what drives the cross country growth and inequality correlation we present a neo classical model that explores the determinants of growth inequality correlation and attempts to reconcile the seemingly conflicting evidence on the nature of the growth inequality relationship the initial distribution of human capital determines the long run income distribution and the growth rate by influencing the occupational choice of the agents the steady state proportion of adults that innovates and updates human capital is path dependent the output elasticity of skilled labour barriers to knowledge spillovers and the degree of redistribution determine the range of steady state equilibria from a calibration experiment we report that a skill intensive technology low barriers to knowledge spillovers and high degrees of redistribution characterize the industrial countries with a positive growth inequality correlation a negative correlation between growth and inequality arises for the group of non industrial countries with the opposite characteristics jel classification e1 o4 qu est ce qui sous tend la correlation transversale entre la croissance des pays et son niveau d inegalite on presente un modele neo classique qui explore les determinants de la correlation croissance inegaliteet on tente de reconcilier les resultats qui semblent contra dictoires ace propos la distribution initiale de capital humain determine la distribution des revenus along terme et le taux de croissance en influant sur le choix occupationnel des agents

income inequality and growth does the relationship vary with the income level abstract for three different specifications of a cross country growth model the coefficient of initial income inequality is remarkably similar for high and low income countries contrary to some recent suggestions in the literature but varies markedly across models

human capital inequality life expectancy and economic growth this article presents a model in which inequality affects per capita income when individuals decide to invest in education taking into account their life expectancy which depends to a large extent on the human capital of their parents our results show the existence of multiple steady states depending on the initial distribution of education the low steady state is a poverty trap in which children raised in poor families have low life expectancy and work as non educated workers the empirical evidence suggests that the life expectancy mechanism explains a major part of the relationship between inequality and human capital accumulation increases in life expectancy and human capital accumulation have accelerated since the post world war ii period in most parts of the world however in spite of the convergence in life expectancy across countries during this period see for example becker et al 2005 in 2000 there was still an immense gap between the rich and the poor world life expectancy was 78 years in oecd countries but only 47 years in sub saharan africa where the gap with rich countries is increasing nowadays due to aids being widespread likewise the striking disparities in human capital are also evident whereas the secondary school enrolment rate was almost 100 in rich countries more than 70 of children in sub saharan africa were not enrolled in secondary schooling and therefore entered the labour market as unskilled workers from childhood these disparities in schooling are also accompanied by huge differences in the distribution of education thus the human capital gini coefficient in sub saharan africa 0 56 is twice as high as that of oecd countries 0 21 in this article we argue that high human capital inequality low life expectancy and low human capital accumulation rates reinforce each other and may explain the persistence of poverty in a great part of the world

asset inequality matters an assessment of the world bank s approach to poverty reduction the fight against poverty has been adopted by the multilateral development banks as their principal objective almost three decades after robert mcnamara announced that the world bank s fundamental work was to improve the lives of the poor its new president james wolfensohn has reiterated that poverty reduction is the world bank s principal purpose similarly in 1994 the inter american development bank set social progress and social equity as its central objective the emphasis in the international institutions contrasts with disappointing results in the real world although life expectancy school enrollmuent and other indicators of social wellbeing have improved dramatically across the developing world and although the proportion of the poor has declined in the last few decades the absolute number of poor people in the world has actually increased today about 1 3 billion people in less developed countries still subsist on less than 1 per day world bank 1980 1990 1996 the case of latin america is dramatic while in the 1970 s the number of poor fell it nearly doubled in the 1980 s increasing from about 80 to almost 150 million and in the last few years the number of poor now 33 percent of the total population has failed to fall despite economic recovery birdsall and londofio 1997 the contrast between the multilateral banks goals and these disappointing results suggests the need for a critical reassessment of their approach to poverty reduction in this paper we describe the approach reflected in the work of world bank economists and based on new empirical work assess its relevance for latin america

human capital inequality and economic growth some new evidence this paper provides new measures of human capital inequality for a broad panel of countries taking attainment levels from barro and lee 2001 we compute gini coefficients and the distribution of education by quintiles for 108 countries over five year intervals from 1960 to 2000 using this new cross country data on human capital inequality two main conclusions are obtained first most countries in the world have tended to reduce the inequality in human capital distribution second human capital inequality measures provide more robust results than income inequality measures in the estimation of standard growth and investment equations

