choice under uncertainty a model of applications for the social security disability insurance program abstract not all people with health problems are disabled some individuals with severe physical or mental impairments such as blindness or limb amputation continue to hold jobs and generally function satisfactorily they constitute however a group of potentially disabled individuals who might apply and qualify for disability insurance or other disability related benifits if they were to lose their jobs or to decide that employment offered an inadequate financial or non pecuniary reward thus disability or a health related inability to work is more than a medical problem but involves motivational and attitudinal factors we specify a model of the application process which we model as choice under uncertainty about approval of an application for disability insurance we specify the possible outcomes to the choice process of an individual in which the probability of acceptance for disability insurance is a key consideration we then estimate a joint model of labor supply and application to the disability insurance program based on the 1972 survey we then compare our results to the observed time series applications process since 1976 lastly we estimate the sensitivity of the application process to the probability of acceptance and the level of benifits

what have we learned from empirical studies of unemployment and turnover unemployment reminds economists that we have a lot to be modest about twenty years ago robert hall 1972 asked why is the unemployment rate so high at full employment at the time hall wrote male unemployment in the united states had risen to 3 5 percent and it would peak at 4 4 percent in the recession of 1971 since then every cyclical low of unemployment has exceeded the one before it the end of the 1980 s expansion reduced unemployment to about 4 5 percent and unemployment peaked at 7 4 percent of the labor force in the recession that just ended the natural rate of unemployment has evidently risen through time which led lawrence summers 1986 to place a modifier in hall s question why is the unemployment rate so very high in what follows i pose three questions about the causes and consequences of rising joblessness first who are the unemployed i will show that unemployment and nonparticipation are heavily concentrated among the least skilled and more importantly that virtually all of the long term increase in joblessness occurs among low wage men unemployment and nonparticipation among highly skilled men are unchanged since the 1960 s second what factors have caused jobless time to rise there are many theories including changes in labor force demographics social programs that discourage employment and changes in the amount of frictional unemployment caused by sectoral shifts none of these is consistent with the evidence which points instead to a secular decline in the demand for lessskilled workers the data also cast doubt on nonmarket clearing models of rising unemployment wages are demonstrably flexible in the long run and they have fallen dramatically among the unskilled whose jobless rates have risen third what happens to the unemployed in contrast to the view that unemployment spells cause transitory reductions in income recent evidence indicates that job losses have substantial and permanent effects on earning power many of the unskilled who are unemployed or out of the labor force appear to have been high wage workers whose specialized skills have become obsolete

imperfect information and cross autocorrelation among stock prices i develop a model to explain why stock returns are positively cross autocorrelated when market makers observe noisy signals about the value of their stocks but cannot instantaneously condition prices on the signals of other stocks which contain marketwide information the pricing error of one stock is correlated with the other signals as market makers adjust prices after observing true values or previous price changes of other stocks stock returns become positively crossautocorrelated if the signal quality differs among stocks the cross autocorrelation pattern is asymmetric i show that both own and cross autocorrelations are higher when market movements are larger

caps on political lobbying the cost of political campaigns in the u s has risen substantially in recent years for example real spending on congressional election campaigns doubled between 1976 and 1992 steven d levitt 1995 there are many reasons why increased campaign spending might be socially harmful first increased spending means increased fund raising which may keep politicians from their legislative duties 1 second a lobbyist who makes a large campaign contribution may have undue influence on electoral outcomes on the shaping of legislation or on the outcome of regulatory proceedings 2 that is the socially preferred candidate or legislation may not prevail likewise a lobbyist involved in a regulatory matter or a competition for a government contract may benefit unduly from a legislator s intervention 3 third a perception that campaign contributions purchase influence may lead to increased tolerance of corruption in the private sector a desire to control campaign spending has spawned many initiatives to limit both campaign contributions and spending beginning with the passage of the federal election campaign act feca political action committees pacs can contribute at most 5 000 per election to a candidate while individuals can contribute at most 1 000 restrictions have also been put on in kind contributions making it more difficult to circumvent these limits 4 while direct restrictions on campaign spending have proven difficult to implement recent initiatives aim to impose voluntary spending limits and stricter limits on contributions 5 despite the existing legislation and the proposals to limit contributions little is known about the impact of contribution limits on aggregate expenditures while it is intuitively appealing that aggregate expenditures would drop we challenge that intuition here we study a lobbying game and show that a cap on individual lobbyists expenditures may have the perverse effect of increasing aggregate expenditures and loweri this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

heterogeneous risk loss aversion in complete information all pay auctions we extend previous theoretical work on n player complete information all pay auctions to incorporate heterogeneous risk and loss averse utility functions we provide sufficient and necessary conditions for the existence of equilibria with a given set of active players with any strictly increasing utility functions and characterize the players equilibrium mixed strategies assuming that players can be ordered by their risk aversion player a is more risk averse than player b if whenever player b prefers a certain payment over a given lottery so does player a we find that in equilibrium the more risk averse players either bid higher than the less risk averse players and win with higher ex ante probability or they drop out furthermore while each player s expected bid decreases with the other players risk aversion her expected bid increases with her own risk aversion thus increasing a player s risk aversion creates two opposing effects on total expected bid a sufficient condition for the total expected bid to decrease with a player s risk aversion is that this player is relatively more risk averse compared to the rest of the players our findings have important implications for the literature on gender differences in competitiveness and for gender diversity in firms that use personnel contests for promotions

