oil price volatility and stock price fluctuations in an emerging market evidence from south korea abstract how important are oil price fluctuations and oil price volatility on equity market performance what are the policy implications if volatility turns out to be significant we assess this issue in an economics finance nexus for korea using a vec model including interest rates economic activity real stock returns real oil prices and oil price volatility our main aim is to capture the effects of crude oil prices on the korean economy thoroughly covering the period of the asian financial crisis of 1997 which heavily affected the country and the oil price hikes in the early 1990s after the gulf war south korea was the country most hit by the financial crisis together with indonesia and thailand results indicate the dominance of oil price volatility on real stock returns and emphasize how this has increased over time oil price volatility can have profound effect on the time horizon of investment and firms need adjust their risk management procedures accordingly this increase in dependency has been found in other net oil importing emerging equity markets we test the relationship between oil price movements and economic activity by using modern time series techniques in a cointegrating framework we expand the standard error correction model by examining the dynamics of out of sample causality through the generalized variance decomposition and impulse response function techniques the evidence from persistence profiles also gives important guidelines based on how fast the entire system adjusts back to equilibrium in addition we find the cointegrating relationship to be stable and find that the linear error correction model to be more favorable than an asymmetric 2 period markov switching model

on the dynamics of demand for leisure and the production of health our article develops and estimates a structural model of household health production that jointly determines the demand for leisure and the demand for consumption for elderly males we use a stochastic dynamic programming framework based on the assumption that an individual maximizes lifetime utility subject to budget and time constraints and a health production function by choosing hours of leisure and levels of consumption of health related and health neutral goods and services moreover we use a very comprehensive health index that combines four scales measuring a variety of dimensions in the quality of life the euler equations derived from our model are estimated using data from six biennial panels of the retirement history survey

assessing green energy economy stimulus packages evidence from the u s programs targeting renewable energy the paper provides a comprehensive empirical assessment of american stimulus policies aimed at renewable energy re technologies we use an indicator based methodology to assess progress with respect to energy environmental and socio economic issues resulting from re stimulus programs linked to the american recovery and reinvestment act and review and analyze the emerging but scattered literature overall our results indicate that stimulus programs have had a positive effect on the re sector this is despite the fact that they were originally planned to work in combination with a greenhouse gas cap and trade system which has not been implemented from the methodological perspective our approach is resource intensive and our analysis highlights numerous challenges notably related to causality and additionality despite these limitations this research improves our understanding of the broad effects and impacts of re stimulus programs

demand for home modifications a household production function approach coping with activity limitations that occur in old age is an important issue in the context of increasing life expectancy and the still inevitable onset of chronic conditions in old age elderly households can be viewed as coping with activity limitations by producing functionality with the use of direct inputs that include home modifications a model of the household production of functionality is developed within the general framework of household production function models of health hypotheses generated from this model are tested using a logit model for data from the survey of asset and health dynamics among the oldest old ahead the main findings of the empirical analysis are that the demand for home modifications is fairly income inelastic home modifications and personal care are substitutes to some degree the demand for home modifications increases with years of schooling and that particular health conditions and the use of other assistive devices are important determinants of the demand for

education and health in europe abstractthe productive and allocative theories predict that education has positive impact on health the more educated adopt healthier life styles and use more efficiently health inputs and this explains why they live longer we find partial support for these theories with an econometric analysis on a large sample of europeans aged above 50 documenting a significant and positive correlation among education years life styles health outputs and functionalities we however find confirmation for an anomaly already observed in the united states namely the more educated are more likely to contract cancer our results are robust when controlling for endogeneity and reverse causality in iv estimates with instrumental variables related to quarter of birth and neighbours cultural norms

