the local response to tax limitation measures do local governments manipulate voters to increase revenues abstract this paper provides evidence that some cities subject to a statewide tax limit manipulate their mix of productive and administrative services in an attempt to get voters to override the statewide limit when a statewide limit reduces a city s budget one manipulative response is to cut service inputs for example teachers or uniformed police officers by a relatively large amount while cutting administrative inputs by a relatively small amount this approach reveals a relatively large trade off between public and private goods and the severe consequences from a tax limit may encourage local voters to override the statewide limit we provide evidence that cities with local override options tend to adopt this approach manipulation is most prevalent among cities run by city managers as opposed to strong mayors

data watch research data in the economics of education economists have developed a wide variety of policy relevant empirical research projects that address the role of education in promoting individual and social welfare recent examples include studies on the impact of school spending on educational outputs the differences between public and private schools the effects of competition among schools the determinants of teacher quality the impact of unions on schools and the consequences of education finance reform one reason for the proliferation of such empirical studies has been the emergence of high quality micro level data on education in this paper we discuss three broad types of data sets data on educational institutions data on educational outcomes at the individual level and data sets from school reforms and experiments in each section we summarize some of the leading surveys discuss the general availability of the data and identify some but certainly not all of the research that has utilized these data this review is by no means exhaustive we have restricted our attention to analyses of data sets describing primary and secondary education moreover we emphasize data sets that are excellent sources of information but are less wellknown and utilized by economists in particular two obvious omissions from this review are the national longitudinal survey of youth nlsy and the panel study of income dynamics psid both are broad based studies that track people over periods of time gathering information both on educational attainment and on many other issues as well

is there a glass ceiling in sweden using 1998 data we show that the gender log wage gap in sweden increases throughout the wage distribution and accelerates in the upper tail we interpret this as a strong glass ceiling effect we use quantile regression decompositions to examine whether this pattern can be ascribed primarily to gender differences in labor market characteristics or in the rewards to those characteristics even after extensive controls for gender differences in age education both level and field sector industry and occupation we find that the glass ceiling effect we see in the raw data persists to a considerable extent

tax limited reaction functions summary this paper models for the first time a spatial process in local tax policies in the presence of centrally imposed fiscal limitations focusing on the frequently encountered case of a tax rate cap we evaluate three empirical approaches to the analysis of spatially dependent limited tax policies i a bayesian spatial approach for censored dependent variables ii a tobit corner solution model augmented with a spatial lag iii a spatial discrete hazard model the evidence arising from an investigation of severely state constrained local vehicle taxes in italy suggests that ignoring tax limitations can lead to substantial underestimation of inter jurisdictional fiscal interaction copyright 2011 john wiley sons ltd

sex and science how professor gender perpetuates the gender gap nber working paper seriessex and science how professor gender perpetuates the gender gapscott e carrellmarianne e pagejames e westworking paper 14959http www nber org papers w14959national bureau of economic research1050 massachusetts avenuecambridge ma 02138may 2009thanks go to usafa personnel j putnam d stockburger r schreiner k carson and p eglestonfor assistance in obtaining the data and to deb west for data entry thanks also go to charlie brown charles clotfelter caroline hoxby deborah niemeier kim shauman catherine weinberger andseminar participants at nber higher education working group ppic sdsu uc davis uc irvine and uc santa cruz for their helpful comments and suggestions the views expressed in this articleare those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the usaf dod the u s government or the national bureau of economic research 2009 by scott e carrell marianne e page and james e west all rights reserved short sectionsof text not to exceed two paragraphs may be quoted without explicit permission provided that fullcredit including notice is given to the source

why small centrist third parties motivate policy divergence by major parties plurality based elections between two major parties or candidates sometimes feature small cen trist third parties we modify the standard two party spatial model of policy seeking parties to incorporate a centrist third party and we show that the presence of such a party even if it has no chance of winning motivates the major parties to propose policies that are much more divergent than without the third party we derive explicit formulas for party locations at a three party equilibrium and provide necessary and sufficient conditions for existence ofthat equilibrium we show that over time the major parties can be expected to shift their policies in the same direction relative to each other but in the opposite direction relative to the minor party the predictions of this model are compared with estimates of party policy locations during appropriate periods in postwar britain for the past half century a small british party first the liberals now the liberal demo crats has occupied a policy position in between the two major british parties labour and the con servatives during much of the same period the free democrats in germany have held a similar posi tion between the social democrats and the christian democrats in addition recent american presidential elections have featured the candidates john anderson in 1980 and ross perot in 1992 and 1996 who had no realistic chance of winning and who were arguably located between the democratic and republican nom inees 1 what are the policy consequences of the existence of such small centrist parties or candidates on what political institutions do these consequences depend do these consequences benefit the policy aspirations of the centrist party or do they undermine these goals under proportional representation it is well known that a small centrist party such as the free democrats in germany may hold the balance of power bargaining with each of the major players as they attempt to form governing coalitions but in a plurality based system as in britain or the united states the consequences are far

individual risk attitudes measurement determinants and behavioral consequences this paper studies risk attitudes using a large representative survey and a complementary experiment conducted with a representative subject pool in subjects homes using a question asking people about their willingness to take risks in general we find that gender age height and parental background have an economically significant impact on willingness to take risks the experiment confirms the behavioral validity of this measure using paid lottery choices turning to other questions about risk attitudes in specific contexts we find similar results on the determinants of risk attitudes and also shed light on the deeper question of stability of risk attitudes across contexts we conduct a horse race of the ability of different measures to explain risky behaviors such as holdings stocks occupational choice and smoking the question about risk taking in general generates the best all round predictor of risky behavior

do limits matter evidence on the effects of tax limitations on student performance abstract the goal of this research is to determine if limits on the revenue raising ability of school districts translate into constraints on the ability of these districts to affect student performance we use the recent imposition of property tax limitations on school districts in the chicago metropolitan area to determine if these limits have translated into slower growth in student performance we find only limited evidence that student performance in districts subject to the tax limitations has fallen relative to student performance in districts not subject to the limitations