means testing versus universal provision in poverty alleviation programs this paper contrasts the use of means tested and universal schemes in the alleviation of poverty using a class of poverty measures the authors illustrate the trade off from the fact that means testing is costly to both the government and the claimant while universal provision entails a leakage to the nonpoor the paper provides numerical as well as analytical results copyright 1990 by the london school of economics and political science

how financial incentives induce disability insurance recipients to return to work using a local randomized experiment that arises from a sharp discontinuity in disability insurance di policy in norway we provide transparent and credible identification of how financial incentives induce di recipients to return to work we find that many di recipients have considerable capacity to work that can be effectively induced by providing financial work incentives we further show that providing work incentives to di recipients may both increase their disposable income and reduce program costs our findings also suggest that targeted policies may be the most effective in encouraging di recipients to return to work

male labour force participation following illness or injury this paper develops a model of the disabled individual s labour force participation decision following illness or injury and confronts it with data on the financial consequences of ill health a utility function is specified which allows for the effect of changes in health on work leisure preferences and is evaluated in relation to a household budget constraint estimation is through maximization of the appropriate likelihood function correcting for self selection bias within a switching regression model results are presented showing significant effects of financial variables on participation and these are seen to vary with age disability and income

portfolio serial correlation and nonsynchronous trading common stock portfolios of large heavily traded firms exhibit daily first order serial correlation in excess of what would be expected given the individual security coefficients further this correlation rises as the number of securities in the portfolio increases the direct implication of this finding is that nonsynchronous trading is not the only cause of correlation in daily market indices related implications are also discussed

a transactions data analysis of nonsynchronous trading weekly returns of stock portfolios exhibit substantial autocorrelation analytical studies suggest that nonsynchronous trading is capable of explaining from 5 to 65 of the autocorrelation the varying importance of nonsynchronous trading in these studies arises primarily from differing assumptions regarding nontrading periods of stocks we simulate the effects of nonsynchronous trading by sampling stock returns from a return generating process using transactions data to obtain the precise time of each stock s last trade we find that simulated weekly portfolio returns exhibit autocorrelations that are roughly 25 that of their observed crsp weekly returns article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

family welfare cultures strong intergenerational correlations in various types of welfare use have fuelled a long standing debate over whether welfare receipt in one generation causes welfare participation in the next generation some claim a causal relationship in welfare receipt across generations has created a culture in which welfare use reinforces itself through the family others argue the determinants of poverty or poor health are correlated across generations so that children s welfare participation is associated with but not caused by parental welfare receipt however there is little empirical evidence to sort out these claims in this paper we investigate the existence and importance of family welfare cultures in the context of norway s disability insurance di system to overcome the challenge of correlated unobservables across generations we take advantage of random assignment of judges to di applicants whose cases are initially denied some appeal judges are systematically more lenient which leads to random variation in the probability a parent will be allowed di using this exogenous variation we find strong evidence that welfare receipt in one generation causes welfare participation in the next generation when a parent is allowed di their adult child s participation over the next five years increases by 6 percentage points this effect grows over time rising to 12 percentage points after ten years while these findings are specific to our setting they serve to highlight that welfare reforms can have long lasting effects on program participation since any original effect on the current generation could be reinforced by changing the participation behavior of their children as well the detailed nature of our data allows us to compare the intergenerational transmission with spillover effects in other networks and to explore mechanisms our findings point to a special link between parents and their children with little impact due to close neighbors di participation we find suggestive evidence that what may change as a result of a parent being allowed di is their children s beliefs about the efficacy of trying to get on to the di program or their attitudes about di participation and its stigma

measurement error in models of welfare participation we consider the problem of modeling welfare participation when measurement error may affect simulated welfare entitlement we identify a flaw in past implementations of the ml approach and develop a more appropriate ml approach a model of welfare participation is estimated for british pensioners linking the probability of participation to the value of benefit entitlement incorporating the nonlinear rule relating entitlement to the household s income and financial assets the model is used to evaluate the claim costs incurred by participants when we allow for measurement errors in income and assets estimated claim costs are substantially reduced

modelling the take up of state support abstract we discuss the modelling of the take up of state support by going beyond the standard analysis and recognising that both the researcher and the welfare agency make errors is assessing entitlement we apply the discussion to an examination of the take up of supplementary benefits in britain by explicitly modelling the costs to taking up state support we can illustrate how these costs can dampen the welfare impact of state support and mitigate or aggravate welfare agency errors in assessing entitlement

factor related and specific returns of common stocks serial correlation and market inefficiency one of the most basic tests of market efficiency is the test for serial correlation of returns if the return on a typical stock in period t is correlated with its return in period t 1 then the best unbiased minimum mean square error prediction for the return in period t equals the prior return multiplied by the correlation coefficient an investor concerned only about the mean and variance of portfolio return would use the prediction to improve the mean variance trade off of portfolio return by shading the portfolio toward stocks predicted to have high returns and away from stocks predicted to have low returns hence using knowledge about the previous month s returns the investor produces a portfolio with superior mean variance performance this violates the weak form of market efficiency fama 1 in the sense that the expected return for each stock based upon knowledge of the previous month s return is different from the expected return based only upon the current stock price the same argument may be applied to any component of returns as distinct from total return for example in a linear multiple factor plus specific return model of security returns total excess return is decomposed into factor related return and specific return the empirical results in this paper find positive serial dependence in the factor related component and negative serial dependence in the specific component which nearly offset one another resulting in zero correlation in total excess returns formally

