to technological improvement in the long run demand conditions play a crucial role in determining whether leapfrogging can be perpetual in bertrand duopoly

innovation and industry evolution the theoretical literature on innovation has been concerned with a single innovation produced by a number of identical agents by contrast we consider a market in which one firm is the current incumbent while the remaining firms are challengers moreover we consider a sequence of innovations so that success does not imply that the successful firm reaps monopoly profits forever after but only until the next better innovation is developed we begin with a fully optimizing behavioral model and derive the equivalent of the schumpeterian process of creative destruction that is a firm enjoys temporary monopoly power but is soon overthrown by a more inventive challenger the essential point to grasp is that in dealing with capitalism we are dealing with an evolutionary process the fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new consumers goods the new methods of production or transportation the new markets the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates schumpeter 1942 pp 82 83

the made in effect and leapfrogging a model of leadership change for products with country of origin bias abstract change in industrial leadership is often explained in terms of technological and costs advantages however firms in emerging economies not only have to produce high quality cost competitive goods but also win the resistance of consumers in the world market who are often adverse to purchasing products from countries that yet have to build a reputation we argue that this country of origin bias significantly influences the chances of leadership change a model that aims at capturing the endogenous dynamics of demand building and leapfrogging is proposed we show that in sectors with high monopoly power acquiring a superior technology is not sufficient for a latecomer country to become leader unless a significant share of consumers is aware of the quality of its products an extension of the model to multiple sectors shows that a latecomer country remains specialized into low value undifferentiated goods even after overtaking the technology of the leading country

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

large scale market power modeling analysis of the u s eastern interconnection and regulatory applications this paper presents results from a large scale cournot model of the u s eastern interconnection using a dc load flow network there are 100 network locations at the level of control areas along with 2725 generators owned by 99 cournot firms and 200 competitive fringe suppliers these results demonstrate that this modeling approach can analyze potential generation market power with a reasonable approximation of the actual transmission network over a large integrated region while such models have been used to analyze market design alternatives their application to regulatory decision making concerning generation market power mitigation has been more controversial we suggest that such large scale market price simulations could improve upon aspects of the existing generation market power screening methods used in the united states for mergers and market based rates illustrating such applications using this model

time of use pricing in electricity markets under different market structures in this paper we propose variational inequality models for electricity markets with time of use tou pricing demand response is dynamic in the model through a dependence on the lagged demand different market structures are examined within this context with an illustrative example the welfare gains losses are analyzed after an implementation of tou pricing scheme over the single pricing scheme it is intended that the proposed models would be useful 1 for regulatory bodies in jurisdictions to assess market power 2 to forecast future tou prices and 3 to examine welfare changes in electricity markets that change to tou pricing from single pricing

preemptive adoptions of an emerging technology many oligopolies exhibit continuing technological change and lumpy costs of adopting new technologies if firms choose adoption dates in a game of timing and if the downstream market structure is a bertrand duopoly the equilibrium adoption pattern displays rent dissipating increasing dominance i e all adoptions are by the same firm and the discounted value of profits is zero these results need not hold for other market structures including cournot duopoly copyright 1994 by blackwell publishing ltd

the evolution of market structure when there is a sequence of innovations the paper explores the question of how market structure evolves when there is a sequence of opportunities to innovate does one firm extend its technological superiority to become increasingly dominant or does technological leadership constantly change hands in a process of actionreaction a simple duopoly model is proposed in which the answer to this question depends upon the nature of product market behaviour in that model highly competitive product market behaviour leads to increasing dominance whereas cournot behaviour may lead to action reaction

optimal opt in residential time of use contract based on principal agent theory installation of smart meters is increasing world wide opening the possibility to implement time of use tou tariffs to moderate peak loads this study is focused on the design of an optimal opt in residential tou tariff residential consumers are assumed to act in their private interests and maximize utility in response to tariffs the regulated utility has a broader interest in maximizing societal welfare however the regulated utility cannot impose household behavior and cannot directly observe household type instead the regulated utility must offer contract options including both a tou tariff and current pricing to allow households to self select the plan best suited to their interests this paper proposes a simple flexible household utility function that can be calibrated with minimal data to describe diverse household behaviors and reveal household responses to different prices an optimal pricing model is designed for the regulated utility taking account of asymmetric information and potential household opportunistic behavior using economic constructs from principal agent theory the pricing model ensures participation among households most aligned with the regulated utility s desire the pricing model can also be extended for competitive markets a case study is performed to demonstrate the benefit the optional tou tariff can realize

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

bertrand competition with cost uncertainty abstract we analyze the classical model of bertrand competition in a homogeneous good market with constant marginal costs and uncertainty regarding rivals costs first we show that there exists a mixed strategy nash equilibrium under the conventional equal sharing rule second we illustrate the result for the case of piecewise affine market demand

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

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

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

preemptive patenting and the persistence of monopoly this article takes a different tack and inquires whether institutions such as the patent system create opportunities for firms with monopoly power to maintain their monopoly power the results apply to other situations such as brand identification spatial location and capacity expansion which share the characteristic that early or preemptive actions may lower the returns to potential competitors