an irrational party of rational members the collision of legislators reelection quest with party success in the japan socialist party this study presents a new explanation to a puzzle regarding the reluctance of the japan socialist party jsp to moderate its hard liner marxist platform the author does so by focusing on the pref

anticipated discrimination choices and performance experimental evidence abstract this paper studies experimentally whether potential perceived discrimination affects decisions in a labor market setting with different stereotypes participants are assigned to a seven person group and randomly allocated a role as a firm or worker in each group there are five workers and two firms the only information firms have about each worker is a self selected avatar male female or neutral representing a worker s gender each firm then decides which worker to hire female workers react to potential discrimination when they know the task is math related but not otherwise men choose similar avatar patterns regardless of the task men do perform at much higher levels in the math related task but there is no difference in performance in the emotion recognition task where there is a strong female stereotype

centripetal and centrifugal incentives under different electoral systems inaseminalarticle cox 1990 suggestedthatelectoralsystemswithlargerdistrictmagnitudesprovideincentivesforparties to advocate more extreme policy positions in this article we put this proposition to the test informed by recent advances in spatial models of party competition we introduce a design that embeds the effect of electoral rules in the utility function of voters we then estimate the equilibrium location of parties as the weight voters attach to the expected distribution of seats and votes changes our model predicts that electoral rules affect large and small parties in different ways we find centripetal effects only for parties that are favorably biased by electoral rules by contrast smaller parties see their vote share decline and are pushed toward more extreme equilibrium positions evidence from 13 parliamentary democracies supports model predictions along with testing the incentives provided by electoral rules results carry implications for the strategies of vote maximizing parties and for the role of small parties in multiparty competition

state responses to fiscal crises the effects of budgetary institutions and politics this paper explores the dynamics of state taxes and spending during the late 1980s when regional economic downturns and increased expenditure demands led to substantial state budget deficits more restrictive state fiscal institutions such as no deficit carryover rules and tax and expenditure limitations are correlated with more rapid fiscal adjustment to unexpected deficits political factors are also important when a single party controls the state house and the governorship deficit adjustment is much faster than when party control is divided in gubernatorial election years tax increases and spending cuts are both significantly smaller than at other times

is there a glass ceiling over europe exploring the gender pay gap across the wages distribution using harmonised data from the european union household panel we analyse gender pay gaps by sector across the wages distribution for ten countries we find that the mean gender pay gap in the raw data typically hides large variations in the gap across the wages distribution we use quantile regression qr techniques to control for the effects of individual and job characteristics at different points of the distribution and calculate the part of the gap attributable to differing returns between men and women we find that first gender pay gaps are typically bigger at the top of the wage distribution a finding that is consistent with the existence of glass ceilings for some countries gender pay gaps are also bigger at the bottom of the wage distribution a finding that is consistent with sticky floors third the gender pay gap is typically higher at the top than the bottom end of the wage distribution suggesting that glass ceilings are more prevalent than sticky floors and that these prevail in the majority of our countries fourth the gender pay gap differs significantly across the public and the private sector wages distribution for each of our eu countries

the tax revolt and electoral competition this paper explores the effect of electoral competition onstate and local expenditures in the us during the politicalenvironment following the tax revolt of the late 1970s itutilizes a theoretical model in which both electoralcompetition and tax and expenditure limits impact spending empirical results indicate the tax revolt s primary impact wastransmitted through political candidate competition notthrough the adoption of tax or expenditure limitations as iscommonly believed however tax and expenditure limits doaffect public education expenditures

do barriers to candidacy reduce political competition evidence from a bachelor s degree requirement for legislators in pakistan in the 2002 election candidates for pakistan s federal legislature had to possess at least a bachelor s degree this policy disqualified 60 out of the 207 incumbent legislators from running for election again using a difference in differences approach with panel data on all electoral constituencies in pakistan i find that this ballot access restriction does not affect political competition across all constituencies with disqualified incumbents equally stronger political competition is defined as a larger number of candidates contesting election a smaller vote share and vote margin for the winning candidate and a less concentrated candidate field as measured by a herfindahl hirschman index hhi of vote shares competition declined significantly in constituencies where the disqualified incumbent belonged to a small party and where literacy levels were lower signifying a smaller pool of substitute candidates however political competition increased in areas where the disqualified incumbent was stronger in terms of his winning vote margin

heterogeneous human capital occupational choice and male female earnings differences human capital models have mainly focused on the rate of return to investment in a homogeneous stock of capital yet individuals have different initial attributes that determine comparative advantage in producing different types of human capital we find that mathematical ability is an important determinant of field choice for college students and that differences in earnings across fields are largely explained as a return to the use of scarce quantitative abilities in the production of each type of human capital the model successfully accounts for the observed male female differences in earnings and occupational choices of recent college graduates

do competitive workplaces deter female workers a large scale natural field experiment on job entry decisions an important line of research using laboratory experiments has provided a new potential reason for gender imbalances in labour markets men are more competitively inclined than women whether and to what extent gender differences in attitudes toward competition lead to differences in naturally occurring labour markets remains an open question to examine this we run a natural field experiment on job entry decisions where we randomize almost 9000 job seekers into different compensation regimes by varying the role that individual competition plays in setting the wage and the gender composition we examine whether a competitive compensation regime by itself can cause differential job entry the data highlight the power of the compensation regime in that women disproportionately shy away from competitive work settings yet there are important factors that attenuate the gender differences including whether the job is performed in teams whether the position has overt gender associations and the age of the job seekers we also find that the effect is most pronounced in labour markets with attractive alternative employment options furthermore our results suggest that preferences over uncertainty can be just as important as preferences over competition per se in driving job entry choices