agency and the design of welfare systems abstract transfers to the needy are administered by social workers whose job it is to tag welfare applicants to determine eligibility for disability benefits the accuracy of tagging depends on the effort of the social workers which is private information to prevent shirking and induce optimal effort costly monitoring is required using the framework of optimal non linear taxation we characterize the form of the optimal tax transfer system when the government operates a costly welfare system financed by income taxation higher income persons self select into the income tax system the needy apply for welfare if tagged they receive a disability benefit if untagged they receive general welfare benefits we characterize circumstances under which welfare recipients should or should not be induced to work the structure of the optimal tax transfer system and the optimal payment and monitoring of social workers

information and participation in social programs participation in social programs such as clubs and other social organizations results from a process in which an agent learns about the requirements benefits and likelihood of acceptance related to a program applies to be a participant and finally is accepted or rejected we propose a model of this participation process and provide an application of the model using data from a social program in mexico our empirical analysis illustrates that decision at each stage of the process are responsive to expectations about the decisions and outcomes at the subsequent stages and that knowledge about the program can have a significant impact on participation outcomes

the welfare cost of means testing pensioner participation in income support we estimate parametric and semi parametric binary choice models of benefit take up by british pensioners and use a revealed preference argument to infer the cash equivalent value of disutility arising from stigma or complexity of the claims process these implicit costs turn out to be relatively small averaging about 3 4 per week across income support recipients using the foster greer thorbecke measure of poverty among pensioners we find that allowing for implicit claim costs incurred by benefit recipients raises the measured degree of poverty by not more than 13 copyright 2007 john wiley sons ltd

dissipation of contestable rents by small numbers of contenders the theory of rent seeking with its origins in the observations of gordon tullock 1967 or to use jagdish bhagwati s 1982 proposed term the theory of directly unproductive profit seeking activities is concerned with the potentially adverse effects on resource allocation of incentives to cap ture and defend artificially contrived rents and transfers the scope for so cial loss proposed by the theory derives from the relation between the value of a contestable prize and the value of the resources attracted into the con test to determine the beneficiary of the prize underlying this social loss is a specification of how rational behavior by optimizing agents links the value of the prize sought to the resources expended it has been traditional to assume competitive behavior in describing the activities of lobbying and influence seeking then if some further condi tions are satisfied l the total value of the resources expended precisely equals the value of the prize sought so dissipation is complete 2 conse quently the social cost associated with contestability of a rent can be in ferred from the value of the rent itself and the detailed and hard to come by information on individual outlays made in the course of the contest be comes unnecessary by basing their analyses on competitive dissipation contributors to the rent seeking literature see the review by robert tollison 1982 have been able to presume that the observed value of a contested rent is an exact measure of the associated social cost of monopoly power or regu lation similarly in the trade theoretic literature where the rights contested are to quota premia or revenues from trade taxes krueger 1974 bhagwati

do local officials know something we don t decentralization of targeted transfers in albania abstract albania provides a small amount of social assistance to nearly 20 of its population through a system which allows a degree of community discretion in determining distribution this study indicates that relative to other safety net programs in low income countries social assistance in albania is fairly well targeted to the poor moreover the poverty targeting exceeds that which could be expected on the basis of proxy indicators of targeting alone communes appear to be using local information unlikely to be obtained on the basis of a questionnaire or formula this remains the case conditional on the level of funding allocated from the central government

viewpoint innovations in the theory and practice of redistribution policy we present a survey of key results from second best optimal redistribution theory and their implications for tax transfer policy the core results include the corlett hague theorem the deaton conditions the production efficiency theorem the atkinson stiglitz theorem and the mirrlees saez characterization of the optimal non linear income tax system these have been augmented in recent years by optimal participation tax rates the implications of involuntary unemployment the use of unconventional instruments such as minimum wages in kind transfer and workfare and the optimal taxation of capital income and bequests l auteur presente un survol des principaux resultats theoriques de la redistribution optimale de second ordre et de leurs implications pour les politiques d imposition et de transferts les resultats fondamentaux incluent le theoreme de corlett hague les conditions de deaton les theoremes d efficacite en production le theoreme d atkinson stiglitz ainsi que la caracterisation du systeme optimal d imposition non lineaire du revenu a la mirrlees saez ces derniers resultats ont ete enrichis au cours des dernieres annees par certains autres portant sur les taux d imposition decoulant des allocations conditionnelles les implications du chomage involontaire l usage d instruments non conventionnels tels que le salaire minimum les transferts en nature le workfare ainsi que l imposition optimale des revenus du capital et des legs ces resultats sont exposes et leurs implications pour les politiques d imposition et de transferts sont discutees

friction in the trading process and the estimation of systematic risk abstract this paper considers how estimates of the market model beta parameter can be biased by friction in the trading process information decision and transaction costs that a leads to a distinction between observed and true returns b causes observed returns to be generated asynchronously for a set of interdependent securities and c thereby introduces serial cross correlation into security returns several propositions are derived from which consistent estimators of beta are obtained and the effect of differencing interval length on beta estimates is specified the formulation is contrasted with the related analyses of scholes williams 1977 and dimson 1979