identifying barriers in the diffusion of renewable energy sources abstract rapid diffusion of renewable energy sources res in the electricity power sector is crucial if the eu wants to fulfill its 2050 co2 reduction commitments for this reason identifying and alleviating all barriers that hinder the development of res is necessary to the successful deployment of these technologies this paper discusses the main barriers in the diffusion of wind and photovoltaic pv solar power in the greek electricity sector by drawing on the literature of technological innovation systems and system functions furthermore we provide an explanation of the different diffusion rates between the two technologies inadequate financial resources low grid capacity delays in the issuance of building permits opposition from local communities to the construction of wind farms and the lack of a stable institutional framework are among the most important barriers that inhibit the diffusion of the wind and pv solar power the nature of the barriers identified in this study calls for policy intervention

endowments at birth and parents investments in children do parents invest more in higher quality children or do they compensate for lower quality by giving more to children with lower endowments we answer this question in the context of a large scale iodine supplementation programme in tanzania we find that children with higher programme exposure were more likely to receive necessary vaccines and were breastfed for longer siblings of treated children were also more likely to be immunised fertility behavior and investments at the time of birth were unaffected

early maternal time investment and early child outcomes using large longitudinal survey data from the uk millennium cohort study this article estimates the relationship between maternal time inputs and early child development we find that maternal time is a quantitatively important determinant of skill formation and that its effect declines with child age there is evidence of long term effects of early maternal time inputs on later outcomes especially in the case of cognitive skill development in the case of non cognitive development the evidence of this long term impact disappears when we account for skill persistence

can personal gasoline permit trading be effective an investigation into permit demand this study proposes a personal gasoline permit trading scheme to limit the total gasoline consumption thus reducing its environmental impact we studied the effectiveness of this scheme by analyzing the permit demand of a gasoline driven vehicle in transportation sector a general utility optimization model is formulated and a cobb douglas utility function is further assumed to analyze the response of permit demand to its price changes with the slutsky decomposition of price effects the results when defined in economic terms indicate that the permit demand of consumers in higher income groups are negatively related to permit price permit demand are also negatively related to permit price for consumers in medium income groups but with positive income effect and the direct relationship between permit demand of lower income groups and the price is defined as a giffen good effect that is for those low income groups when the permit price rises their demand for permits would also increase then us and singapore household expenditure data are used to show comparable results of a pilot personal gasoline permit trading scheme further some regulations on critical parameters such as permit allocation and permit prices in the policy design are proposed to make the scheme feasible in different income groups based on these results implications limitation and suggestions for future study are discussed

patterns of acceptance and non acceptance within energy landscapes a case study on wind energy expansion in austria abstract wind energy is a key technology in the transition toward a low carbon society but acceptance is considered to be a constraining factor in achieving ambitious wind deployment targets based on an austrian case study this paper investigates eight decisive patterns of acceptance and non acceptance of wind energy we apply qualitative research methods such as interviews focus groups and worldcafe discussions with stakeholders on the national level and with citizens and local decision makers at potential wind power expansion sites the results show that local opposition to wind energy cannot be explained by single factors but is caused by a complex set of individual and collective preferences rooted in institutional and socio political arrangements the problem concerning these conflicting patterns is that they are trapped in often opposing or confronting policy core beliefs which are unlikely to change hence it is necessary to appeal to overarching targets like the claims of environmental justice to counterbalance the impacts of wind energy we conclude that there is a strong demand for fair decision making processes and an equal distribution of environmental and economic gains and losses this article is part of a virtual special issue entitled the collaborative making of energy landscapes

health economics and applications in developing countries the concept of health human capital guides the statistical study of 1 health production functions 2 derived demands for medical and behavioral health inputs and 3 determinants of health and productivity outcomes health inputs are generally endogenous to health outcomes and prices of health inputs are the most common instrumental variable for identifying estimates of the causal effects of health inputs but when health input prices are modified by individual regional migration the regional prices no longer satisfy the requirement of being independent of preferences and omitted variables then the difficulty of evaluating health program effects reinforces the need to design randomized regional treatments in order to be able to evaluate without bias the consequences of critical health interventions such as are needed today to deal with the hiv aids epidemic