mass education or a minority well educated elite in the process of growth the case of india abstract this paper analyzes whether mass education is more growth enhancing in developing countries than having a minority well educated elite using indian census data as a benchmark and enrollment rates at different levels of education we compute annual attainment levels for a panel of 16 indian states from 1961 to 2001 results indicate that if the reduction in illiteracy stops at the primary level of education it is not worthwhile for growth instead the findings reveal a strong and significant effect on growth of a greater share of population completing tertiary education the economic impact is also found to be large a one percent change in tertiary education has the same effect on growth as a 13 decrease in illiteracy rates a sensitivity analysis shows the results are unlikely to be driven by omitted variables structural breaks reverse causation or atypical observations

the proper scope of government theory and an application to prisons when should a government provide a service in house and when should it contract out provision we develop a model in which the provider can invest in improving the quality of service or reducing cost if contracts are incomplete the private provider has a stronger incentive to engage in both quality improvement and cost reduction than a government employee has however the private contractor s incentive to engage in cost reduction is typically too strong because he ignores the adverse effect on noncontractible quality the model is applied to understanding the costs and benefits of prison privatization

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

a meta analytic reassessment of the effects of inequality on growth this paper develops a meta analysis of the empirical literature that estimates the effect of inequality on growth it covers studies published in scientific journals during 1994 2014 that examine the impact on growth of inequality in income land and human capital distribution we find traces of publication bias in this literature as authors and journals are more willing to report and publish statistically significant findings and the results tend to follow a predictable time pattern over time according to which negative and positive effects are cyclically reported after correcting for these two forms of publication bias we conclude that the high degree of heterogeneity of the reported effect sizes is explained by study conditions namely the structure of the data the type of countries included in the sample the inclusion of regional dummies the concept of inequality and the definition of income in particular our meta regression analysis suggests that cross section studies systematically report a stronger negative impact than panel data studies the effect of inequality on growth is negative and more pronounced in less developed countries than in rich countries the inclusion of regional dummies in the growth regression of the primary studies considerably weakens such effect expenditure and gross income inequality tend to lead to different estimates of the effect size land and human inequality are more pernicious to subsequent growth than income inequality is we also find that the estimation technique the quality of data on income distribution and the specification of the growth regression do not significantly influence the estimation of the effect sizes these results provide new insights into the nature of the inequality growth relationship and offer important guidelines for policy makers

inequality and the instability of polity and policy we create alternative measures of political instability which capture only movements from dictatorship to democracy and vice versa and unlike older well known measures does not capture government changes that preserve the democratic or dictatorial structure of the country we show that inequality is positively correlated with our measures of political instability as well as with a well known measure used by alesina and perotti but the impact of inequality on the latter is only through components of political instability captured by our measures we show that our measures have significant policy implications political instability increases both fiscal and trade polity volatility

everyone s a winner the market impact of technologically advantaged agents using betting data we show that a market with agents having heterogeneous utility can include a net transfer of wealth to technologically advantaged agents taas from non taas with the transaction proving beneficial to both in terms of their realized utility

income distribution political instability and investment abstract this paper successfully tests on a sample of 71 countries for the period 1960 85 the following hypotheses income inequality by fuelling social discontent increases sociopolitical instability the latter by creating uncertainty in the politico economic environment reduces investment as a consequence income inequality and investment are inversely related since investment is a primary engine of growth this paper identifies a channel for an inverse relationship between income inequality and growth we measure socio political instability with indices which capture the occurrence of more or less violent phenomena of political unrest and we test our hypotheses by estimating a two equation model in which the endogenous variables are investment and an index of socio political instability our results are robust to sensitivity analysis on the specification of the model and the measure of political instability and are unchanged when the model is estimated using robust regression techniques

human capital kuznets curve with subsistence consumption level abstract we examine the human capital kuznets curve in a simple model that does not assume increasing returns to scale in human capital formation with a utility function that specifies a subsistence consumption level consumption is a necessary good and education is a luxury good as the children of poor households receive a low level of education the gap in human capital endowments expands between poor and rich households eventually economic development increases income and expenditure for education and income inequality declines

the economics of moonlighting a double self selection model the model proposed here for obtaining the labor supply functions of moonlighters uses a double self selection system to explore the husband s decision to moonlight together with his wife s decision to work subsequently the labor functions are classified under two regimes depending on whether the wife works the model is estimated based on a cross section of 4 448 married couples from the survey of income and program participation wave 2 i find that the household production time of husbands and wives are substitutes and that specific human capital deters moonlighting copyright 1990 by mit press

