selection investment and women s relative wages over time in theory growing wage inequality within gender should cause women to invest more in their market productivity and should differentially pull able women into the workforce our paper uses heckman s two step estimator and identification at infinity on repeated current population survey cross sections to calculate relative wage series for women since 1970 that hold constant the composition of skills we find that selection into the female full time full year workforce shifted from negative in the 1970s to positive in the 1990s and that the majority of the apparent narrowing of the gender wage gap reflects changes in female workforce composition we find the same types of composition changes by measuring husbands wages and national longitudinal survey iq data as proxies for unobserved skills our findings help to explain why growing wage equality between genders coincided with growing inequality within gender

rationing by waiting and the value of time results from a natural experiment the authors analyze data from a natural experiment with rationing by waiting in the situation motorists were confronted with a choice between waiting in line for low priced gasoline or purchasing at a higher price without waiting they view this as a revealed preference experiment and use their choices to estimate the value of time spent waiting as a function of individual characteristics in most cases the estimates of the value of time are quite similar to individuals after tax wages 13 references 7 tables

markets under price controls in partial and general equilibrium abstract when parallel markets arise in the face of price or other controls two aspects of agents behavior become crucial in analyzing market outcomes first sellers risk will rise with increases in illegal sales but may also fall with increases in legal sales if the latter is true the parallel market price will induce higher output second if consumers can be given access to the price controlled good without incurring search queuing and other transaction costs due to rationing production of the controlled good will be higher these effects are demonstrated in both partial and general equilibrium

food preferences and nutrition in rural bangladesh t he dietary choice of households near subsistence levels of nutrient intake is one of obvious policy importance in many countries such as bangladesh national goals are set in terms of nutritional intake and there is heavy intervention in the markets for foods however little is known about the manner in which food preferences vary with food expenditure and nutrient intake the design of efficient programs to aid nutritionally deficient households in attaining minimal levels of nutrient intake requires information on all ownand cross price elasticities for both target and non target groups the net effect of a food price subsidy on the consumption of food nutrients cannot be predicted without knowledge of the complete elasticity matrix results presented below demonstrate that substitution effects can be so strong that the subsidization of certain foods quite often reduces nutrient consumption in this study demand equations for nine foods which allow for extremely flexible consumer price response are estimated from the individual budgets of 5 750 rural bangladeshi households estimation at the household level is preferred because it more readily permits the incorporation of household composition variables into the demand analysis such as household size occupation and employment status that are typically lost in aggregation there is also a greater range and variation in expenditure levels than found in grouped data this is of particular importance in the study of nutritional well being as it is the poorest households which are of special interest moreover the household sample provides sufficient degrees of freedom to estimate a simple varying parameter model which requires the estimation of 270 parameters previous econometric analysis of income class specific dietary choice has been limited and not altogether satisfactory pinstrup anderson de londono and hoover 1976 estimated complete sets of price elasticities for different income strata using frisch s scheme in order to study the impact of changes in relative prices on nutrient consumption their results are suspect because of the assumption of want independence necessary for this methodology to be valid alderman and timmer 1980 who were also concerned with studying the relationship between food price policy and nutrient intake by income classes econometrically estimated separate price coefficients for each income group by including slope dummy variables in their demand equations for rice and cassava in indonesia the inclusion of these dummy variables revealed surprisingly large differences in compensated price response across income groups although their results support the notion that poorer households respond differently to prices than the rich the limitations of their data constrained them to consider only two foods and to specify changes in price response which are discontinuous with respect to income i the formulation and estimation of the food demand equations is discussed in section ii below section iii presents the results of the estimation and discusses the nutritional implications of movements in relative food prices and other exogenous variables section iv summarizes our findings

time based competition and the privatization of services the authors develop a vertical differentiation model which exhibits congestion externalities and in which firms choose service time this model is formulated for a variety of industry and ownership structures the authors find an ownership effect in which service speeds decrease when public services are privatized this effect however could be offset and even reversed by increased efficiency of private services the authors also investigate how prices and commitment ability with respect to service times will affect the service speeds in equilibrium copyright 1995 by blackwell publishing ltd