taxes and employment subsidies in optimal redistribution programs this paper explores how to optimally set taxes and transfers when taxation authorities 1 are uninformed about individuals value of time in both market and non market activities and 2 can observe both market income and time allocated to market employment we show that optimal redistribution in this environment involves distorting market employment upwards for low wage individuals through decreasing wage contingent employment subsidies and distorting employment downwards for high wage individuals through positive and increasing marginal income tax rates in particular we show that whether a person is taxed or subsidized depends primarily on his wage with the optimal program involving a cut off wage whereby workers above the cutoff are taxed as they increase their income while workers earning a wage below the cutoff receive an income supplement as they increase their income finally we show that the optimal program transfers zero income to individuals who choose not to work

disability transfers and the work decision of older men the potential causal relationship between the availability and generosity of disability transfers and the nonparticipation rates of older men is often asserted and much studied parsons 1980 haveman and wolfe 1984 leonard 1986 however estimates of the magnitude of this linkage vary widely the growth in transfer availability and generosity has been credited with from 30 to 100 percent of the significant post 1960 fall in older male participation rates the disparity in these research results stems primarily from 1 alternative sources of data that differentially constrain estimation of relevant expected wage and transfer incomes 2 specifications that are unable to distinguish income transfer from labor market effects and 3 reliance on measures of health status that are endogenous to the work leisure decision this study seeks to narrow the range of estimates by addressing each of these issues our utility maximization model of work status choice assumes that workers who differ in health status choose between the mutually exclusive options of working at the wage offered for their characteristics and accepting public or private disability transfers because the income flows in the two options are censored they are estimated using switching regression techniques as expectations conditional on exogenous individual characteristics hence accounting for the potentially endogenous process that separates wage earners from transfer recipients the marginal utilities of income from the two sources are allowed to differ because of stigma effects in the estimation we adjust the choice based nature of our sample employ longitudinal earnings data to measure expected changes in as distinct from the expected level of income in the two options and use a separately estimated latent health status measure largely purged of its endogeneity with the participation decision

the rise in the disability rolls and the decline in unemployment between 1984 and 2001 the share of nonelderly adults receiving social security disability insurance income di rose by 60 percent to 5 3 million beneficiaries rapid program growth despite improving aggregate health appears to be explained by reduced screening stringency declining demand for less skilled workers and an unforeseen increase in the earnings replacement rate we estimate that the sum of these forces doubled the labor force exit propensity of displaced high school dropouts after 1984 lowering measured u s unemployment by one half a percentage point steady state calculations augur a further 40 percent increase in the rate of di receipt

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

hypothesis testing with the sharpe and treynor portfolio abstract using the scholes and williams 1977 model consistent estimates of the variances and covariances of security returns under conditions of non synchronous trading are derived the effects of using such corrected estimates on the measurement of portfolio performance are illustrated by assessing the performance of a value and equally weighted portfolio of all the stocks issued under the quebec stock savings plan qssp

an economic model of welfare stigma perhaps the most basic assumption of the economic theory of consumer demand is that more is better than less virtually all of the major propositions of consumer theory can in a certain sense be derived from the assumption that goods are good interestingly however this tenet seems to be violated by the behavior of many individuals in the low income population for many turn out to be eligible for a positive welfare benefit but do not in fact join the welfare rolls for example it has been estimated that in 1970 only about 69 percent of the families eligible for afdc aid to families with dependent children participated in the program see richard michel 1980 the corresponding percentage for afdc u the program for which families with an unemployed male are eligible was only 43 percent and the participation rate in the food stamp program was only 38 percent see maurice mcdonald 1977 this phenomenon has puzzled many investigators because such individuals do not locate on the boundaries of their budget sets consequently most investigators ignore the problem when studying the effects of welfare programs on behavior in this paper this seemingly irrational rejection of an increase in income is modeled as resulting from welfare stigma that is from disutility arising from participation in a welfare program per se 1 the existence of stigma has been amply documented in the sociological literature patrick horan and patricia austin 1974 lee rainwater 1979 where interviews of recipients have often uncovered feelings of lack of self respect and negative self characterizations from participation in welfare nevertheless this phenomenon has not been modeled and many questions consequently remain when is the disutility of participation strong enough to prevent participation shouldn t we expect individuals to weigh the disutility of participation against the potential benefit in their decisions what is the elasticity of participation with respect to the potential benefit also in a slightly different vein how are the work disincentives of welfare affected by stigma these questions have been given scant attention by economists yet they are crucial for our ability to predict the impact of various welfare programs on the lowincome population here these questions are addressed by modeling nonparticipation as a utility maximizing decision the model is developed and estimated for the afdc program 2 the model posits an individual utility function containing not just disposable income but

living standards and incentives in transition the implications of ui exhaustion in hungary the single most likely way to leave the unemployment insurance ui register in hungary is not by getting a job but by exhausting entitlement to benefit two questions follow first what are the implications of the cessation of ui for living standards second does ui exhaustion have much effect on the probability of getting a job through increasing incentives to work we investigate these issues with a survey of persons exhausting entitlement to ui in summer 1995 paying special attention to the household circumstances of the unemployed and to the probabilities of claiming and being awarded means tested assistance benefit