how do prior gains and losses affect subsequent risk taking new evidence from individual level horse race bets many empirical studies focusing on how prior outcomes affect subsequent risk taking report conclusions that appear mutually contradictory while some studies document increased risk taking after gains and risk aversion after losses others report the opposite this paper contributes to this literature by investigating horse race bettors sequential risky decisions using individual level data a horse race betting market is a laboratory like environment and can be used to analyze behavioral patterns associated with decision making under risk we find evidence for i the house money effect as bettors take riskier wagers after gains and mostly spend the money they have won ii risk aversion after prior losses which we label a playing safe effect and iii a preference for breakeven contrary to the widely held conception in the empirical literature our findings suggest that the break even effect does not necessarily imply an increased preference for riskier bets because bettors may seek to break

the public sector and convergence with spatial interdependence empirical evidence from spain abstractwe propose a framework to analyse convergence between regions incorporating the public sector and technological knowledge spillovers in the context of a neoclassical growth model second we apply novel estimation methods pertaining to the spatial econometrics literature introducing a spatial durbin panel data model based on instrumental variables and maximum likelihood estimation our model makes it possible to analyse in terms of convergence the results obtained in spanish regions with the policies implemented during the period 1980 2011 the results support the idea that education and fiscal policies have a positive effect on regional development and cohesion therefore we can conclude that it is possible to obtain better results for regional convergence with higher rates of public investment in education and tax revenues we also obtain interesting results that confirm the existence of spillover effects in economic growth and public policies identifying their magnitude and significance

income distribution and macroeconomics this paper analyzes the role of wealth distribution in macroeconomics through investment in human capital it is shown that in the presence of credit markets imperfections and indivisibilities in investment in human capital the initial distribution of wealth affects aggregate output and investment both in the short and in the long run as there are multiple steady states this paper therefore provides an additional explanation for the persistent differences in per capita output across countries furthermore the paper shows that cross country differences in macroeconomic adjustment to aggregate shocks can be attributed among other factors to differences in wealth and income distribution across countries

new ways of looking at old issues inequality and growth abstract the paper uses new cross country data on income and asset land distribution to show that i there is a strong negative relationship between initial inequality in the asset distribution and long term growth ii inequality reduces income growth for the poor but not for the rich and iii available longitudinal data provide little support for the kuznets hypothesis policies that increase aggregate investment and facilitate acquisition of assets by the poor might thus be doubly beneficial for growth and poverty reduction

the wage local unemployment relationship in a highly regulated labour market greece livanos i the wage local unemployment relationship in a highly regulated labour market greece regional studies using data obtained from 80 000 employees this paper examines the relationship between individual wages and regional unemployment in greece the findings highlight the dynamics of the local labour markets in a case such as greece where the organisation for economic co operation and development oecd claims that wage flexibility is limited this study does not find evidence that wages in greece are rigid but finds a wage curve elasticity of close to 0 1 which corresponds to evidence from many counties interestingly graduates are found to be the most responsive group of workers to the behaviour of local labour markets livanos i le rapport salaire chomage local dans un marche du travail extremement reglemente la grece regional studies a partir des donnees provenant de 80 000 salaries cet article cherche a examiner le rapport entre les salaires des individus et le chomage regional

the ordinal efficiency of betting markets an exploded logit approach this article offers a new perspective on efficiency in betting markets by examining the degree to which finishing order in horse races corresponds to probabilities inherent in odds across different categories of horse race the application of an exploded logit procedure reveals a significantly greater degree of ordinal efficiency in higher relative to lower class races explanations for the phenomenon include differences in prize related incentives cross market distinctions in information markets and differential opportunity incentive for market manipulation

distributional effects of growth and public expenditures in africa estimates for tanzania and rwanda summary in this paper we explore the effects of fiscal policies and growth on measures of household welfare across the distribution of expenditures for two african countries rwanda and tanzania we explore the effect of government expenditures on expenditure growth in each quintile of the expenditure distribution and the effect of growth for each group we find that the benefits of growth are concentrated among the better off sectors of the population in these two countries perhaps to the detriment of the poorer sectors by looking at the effects within a country and across different groups of households and administrative entities we exploit variation in expenditures and growth across and within regions of each country to estimate the elasticities of expenditure with respect to fiscal expenditure and mean expenditure growth at different points of the expenditure distribution using household survey data and government expenditure data at the district level we find that overall mean expenditure growth benefits the top expenditure groups the welfare spillovers are mostly present for top 20 of the expenditure distribution with the middle of the distribution in tanzania responding slightly to these spillovers public social expenditures do not appear to affect inequality considerably but do tend to work toward decreasing inequality however mean expenditure growth is related to increases in inequality in the sense that the richest sectors of the population benefit the most from growth we find that the growth elasticity of expenditure is only above one for the top quintile in both countries in tanzania a 1 increase in average household expenditure is related to a 1 96 expenditure growth in the top quintile and 0 43 in the third quintile in rwanda a 1 increase in average household expenditure is related to a 1 93 increase in household expenditure in the top 20 of the distribution