gender achievement and subject choice in english education in common with other oecd countries there is a gender gap in educational achievement in england favouring girls this carries through to tertiary education on the other hand boys are far more likely to engage in stem in post 16 vocational education and at university the underachievement of boys overall but over representation in stem presents significant challenges for policy this paper documents changes in the gender gap over the last 20 years in england and discusses findings in the light of international evidence it concludes that education policies in academic and in vocational spheres can be designed to reduce gender inequalities that exist in both

a predictive index for the flypaper effect abstract it is well established that lump sum public grants boost local government spending more than an equivalent increase in private income the flypaper effect one shortcoming of the related literature is that it presumes all communities have an identical propensity to consume from an intergovernmental grant this paper is one attempt to allow for a heterogeneous response the working conjecture is that government expenditure on administrative overhead is a gauge of voter control over fiscal decisions high overhead spending implies a lower provision of public services and a stronger role for revenue maximizing forces in the budget setting process as such the flypaper effect should be more marked in high overhead communities an overhead index is applied to a sample of pennsylvania communities in the philadelphia metropolitan area it is difficult to understand these governments spending propensities from various windfall revenues without the help of the overhead index supportive evidence for this approach because overhead data is widely available the technique here can be used to address important policy questions such as predicting variations in state government responses to the recently created lump sum welfare grants

did the tax revolt reduce school performance abstract this paper uses detailed school level data from 49 states to analyze the effects of tax revolt era property tax limitations on school services i find that limitations are associated with larger student teacher ratios and lower cost of living adjusted starting teacher salaries all else equal these results are robust to modelling the results as endogenous and using a variety of measures for whether the limitation binds at particular schools however i find no such evidence that schools subject to limitations have reduced their administrative costs furthermore i find that limitations are associated with lower student performance on mathematics science social studies and reading examinations all else equal

on the size of the gender difference in competitiveness we design a new procedure for measuring competitiveness and use it to estimate the magnitude of the gender gap in competitiveness before working on a task participants choose what percentage of their payoffs will be based on a piece rate compensation scheme the rest of their payoff is allocated to a competitive compensation scheme this novel procedure allows us to distinguish between 101 levels of competitiveness as opposed to the binary measure used in the literature whereas the binary measure allows researchers to conclude that about twice as many men as women choose to compete typically two thirds versus one third the new procedure sheds light on the intensive margin we find that the intensity of the preference is more extreme than the binary measure could detect for example we find that only one fifth of the most competitive 25 of our participants are women and the most competitive 10 of our participants are all men the new procedure also allows us to study the correlation between comp

competition between private and public schools testing stratification and pricing predictions abstract when there are peer effects in education private schools have an incentive to vary tuition to attract relatively able students epple and romano american economic review 88 1 1998 33 develop a general equilibrium model characterizing equilibrium pricing and student selection into schools when peer effects are present the model predicts that competition will lead private schools to give tuition discounts to more able students and that this will give rise to an equilibrium exhibiting stratification by income and ability between the public and private sectors and to a hierarchy of schools within the private sector the model also yields a variety of comparative static predictions the predictions of the model are tested in this paper using a unique data set assembled by figlio and stone research in labor economics 1999 115 tests of equilibrium predictions of the model reveal that the propensity to attend private school increases with both income and ability and among private schools the propensity to attend the highest tuition schools rises with both income and ability within private schools tuition declines with student ability with a substantial number of even high income households paying little or no tuition the correlation between income and ability is greater in public than private schools tests of comparative static predictions of the model reveal that both income and ability become stronger predictors of private school attendance as public school expenditure falls income becomes increasingly important in determining placement in the private school hierarchy as public school expenditure falls discounts to ability in the lowest quality private school decline as public school expenditure rises while discounts to ability in the highest quality private school are little affected by changes in public school expenditure expenditure in private schools rises as expenditure in public schools increases these empirical results are consistent with the predictions of the theoretical model

effect of constraints on tiebout competition evidence from a school finance reform abstracteffect of constraints on tiebout competition evidence from a school finance reform regional studies michigan s school finance reform significantly increased state aid to low spending districts and placed restraints on the growth of spending in high spending districts it is noteworthy that there is no literature yet on the impact of such reforms on resource allocation by school districts this study begins to fill this gap it finds that the reform led the high spending districts to allocate a lower share of their total expenditure to support services and a higher share to instruction relative to the low spending districts to the extent that instructional expenditures are more productive and contribute to student achievement more than support services expenditures these results suggest that the reform led to a relative increase in productivity in the high spending districts

gender differences in competitiveness and risk taking comparing children in colombia and sweden we explore gender differences in preferences for competition and risk among children aged 912 in colombia and sweden two countries differing in gender equality according to macro indices we include four types of tasks that vary in gender stereotyping when looking at competitiveness running skipping rope math and word search we find that boys and girls are equally competitive in all tasks and all measures in colombia unlike the consistent results in colombia the results in sweden are mixed with some indication of girls being more competitive than boys in some tasks in terms of performance change whereas boys are more likely to choose to compete in general boys in both countries are more risk taking than girls with a smaller gender gap in sweden

does competition among public schools benefit students and taxpayers tiebout choice among districts is the most powerful market force in american public education naive estimates of its effects are biased by endogenous district formation i derive instruments from the natural boundaries in a metropolitan area my results suggest that metropolitan areas with greater tiebout choice have more productive public schools and less private schooling little of the effect of tiebout choice works through its effect on household sorting this finding may be explained by another finding students are equally segregated by school in metropolitan areas with greater and lesser degrees of tiebout choice among districts

electoral competition with informed and uninformed voters i present a model of electoral competition in which candidates raise campaign contributions by choosing policies that benefit interest groups and then expend those contributions to influence voters who are uninformed about the policies informed voters however vote based on those policies so candidates face a trade off between choosing a policy to generate funds to attract the uninformed vote and choosing a policy to attract the informed vote electoral equilibria are characterized for two categories of policies particularistic and collective in the case of particularistic policies the equilibrium policies of the candidates are separated if the proportion of uninformed voters is sufficiently high and the degree of separation is an increasing function of that proportion the model is extended to include the public financing of elections and incumbency advantages for the case of collective policies the candidates locate at the median of the ideal points of the informed voters and contributions are zero