market serial correlation on a small security market a note this note reports on an empirical investigation into the relative importance of different explanations of market serial correlation market serial correlation taken as the first order serial correlation in the logarithmic differences of a market index may apparently be explained by the serial correlation of individual stock returns the other less apparent explanation advanced in the literature concerns nonsynchronous trading in individual stocks recently perry 9 and atchinson butler and simonds 1 1 have shown that there seems to be yet an additional unexplained component present that tends to induce serial correlation in portfolio returns at least in u s data in this paper the actual contribution of these explanations to the first order autocorrelation of changes in the value weighted market index on a markedly thin security market the helsinki stock exchange hese 2 in finland will be examined the hese is a specific case in the sense that its trading procedure may create additional first order market serial correlation we will show that the rules of the exchange produce additional intraday nonsynchroneity in stock returns and thus aggravate the problem of market serial correlation an attempt to assess the importance of this additional cause of market serial correlation will also be made in 1966 lawrence fisher 7 observed that an index return calculated on the basis of the latest recorded trading prices will tend to be serially correlated if share prices tend to react similarly to certain types of news this will be the case when some share prices react almost immediately whereas others simply because of an absence of trading will experience a reaction delay if nonsynchronous trading is taken to be the first cause of market serial correlation the second one is the serial correlation of individual stock returns cohen hawawini maier schwartz and whitcomb 6 review the literature on why individual stock returns especially in thin markets may be serially corre

the growth in the social security disability rolls a fiscal crisis unfolding the u s social security disability insurance di program has grown dramatically over the last 20 years in size and expense this growth poses significant risks to the finances of the di program and the broader social security system and raises troubling questions as to whether the program is being misused by claimants this article first provides an overview of the disability insurance program describing who qualifies for the program how an individual applies for benefits and how the level of benefits is determined next we summarize the factors responsible for the growth in the di rolls and discuss how the characteristics of di recipients have changed as a result we then explore the extent of moral hazard in the di program and the effectiveness of the screening process in distinguishing meritorious from nonmeritorious claims finally we identify the challenges that the di program creates for social security finances and social security reform and discuss potential reforms to the di program

the health and earnings of rejected disability insurance applicants applicants for social security disability benefits who fail to pass the medical screening form a natural control group for beneficiaries data drawn from the 1972 and 1978 surveys of the disabled done for the social security administration show that fewer than 50 percent of rejected male applicants work typical earnings of those that do are less than 59 percent of median earnings for other men their age these data cast doubt on recent econometric work that suggests that the disincentive effects of the social security disability program have been substantial copyright 1989 by american economic association

disability earnings income and consumption using longitudinal data for the period 1968 2005 for a sample of male household heads we determine the prevalence of disability during the working years and examine how the extent of disability affects a range of outcomes including earnings income and consumption we have seven main findings first disability rates are high we divide the disabled along two dimensions based on the persistence and severity of their work limiting condition we estimate that a person reaching age 56 has a 53 percent chance of having been disabled at least once during his working years and a 19 percent chance that he has begun a chronic and severe disability second the economic consequences of disability are frequently profound ten years after disability onset a person with a chronic and severe disability on average experiences a 68 percent decline in earnings a 32 percent decline in after tax income a 22 percent decline in food and housing consumption and a 21 percent decline in food consumption third the various economic consequences differ sharply across disability groups the outcome declines for those with a chronic and severe disability are often more than twice as large as those for the average disabled fourth our findings show the partial and incomplete roles that individual savings family support and social insurance play in reducing the consumption drop that follows disability only about half of this most disabled group reports receiving social security disability insurance or supplemental security income fifth we find a noticeable fall in earnings and income prior to the onset of a reported disability consumption also falls somewhat suggesting that future disability is partially but incompletely predictable in the short run sixth time use and detailed consumption data further indicate that disability is associated with a decline in well being seventh the quantities we have estimated combined with elasticities from the literature allow us to examine the optimality of current compensation for the disabled we find that the current compensation for our most disabled group appears to be lower than is optimal

trends in employment and earnings of allowed and rejected applicants to the social security disability insurance program since the early 1980s changes in the economic environment and in the process for determining eligibility for the social security disability insurance di program have had significant effects on the program first the economic situation and labor force opportunities for lower skilled people continued to decline leading to lower rates of participation in the labor force for less educated men second changes in the eligibility process made it easier to obtain di benefits based on conditions difficult to clearly identify on medical terms alone such as back pain or depression 1 those two factors have likely contributed to a substantial increase in the number of individuals receiving di as well as a significant change in the characteristics of applicants and new beneficiaries over the same period both applicants and new beneficiaries have become younger longer lived more likely to apply because of nonterminal conditions such as back pain or mental health and more likely to be female 2 as a result recent work projects a rapid increase in program costs as greater numbers of beneficiaries stay on the program for more years e g david h autor and duggan 2006 the concurrent developments in the economy and eligibility rules have also fueled the concern that the generosity of di increasingly induces low income workers to apply for and sometimes receive benefits and that some of those beneficiaries would be able to work in the absence of the program indeed a growing body of research suggests that some workers in difficult economic conditions exit the labor force to

targeting transfers through restrictions on recipients our objective is to design transfer programs that maximize some social welfare function following the optimal income tax formulation we assume that a random process endows individuals with characteristics that influence welfare such as ability to earn income medical condition or unmonitorable income the goal is to maximize the utility of a randomly chosen individual other individualistic social welfare functions would lead to equivalent results if the random characteristics were observable a first best outcome could be achieved by making them the basis for lump sum transfers in practice however we can observe only indicators of these characteristics such as earnings medical expenditures or consumption patterns the challenge for policy is to design an efficient second best transfer program based on indicators in this paper we argue that 1 an optimal transfer program in general must sacrifice productive efficiency to target efficiency this is done by imposing restrictions on the choices made by intended beneficiaries 2 a program that incorporates restrictions such as means tested in kind transfers commodity specific taxes and subsidies and even ordeals i e the imposition of deadweight costs to qualify for a transfer will perform better than programs that rely solely on income taxes and cash transfers