on the distribution of education and democracy this paper empirically analyzes the influence of education on democracy by controlling for unobservable heterogeneity and by taking into account the persistency of some of the variables the most novel finding is that an increase in the education attained by the majority of the population is what matters for the implementation and sustainability of democracy rather than the average years of schooling we show this result is robust to issues pertaining omitted variables outliers sample selection or a narrow definition of the variables used to measure democracy

sequential parimutuel games abstract in a parimutuel betting system a successful player s return depends on the number of other players who choose the same action this paper examines a general solution for two action sequential parimutuel games and shows how the unique equilibrium of such games leads to a simple pattern of behavior in particular we show that there is an advantage to being an early mover that early players might choose actions with an ex ante low probability of success and that player action choices can flip with small changes in the parameters of the game

education economic growth and measured income inequality in this paper education simultaneously affects growth and income inequality more education does not necessarily decrease inequality when the latter is assessed by the lorenz dominance criterion increases in education first increase and then decrease growth as well as income inequality when measured by the gini coefficient there is no clear functional relationship between growth and measured income inequality the model identifies regimes of this relationship which depend crucially on the production and schooling technology conventional growth regressions with human capital and inequality as regressors may miss the richness of the underlying nonlinearities but viewed as approximations may still provide important information on the nonlinear relationship between growth and education

schooling data technological diffusion and the neoclassical model this research was supported by the spanish ministry of science and technology through cicyt grants sec99 1189 and sec99 0820 and by the spanish ministry of finance and fundacion caixa galicia

nordic exceptionalism social democratic egalitarianism in world historic perspective abstract in what respect if any are the nordic economies exceptionally egalitarian when viewed from a world historical perspective our answer is based on archaeological historical and ethnographic as well as contemporary evidence over the past three thousand years the countries exemplifying the nordic model are not exceptionally equal in the ownership of material wealth moreover the advent of social democracy in the nordic nations did not result in a more equal distribution of years of schooling but intergenerational economic and social mobility appears to be exceptional in the nordic nations and by most measures inequalities in living standards in the nordic economies are less than in other advanced economies the closest nordic analogy in our data set is to the egalitarian distribution of well being and limited intergenerational transmission of wealth found in some horticultural and especially forager economies

testing for convergence across the greek regions siriopoulos c and asteriou d 1998 testing for convergence across the greek regions reg studies 32 537 546 during the last five years few issues have proved more controversial in empirical economics than the so called convergence hypothesis this paper examines the issue of convergence across greek regions following the theoretical basis of the neoclassical model of economic growth our empirical results support the popular view prevailing in greece about the existence of dualism across the southern and northern regions of greece a possible explanation for this may be the lack of experience that poor countries like greece have in comparison with the rich ones rich countries have the combined ability to educate themselves as they grow rich and the endogenous ability to accumulate the knowledge upon which these efforts are made the same argument can be also used as an explanation for regional differences the fact that poor regions do not have previous experience and knowledge for efficient i

betting bias in exotic bets abstract the evidence from racetrack betting is that the subjective probabilities to win expressed through the public s bets are good approximations to the objective probabilities on the whole but that a betting bias exists in that favorites are underbet and long shots overbet we examine these questions for exactas and trifectas which the aid of a new database the approximation of subjective to objective probabilities is good for exactas and no betting bias is evident for trifectas the findings are more ambiguous and suggest that a taste for long shots or a misperception of true probabilities may play a role

a new data set measuring income inequality this article presents a new data set on inequality in the distribution of income the authors explain the criteria they applied in selecting data on gini coefficients and on individual quintile groups income shares comparison of the new data set with existing compilations reveals that the data assembled here represent an improvement in quality and a significant expansion in coverage although differences in the definition of the underlying data might still affect inter temporal and international comparability based on this new data set the authors do not find a systematic link between growth and changes in aggregate inequality they do find a strong positive relationship between growth and reduction of poverty