do women shy away from competition do men compete too much we examine whether men and women of the same ability differ in their selection into a competitive environment participants in a laboratory experiment solve a real task first under a noncompetitive piece rate and then a competitive tournament incentive scheme although there are no gender differences in performance men select the tournament twice as much as women when choosing their compensation scheme for the next performance while 73 percent of the men select the tournament only 35 percent of the women make this choice this gender gap in tournament entry is not explained by performance and factors such as risk and feedback aversion only playa negligible role instead the tournament entry gap is driven by men being more overconfident and by gender differences in preferences for performing in a competition the result is that women shy away from competition and men embrace it

gender differences and the effect of facing harder competition gender differences in competition have been demonstrated in a variety of contexts yet it remains unclear how people respond to competitors they perceive to be hard or easy and whether gender differences exist in this response i run an experiment in eighteen public high school classrooms to study the effect of competing in a math task against different levels of competitors i exploit natural sorting within grade levels in malaysian public schools to randomly assign competitors of different perceived difficulty levels using a standard competition measure males are significantly more competitive than females however when students face harder competitors males respond by lowering performance while the performance of females does not vary significantly by level of competition

how uncertainty and ambiguity in tournaments affect gender differences in competitive behavior abstract tournament incentives prevail in labor markets yet the number of tournament winners is often unclear to competitors while it is hard to measure how this uncertainty affects work performance and willingness to compete in the field it can be studied in a controlled lab experiment we present a novel experiment where subjects can compete against each other but the number of winners is either uncertain but with known probabilities or ambiguous with unknown probabilities for different numbers of winners we compare these two conditions to a control treatment with a known number of winners we find that ambiguity induces a significant increase in the performance of men who choose to compete while we observe no change for women men also increase their willingness to enter competition in the presence of ambiguity overall both effects contribute to men winning the tournament significantly more often than women under uncertainty and ambiguity these findings suggest that management should make tournament conditions transparent and information available in order to prevent gender disparities from increasing under uncertainty and ambiguity

overlapping marathons what happens to female pace when men catch up we exploit a highly competitive environment in which elite female athletes are exposed to the presence of men but without being in direct competition with them specifically we use variation in how fast the fastest man runs in the new york city marathon to identify the potential influence of men on female performance while holding constant female runners marginal incentives to perform our results suggest that as the men overtake the female runners the performance of female runners declines differentially across ability with the largest declines concentrated among lower ability runners

the distributional effects of new jersey s tax and expenditure limitation when state governments issue general rules that dictate the spending or tax policies of varied local municipalities they distort local government outcomes one example of this is state limitations on local government authority to levy taxes and make expenditures although state imposed tax and expenditure limits tels have been used throughout much of the united states s history they have recently stimulated attention in both the mass media and the academic press in practice tels can be divided into limitations on the authority of local governments to 1 make expenditures and 2 collect property taxes according to a 1981 tabulation of the advisory commission on intergovernmental relations acir reprinted in gold 1983 p 112 46 states had some kind of limitation on local county municipal or school governments ability to collect property taxes and 6 states imposed general expenditure limitations on local governments many of these controls are quite recent in origin in fact all but 18 of the 46 states with property tax limits enacted them after 1970 though some may have had earlier laws restricting the use of the property tax and all of the general expenditure limits were enacted after 1970 a particularly rapid wave of tels followed california s approval of proposition 13 which reduced property taxes there to one percent of assessed value in june 1978 in november 1978 just five months after proposition 13 was approved voters in alabama michigan nevada and texas approved legislation or constitutional amendments that reduced the authority of local governments to raise taxes 2 while many tels set maximum property tax rates and expenditure limits that do not appea to have much effect on the behavior of l cal governments others such as those in california massachusetts and new jersey do a pear to be binding on many localities several r cent studies have attempted to empirically measure the effects of tels 3 the most well known of these studies is a 1977 acir study that used a dummy variable indicating the pres nce or absence of property tax rate and or levy limits along with other independent variables to explain total per capita local own source government expenditures in each of the 50 states primarily because the estimated parameters of these dummy variables were negative and significantly different from zero the acir concluded that tels have reduced government spending further analyses showed the average tel reduced spending 6 to 8 percent inman s 1979b paper which used fiscal year 1966 67 data also employed dummy variables to indicate the presence or absence of various kinds of tax rate limits but used data disaggregated at the city level inman found a positive and insignificant coefficient on all dummy variables and concluded that efforts to regulate local taxation in 1967 through

tax incentives and the decision to purchase health insurance evidence from the self employed the tax reform act of 1986 introduced a new tax subsidy for health insurance purchases by the self employed we analyze the changing patterns of insurance demand before and after tax reform to generate new estimates of how the after tax price of insurance affects the discrete choice of whether to buy insurance we employ both traditional regression models and difference in difference methods that compare changes in insurance coverage across groups around tra86 the results from our most carefully controlled comparison suggest that a 1 percent increase in the cost of insurance coverage reduces the probability that a self employed single person will be insured by 1 8 percentage points

equilibrium strategies for final offer arbitration there is no median convergence final offer arbitration is a procedure for settling disputes between two parties in which an arbitrator chooses the final offer of the party closest to what he considers a fair settlement this procedure is modeled as a two person zero sum game of imperfect information in which the parties are assumed to know the probability distribution of the arbitrator s fair settlements and to make bids in an infinite strategy space that maximize their expected payoffs necessary and sufficient conditions for there to be local and global equilibria in pure strategies are derived and necessary conditions for mixed strategies in a particular case are found such equilibria when they exist in pure strategies represent bids which are symmetric about the median and for most common distributions are separated from one another by two or more standard deviations this finding suggests that final offer arbitration may not accomplish its avowed purpose of inducing the two parties to converge on what they perceive to be t