endogenous quality differentiation in congested markets firms selling a product with congestion externalities to a heterogeneous population of customers have an incentive to offer differentiated levels of quality in a price competitive market differentiation arises endogenously through the prices chosen by firms in equilibrium firms offer a range of prices which induce an efficiency improving range of quality levels and allow customers to self select their preferred price quality combinations additional results suggest that with many firms in the market the choice of prices dominates the choice of service capacities in determining congestion levels copyright 1991 by blackwell publishing ltd

using revealed preferences to estimate the value of travel time to recreation sites the opportunity value of travel time vtt is one of the most important elements of the total cost of recreation day trips and arguably the most difficult to estimate most studies build upon the theoretical framework proposed by becker 1965 by using a combination of revealed and stated preference data to estimate a value of time which is uniform in all activities and under all circumstances this restriction is relaxed by deserpa s 1971 model which allows the value of saving time to be activity specific we present the first analysis which uses actual driving choices between open access and toll roads to estimate a vtt specific for recreation trips thereby providing a value which conforms to both becker s and deserpa s theoretical models using these findings we conduct a monte carlo simulation to identify generalizable results for subsequent valuation studies our results indicate that 3 4 of the wage rate provides a reasonable approximation of the average vtt for recreation trips while the commonly implemented assumption of 1 3 of the wage rate generates downward biased results

value of time speeding behavior and gasoline prices abstract value of time vot is a key parameter in economics and policy this paper presents an alternative method to estimate vot by analyzing an hourly dataset on drivers speeding behavior as a function of the gasoline price our identification strategy is novel as it is based on the intensive margin in comparison previous studies reveal vot on the extensive margin but choice alternatives have multiple attributes thereby potentially confounding estimates consistent with the range of the prior literature we find a vot of about 50 of the wage rate and analyze sources of bias from accidents and traffic tickets these bias functions suggest that previous stated preference vot estimates are likely downward whereas previous revealed preference estimates are likely upward biased

how well do static indicators identify the chronically poor abstract we investigate how well the most widely used static welfare indicators perform in identifying the chronically poor we propose a normative measure of performance the cost of a given impact on chronic poverty when transfers are contingent upon a purely static indicator using longitudinal household data from rural india we find that current consumption is not always a better indicator of chronic poverty than current income both however perform much better than other common indicators such as food share and access to land

the value of time hypothesis and the demand for money some new evidence for the uk this paper presents some results for a version of the value of time model of the demand for money using uk date the model performs quite well and the value of time hypothesis appears to be confirmed

households willingness to pay for public housing in the presence of price controls nonmarket housing allocation mechanisms such as queueing prevent households from revealing their marginal willingness to pay for housing through market prices we derive the households marginal willingness to pay using the intuitive idea that the length of the queue for a specific house reflects the households willingness to pay for housing characteristics we apply our methodology to public housing in the amsterdam metropolitan area and show that on average the households marginal willingness to pay for a unit of public housing is close to its marginal costs this suggests that the welfare loss of public housing through distortions in housing supply is rather limited and is mainly through distortions in housing demand we provide indirect evidence of the latter by showing that queueing induces inefficient matching of households and housing

changes in labor force participation in the united states the labor force participation rate in the united states increased almost continuously for two and a half decades after the mid 1960s pausing only briefly during economic downturns the pace of growth slowed considerably during the 1990s however and after reaching a record high of 67 3 percent in the first quarter of 2000 participation had declined by 1 5 percentage points by 2005 this paper reviews the social and demographic trends that contributed to the movements in the labor force participation rate in the second half of the twentieth century it also examines the manner in which developments in the 2000s reflect a break from past trends and considers implications for the future