education democracy and growth abstract this note presents a model of endogenous growth where redistribution determined by a political equilibrium is in the form of public education it is shown that there need not be a negative relationship between growth and redistribution as public education increases the level of human capital in the conomy and at the same time tends to produce a more even income distribution

multiple job holding among male workers in greece livanos i and zangelidis a multiple job holding among male workers in greece regional studies this paper studies the incidence of multiple job holding in greece and contributes to the literature by examining its determinants its variance across different regions and the effect of the business cycle on its occurrence the empirical analysis highlights the importance of both pecuniary and non pecuniary motives behind multiple job holding and reveals significant variations in its incidence across regions with areas that have a large primary sector having higher multiple job holding rates finally multiple job holding is found to be pro cyclical with the probability of holding a second job estimated to increase during economic expansion livanos i et zangelidis a les emplois multiples masculins en grece regional studies l article cherche a etudier la frequence des emplois multiples en grece et contribue a la documentation en examinant ses determinants sa variance a travers les diverses regions

searching for positive returns at the track a multinomial logic model for handicapping horse races this paper investigates fundamental investment strategies to detect and exploit the public s systematic errors in horse race wager markets a handicapping model is developed and applied to win betting in the pari mutuel system a multinomial logit model of the horse racing process is posited and estimated on a data base of 200 races a recently developed procedure for exploiting the information content of rank ordered choice sets is employed to obtain more efficient parameter estimates the variables in this discrete choice probability model include horse and jockey characteristics plus several race specific features hold out sampling procedures are employed to evaluate wagering strategies a wagering strategy that involves unobtrusive bets with a side constraint eliminating long shot betting appears to offer the promise of positive expected returns even in the presence of the typically large track take encountered at thoroughbred racing events

efficiency of the market for racetrack betting many racetrack bettors have systems since the track is a market similar in many ways to the stock market one would expect that the basic strategies would be either fundamental or technical in nature fundamental strategies utilize past data available from racing forms special sources etc to handicap races the investor then wagers on one or more horses whose probability of winning exceeds that determined by the odds by an amount sufficient to overcome the track take technical systems require less information and only utilize current betting data they attempt to find inefficiencies in the market and bet on such overlays when they have positive expected value previous studies and our data confirm that for win bets these inefficiencies which exist for underbet favorites and overbet longshots are not sufficiently great to result in positive profits this paper describes a technical system for place and show betting for which it appears to be possible to make substantial positive profits and thus to demonstrate market inefficiency in a weak form sense estimated theoretical probabilities of all possible finishes are compared with the actual amounts bet to determine profitable betting situations since the amount bet influences the odds and theory suggests that to maximize long run growth a logarithmic utility function is appropriate the resulting model is a nonlinear program side calculations generally reduce the number of possible bets in any one race to three or less hence the actual optimization is quite simple the system was tested on data from santa anita and exhibition park using exact and approximate solutions that make the system operational at the track given the limited time available for placing bets and found to produce substantial positive profits a model is developed to demonstrate that the profits are not due to chance but rather to proper identification of market inefficiencies

growth empirics a panel data approach a comment this paper comments on recent developments in the literature on the econometric analysis of international growth and convergence it notes that panel estimates of the neoclassical model accommodating level effects for individual countries through heterogeneous intercepts deal with some of the econometric difficulties arising in some of the earlier cross sectional studies but it notes that in dynamic panels heterogeneity in growth effects and in speeds of convergence renders this estimator inconsistent also the pervasiveness of such heterogeneity is demonstrated in three samples of countries and the effects of incorrectly imposing homogeneity on estimated parameters are illustrated and discussed

exclusion unemployment and non employment green a e 1997 exclusion unemployment and non employment reg studies 31 505 520 this paper provides an overview of selected issues pertinent to an examination of comparative experiences of exclusion with foremost emphasis on the labour market dimension of exclusion notably unemployment and non employment the way in which losers and winners emerge as a result of changes in the socio economic environment is outlined with particular attention paid to identification of who the losers are and where they are located specific remarks and empirical details of the uk experience are used for illustrative purposes but much of the discussion relates to the situation in european union countries more generally drawing on this review some of the issues surrounding the identification and measurement of the unemployed and non employed are explored and the need for a range of alternative indicators and methodological perspectives on labour market exclusion is discussed finally some of the issues r