the economics of schooling production and efficiency in public schools n recent years public and professional interest in schools has been heightened by a spate of reports many of them critical of current school policy these policy documents have added to persistent and long standing concerns about the cost effectiveness and fairness of the current school structure and have made schooling once again a serious public issue as in the past however any renewed interest in education is likely to be short lived doomed to dissipate as frustration over the inability of policy to improve school practice sets in this frustration about school policy relates directly to knowledge about the educational production process and in turn to underlying research on schools although the educational process has been extensively researched clear policy prescriptions flowing from this research have been difficult to derive 2 there exists however a consistency to the research findings that does have an immediate application to school policy schools differ dramatically in quality

a gender agenda a progress report on competitiveness i review the role of a new behavioral trait competitiveness on the gender agenda i first describe how to measure competitiveness in the laboratory and show that gender differences in competitiveness are robust i then establish the external economic relevance of the experimental measure of competitiveness competitiveness correlates with education and labor market outcomes and can help account for gender differences therein finally institutions can differ in the importance they place on competitiveness and hence can affect gender differences in economic outcomes exploring these institutional differences and their effects remains an open area of behavioral market design

gender differences in response to big stakes it is commonly perceived that increasing incentives improves performance however the reaction to increased incentives might differ between men and women leading to gender differences in performance in a natural experiment we study the gender difference in performance resulting from changes in stakes we use detailed information on the performance of high school students and exploit the variation in the stakes of tests which range from 5 to 27 of the final grade we find that female students outperform male students in all tests but to a relatively larger degree when the stakes are low the gender gap disappears in tests taken at the end of high school which count for 50 of the university entry grade jel d03 j16 i21 c30

the bargaining power of teachers unions and the allocation of school resources abstract this paper examines how district size affects the bargaining power of teachers unions and the allocation of school resources our identification strategy exploits the fact that 33 states mandate collective bargaining while 5 states prohibited it in states that mandate collective bargaining we find that beginning salaries and the premium paid to experienced teachers increase with district size while the teacher pupil ratio declines with district size in contrast in states that prohibit collective bargaining we find a negative relationship between district size and the premium paid to experienced teachers district size also has a stronger positive effect on beginning salaries and a weaker negative effect on teacher pupil ratios in states that prohibit collective bargaining collectively our results suggest that more powerful unions bargain for more generous returns to teacher seniority at the expense of staffing ratios and base salaries

globalization party positions and the median voter the authors argue that the effects of economic globalization on social democratic parties in western europe are conditional on the position of the median voter if the median is far enough to the right such parties will adopt business friendly policies because they are required to win office only when the median is relatively far to the left will globalization constrain social democratic parties forcing them to adopt policies further to the right in order to retain credibility it is on this basis the authors argue that empirical studies are misspecified unless they include an interaction between measures of globalization and the position of the median in addition to presenting formal theoretical arguments the article reports empirical findings from fifteen countries in the period from 1973 to 2002 that support the conclusion that the effects of globalization are indeed contingent on the median the authors find that the effects of globalization are significant for social democratic parties only in circumstances in which the median is relatively far to the left

tax limits and the qualifications of new teachers abstract this paper examines the impact of local tax limits on new teacher quality using data from the national center for education statistics we find that tax limits systematically reduce the average quality of education majors as well as new public school teachers in states that have passed these limits the average relative test scores of education majors in tax limit states declined by ten percent as compared to the relative test scores of education majors in states that did not pass limits this relationship is strengthened if we control for school finance equalization reforms or examine tax limits passed in two different periods

equilibrium in multicandidate probabilistic spatial voting this paper presents a multicandidate spatial model of probabilistic voting in which voter utility functions contain a random element specific to each candidate the model assumes no abstentions sincere voting and the maximization of expected vote by each candidate we derive a sufficient condition for concavity of the candidate expected vote function with which the existence of equilibrium is related to the degree of voter uncertainty we show that under concavity convergent equilibrium exists at a minimum sum point at which total distances from all voter ideal points are minimized we then discuss the location of convergent equilibrium for various measures of distance in our examples computer analysis indicates that non convergent equilibria are only locally stable and disappear as voter uncertainty increases

gender competitiveness and study choices in high school evidence from switzerland willingness to compete has been found to predict individual and gender differences in educational choices and labor market outcomes we provide further evidence for this relationship by linking swiss students baccalaureate school high school specialization choices to an experimental measure of willingness to compete boys are more likely to specialize in math in baccalaureate school in line with previous findings competitive students are more likely to choose a math specialization boys are more likely to opt for competition than girls and this gender difference in competitiveness could partially explain why girls are less likely to choose a math intensive specialization

probation length and teacher salaries does waiting pay off tenure policies for elementary and secondary school teachers is a controversial issue in many states but there is virtually no empirical evidence on how tenure affects teacher labor markets this paper begins to fill this research void by using cross state variation in tenure policies to identify the effects if any of the length of the probationary period on entry level teacher salaries using data from the schools and staffing survey the authors investigate whether districts in states with longer probationary periods offer higher wages to teachers as a way to compensate for the extended evaluative period results suggest that they do although effects are concentrated in districts that are most likely to be competing for teachers with districts in neighboring states with shorter probation periods the authors also find that the relationship between probation length and wages is stronger for experienced teachers and in districts that engage in collective bargaining

does school quality matter returns to education and the characteristics of public schools in the united states this paper estimates the effects of school quality measured by the pupil teacher ratio average term length and relative teacher pay on the rate of return to education for men born between 1920 and 1949 using earnings data from the 1980 census we find that men who were educated in states with higher quality schools have a higher return to additional years of schooling rates of return are also higher for individuals from states with better educated teachers and with a higher fraction of female teachers holding constant school quality measures however we find no evidence that parental income or education affects average state level rates of return