wage and labor supply effects of illness in cote d ivoire and ghana instrumental variable estimates for days disabled abstract sickness should make individuals less productive but there are problems in measuring this effect first how is adult morbidity measured in a household survey second how is the impact or morbidity on productivity inferred if earning is partly used to improve health self reported functional activity limitation due to illness is considered an indicator of morbidity for wage earners and self employed people to deal with both the measurement and joint determination problems an instrumental variable estimation approach is used where local food prices and health services instrument for disability days that reduce wages by at least 10 and hours by 3 or more

strategic choices for renewable energy investment conceptual framework and opportunities for further research this paper introduces the special issue on strategic choices for renewable energy investment which is a collection of best papers presented at an international research conference held in st gallen switzerland in february 2010 substantial private investment is needed if public policy objectives to increase the share of renewable energy and prevent dangerous anthropogenic climate change are to be achieved the aim of this paper and the entire special issue is to draw scholarly attention to the processes underlying strategic choices for renewable energy investment and how they are influenced by energy policy we disentangle the role of risk return perceptions portfolio effects and path dependence in explaining energy investment decisions and suggest that the heterogeneous universe of investors requires a segmentation of policies the paper outlines some of the rich opportunities for further research in this emerging area

child care choices and children s cognitive achievement the case of single mothers we evaluate the effect of child care versus maternal time inputs on child cognitive development using single mothers from the nlsy79 to deal with nonrandom selection of children into child care we exploit the exogenous variation in welfare policy rules facing single mothers in particular the 1996 welfare reform and earlier state level policy changes generated substantial increases in their work child care use we construct a comprehensive set of welfare policy variables and use them as instruments to estimate child cognitive ability production functions in our baseline specification we estimate that a year of child care reduces child test scores by 2 1

parental preference heterogeneity and human capital inequality abstract in this article i provide an empirical account of the human capital investment behavior of parents in the face of endowment differences among siblings the data set used contains a three wave panel of 4 030 individuals the article presents a rare case in which endowments are measured explicitly health endowments are estimated from dynamic health production functions while educational endowments are obtained from test scores the simple score of the standard raven s colored progressive matrix cpm test is used to measure educational endowments i use estimation procedures that combine an instrumental variables method with panel data estimators to control for endogeneity and heterogeneity the results suggest that parents compensate for initial differences in health but reinforce initial educational differences among siblings hence an educational subsidy aimed at reducing inequality may end up reinforcing the inequality that might exist in the absence of such subsidy when parents invest mor

prenatal care and birthweight production evidence from south america research using us data has shown that increases in prenatal care have positive effects on birthweight and that the existence of unobserved health heterogeneity tends to reduce the measured effect of prenatal care this study extends extant research to the south american countries of bolivia brazil columbia and peru using data from the demographic and health surveys finding a positive effect of increased prenatal care use on birthweight furthermore the largest marginal effect of increased prenatal care use is found at low levels of usage the results highlight both the usefulness of existing methodologies for estimating the effect of prenatal care on birthweight and the importance of extending these methodologies to data from countries other than the usa

impact of immigration on prenatal care use and birth weight evidence from california in the 1990 s the mid 1990 s witnessed the passage of two legislative measures restricting noncitizens use of public services in response to the extensive and costly use of public assistance by immigrants reported by earlier studies jane l ross 1996 first the immigration control and financial responsibility act restricted illegal immigrants access to medical services and to other forms of public assistance in addition the personal responsibility and work opportunity reconciliation act extended the restriction to legal immigrants entering the country after its enactment for at least five years after entry and effectively until they naturalize however some states with large immigrant populations like california chose to institute state funded substitute benefits for immigrants losing federal assistance in spite of these states assistance possibly working as an immigrant magnet george j borjas 2001 the literature emerging after welfare reform has often found a greater decline in the use of public assistance particularly medicaid among noncitizen households relative to citizens this finding has been attributed to the chilling effects of welfare reform wendy zimmermann and michael fix 1998 in light of these findings should we now expect greater noncitizenship rates to ease access to public services or rather to impose a burden on access to public services in this paper we look into this question and examine the impact of noncitizenship rates on women s use of prenatal care pnc over the period 1991 2000 in california we focus on women s pnc use given the health implications that pnc can have for both mother and infant and yet the lack of studies examining the role of noncitizenship rates even in high immigration areas on women s pnc use we use 1991 and 2000 to assess significant changes in the effect of noncitizenship rates on women s pnc use before and after the 1996 reform additionally we focus on california due to its population size and its large immigrant population of whom approximately 61 percent are noncitizens finally given the implications of adequate pnc on newborns birth weight through the early detection and treatment of any existing health problems we examine how pnc in turn has affected the birth weight of babies born in california over the examined time period in sum this study addresses the following questions has the effect of noncitizenship rates on women s pnc use changed before and after the 1996 reform in particular do greater noncitizenship rates result in reduced pnc use due to increased competition for public services or do they lead to increased pnc use due to welfare reform s chilling effect and increased awareness of the importance of pnc furthermore how does pnc use affect birth weight