the dynamics of dual job holding and job mobility this article concerns dual job holding and its link to job mobility we present evidence from u s data on patterns of dual job holding hours changes and job mobility we find that workers move into and out of second jobs frequently that these movements are associated with large changes in work hours and that hours constraints may prompt workers to take second jobs second we review theories of dual job holding and present a stochastic dynamic model of dual job holding and job mobility in which decisions to take second jobs and or change main jobs are made simultaneously

inequality and growth uncovering the main conclusions from the empirics abstractthis paper is a critical survey of the empirical literature on the effects of inequality on economic growth we conclude that it is most likely that the disparities found in the results are due to differences in the type of countries and time periods included in the samples the variable used to measure inequality the structure of the data and the estimation techniques these findings suggest that the mechanisms that link inequality to growth are likely to operate differently in different circumstances an element that may offer important guidelines for both policy makers and researchers

do horses like vodka and sponging on market manipulation and the favourite longshot bias one of the most striking empirical patterns of horse race betting markets is the favourite longshot bias bets on favourites have dramatically higher expected returns than bets on longshots the literature offers a couple of different though not mutually exclusive explanations based on risk preferences and probability perceptions this article adds a new possible explanation the favourite longshot bias may be the rational answer of an honest audience to a simple but highly lucrative cheating opportunity of insiders we provide anecdotal evidence that the type of cheating we model here really takes place what is more by employing a large scale german data set we are able to demonstrate that the pattern of the favourite longshot bias changes as the opportunity of cheating vanishes the changes we observe are in accord with the cheating model we suggest

value diversity and regional economic development we investigate the link between culture and regional economic development within european countries considering a variety of cultural values we provide evidence that it is the degree of diversity in these values at the regional level that strongly correlates with economic performance rather than the prevalence of specific values in particular we show that greater value diversity is negatively associated with regional economic performance within countries which also relates to lower institutional quality and poorer public goods provision these patterns are robust even when diversity is measured based on values expressed by emigrants residing outside of their region of origin this article is protected by copyright all rights reserved

yes one day international cricket in play trading strategies can be profitable abstract in this study we employ a monte carlo simulation technique for estimating the conditional probability of victory at any stage in the first or second innings of a one day international odi cricket match this model is then used to test market efficiency in the betfair in play market for large sample of odi matches we find strong evidence of overreaction in the first innings a trading strategy of betting on the batting team after the fall of a wicket produces a significant profit of 20 we also find some evidence of underreaction in the second innings although it is less economically and statistically significant than the first innings overreaction we also implement trades when the discrepancy between the probability of victory implied by current market odds differs substantially from the odds estimated by our monte carlo simulation model we document a number of trading strategies that yield large statistically significant positive returns in both the first and second innings

the puzzling pattern of multiple job holding across u s labor markets multiple job holding mjh rates differ substantially across u s regions states and metropolitan areas rates decrease markedly with respect to labor market size these patterns have been largely overlooked despite being relatively fixed over at least the past 20 years this article explores explanations for these persistent differences we account for roughly two thirds of the mean absolute deviation in mjh across local labor markets msas the results suggest that variation in mjh across labor markets is driven by labor market differences in job opportunities and worker preferences most important in explaining variation in mjh are msa industry and occupation structure ancestry shares commute times and to a lesser extent labor market churn

revealing weak form inefficiency in a market for state contingent claims the importance of market ecology modelling procedures and investment strategies this paper examines the degree to which current prices discount historical prices in a market for state contingent claims conditional logit analysis is employed to predict winning probabilities based on market prices in a betting market these are used together with various wagering strategies to yield substantial abnormal returns consequently in contrast to the existing literature the results suggest that the market is not weak form efficient the disparity with previous efficiency studies highlights the importance of considering market ecology and of adopting an appropriate modelling procedure and investment strategy to fully exploit information contained in market prices

moonlighting multiple motives and gender differences this paper examines the incidence and reasons for moonlighting with a focus on gender differences the study specifies and estimates a bivariate probit model of labour supply and the decision to hold more than one job it is found that the factors leading men and women to moonlight are similar a wage decomposition analysis reveals that 93 percent of the differential between male and female moonlighters wages is not explained by differences in characteristics and little connection is found between an individual s human capital and their moonlighting wage finally it is found that moonlighters are less likely to report their income