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

the dynamics of bertrand price competition with cost reducing investments the authors would like to acknowledge the funding received from the danish council for independent research and innovation fund denmark fedor iskhakov gratefully acknowledges the support from the australian research council projects ce110001029 and fl110100247 as well as from frisch centre project 1307 financed by the ministry of labor norway

a penny for your quotes patent citations and the value of innovations the use ofpatents in economic research has been seriously hindered by the fact that patents vary enormously in their importance or value and hence simple patent counts cannot be informative about innovative output the purpose of this article is to put forward patent counts weighted by citations as indicators of the value of innovations thereby overcoming the limitations of simple counts the empirical analysis of a particular innovation computed tomography scanners indeed shows a close association between citation based patent indices and independent measures of the social value of innovations in that field moreover the weighting scheme appears to be nonlinear increasing in the number of citations implying that the informational content of citations rises at the margin as in previous studies simple patent counts are found to be highly correlated with contemporaneous rd however here the association is within afield over time rather than cross sectional

a model for efficient consumer pricing schemes in electricity markets suppliers in competitive electricity markets regularly respond to prices that change hour by hour or even more frequently but most consumers respond to price changes on a very different time scale i e they observe and respond to changes in price as reflected on their monthly bills in this paper we examine mixed complementarity programming models of equilibrium that can bridge the speed of response gap between suppliers and consumers yet adhere to the principle of marginal cost pricing of electricity we develop a computable equilibrium model to estimate ex ante time of use tou prices for a retail electricity market it is intended that the proposed models would be useful 1 for jurisdictions e g ontario where consumers prices are regulated but suppliers offer into a competitive market 2 for forecasting forward prices in unregulated markets and 3 in evaluation and welfare analysis of the policies regarding regulated tou pricing compared to regulated single pricing

demand side management in china the context of china s power industry reform abstract the reform of china s power industry has lasted for decades while the implementation of demand side management dsm in china is still in its infancy in this paper we present a comprehensive study of the dsm and demand response dr programs in china under the context of china s power industry reform we first present a brief introduction of the background including the socio economic status and geographical location of china the energy policy of china china s power industry the smart grids and microgrid in china and the reform of china s power industry then based on the introduction of dsm and the analysis of dsm practices in some countries we discuss the development status of dsm and the reform of electricity pricing in china finally the main challenges in five aspects for the future development of dsm programs in china are proposed and discussed these challenges include customer understanding and participation advanced metering infrastructure ami and information and communication technology ict pricing mechanisms and optimal scheduling big data analytics based decision support as well as government regulations and market policies

on the diffusion of new technology a game theoretic approach this paper is an attempt at a rigorous albeit not exceedingly general analysis of the diffusion of new technology in particular consider an industry composed of two firms each using the current best practice technology the firms are assumed to be operating at nash equilibrium output levels generating a market price given demand and profit allocations when a cost reducing innovation is announced each firm must determine when if ever to adopt it based in part upon the discounted cost of implementing the new technology and in part upon the behavior of the rival firm if either firm adopts before the other it can expect to make substantial profits at the expense of the other firm on the other hand the discounted sum of purchase price and adjustment costs may decline with the lengthening of the adjustment period as various quasi fixed factors become more easily variable therefore although waiting costs the firm more in terms of foregone profits it may save money on the cost of purchasing the new technology thus the firm must weigh the costs and benefits of delaying adoption as well as take account of its rival s strategic behavior

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

dynamic competition in technological investments an empirical examination of the lcd panel industry abstract when are technological laggards more likely to try to catch up with leaders we offer empirical evidence on firm level data of plant investments in the tft lcd panel industry where technological competition has been intense and dynamic we find that the followers level of technology has a non monotonic effect on technology improving investments with intermediate followers the most apt to invest in catch ups this result is a puzzle given the existing theory on technology race we also find that followers catch up investments increase with the capacity of the leader that employs the state of the art technology these results are robust to variations in specification and alternative accounts of effects we discuss our findings and contributions in light of the technology race literature

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

does amd spur intel to innovate more we estimate an equilibrium model of dynamic oligopoly with durable goods and endogenous innovation to examine the effect of competition on innovation in the personal computer microprocessor industry firms make dynamic pricing and investment decisions while consumers make dynamic upgrade decisions anticipating product improvements and price declines consistent with schumpeter we find that the rate of innovation in product quality would be 4 2 percent higher without amd present though higher prices would reduce consumer surplus by 12 billion per year comparative statics illustrate the role of product durability and provide implications of the model for other industries

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

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

linear complementarity models of nash cournot competition in bilateral and poolco power markets two cournot models of imperfect competition among electricity producers are formulated as mixed linear complementarity problems lcps and a simple example is presented to illustrate their application the two models simulate bilateral markets the models include a congestion pricing scheme for transmission but other transmission pricing approaches can also be represented in this framework the two models differ from each other in that one has no arbitrage between nodes of the network while in the other model arbitragers erase any noncost based differences in price the latter bilateral model turns out to be equivalent to a cournot model of a poolco the models differ from other cournot market models in that they include both of kirchhoff s laws via a dc approximation can include arbitragers possess unique solutions and are readily solved by efficient lcp algorithms the key assumption that permits their formulation as lcps is that each producer naively assumes that its output will not affect transmission prices

unitary or noncooperative intrahousehold model evidence from couples in uganda we present an overview of the evidence regarding the unitary collective and non cooperative models of household decision making and discuss how they can affect individual and household welfare we then discuss the results of an artefactual experiment conducted in uganda with spouses in order to test whether household members maximize common preferences or instead are willing to pay a significant cost to hide money from their spouse we find that both the unitary and non cooperative models exist in the intra household decision making process and that a one size fits all model of household decision making is unlikely to be satisfactory

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