dynamic pricing through discounts for optimizing multiple class demand fulfillment in a multiple customer class model of demand fulfillment for a single item we consider the use of dynamic price discounts to encourage backlogging of demand for customer classes denied immediate service customers are assumed to arrive over several stages in a period and customer classes are distinguished by their contractual price and sensitivity to discounts through dynamic programming we determine the optimal discounts to offer assuming a linear model for the sensitivity of customers to such inducements we show that customers are served in class order and allocation of inventory to demand is determined by considering the current number of customers backlogged as well as the current inventory position through comparison to a naive supplier allocating inventory first come first served with no discounting we show that profits are primarily influenced by the allocation of capacity and the use of price discounts primarily benefits the second class customers overall fill rate heuristics for implementation of the solution in real time settings are given

the welfare cost of rationing by queuing across markets theory and estimates from the u s gasoline crises governments sometimes impose price controls and nonprice rationing by queuing profit seeking firms occasionally ration by putting their customers on allocation following barzel 1974 and deacon and sonstelie 1985 we take the decision to ration as a given and analyze it employing standard microeconomics and applied welfare economics this paper adds to the literature by focusing on optimally rationing a good across markets further we estimate the actual welfare cost of improper allocation across markets in the u s gasoline crises of 1973 1974 and 1979

allocation of goods through non price mechanisms evidence on distribution by willingness to wait abstract this paper discusses a model of market clearing when prices are rigid the estimated model is one in which the waiting time necessary to obtain the scarce goods brings the excess demand in line with current supply in a manner of a flexible price the mechanism of such a market has been discussed by barzel and by nichols smolensky and tideman but little empirical evidence has been reported estimation of consumer demand in such a market is presented here heckman s approach to truncated sample estimation has been employed the approach allows modelling of time costs as a two part tariff the results confirm that consumer s response to waiting time is measurable and in the same order of magnitude as expected from response to changes in prices the study also indicates that rationing by willingness to wait does not necessarily distribute goods to the poor

rationing by waiting lists an empirical investigation abstract many social systems rely on a waiting list rather than price as a rationing device we present a model of the waiting list for elective surgery in the british national health service waiting time is allowed to influence both supply of and demand for surgery the resulting models of supply and demand are estimated empirically using over 4000 observations the results indicate low elasticity of demand with respect to waiting time suggesting that increased resources may reduce waiting times without greatly stimulating utilization the policy implications are important for the british national government when choosing the level of public expenditure to be devoted to health care

on the coverage of public employment schemes for poverty alleviation abstract the cost effectiveness of public employment as a means of poverty alleviation depends on policy design choices concerning coverage and wage rates the choice is between schemes which aim for wide coverage at potentially low wages and schemes which ration participation so that more beneficiaries can escape poverty conditions are derived for ranking stylized policy alternatives in terms of a broad class of poverty measures the preferred policy is shown to depend on the budget level administrative cost the initial wage distribution and the policy maker s aversion to poverty empirical simulations for bangladesh data generally support wide coverage for distributionally sensitivity poverty measures but limited coverage for other measures

an efficiency and welfare classification of rationing by waiting in the presence of bribery abstract governments often allocate commodities at low prices and on a first come first served basis rationing by waiting while bureaucrats who distribute the commodities usually take bribes a model is developed to classify the efficiency implications of bribery and socially optimal pricing schemes in rationing by waiting if the rationed good and individual income spent on other goods other income are complements then bribery may enhance allocative efficiency and a dual pricing scheme can augment social welfare however if the rationed commodity and other income are substitutes then bribery may not improve allocative efficiency and distributing the rationed commodity free is socially optimal

gas wars retail gasoline price fluctuations this paper examines the retail gasoline price fluctuations known as gas wars weekly prices for the los angeles area were examined for the period from january 2 1968 through december 23 1975 the observed fluctuations were remarkably regular and apparently large ly predictable the data appear consistent with the recent game theory model of e maskin and j tirole in which competing firms produce edgeworth cycles by undercutting each other and eventually relenting copyright 1993 by mit press