inequality and economic growth the empirical relationship reconsidered in the light of comparable data all of the recent empirical work on the relationship between income inequality and economic growth has used inequality data that are not consistently measured this paper argues that this is inappropriate and shows that the significant negative correlation often found between income inequality and growth across countries is not robust when income inequality is measured in a consistent manner using data from the world income inequality database however evidence is found of a significant negative correlation between consistently measured inequality of expenditure data and economic growth for a sample of developing countries

socially gainful gender quotas abstract we study the impact of gender quotas on the acquisition of human capital we assume that individuals formation of human capital is influenced by the prospect of landing high pay top positions and that these positions are regulated by gender specific quotas in the absence of quotas women consider their chances of getting top positions to be lower than men s the lure of top positions induces even men of relatively low ability to engage in human capital formation whereas women of relatively high ability do not expect to get top positions and do not therefore engage in human capital formation gender quotas discourage men who are less efficient in forming human capital and encourage women who are more efficient in forming human capital we provide a condition under which the net result of the institution of gender quotas is an increase in human capital in the economy as a whole

betting on bitcoin does gambling volume on the blockchain explain bitcoin price changes abstract we measure lottery appetite using historical gaming transaction data of bitcoin holders changes in the volume spent on the most lottery like gambling wallet explain 32 of variation in the returns to the btc price pre 2016 but this effect disappears post 2016

racetrack betting and informed behavior abstract horse racing data permit interesting tests of attitudes toward risk the present paper studies a new sample of racetrack results from atlantic city new jersey the questions examined are 1 are the market odds the best data for predicting the order of finish 2 do horses go off at odds that reflect their true probability of winning 3 is there any evidence that late bettors have better information than early bettors it is found that market odds predict the order of finish well but that favorites are good bets and long shots are poor ones the data suggest that there does exist an informed class of bettors and that bettors are on the whole neither risk neutral nor risk averse

risk and the distribution of human capital abstract we developed a model in which aggregate production risk determines the average level of education and its distribution greater risk is associated with greater educational inequality and a lower average attainment an empirical test using panel data supports this conclusion

quality of higher education and the labor market in developing countries evidence from an education reform in senegal summary while many studies examine the effect of primary education quality on labor market outcomes in developing countries little is known about the effects at higher levels we exploit the quasi experiment provided by a large scale education reform launched in senegal in 2000 to investigate how quality improvements at the university level affect employment our difference in difference estimates suggest that young high skilled workers experienced a nine percentage point employment gain relative to older workers they are also more likely to have better jobs in the service industry or government suggesting a reduction in the mismatch between the quality of high skilled labor demanded and supplied

distributive politics and economic growth a crude distinction between economics and politics would be that economics is concerned with expanding the pie while politics is about distributing it in this paper we analyze the relationship between the two we focus on how an economy s initial configuration of resources shapes the political struggle for income and wealth distribution and how that in turn affects long run growth our main conclusion is that inequality is conducive to the adoption of growth retarding policies we derive this result from a simple political economy model of growth and present cross country evidence consistent with it the key feature of our model is that individuals differ in their relative factor endowments we distinguish between two types of factors an accumulated factor called capital and a nonaccumulated factor called labor growth is driven by the expansion of the capital stock which is in turn determined by individual saving decisions long run growth is endogenous as the aggregate production function is taken to be linearly homogeneous in capital and productive government services taken together the provision of government services is financed by a tax on capital because government services are productive a small tax on

testing risklove in an experimental racetrack abstract this paper tests the asch quandt betting hypothesis which accounts for the ubiquitous underbetting overbetting favourite longshot phenomenon found at most racetracks by postulating that horserace wagering is a consumption activity an experimental racetrack was designed with only off track betting permissible thereby eliminating much or all of the consumption involved but the basic anomaly remained and in a somewhat stronger form it is hypothesized that the observed betting behaviour of our subjects is consistent with prospect theory and its two outcome equivalent rank dependent expected utility theory

labor supply of new york city cabdrivers one day at a time life cycle models of labor supply predict a positive relationship between hours supplied and transitory changes in wages because such changes have virtually no effect on life cycle wealth previous attempts to test this hypothesis empirically with time series data have not been supportive estimated elasticities are typically negative or nonsignificant such analyses however are vulnerable to measurement error and other estimation problems we use data on daily observations of wages and hours for new york city cab drivers to estimate the supply response to transitory fluctuations in wages cab drivers decide daily how many hours to supply and face wages that are positively correlated within days but largely uncorrelated between days using these data our central finding is that wage elasticities are persistently negative from 5 to 1 in three different samples even after correcting for measurement error using instrumental variables these negative wage elasticities challenge the notion that cab drivers trade off labor and leisure at different points in time and question the empirical adequacy of life cycle formulations of labor supply