gary becker s contributions to economics from his first published work gary becker has consistently strived to extend the domain of economic analysis his interest is in social science broadly defined and he is convinced that economic theory in its established neoclassical form provides the best set of tools for analysing social science questions when he finds an interesting problem on the borderland of what is conventionally thought of as economics and that is where he is looking for his problems he is not worried that he is trespassing on the traditional grounds of sociologists political scientists lawyers anthropologists or biologists on the contrary he clearly delights in showing how economic theory can be brought to bear on such problems he is of course not alone in trying to extend the borders of economics many other scholars have contributed to the movement which some have characterized as economic imperialism becker is one of the most outstanding of the imperialists this review of his work is organized in accordance with the main topics on which becker has worked chronologically his work on the economics of discrimination which grew out of his doctoral dissertation comes first next in order come his fundamental contributions to human capital theory he was also one of the founders of the so called new theory of consumption which is no longer so new and he has made important contributions to the economic study of crime and punishment and to the economics of political decision making some of his most original work is in the economics of the family where he provides economic explanations of such questions as marriage divorce and procreation after the topic by topic review of becker s contributions i will try to provide a more general evaluation of his work and to characterize it more fully in terms of research traditions and methodological attitudes

a direct test of the efficient marriage market hypothesis this paper takes gary becker s theory of marriage seriously in his seminal paper becker 1973 proposes an invisible hand theorem for the marriage market he argues that the competition for spouse leads men and women to be matched in such a way that maximizes the sum total of marital output applications of the economic approach to marriage are now commonplace becker et al 1977 study the effect of imperfect information on divorce benham 1974 scully 1979 and wong 1986 estimate the effect of wife s education on husband s earnings grossbard shechtman 1993 and rao 1993 focus on the effect of sex ratio on implicit or explicit bride prices or dowries the literature however has virtually ignored becker s hypothesis that marriage markets maximize total marital output i e that marriage markets are efficient mistakes are no doubt made in marriage decisions the marriage market is not a text book example of perfect competition because of elaborate social norms substantial search costs and room for bargaining and opportunistic behavior nevertheless we intend to push becker s efficient marriage market model at face value and directly confront it with data the hypothesis that the marriage market maximizes marital output provides a framework that allows estimating a model of spouse selection which recovers some of the parameters of the production function for marital output using the estimated parameters we can use programming techniques to find the optimal male female pairing that maximizes the sum of marital output the degree to which the actual pairing of husbands and wives corresponds to the optimal pairing provides a goodness of fit test of the efficient marriage market hypothesis our method is applied to census data in hong kong a model of spouse selection and other matching models differs from a discrete choice model e g mcfadden 1984 in two important ways first the choice of a spouse is mutual not only does each man choose a woman that yields him the highest net utility but each woman also picks a man that gives her the highest net utility second in a discrete choice model several individuals can choose the same alternative in marriage markets this is prohibited under monogamy thus new methods have to be developed to analyze choice in marriage markets although marital output and the shadow price of husbands and wives are not observable the theory of optimal matching allows us to write down the likelihood function for the observed choice of marital partners it turns out that this model of spouse selection reduces to a version of the tobit model under the assumption that error terms are independently and identically normal in multinomial logit models the interpretation of parameters is cumbersome especially when the number of alternatives is large in our model of spouse selection the estimated parameters are directly related to the production function of marital output the signs of these parameters can be used to address the issue of positive versus negative assortative mating the model can also be used to test marginal product pricing in the marriage market with the estimated production function from the model of spouse selection we can impute the marital output for all possible male female pairs using these imputed output figures the optimal pairing between men and women that maximizes the sum of marital output can be found using an algorithm that solves the assignment problem the degree to which this optimal pairing corresponds to the observed pairing then provides a natural way of assessing marriage market efficiency given the limited range of information contained in the census we find that our model of spouse selection fits the observed choices better than other models such as one based on ranking method following varian s 1990 proposal for goodness of fit tests for optimizing models we derive a measure of efficiency which is based on the distance between total imputed marital output under observed matching and that under optimal matching