household commodity production and social harassment costs in a seminal article becker 2 suggested that consumer behavior be viewed as a process in which households produce commodities meals plays and so on by combining goods or services food theatre tickets and so on and time households are perceived in that model as utility maximizing producers in effect becker s model demonstrates that money prices of goods or services do not provide sufficient information to explain or predict household choice more specifically money prices of goods or services do not reflect the full costs of household produced commodities because money prices exclude the costs of the household s time spent in the production of such commodities mincer 7 showed that unless the costs of time are considered the income elasticities of demand for different commodities are biased abbott and ashenfelter 1 have established the theoretical conditions for household utility maximizing expenditures of income and time wales and woodland 9 assumed that households maximize utility functions which include leisure and a hicksian composite good the budget constraint is written in terms of wage rates the price of the composite good nonlabor income the total number of hours available and the full income of the household consistent with the becker model kohlhase 5 constructed simultaneous constraints in which the income and time constraints are reduced to a full income constraint under the assumption that households buy back the leisure time and commuting time of market workers at the market wage rates and deacon and sonstelie 4 analyzed a natural situation in which for a short time motorists were faced with a choice between a waiting in line for low priced gasoline or b not waiting and purchasing gasoline of a similar quality at a higher price by surveying customers at one low priced station and at two nearby high priced stations they were able to estimate the costs of time for people in both groups they found that in general estimates of the costs of time were similar to the after tax wages of respondents thereby providing additional evidence that the money price does not always convey sufficient information to predict household choice

time is money improved valuation of time and transportation costs the proper valuation of time isimportant for estimating the demand for severaleconomic goods this paper explores the propervaluation of time when estimating recreationaldemand where time costs represent asubstantial portion of the purchase price toestimate demand this paper uses a travel costframework to analyze actual behavior revealedpreference data and hypothetical behavior stated preference data which is induced byhypothetical increases in access fees traveltime and travel distance by comparing theresponses to these three contingencies theanalysis adjusts and improves the valuation oftime costs as evidence of this improvement this analysis demonstrates a great increase inthe consistency between the revealed and stateddata similarly this paper improves thevaluation of transportation related costs

parental and social valuations of child health information abstract we construct an endogenous risk model of the influence of more precise hazard information on the parental demand for child health a 256 observation data set is used to estimate the marginal value to parents and to society of risk information about the future consequences of children s body lead burdens our results indicate that the social value of risk information greatly exceeds the cost of providing it and that parents will purchase too little of this information

wages and participation during the last 25 years annual hours worked by prime aged men fell by the equivalent of six 40 hour workweeks the reduction was more pronounced among those younger than among mid age workers among black men than among white men and among those with less schooling thus hours worked not only fell but showed increased dispersion increases that paralleled the growth in wage dispersion that has become so familiar to students of trends in wages the argument advanced here is that the correspondence is not coincidental the changes in hours worked are simply the labor supply responses that follow the changes in the structure of wages

self selection and the redistributive impact of in kind transfers an econometric analysis self targeting welfare programs have received increasing attention from economists and policymakers alike this paper provides evidence on the redistributive impact of transferring low quality goods in kind i study a school feeding program in jamaica which distributes a bland snack to all students poorer households and those with a greater number of eligible children are found significantly more likely to self select into the program but against these targeting benefits is a large estimated dead weight loss