early gender gaps among university graduates abstract we use data from six cohorts of university graduates in germany to assess the extent of gender gaps in college and labor market performance twelve to eighteen months after graduation men and women enter college in roughly equal numbers but more women than men complete their degrees women enter college with slightly better high school grades but women leave university with slightly lower marks immediately following university completion male and female full timers work a very similar number of hours per week but men earn more than women across the pay distribution with an unadjusted gender gap in full time monthly earnings of about 20 log points on average including a large set of controls reduces the gap to 5 10 log points the single most important proximate factor that explains the gap is field of study at university

do quotas help women to climb the career ladder a laboratory experiment abstract women are less likely to enroll in selective or scientific courses applying for promotions and are particularly underrepresented in both middle and top positions in the stem field quota are often advocated as an instrument to reduce this gender gap but it remains unclear at what step of the career ladder they more effectively foster women s reaching the top many factors may affect quota s success or failure such as how they would in turn affect teamwork and trust between members within organizations or coordination in applying for promotions in this paper by means of a laboratory experiment implementing a two stage tournament we evaluate the impact of three different interventions in affecting individual decision to climb the career ladder abstracting away from other possible confounding factors we find that compared with no intervention a gender quota introduced in the initial stage of competition was ineffective in encouraging women to compete for the top quotas introduced in the final stage of competition or at both stages increased women s willingness to compete for the top without distorting the performance of the winners

a model of candidate location when one candidate has a valence advantage that under some fairly weak assumptions for all levels of the valence advantage the advantaged candidate chooses a more moderate position than the disadvantaged candidate empirical studies of congressional elections by fiorina 1973 and ansolabehere snyder and stewart 2001 support this result d owns 1957 seminal work presents a puzzle for scholars of u s elections why do candidates not converge to the median voter one of the best explanations is that the candidates themselves have ideological preferences as calvert 1985 and wittman 1977 1983 have shown when candidates have such preferences and they are sufficiently uncertain about the preferences of the median voter then they do not converge although they may moderate their positions from their ideal point the basic version of the calvert wittman model however does not account for another basic fact of u s elections often one of the candidates has an advantage due to a nonpolicy factor such as incumbency greater campaign funds better name recognition superior charisma superior intelligence and so on stokes has dubbed such factors valence factors and he has noted their importance in u s elections stokes 1963 1992 1 in this article i extend the basic calvert wittman model by giving one candidate a valence advantage over the other i show that if the valence characteristics of the candidates are approximately equal then when a candidate s valence advantage increases this causes her to move toward the

orchestrating impartiality the impact of blind auditions on female musicians a change in the audition procedures of symphony orchestras adoption of blind auditions with a screen to conceal the candidate s identity from the jury provides a test for sex biased hiring using data from actual auditions in an individual fixed effects framework we find that the screen increases the probability a woman will be advanced and hired although some of our estimates have large standard errors and there is one persistent effect in the opposite direction the weight of the evidence suggests that the blind audition procedure fostered impartiality in hiring and increased the proportion women in symphony orchestras

electoral rule disproportionality and platform polarization despite common perception existing theoretical literature lacks a complete for mal argument regarding the relationship between the electoral rule disproportionality and platform polarization in this paper we build a model that incorporates the disproportionality of the electoral system in a standard downsian electoral competition setup with mainly but not necessarily purely policy motivated parties we first show that in equilibrium platform polarization is decreasing in the level of the electoral rule disproportionality we then argue that the number of parties has a positive effect on platform polarization when polarization is measured by the distance between the two most distant platforms this effect does not hold when polarization is measured by the widely used dalton index constructing a dataset covering more than 300 elections our main theoretical findings are empirically supported pointing towards the electoral rule disproportionality as a major determinant of polarization

why women don t run experimental evidence on gender differences in political competition aversion abstract women s underrepresentation in leadership positions has been well documented but the reasons behind it are not well understood we carry out a field experiment to test a prominent theory about the source of the gender gap in leadership ambition women s higher aversion to competitive environments using politics as a context for our study we employ two distinct subject pools highly politically active individuals and workers from an online labor market we find that priming individuals to consider the competitive nature of politics has a strong negative effect on women s interest in political office but not on men s interest hence significantly increasing the gender gap in leadership ambition

how costly is diversity affirmative action in light of gender differences in competitiveness affirmative action is often criticized for causing reverse discrimination and lowering the qualifications of those hired under the policy however the magnitude of such adverse effects depends on whether the best suited candidate is hired absent the policy indeed affirmative action may compensate for the distortion discrimination imposes on the selection of candidates this paper asks whether affirmative action can have a similar corrective impact when qualified individuals fail to apply for a job we evaluate the effect of introducing a gender quota in an environment where high performing women fail to enter competitions they can win we show that guaranteeing women equal representation among winners increases their entry the response exceeds that predicted by the change in probability of winning and is in part driven by women being more willing to compete against other women the consequences are substantial as the boost in supply essentially eliminates the anticipated costs of the policy this paper was accepted by uri gneezy behavioral economics

are community nuisance fiscal zoning arrangements undermined by state property tax reforms evidence from nuclear power plants and school finance equalization the conventional view of fiscal zoning is that communities make land use accommodations only for nuisance entities that generate sufficient net fiscal benefits state reforms that redistribute property tax revenues have been accused of undermining these decisions ex post this paper tests this critique by examining communities with nuclear power plants sited before the school finance equalization reforms of the 1970s and 1980s hedonic regressions reveal these reforms to disproportionately reduce housing prices in nuclear plant communities but increase them among neighboring areas this pattern of interjurisdictional capitalization is consistent with the concerns raised by critics of these reforms jel h71 h73