estimating the parameters of a household production function with joint products by estimating the parameters of a production function whose inputs consist of family time and market goods the authors offer some new microeconomic estimates of the value of production that takes place in the home and also examine the concept of joint production that is the degree to which time devoted to home production simultaneously serves as leisure they find evidence of substantial jointness between home production time and leisure the degree of which is greater for wives than for husbands and that both husband and wife possess human capital skills more productive in market work than in home work

wavelet decomposition and regime shifts assessing the effects of crude oil shocks on stock market returns while there is a large body of empirical studies on the relationship between crude oil price changes and stock market returns they have failed to achieve a consensus on this subject in this paper we combine wavelet analysis and markov switching vector autoregressive ms var approach to explore the impact of the crude oil co shocks on the stock market returns for uk france and japan over the period from january 1989 to december 2007 our procedure involves the estimation of the extended ms var model in order to investigate the importance of the resultant wavelet filtering series after removing random components in determining the behavior of the stock market volatilities we show that co shocks do not affect the recession stock market phases except for japan however they significantly reduce moderate and or expansion stock market phases temporarily moreover this negative relationship appears to be more pronounced during the pre 1999 period the empirical findings will prove extremely useful to investors who need to understand the exact effect of international oil changes on certain stocks prices as well as for policy managers who need a more thorough evaluation about the efficiency of hedging policies affected by oil price changes

birth spacing and sibling inequality asymmetric information within the family this paper formulates a dynamic model of birth spacing incorporating uncertainty about and heterogeneity in birth outcomes and joint production to assess how the spacing of children responds to exogenous shocks in birth outcomes estimation technics are developed that use assumptions about the constraints on the information available to parental decision makers associated with the sequential nature of childbearing ignored in static models of intra household behavior section 1 examines the technology of birth spacing and its consequences for the level and distribution of child outcomes and resources in section 2 the model compares alternative estimation technics in section 3 data from a probability sample of us white married couples are used to describe intrafamily variation in birth outcomes and spacing and to test for heterogeneity bias the results in section 4 suggest that across family heterogeneity bias may be less important than within family heterogeneity bias in estimates of the effects of birth order and timing patterns of births on health results from family fixed effect of sibling models of child quality determination that ignore intrafamily substitution may be misleading section 5 estimates how birth outcome endowments and information on gender are used to estimate how differences in them affect subsequent birth timing decisions and sibling inequality results suggest that 1 the birth of 1st born children tends to be delayed among families with high income husbands highly educated parents superior health endowment or high tastes for health investments 2 the proximity of the birth of the 2nd child to that of the 1st child is a positive function of the quality of the 1st born and 3 the spacing and existence of a 3rd child is significantly related to the birth outcomes sex composition and sex ordering of the 1st and 2nd children

searching for the opportunity cost of an individual s time a traditional assumption made in the literature is that the value of an individual s time spent in any activity is equal to his or her wage rate this result stems from the derivation of the value of leisure time in the context of the standard labor supply model this paper pre sents some reasons why the relationship be tween the wage rate and the value of time does not hold suggestions for what to do when the relationship breaks down and the investigator needs some value to impute to the individual are given in the final section of the paper