does the labour supply of wives respond to husbands wages canadian evidence from micro data and grouped data using micro data and grouped data we assess the extent to which canadian wives adjusted their labour supply in response to changes in husbands wages during the period 1980 2000 grouped data parameters based on weighted least squares and the unbiased error in variables estimator developed by devereux 2004 2007a b yield cross wage elasticities that are substantially higher in absolute value than those derived from ols regressions run on micro data both grouping estimators indicate that the labour supply of canadian wives responded strongly to changes in husbands wages during the 1980s for the 1990s our estimates of wives cross wage elasticity display greater dispersion a l aide de micro donnees et de donnees groupees on etablit jusqu a quel point les epouses canadiennes ont ajuste leur offre de travail en reponse aux changements dans les salaires de leurs epoux au cours de la periode 1980 2000 les parametres pour les donnees groupees derives par la methode des moindres carres ponderes et de l estimateur developpe par devereux 2004 2007a b engendrent des elasticites croisees qui sont substantiellement plus grandes en termes absolus que ceux derives par la methode des moindres carres ordinaires en utilisant des micro donnees les deux estimations montrent que l offre de travail des epouses canadiennes a repondu fortement aux changements dans les salaires des epoux au cours des annees 80 pour les annees 90 les evaluations des elasticites croisees des salaires montrent une plus grande dispersion

the value of time and the effect of fines on child car safety seat usage we report the results of a survey on child car safety seat usage and test the hypothesis that the opportunity cost of time is a significant determinant of proper seat use we find that parents with high wage rates are less likely to properly use a car seat we predict that a fine of 1775 along with a certainty of being apprehended once in a four year period would be needed to induce 95 compliance with child car safety seat laws

the value of time and the transactions demand for money this paper reexamines the hypothesis of dean s dutton and william p gramm and edi karni that the wage rate influences the demand for money as a proxy for the value of transactions time it develops value of time transactions models which yield demand for money equations that have a real wage rate argument and compares it to a non value of time alternative that does not the author finds that the value of time models perform well and that the value of time effect is empirically significant copyright 1990 by ohio state university press

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

family labour supply and fertility a two regime model the central hypothesis of the new micro economics of fertility was examined i e because children are female time intensive fertility is inversely related to the mothers wage a theoretical model of lifetime family labor supply and completed fertility which forms the basis for the subsequent empirical investigation is presented empirical estimates of the model are provided using 1971 canadian census data the 1 period model of completed family size and lifetime labor supply indicates that fertility and labor supply behavior of families where the wife participates in the labor market will differ from that of families with never participating wives the systematic differences arise because families with nonworking wives face the additional binding constraint of an inflexible supply of wifes time to the home a comparison of these 2 regimes allows inferences concerning the female time intensity of children and the substitutability of husbands and wifes time in the context of the 1 period model the relevant criterion for separating families into the 2 regimes is the lifetime rather than current participation status the evidence suggests that when this procedure is followed much doubt is cast on the conventional wisdom that children are female time intensive the usual inverse relation found between wifes wage or education and completed family size appears to be the result of a complex interaction between wage rates lifetime labor force participation and fertility some support is found for complementarity between the home time of the husband and wife but the evidence is not totally consistent results of the female participation equation strongly suggest complementarity proxies for the husbands lifetime labor supply suggest weak or zero complementarity when the sample is split by current participation of the wife rather than lifetime participation then the results support conventional wisdom concerning the female time intensity of children and replicate kneisners finding of complementarity between husband and wifes time reconciling these differences within the framework of the 1 period model is difficult since it yields no predictions concerning current variables yet since the wifes lifetime participation is the correct criterion for allocating families to the 2 regimes under the 1 period model doubt must remain concerning the female time intensity of children until the current lifetime results are reconciled

in search of the glass ceiling gender and earnings growth among u s college graduates in the 1990s gender typical educational choices and the glass ceiling are widely believed to explain why older women earn far less than observably similar men using large panels drawn from the national science foundation s nsf national survey of college graduates and other data representative of u s college graduates from the 1990s the author documents the small role of personal choices and finds evidence contrary to the predictions of both human capital and discrimination models rather than the differential wage growth rates predicted by these models she finds similar average rates of earnings growth for women and men across numerous specifications which suggests that the gender gap in earnings is determined by factors already present early in the career her findings reveal slower earnings growth in only two subsets of women young mothers who experience slower earnings growth during the early career relative to men the same age but then compensate with faster growth later in their careers and women wit