the human capital and economic growth nexus in east and south asia abstractthis study adopts a disaggregated regional focus to test for the human capital hc growth nexus in selected nine asian countries it utilizes the empirical bayesian methodology which addresses not only the heterogeneity issue but it also utilizes the common structural priors of regional countries to yield informationally efficient estimates of the impact of hc on the stock and levels of gdp various measures of hc are utilized to determine which of these produces a better explanation of economic growth in the two asian regions the study finds that primary and secondary education was more prominent in explaining the fluctuations of economic growth in east asia whereas tertiary and vocational education showed positive effects on economic growth in south asia government expenditures on education were also found to positively affect economic growth in both regions the results shed new evidence to establish that the differences in growth rates within east and south asia are associated with diffe

explaining international and intertemporal variations in income inequality this paper explores the propositions that income inequality is relatively stable within countries and that it varies significantly among countries a new and expanded data set provides broad support for both propositions drawing on a political economy and capital market imperfection arguments to explain the intertemporal and international variation in inequality the empirical analysis shows that the predicted variables associated with the first argument a measure of civil liberties and the initial level of secondary schooling and the second argument a measure of financial depth and the initial distribution of land are indeed important determinants of inequality this paper explores two propositions regarding income inequality they are first income inequality is relatively stable within countries and second it varies significantly across countries to illustrate note that the gini coefficient in india remained almost constant for forty years 1951 92 with mean 32 6 and standard deviation 2 0 2 in contrast the variation in gini coefficients across countries is large 61 9 in honduras in 1968 compared with 17 8 in bulgaria in 1976 if substantiated these propositions have potentially significant implications for poverty the significance of the first is obvious barring any fundamental socio political change poverty reduction will depend crucially on the rate of economic growth given this the significance of the second is that in inegalitarian economies the poor will enjoy a smaller share of any national increment in income than in more egalitarian ones drawing on a new and expanded data set on inequality deininger and squire 1996a the first of the paper s three sections conducts standard statistical tests of the two propositions the sample comprises 573 observations on the most common measure of inequality the gini coefficient for 49 developed and developing countries covering the period 1947 94 the results broadly confirm our two propositions specifically analysis of variance anova shows that about 90 of the total variance in the gini coefficients

economic growth and the quantity and distribution of education a survey the focus of this survey is to discuss different attempts at incorporating the distributional dimension of human capital into the theoretical and empirical growth framework we present a series of models which deviate from the direct link between the aggregate or average level of human capital and economic growth in that they introduce the distribution of education as a new element in explaining the relationship under investigation after surveying the theoretical literature we present recent empirical work on the relation between economic performance and the average level as well as the distribution of education respectively

the favourite longshot bias in parimutuel betting a clarification of the explanation that bettors like to bet longshots abstract one explanation of the favourite longshot bias in parimutuel betting is that bettors derive utility from betting longshots the purpose of this paper is to explore the conditions where such an explanation makes sense we posit a simple two horse race where there are two groups of bettors one group always bets the longshot the other bets on the basis of expected value the model yields two results in the absence of transactions costs track take there is no favourite longshot bias however if the track take is positive we would expect to observe the bias the primary reason is that there is no short selling mechanism in parimutuel betting markets hence the explanation that bettors like to bet longshots also requires transactions costs and no short selling

searching for the favourite longshot bias down under an examination of the new zealand pari mutuel betting market this paper tests for the presence of the favourite longshot bias in a new setting this bias 150 the tendency for bettors to underbet favourites and overbet longshots 150 has been found in most studies of pari mutuel and bookmaking betting markets in the usa the uk and australia however there is growing evidence that in at least some pari mutuel betting markets there is no favourite longshot bias this paper examines the previously unexplored new zealand pari mutuel betting market on horse races for evidence of this bias utilizing a large sample of recent new zealand thoroughbred horse races it is found that while early off track bettors price this bias into odds late on and off track bettors eliminate much of the bias by the close of betting that is the results reinforce the view that not all pari mutuel betting markets are characterized by a favourite longshot bias at the close of betting evidence is also found that late bettors in this market are smart bettors