multidimensional welfare distributions empirical application to household panel data from vietnam this article explores the empirical application of theoretical multidimensional welfare distribution analysis techniques to real household welfare distributions the article operationalizes recent conceptual developments in multidimensional distribution theory and assesses their usefulness for the measurement of multidimensional household inequality the results strongly highlight the importance of bringing nonmonetary aspects of household welfare into the forefront of inequality analysis agreement over the various approaches to the measurement of multidimensional inequality entails however nontrivial decisions that may limit the practical usefulness of these measures we suggest that the use of multidimensional inequality ranges and the application of restrictive dominance criteria to multidimensional welfare distributions may open significant scope for further developments in the empirical analysis of multidimensional inequality

challenges in the wind turbines location process in central europe the use of spatial decision support systems abstract the implementation of a framework for climate and energy policies in europe entails a number of development projects connected to renewable energy resources as far as many western countries have realized some of those investments during recent decades and have more experience in that field most of the countries in central europe have to face that challenge right now however a rapid increase in renewable energy production in those countries can cause some dysfunctions in the investment process national control authorities in poland marked that the decision making process concerning the location of wind turbines has not been carried out properly the paper presents a review of the studies regarding the use of spatial analysis in renewable energy policy implementation and a proposition for the use of the multi criteria spatial decision support system based on geographical information systems the presented model has a character of an open framework which allows a user to add any location parameter or factor which is possible to be represented as a metric value the spatial character of the proposed solution exceeds only mathematical models in the way of interpretation of the results an intuitive model supports communication with stakeholders and helps to explain the correlations between human activity and the location of power plants the model was tested on the case study of wroclaw agglomeration area poland and includes 13 location factors the use of a multi criteria model guaranteed a broader point of view in comparing five different scenarios of wind farms development in the decision making process as it combines conflicted interests groups minimalizes subjective assessment and enables to define priorities while setting weights of factors

conflicts between decentralized renewable electricity production and landscape services a spatially explicit quantitative assessment for switzerland abstract the production of decentralized renewable electricity often collides with provisioning regulating and cultural services of the landscape in this paper we operationalize the landscape service approach and generate conflict maps between three renewable energies wind pv forest biomass and six competing landscape services nutrition and materials aesthetics physical and experiential interactions heritage and symbolic content water and liquid flows lifecycle maintenance habitat and gene pool protection media content analysis and expert interviews were used to ground truth the national conflict maps in several swiss regions and to understand to what degree the national conflict assessments match the regional and local perceptions of these conflicts in switzerland approximately 40 000 km 2 biomass from forests is by far the least conflicting renewable energy followed by pv on roofs for the latter 68 of the technically feasible energy potential can be generated with low conflicts and more is expected with new materials wind has a high conflict potential only 12 of the technically feasible energy potential is low conflict pv on open land marginal land and shrubland is at the moment not currently feasible in switzerland the accuracy of our conflict assessment is sufficiently high to estimate the proportion that socially sustainable energy could cover of the overall energy gap of 22 25 twh yr caused by the phase out of swiss nuclear plants by 2050 low conflict solar energy from rooftops could contribute approximately 30 of the required 22 25 twh yr intensified wood production and wind energy could add another 40 the gap of approximately 30 must come from undisputed energy sources such as biogas from recycled organic material from centralized renewable energies such as geothermal or large hydropower or from new or technologically improved renewable energies the presented decision support tools are a timely contribution to the designation of legally binding zones for renewable energy production

a guide to wavelets for economists abstract wavelet analysis although used extensively in disciplines such as signal processing engineering medical sciences physics and astronomy has not fully entered the economics discipline yet in this survey article wavelet analysis is introduced in an intuitive manner and the existing economics and finance literature that utilizes wavelets is surveyed and explored extensive examples of exploratory wavelet analysis are given most using canadian us and finnish industrial production data finally potential and possible future applications for wavelet analysis in economics are discussed