multiproduct monopoly a queueing approach using queuing theory to model traditional market structures can provide interesting insights into the underlying mechanisms many characteristics of markets are well known but queuing models often illustrate these in a novel manner a stochastic model of multiproduct monopoly with impatient consumers is developed the model explicitly allows for congestion effects a monopoly that offers two services distinguished only by a time element that is where two distinct service rates apply is considered two different classes of consumer are considered according to their waiting time tolerances given assumptions about dynamic consumer choice behaviour queuing theory techniques are used to derive market share and effective demand details for each class of consumer in terms of the firm s pricing quality and processing speed policy economic analysis is performed allowing for the possibility of offering a reward when the consumer has to face a long queue the economic summary provided forms the basis of a

a comparison of the labor force behavior of married women in the united states and canada with special attention to the impact of income taxes estimation results are presented for the probability of working the hourly wage rate and the annual hours of work for wives in seven different age groups in both the u s and canada federal and state or provincial taxes are incorporated into the analysis an iterative estimation method is employed to circumvent the statistical problems resulting from the dependence of the hours of work on the tax rate and the dependence of the tax rate on the hours of work authors

using mandated speed limits to measure the value of a statistical life in 1987 the federal government permitted states to raise the speed limit on their rural interstate roads but not on their urban interstate roads from 55 mph to 65 mph since the states that adopted the higher speed limit must have valued the travel hours they saved more than the fatalities incurred this institutional change provides an opportunity to estimate an upper bound on the public s willingness to trade off wealth for a change in the probability of death our estimates indicate that the adoption of the 65 mph limit increased speeds by approximately 4 percent or 2 5 mph and fatality rates by roughly 35 percent together the estimates suggest that about 125 000 hours were saved per lost life when the time saved is valued at the average hourly wage the estimates imply that adopting states were willing to accept risks that resulted in a savings of 1 54 million 1997 dollars per fatality with a sampling error roughly one third this value we set out a simple model of states decisions to adop

two sides of the same coin u s residual inequality and the gender gap abstract we show that the narrowing gender gap and the growth in earnings inequality are consistent with a simple model in which skills are heterogeneous and the growth in skill prices has been particularly strong for skills with which women are well endowed empirical analysis of dot cps and nlsy79 data finds evidence to support this model a large increase in the prices of cognitive and people skills skills with which women are well endowed and a decline in the price of motor skills account for up to 40 percent of the rising inequality and 20 percent of the narrowing gender gap

what is the optimal speed limit on freeways abstract when choosing his speed a driver faces a trade off between private benefits time savings and private costs fuel cost and own damage and injury driving faster also has external costs pollution adverse health impacts and injury to other drivers this paper uses large scale speed limit increases in the western united states in 1987 and 1996 to address three related questions first do the social benefits of raising speed limits exceed the social costs second do the private benefits of driving faster exceed the private costs third what is the optimal speed limit i find that a 10 mph speed limit increase on highways leads to a 3 4 mph increase in travel speed 9 15 more accidents 34 60 more fatal accidents and elevated pollutant concentrations of 14 24 carbon monoxide 8 15 nitrogen oxides 1 11 ozone and 9 higher fetal death rates around the affected freeways using these estimates i find that the social costs of speed limit increases are two to seven times larger than the social benefits in contrast many individual drivers would enjoy a net private benefit from driving faster privately a value of a statistical life vsl of 6 0 million or less justifies driving faster but the social planner s vsl could be at most 0 9 2 0 million to justify higher speed limits i conclude that the optimal speed limit was lower but not much lower than 55 mph

canadian contributions to family economics canadian scholars have made substantial contributions to the relatively new field of family economics these include new models of how men and women match in marriage markets and of how decisions are made in multi person households several were early contributors to the literature on married women s labour supply and labour supply in a family context and helped to develop empirical methods in this area a particular focus has been on the impacts of policy relevant parameters such childcare costs on family labour supply and child well being new work on child development the impact of early life conditions and the processes of intergenerational transmission also highlight the importance of family context in determining economic well being