the gender difference in the value of winning we design an all pay auction experiment in which we reveal the gender of the opponent using this design we find that women bid higher than men but only when bidding against other women these findings interpreted through a theoretical model incorporating differences in risk attitude and the value of winning suggest that women have a higher value of winning than men

invention and innovation under alternative market structures the case of natural resources this paper examines the interactions between market structure and resource allocation over time when there is endogenous technical progress the structures considered are a planned economy pure monopoly and competition with patent rights in an efficient allocation the date of invention coincides with the date of innovation the date at which technology is used this is also true with a pure monopoly but monopoly retards technical progress relative to the efficient level competition for patents rights to a new technology results in excessively rapid technical progress if the resource endowment of the economy is sufficiently large also competition may lead to sleeping patents where invention strictly precedes the date of innovation

rigging the lobbying process an application of the all pay auction textabstractin a world where a politician can explicitly auction off a prize to the high bidder the standard auction literature can be used to analyse political behavior the justice system however precludes politicians from explicitly selling the prize to the highest bidder thus politicians cannot let it become public knowledge that they are in the business of selling political favors an institution has emerged in political markets to overcome this constraint which are termed as lobbying lobbyists make implicit payments to the politician through campaign contributions if these up front payments were rebated to those failing to receive the prize it would be clear that the politician was selling favors this article has examined an interesting principle arising in all pay auctions this principle states that a politician wishing to maximize political rents may find it in his best interest to exclude certain lobbyists from participating in the lobbying process particularly lobbyists valuing most the political prize

why do disability benefit rolls vary between regions a review of the evidence from the usa and the uk mcvicar d 2006 why do disability benefit rolls vary between regions a review of the evidence from the usa and the uk regional studies 40 519 533 over the last 30 years many organization for economic co operation and development oecd countries have seen a dramatic rise in the share of the working age population receiving earnings replacement sickness and disability benefits the reasons behind this growth particularly for the usa but also to a lesser extent elsewhere have been extensively researched in the economics literature what have been less well researched are the large spatial differences in the size of disability benefit rolls that have emerged in some countries over this period the uk displays a distinct regional pattern where working age men and women in the north are considerably more likely to be claiming disability benefits than those in the south the usa has its own version of the north south divide with many southern states displaying disproportionately large disabilit

disability insurance rejection rates and the labor supply of older workers abstract we investigate the effects of trying to mitigate moral hazard in the disability insurance di program by raising the stringency of the screening process for applicants we do so by studying a dramatic increase in rejection rates for the di program in the late 1970s which varied substantially across the us states we find that each 10 rise in denial rates led to a statistically significant 2 8 fall in labor force non participation among 45 64 year old males we also find that the denial rate increases effectively targeted their incentive effects to more able individuals according to an anthropometric measure of disability

nonsynchronous security trading and market index autocorrelation the theoretical portfolio autocorrelation due solely to nonsynchronous trading is estimated from a derived model this estimated level is found to be substantially less than that observed empirically the theoretical and empirical relationship between portfolio size and autocorrelation also is investigated the results of this study suggest that other price adjustment delay factors in addition to nonsynchronous trading cause the high autocorrelations present in daily returns on stock index portfolios

modelling the take up of means tested benefits the case of housing benefits in the united kingdom official estimates of housing benefit take up rates suggest that up to two million families in the united kingdom ma y not be receiving the help with their housing costs to which they ar e entitled the authors interest in the take up of means tested bene fits is therefore motivated by two concerns the first is the governm ent revenue implications of a change to benefit entitlement levels t he second relates to the welfare of individuals who fail to claim the ir entitlement to benefit in this paper the authors investigate the relationship between the take up of means tested housing benefit in dividual socioeconomic characteristics and the level of entitlement copyright 1987 by royal economic society

optimal income transfer programs intensive versus extensive labor supply responses this paper analyzes optimal income transfers for low incomes labor supply responses are modeled along the intensive margin intensity of work on the job and along the extensive margin participation into the labor force when behavioral responses are concentrated along the intensive margin the optimal transfer program is a classical negative income tax program with a substantial guaranteed income support and a large phasing out tax rate however when behavioral responses are concentrated along the extensive margin the optimal transfer program is similar to the earned income tax credit with negative marginal tax rates at low income levels and a small guaranteed income carefully calibrated numerical simulations are provided

does disability insurance receipt discourage work using examiner assignment to estimate causal effects of ssdi receipt abstract we present the first causal estimates of the effect of social security disability insurance benefit receipt on labor supply using all program applicants we use administrative data to matc

self screening in targeted public transfer programs the self screening properties of initial eligibility determination a mechanism often under the control of the administrators of targeted transfer programs are derived and the use of this mechanism in the social security disability insurance system is explored empirically an increase in the rigor of initial eligibility screening may discourage potential applicants because they are unaware of appeal prospects and because the eligibility decision delay is lengthened as denied applicants are forced to appeal their claims in the disability program a 10 percent increase in the initial denial rate induces a 4 percent decrease in applications self selection is nonperverse