wage gains associated with height as a form of health human capital height is consulted as a latent indicator of early nutrition and lifetime health status height is observed to increase in recent decades in populations where per capita national income has increased and public health activities have grown height is determined by genetic make up and realized in part through satisfactory nutrition and health related care and conditions alternative instrumental variables iv are explored which proxy price and income constraints which are expected to influence the latter reproducible human capital investments in height i report ols and iv estimates of the partial effect of height on log hourly wages in recent national surveys from three countries ghana brazil and the united states i conclude that the human capital productivity effect of height estimated by parent education ivs in the us and ghana are many times larger than the ols estimates and in ghana and brazil the regional price ivs estimates also imply a substantially larger human capital wage effects of height compared with the ols estimates the ols estimates of height effects on wages are dominated by the genetic variation in height and appear to understate substantially the human capital returns to health and nutrition inputs which increase adult height this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

estimating a household production function heterogeneity the demand for health inputs and their effects on birth weight the household production literature emphasizes that technical or biological processes condition input selection by households in their production activities along with prices and income exogenous variations in health to the extent that they are perceived by individuals heterogeneity lead to correlations between inputs and health outcomes that cannot be used to derive causal conclusions therefore estimates of health technology must be obtained from a behavioral model in which health inputs are themselves choices consistent estimates are reported of the effect of endogenous inputs such as medical care smoking and fertility on birth weight and fetal growth in the presence of health heterogeneity

household production and sexual orientation the 2006 canada census is used along with a well known model of household production to estimate the value of household commodities produced by gay lesbian and heterosexual couples the results show some intriguing differences and similarities unlike heterosexuals gay and lesbian couples respond differently to changes in the cost of time however all couples are characterized by the importance of market goods over time and the importance of human capital in the market over the home with respect to household production hence although there are differences in the sexual division of labor between households of different sexual orientations the value of household commodities is mostly driven by differences in the amount of market goods used in the home market goods are determined by income and differences in income within a couple type swamp differences in income across couple types and as a result there is no statistical difference in the value of household commodities produced across the three sexual orientations jel d13

risks and rewards gary becker s contributions to economics gary becker is one of the most original and influential economists of our age his originality lies in extending the frontiers of economics and broadening the range of important social science problems that are amenable to economic analysis he has gone against the grain of establishment thinking in the economics profession invariably choosing to work on problems that were considered beyond the boundaries of modem economics yet this work made close contact with many of the great economists of the past and many of the concepts he invented and developed are now widely if not routinely used in modem economics several of the approaches to problems he pioneered have evolved into fields and specialities in their own right that becker has had an immense intellectual impact and influence in the economics profession is supported empirically by the voluminous citations to his work over the years and in other ways obviously citation counts have well known difficulties and cannot prove anything by themselves but if used in conjunction with more fundamental evidence they do have the virtue of being quantifiable marshall medoff s 1989 1 recent citation study is one of the best available because citations are weighted by the importance of the journals in which articles appear among non nobel prize economists working in u s universities under 65 years of age becker ranks first in total citations over the 1971 85 period to which medoff s study refers and he is first by a very wide margin though the study is limited to economists in the united states it is clear that becker would rank at or very close to the top of any worldwide list furthermore becker s work is virtually all substantive economic analysis hardly any of it is devoted to the development of methodological tools or to surveys both of which gamer citations more easily and many concepts

evaluating ecosystem service trade offs with wind electricity production in switzerland in switzerland different types of land use including electricity production compete directly for little available space the swiss energy strategy relies heavily on incorporating renewable sources of electricity including wind in order to ensure long term efficient socially acceptable and sustainable electricity production land use conflicts should be addressed and properly managed through a comprehensive and balanced process we propose a method to apply the ecosystem service es approach combined with an optimisation tool to tackle the complex problems posed by wind electricity development in a topographically challenging landscape marxan was used as optimisation software to evaluate assess and quantify the trade offs between es provisioning and wind electricity production expressing different es in comparable units and evaluating the costs to the system when these are lost versus the benefits gained from wind electricity production generated an output of possible solutions when compared to similar studies modelling wind electricity output that avoid negative interaction with es throughout switzerland the current results using the optimisation tool marxan suggest a solution requiring 13 5 fewer turbines 1903 in an average solution in order to produce 12 twh yr of wind generated electricity and 18 fewer turbines 842 on average to produce 5 twh yr thus using optimisation software can lead to more efficient spatial planning solutions our methodology can be applied toward cost effective renewable energy development that minimises opportunity cost in terms of foregone es provisioning