is there curvature in the slutsky matrix d o the poor substitute among commodities more flexibly than the rich when relative prices change even when compensated for the income effects of the price changes is it necessary to add a third dimension to the slutsky substitution matrix to identify household income in short do the terms of the slutsky elasticity matrix curve smoothly from poor households to rich households in such a way that equation 1 is meaningful

growth in women s relative wages and in inequality among men one phenomenon or two although increased wage inequality among men during the past three decades has received more attention the growth in women s wages has been equally remarkable in fact by one measure of inequality the ninth decile median ratio the proportional growth in inequality has moved in exact proportion with the female male wage ratio it is suggested that both result from expansion in the value of brains relative to brawn there is no way of knowing the full story of growth in women s relative wages and it is important not to dismiss the import of changing career patterns as is evident in the panel data increasing labor market participation must be important so too are the implications that follow the movement of women from the home to the job

the value of time and recent u s money demand instability much controversy has surrounded the u s money demand relationship or more precisely its stability this is rather disappointing in light of the central importance of money demand estimates for the formulation and implementation of effective monetary policy and for almost all theories of aggregate economic activity to date the vast majority of alternative money demand specifications have generally failed to produce a stable money demand function throughout the 1970s and 1980s

the welfare costs of price controls for cars and color televisions in poland contrasting estimates of rent seeking from recent experience the welfare costs of price controls can vary enormously depending on the method of allocating the goods in shortage and the possible rent seeking costs that may result with full rent dissipation the welfare loss from price controls on polish color televisions in 1989 was about ten times the standard estimates of distortion costs which ignore rent seeking and was more than 100 percent of the value of domestic producers sales the methods of allocating cars however did not result in rent seeking costs the domestic price controls were an unintended implicit subsidy to imports subsidies for cars were estimated at 43 percent and for color televisions at 22 percent

more power to the pill the impact of contraceptive freedom on women s life cycle labor supply the release of enovid in 1960 the first birth control pill afforded u s women unprecedented freedom to plan childbearing and their careers this paper uses plausibly exogenous variation in state consent laws to evaluate the causal impact of the pill on the timing of first births and extent and intensity of women s labor force participation the results suggest that legal access to the pill before age 21 significantly reduced the likelihood of a first birth before age 22 increased the number of women in the paid labor force and raised the number of annual hours worked

a comparison of user benefits and costs of nature conservation at three nature reserves willis k g and benson j f 1988 a comparison of user benefits and costs of nature conservation at three nature reserves reg studies 22 417 228 benefits from conserving wildlife at three sites of special scientific interest are estimated using a travel cost method recording demand in terms of actual site visits these benefits are compared to the costs of nature conservation both the financial cost which is or could be incurred under the wildlife and countryside act 1981 and also the social costs of the agricultural output forgone after protective tariffs and subsidies of the common agricultural policy have been removed willis k g et benson j f 1988 une comparaison des avantages et des couts de la defense de l environnement aux usagers a trois reserves naturelles reg studies 22 417 228 on estime les avantages de la protection de la faune a trois sites d inter t scientifique special a partir d une methode qui calcule les frais de trajet enregistrant la demande en fonction des visi

explaining women s success technological change and the skill content of women s work the closing of the gender wage gap is an ongoing phenomenon in industrialized countries however research has been limited in its ability to understand the causes of these changes due in part to an inability to directly compare the work of women to that of men in this study we use a new approach for analyzing changes in the gender pay gap that uses direct measures of job tasks and gives a comprehensive characterization of how work for men and women has changed in recent decades using data from west germany we find that women have witnessed relative increases in non routine analytic tasks and non routine interactive tasks which are associated with higher skill levels the most notable difference between the genders is however the pronounced relative decline in routine task inputs among women with little change for men these relative task changes explain a substantial fraction of the closing of the gender wage gap our evidence suggests that these task changes are driven at least in part by technological change we also show that these task changes are related to the recent polarization of employment between low and high skilled occupations that we observed in the 1990s