the relationship between daily u s and japanese equity prices evidence from spot versus futures markets abstract the daily and overnight transmission of equity prices between the u s and japan is examined in this paper this study documents that the use of the opening value of an equity index to represent equity prices at the open is unlikely to be reliable and the calculated opening values of the nikkei 225 and especially the s p500 indexes mostly reflect prior days closing prices unlike prior studies this paper accounts for this problem of non synchronous trading at the open and finds that u s equity prices do not lead japanese equity prices as both u s and japanese opening equity prices reflect overnight price changes in the other market

all pay contests this paper studies a class of games all pay contests which capture general asymmetries and sunk investments inherent in scenarios such as lobbying competition for market power labor market tournaments and r d races players compete for one of several identical prizes by choosing a score conditional on winning or losing it is weakly better to do so with a lower score this formulation allows for differing production technologies costs of capital prior investments attitudes toward risk and conditional and unconditional investments among others i provide a closed form formula for players equilibrium payoffs and analyze player participation a special case of contests is multiprize complete information all pay auctions

targeting at the margin the glass of milk subsidy programme in peru this article evaluates the vaso de leche vl feeding programme in peru in order to illustrate an evaluation methodology based on targeting criteria for a decentralised transfer programme we find that the degree of overall targeting of poor individuals attributable to the central government s choice of districts is greater than that attributable to choice of participants within districts made by the municipalities and the mothers committees however when we use a version of a targeting efficiency measure first introduced by galasso and ravallion 2003 which we modify to be defined on the values of allocations the opposite is the case the community based decision makers appear to be targeting the poor in terms of the values of the transfers

economic aspects of optimal disability benefits this paper analyzes optimal disability and retirement or welfare benefits with imperfect disability evaluation with some able workers judged disabled and some disabled workers judged able thus the levels of both disability and retirement benefits affect labor supply with anyone not working eligible for retirement benefits we analyze the optimal structure of benefits for a given disability screening mechanism and briefly consider the problem of optimal evaluations of disability evidence in the united states there is an overlap in eligibility for disability and retirement portions of social security more generally welfare is sometimes available to people denied disability benefits

targeting performance under self selection and administrative targeting methods abstract we evaluate the contributions of self selection and administrative targeting to program targeting performance using unique household survey data collected for the evaluation of a mexican social program that has acted as a regional prototype both forms of targeting improve targeting performance but administrative selection based on proxy means testing plays a crucial role in reducing total program coverage to meet a budget constraint while maintaining high coverage among the lowest income groups its importance is reinforced when existing knowledge barriers to participation are addressed reflecting the high application rates among higher income groups conditional on knowledge differentiating transfers based on household demographics also substantially improves targeting performance reflecting the linking of transfers to the number of children although expansion of the program to reduce the remaining undercoverage is likely to come at the expense of targeting performance this trade off can

aching to retire the rise in the full retirement age and its impact on the social security disability rolls abstract the social security amendments of 1983 reduced the generosity of social security retired worker benefits in the u s by increasing the program s full retirement age from 65 to 67 and increasing the penalty for claiming benefits at the early retirement age of 62 these changes were phased in gradually so that individuals born in or before 1937 were unaffected and those born in 1960 or later were fully affected no corresponding changes were made to the program s disabled worker benefits and thus the relative generosity of social security disability insurance ssdi benefits increased in this paper we investigate the effect of the amendments on ssdi enrollment by exploiting variation across birth cohorts in the policy induced reduction in the present value of retired worker benefits our findings indicate that the amendments significantly increased ssdi enrollment since 1983 with an additional 0 6 of men and 0 9 of women between the ages of 45 and 64 receiving ssdi benefits in 2005 as a result of the changes our results further indicate that these effects will continue to increase during the next two decades as those fully exposed to the reduction in retirement benefit generosity reach their fifties and early sixties

a pure jump transaction level price model yielding cointegration we propose a new transaction level bivariate log price model that yields fractional or standard cointegration the model provides a link between market microstructure and lower frequency observations the two ingredients of our model are a long memory stochastic duration process for the waiting times k between trades and a pair of stationary noise processes ek and k which determine the jump sizes in the pure jump log price process our model includes feedback between the disturbances of the two log price series at the transaction level which induces standard or fractional cointegration for any fixed sampling interval t we prove that the cointegrating parameter can be consistently estimated by the ordinary least squares estimator and we obtain a lower bound on the rate of convergence we propose transaction level method of moments estimators of the other parameters in our model and discuss the consistency of these estimators

cost minimizing welfare programs abstract we study opportunities for lowering the cost of welfare programs by exploiting heterogeneity in the unobservable tastes of welfare recipients relying on the inability of cash based programs to achieve self selection we provide circumstances in which it is optimal to provide payments in kind our model differs from other self selection models because we allow the recipients the opportunity to trade the subsequent to the receipt of their welfare packages the presence of unreported cash among the recipient population is considered

the october 1987 s p 500 stock futures basis five minute changes in the s p 500 index and futures contract are examined over a ten day period surrounding the october 1987 stock market crash since nonsynchronous trading problems are severe in these data new index estimators are derived and used the estimators use the complete transaction history of all 500 stocks nonsynchronous trading explains part of the large absolute futures cash basis observed during the crash the remainder may be due to disintegration of the two markets even after adjustment for nonsynchronous trading the index displays more autocorrelation than does the futures and the futures leads the index