entrepreneurs embrace competition evidence from a lab in the field study referring to isreal m kirzner 1973 and schumpeter 1934 who emphasized the competitive nature of entrepreneurship this study investigates whether potential and revealed entrepreneurs are more likely to seek competition than non entrepreneurs we provide a conceptual framework that links entrepreneurship to three facets of individual competitiveness drawn from economic entrepreneurship and psychological research a desire to win striving for personal development and an enjoyment of competition following economic research linking competitive behavior in experiments to career choices we conduct a lab in the field study and demonstrate that entrepreneurs are more likely to enter competitions than non entrepreneurs accounting for individual desires to win and mastery related achievement motivations our results indicate that entrepreneurs tend to enter competition for the sake of competition itself rather than for the prospect of winning it or personal development our results suggest that enjoyment of competition might be an additional factor driving entrepreneurs market entry decisions beyond well known factors like overconfidence and risk taking

competing with confidence the ticket to labor market success for college educated women abstract this study examines whether the female earnings gap results from gender differences in preferences for competition and confidence we use laboratory experiments on college seniors to measure tastes for competition and confidence and then track these subjects labor market experiences in the early years after college women s compensation is positively correlated with preferences for competition coupled with confidence while men s compensation is not women who exhibit a taste to compete and are confident about their performance earn substantially more than other women and do not earn less than men further enjoying competition or being confident alone is insufficient to raise compensation half of this female earnings effect is explained by college major and labor market controls but even controlling for these characteristics a higher taste for competition for the most confident women results in more than a 7 increase in compensation

coase lecture the glass ceiling despite decades of progress women remain underrepresented in the upper part of the earnings distribution we review the recent research trying to explain this phenomenon after briefly revisiting gender differences in education we turn our attention to a body of work that has argued that gender differences in psychological attributes are holding back women s earnings we then review another active area of research focused on the challenges that women may face when trying to juggle competing demands on their time in the workplace and the home particularly when the home includes children we discuss recent work documenting women s greater demand for flexibility in the workplace as well as work measuring the labour market penalties associated with such demand for flexibility particularly in the higher paying occupations in the economy we highlight possible countervailing forces both at work and at home that may explain why these work family considerations may remain highly relevant to today s glass ceiling despite reduced time spent in non market work and a trend towards a more equal division of non market work between men and women finally we discuss the role that public policy and human resource practices may play in adding more cracks to the glass ceiling

gender competitiveness and career choices gender differences in competitiveness have been hypothesized as a potential explanation for gender differences in education and labor market outcomes we examine the predictive power of a standard laboratory experimental measure of competitiveness for the later important choice of academic track of secondary school students in the netherlands although boys and girls display similar levels of academic ability boys choose substantially more prestigious academic tracks where more prestigious tracks are more math and science intensive our experimental measure shows that boys are also substantially more competitive than girls we find that competitiveness is strongly positively correlated with choosing more prestigious academic tracks even conditional on academic ability most important we find that the gender difference in competitiveness accounts for a substantial portion about 20 of the gender difference in track choice

the impact of the menstrual cycle and hormonal contraceptives on competitiveness we examine whether competitiveness in women is influenced by biological factors female participants in a laboratory experiment solve a simple arithmetics task first under a piece rate and then under a competitive tournament scheme participants can then choose which compensation scheme to apply in a third round we find that the likelihood of selecting into the competitive environment varies strongly and significantly over the menstrual cycle and with the intake of hormonal contraceptives the observed patterns are consistent with a negative impact of the sex hormone progesterone on competitiveness we show that the effect of the menstrual cycle and hormonal contraceptives on competitiveness is due neither to an impact on performance nor to an impact on risk aversion or overconfidence

do gender variant preferences for competition persist in the absence of performance the well established gender gap in preferences for competition has been attributed to gender variant feelings about performing in competitive environments using a novel task with agency in which subjects experience competition but cannot perform we find evidence that performing may be sufficient but not necessary to generate gender variant preferences for competition this suggests that the gender gap cannot be eliminated by correcting beliefs alone that eliminating performance for example routinizing tasks may not eliminate the gender gap and that there may be heretofore unidentified determinants of preferences for competition for example men may prefer payment schemes that are based on social comparison jel j16 c91 j24

do faculty serve as role models the impact of instructor gender on female students although women have matched or surpassed men in many educational outcomes such as college access and persistence female students remain much less likely to major in quantitative technical and science related fields while women have made progress in recent years only 20 percent of engineering students are female and the proportion of women receiving degrees in the sciences and engineering in the united states lags that of other industrialized countries national center for education statistics 1995 this underrepresentation of women may have serious implications for women s returns to education and may relate to occupational segregation and earnings inequality by gender linda loury 1997 as the economy shifts to favor these more male dominated fields there is concern that women will not be prepared to succeed moreover the health of the economy depends on the production of certain kinds of degrees and the underrepresentation of women in certain areas may contribute to shortages in critical fields there have been many widely publicized efforts by the government companies and schools to increase female representation in male dominated fields one focus has been to increase mentoring opportunities for female students by hiring more women faculty members theory and evidence suggest that female instructors may be instrumental in encouraging women to enroll and excel in subjects in which they are underrepresented female students may avoid male dominated fields due to biases against women sandra hanson 1996 and the presence of female faculty may mitigate these effects david neumark and rosella gardecki 1998 found that female doctoral students with female mentors were more likely to succeed however similar to student trends women are underrepresented on university faculties particularly in the sciences and quantitative fields and many worry about the lack of potential role models for female undergraduates for example in 2003 princeton university created a 10 million fund to hire and promote women faculty in science and engineering departments while duke s president pledged 1 million per year for the same purpose robin wilson 2003 in addition the national science foundation s advance program continues to push for increased representation and advancement of women in academic careers and engineering careers national science foundation 2004 does the presence of faculty members of the same gender impact student interest in a subject this paper answers this question by estimating how having a female faculty member in an initial course affects the likelihood that a female student will take additional credit hours or major in a particular subject if students choose their courses and major based on their experiences during their initial exposure to a subject then the instructors they face early in a discipline could influence these decisions such an analysis is difficult because few data sets allow researchers to link student outcomes to faculty characteristics however using a comprehensive longitudinal data set of nearly 54 000 students this paper is among the first large scale studies to estimate the impact of faculty on the outcomes of students moreover discussants ronald ehrenberg cornell university brian jacob harvard university richard murnane harvard university