the growing importance of social skills in the labor market the labor market increasingly rewards social skills between 1980 and 2012 jobs requiring high levels of social interaction grew by nearly 12 percentage points as a share of the u s labor force math intensive but less social jobs including many stem occupations shrank by 3 3 percentage points over the same period employment and wage growth were particularly strong for jobs requiring high levels of both math skill and social skills to understand these patterns i develop a model of team production where workers trade tasks to exploit their comparative advantage in the model social skills reduce coordination costs allowing workers to specialize and work together more efficiently the model generates predictions about sorting and the relative returns to skill across occupations which i investigate using data from the nlsy79 and the nlsy97 using a comparable set of skill measures and covariates across survey waves i find that the labor market return to social skills was much greater in the 2000s than in the mid 1980s and 1990s

globalization and gender wage inequality in china summary this paper uses an enterprise population level dataset to investigate the link between globalization and gender inequality in the chinese labor market we find that foreign and exporting firms employ more female workers than domestic nonexporters foreign participation and export orientation within the same region and industry significantly encourage female employment and reduce the gender wage gap furthermore we show that while a large gender wage gap exists for foreign and exporting firms it mainly reflects the difference in gender productivity gender wage discrimination is observed only among private nonexporting firms overall our results highlight the importance of globalization in encouraging female employment and reducing gender discrimination

price controls and rent seeking behavior in developing countries abstract when the price of a good is controlled a nonprice allocation rule must necessarily be substituted for allocation by price examples are first come first served allocation which gives rise to rationing by waiting and allocation by an explicit system of ration coupons with rationing by waiting consumers are induced to pursue activities that economize on waiting costs such as buying a larger quantity per purchase although such responses are individually rational they are socially self defeating in the sense that they lower equilibrium consumer welfare rationing by coupons can avoid some but typically not all of these losses these ideas are developed with examples of model economies and their practical relevance is illustrated with evidence from developing countries

transportation fuels policy since the opec embargo paved with good intentions a long line of research investigates whether the retail prices of electricity and natural gas send proper signals about scarcity in order to induce efficient consumption historically regulated utilities have not designed tariffs that set marginal prices equal to marginal costs currently some jurisdictions are opening the retail sectors to competition via retail choice these new regimes replace imperfect regulation with imperfect competition as the process by which retail tariffs are formed we discuss the challenges in evaluating the efficiency of tariffs and present evidence of how pricing has changed in markets with retail choice

the welfare costs of rationing by waiting with price controls and rationing by waiting rational consumers increase the quantity boughtperpurchase this individually rational response is socially wasteful and the cost of making it is a deadweight loss this cost plus the value of time spent in queues may exceed the total rent transferred from suppliers to consumers by price controls i e the value of resources spent competing for the rent may exceed the rent itself this point is illustrated by an empirical application to gasoline price controls rent seeking exhausts an estimated 116 percent of the rent trangerred the efficiency of the price system is often illustrated lby pointing to the obvious wastes associated with alternative allocation mechanisms for example the queues that accompany price controls and first come first served allocations although rationing by waiting wastes resources in a dramatically visible fashion the magnitude of the waste and the factors that determine it seldom have been examined empirically moreover existing theory on the subject is incomplete unless the first come first served rule is precisely specified consumers will compete for available supplies in ways other than waiting in the model developed below queues cause consumers to compete by increasing amounts bought per trip to the market the analysis demonstrates that such individually rational adjustments only increase the welfare cost of rationing by waiting and thus are socially self defeating the theoretical model is illustrated empirically by estimating the welfare costs of a market wide ceiling on gasoline prices this application was motivated by the availability of two key pieces of information the value of time spent in gasoline queues and the effect of waiting lines on amounts bought per purchase this information was obtained from a survey of motorists conducted during the era of federal gasoline price regulations to focus on competition among consumers one of the inefficiencies that results from price controls is ignored the supply reduction leading to the