withdrawn a wavelet analysis of oil prices and stock market evidence from pakistan and india available online 4 september 2013 this article has been withdrawn at the request of the author s and or editor the publisher apologizes for any inconvenience this may cause the full elsevier policy on article withdrawal can be found at http www elsevier com locate withdrawalpolicy

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

schooling health knowledge and obesity the connection between schooling and health is well documented an important empirical issue that needs to be examined however is whether schooling s effects are due to individual health knowledge differences this empirical study examines this issue with an increasingly important health indicator obesity since provision of health knowledge is a major tool of public agencies promoting health this empirical study uses a new direct measure of health knowledge to test this hypothesis the results show that knowledge is inversely related to the probability that an individual is obese schooling s effects on relative weight and the probability of being obese are explained by differences in knowledge this result may imply that schooling s effect on the allocative efficiency of the household production of health is the main reason schooling is linked to health behaviour the result also may imply that the most effective method of health education is to highlight the disease element of poor dietary habits a

effects of physical activity on earnings in the brazilian labor market abstract this article investigates the effects of physical activity on earnings in the brazilian labor market analyzing workers aged between 30 and 50 years to that end quantile regression was applied to analyze microdata from the 2008 national household sample survey pnad the results showed that workers who engage in regular physical exercise exhibit better social and economic conditions compared to sedentary individuals sedentary lifestyles are typically more common among female employees than their male counterparts and this is reflected in earnings in the labor market the impact of physical activity on wages varied from 15 0 to 31 0 and was greater among the highest quantiles the lowest salaries were recorded among non white sedentary women

oil prices and stock market in china a sector analysis using panel cointegration with multiple breaks this paper investigates the relationship between oil prices and the chinese stock market at the sector level in a panel cointegration and granger causality framework the major sectors in china are studied using data collected from july 2001 to december 2010 when the effects of cross sectional dependence and multiple structural breaks are taken into account the panel cointegration relationship between oil prices and stock prices is confirmed at the disaggregated sector level the results indicate that there is some evidence of structural breaks in the interaction between oil prices and chinese sectoral stocks the long run estimates suggest that the real oil price has a positive effect on sectoral stocks in the long run the granger causality tests demonstrate a unidirectional short run granger causality relationship running from oil prices and sectoral stocks to the interest rate for 2001 07 2005 10 there is also a unidirectional long run granger causality running from sectoral stocks to the interest rate for 2001 07 2005 10 and 2005 12 2007 06 however the long run granger causality is bidirectional between oil prices the interest rate and sectoral stocks for 2007 08 2008 11 and 2009 01 2010 12 meanwhile the short run granger causality is also bidirectional between the interest rate and oil prices

unemployment and infant health times series evidence from the state of tennessee this is the first study that decomposes unemployment into its structural and cyclical components and investigates their impact on income distribution controlling for the influence of inflation increases in structural unemployment have a substantial

prenatal care demand and birthweight production of black mothers infant mortality in the united states has declined by one half in the past 20 years for both blacks and whites though the black infant mortality rate has steadily remained twice the white rate helen wallace 1994 the incidence of low birthweight unfortunately has remained almost unchanged over the same time period again with the black rate being twice the white rate wallace 1994 these two trends taken together suggest that the reduced mortality rate is due entirely to medical advances which allow more small weak and sick newborns to survive this paper investigates the health of newborns using the approach of mark rosenzweig and paul schultz 1982 1983 see also eugene lewit 1983 their work is extended by incorporating the number of visits and a visitsxdelay interaction term into prenatal care demand the goal is to obtain consistent estimates of the impact of prenatal care on infant birthweight these estimates can then be used to design interventions aimed at reducing the incidence of low birthweight