changes in college skills and the rise in the college wage premium the college wage premium for new labor market entrants rose sharply during the 1980s we ask how much of this change arose from changes in the skill level of the typical college graduate we find that skills attained prior to college as measured by standardized test scores and high school grades had no effect on the change in the college wage premium for men in contrast the returns to math ability rose considerably for women failing to account for math skills thus substantially overstates the growth in the female college wage premium skills acquired in college as reflected in the distribution of students across majors had important effects on the relative wages of men the trend away from low skill subjects such as education and toward high skill subjects such as engineering accounts for one fourth of the rise in the male college wage premium

tying odysseus to the mast evidence from a commitment savings product in the philippines we designed a commitment savings product for a philippine bank and implemented it using a randomized control methodology the savings product was intended for individuals who want to commit now to restrict access to their savings and who were sophisticated enough to engage in such a mechanism we conducted a baseline survey on 1777 existing or former clients of a bank one month later we offered the commitment product to a randomly chosen subset of 710 clients 202 28 4 percent accepted the offer and opened the account in the baseline survey we asked hypothetical time discounting questions women who exhibited a lower discount rate for future relative to current trade offs and hence potentially have a preference for commitment were indeed significantly more likely to open the commitment savings account after twelve months average savings balances increased by 81 percentage points for those clients assigned to the treatment group relative to those assigned to the control group we conclude that the savings response represents a lasting change in savings and not merely a short term response to a new product

human and financial capital for microenterprise development evidence from a field and lab experiment microenterprises constitute an important source of employment and developing such enterprises is a key policy concern in most countries but what is the most efficient tool for microenterprise development we study this question in a developing country context tanzania where microenterprises are the source of employment for more than half of the labor force and we report from a field experiment that jointly investigated the importance of a human capital intervention business training and a financial capital intervention business grant using data from three survey rounds a lab experiment and administrative records of the microfinance institution we present evidence on business performance management practices happiness business knowledge and noncognitive abilities our study demonstrates strong effects of the combination of the two interventions on male entrepreneurs while the effects on female entrepreneurs are much more muted the results suggest that long term finance is an important constraint for microfinance entrepreneurs but that business training is essential to transform financial capital into productive investments our study also points to the need for more comprehensive measures to promote the businesses of female entrepreneurs data as supplemental material are available at http dx doi org 10 1287 mnsc 2014 1933 this paper was accepted by john list behavioral economics

school quality and black white relative earnings a direct assessment the wage differential between black and white men fell from 40 percent in 1960 to 25 percent in 1980 it has been argued that this convergence reflects improvements in the relative quality of black schools to test this hypothesis we assembled data on pupil teacher ratios annual teacher pay and term length for black and white schools in the eighteen segregated states from 1915 to 1966 these data are linked to estimated returns to education for southern born men from different cohorts and states in 1960 1970 and 1980 improvements in the relative quality of black schools explain 20 percent of the narrowing of the black white earnings gap between 1960 and 1980

bargaining sorting and the gender wage gap quantifying the impact of firms on the relative pay of women there is growing evidence that rm specic pay premiums are an important source of wage inequality these premiums will contribute to the gender wage gap if women are less likely to work at high paying rms or if women negotiate worse wage bargains with their employers than men using longitudinal data on the hourly wages of portuguese workers matched with balance sheet information for rms we show that the wages of both men and women contain rm specic premiums that are strongly correlated with employer productivity we then show how the impact of these rm specic pay dierentials on the gender wage gap can be decomposed into a combination of bargaining and sorting eects consistent with the bargaining literature we nd that women receive only 90 of the rm specic pay premiums earned by men notably we obtain very similar estimates of the relative bargaining power ratio from our analysis of between rm wage premiums and from analyzing changes in

choice of specialization do peers matter social influence is an important factor in learning and decision making we estimate peer influence on student choice of specialization using data on undergraduate students of a russian university information about individual social ties has been gathered from a questionnaire survey we show that specialization choice is significantly influenced by friends as well as by study partners the strongest effect is produced by friends who are study partners and those who have similar academic achievements reciprocal friendship ties have a stronger influence on the choice than nonreciprocal ones also the decision is affected by classmates with similar academic achievement the results allow us to better understand the mechanisms of peer effects in the specialization choice

performance in competitive environments gender differences even though the provision of equal opportunities for men and women has been a priority in many countries large gender differences prevail in competitive high ranking positions suggested explanations include discrimination and differences in preferences and human capital in this paper we present experimental evidence in support of an additional factor women may be less effective than men in competitive environments even if they are able to perform similarly in non competitive environments in a laboratory experiment we observe as we increase the competitiveness of the environment a significant increase in performance for men but not for women this results in a significant gender gap in performance in tournaments while there is no gap when participants are paid according to piece rate this effect is stronger when women have to compete against men than in single sex competitive environments this suggests that women may be able to perform in competitive environments per se

expenditures and student achievement in illinois abstract this study examines educational outcomes in illinois for the 1989 1990 school year several measures of educational attainment are analyzed including act scores high school graduation rates and the percentage in a high school planning to attend college the most important results are that an increase in average teacher s salary increases act scores and the percentage college bound and an increase in the pupil teacher ratio reduces the graduation rate and the percentage college bound

selection into self improvement and competition pay gender stereotypes and earnings volatility abstract we examine whether men and women differ in their willingness to select into a contract that pays upon improving one s past performance experiment participants choose to perform a task under either a regular piece rate or a larger piece rate provided they improve relative to a previous round women are less willing than men to select into self improvement pay and this gender gap is largely explained by higher risk aversion and to a smaller extent lower self confidence high earnings volatility widens the gender gap and makes self improvement pay less attractive than competition pay we find no effect of gender stereotypes in the willingness to sort into self improvement the results provide insight into the feasibility and potential of using self improvement contracts as gender neutral incentive mechanisms