the impact of economic conditions on participation in disability programs evidence from the coal boom and bust abstract we examine the impact of the coal boom of the 1970 s and the coal bust of the 1980 s on disability program participation these shocks provide clear evidence that as the value of labor market participation increases disability program participation falls for the disability insurance program the elasticity of payments with respect to local earnings is between 0 3 and 0 4 and for supplemental security income the elasticity is between 0 4 and 0 7 consistent with a model where qualifying for disability programs is costly the relationship between economic conditions and program participation is much stronger for permanent than for transitory economic shocks

a tale of three schools insights on autocorrelations of short horizon stock returns this article reexamines the autocorrelation patterns of short horizon stock returns we document empirical results which imply that these autocorrelations have been overstated in the existing literature based on several new insights we provide support for a market efficiency based explanation of the evidence our analysis suggests that institutional factors are the most likely source of the autocorrelation patterns

contests with three or more heterogeneous agents abstract we study monotone equilibrium behavior in contests with observable effort bid where three or more participants have distinct risk attitudes and the monetary value for the prize of each is drawn independently from a distinct distribution these differences can either cause a player to drop out that is always choose zero effort regardless of his valuation or use all or nothing strategies with discontinuous effort choice neither complete drop out nor discontinuous bidding with finitely many gaps is consistent with pure strategy monotone bayesian nash equilibrium in a contest with either ex ante identical players or only two distinct participants

equity and policy effectiveness with imperfect targeting abstract we propose a general approach that jointly integrates horizontal and vertical equity criteria in the assessment of poverty alleviation programs with the strength of each criterion being captured through its own inequity aversion parameter this contrasts with the assessment of poverty alleviation programs done with simple under coverage and leakage ratios or with other methods that do not take into account the heterogeneity of the poor and that do not address directly the social benefits of achieving normative criteria our methodology is illustrated using tunisian data and two alternative poverty alleviation policies we find inter alia that the social ranking of commodity and socio demographic targeting in tunisia depends on the policymaker s comparative preference for vertical and horizontal equity

imperfect tagging in social insurance programs abstract this paper derives the optimal benefit structure of an earnings insurance program when a characteristic or tag imperfectly identifies those unable to work with a two sided classification error the optimal program is a dual work incentive system with a work non work consumption differential maintained for the tagged and untagged just sufficient to induce the able in each group to work and with more generous payments to tagged than to untagged individuals of the same work status it includes premiums to program eligible individuals who work a price missing in the u s social security disability system and in earlier attempts to characterize the optimal disability program

autocorrelation of daily index returns intraday to intraday versus close to close intervals abstract first order autocorrelation coefficients of 1 daily equally weighted open to open returns 2 daily equally weighted intraday to intraday returns terminating at each of 23 successive 15 minute intervals of the trading day beginning at 10 15 a m and 3 daily equally weighted and value weighted close to close returns interval 24 are examined a number of findings concerning the behavior of these autocorrelations are reported first order autocorrelation is shown to follow a crude u shaped pattern when plotted against the time of the trading day but there is no significant difference in the behavior of autocorrelations based on open to open returns and 24 hour returns terminating at 10 15 a m evidence that intraday patterns in autocorrelation cannot be explained fully by trading delays also is presented

asset accumulation and labor force participation of disability insurance applicants abstract this paper provides empirical evidence of the existence of forward looking asset accumulation behavior among disability insurance applicants previously examined only in the theoretical literature using panel data from the rand health and retirement study i show that rejected applicants for social security disability insurance ssdi possess significantly more assets than accepted applicants immediately prior to application and exhibit lower attachment to the labor force these empirical results are consistent with the theoretical prediction in diamond and mirrlees 1978 and golosov and tsyvinski 2006 that certain individuals with high unwillingness to work maximize utility by planning in advance for their future disability insurance application because the existing empirical literature on disability insurance does not account for this intertemporal channel it may underestimate the total work disincentive effect of ssdi

temporary disability insurance and labor supply evidence from a natural experiment most developed countries have compulsory insurance programs for temporary disability that is cash benefits for non work related sickness despite the economic significance of these programs little is known about their effects on work absenteeism or labor supply we exploit a policy reform that consisted of the abolishment of a waiting day together with an increase of cash benefits for short sick leaves we find that the total number of days of sickness absence was reduced by the reform which is likely due to the fact that the abolishment of the waiting period made it less costly for workers to be absent for short periods

estimating the impact of a policy reform on benefit take up the 2001 extension to the minimum income guarantee for uk pensioners in 2001 the minimum income guarantee for uk pensioners was reformed changing the structure and level of benefits we evaluate the behavioural response to this reform using nonparametric analysis comparing a sample of pensioners interviewed before and another interviewed after the reform matching their simulated pre and post reform entitlements and other characteristics we compare the results with conventional parametric methods and also ex ante matching and we consider the effect of measurement error in simulated entitlements the response of take up to the reform is found to be significant and positive with evidence of larger impacts from the nonparametric analysis

optimum taxation with errors in administration abstract the paper compares the welfare levels which can be achieved by two distinct tax regimes lump sum taxation where one attempts to identify individuals and allocate transfers or subsidies on the basis of characteristics and income taxation where characteristics are not observed but personal incomes are measured and taxed where there are no errors in classifying individuals lump sum taxation is superior but where mistakes are made in the allocation of lump sum grants or subsidies income taxation may be more attractive the level of errors where the regimes are equally desirable in terms of social welfare is computed in simple models following that of feldstein 1973 where there is strong aversion to inequality then income taxation becomes preferable at quite small errors in analysing income taxation it is shown that in the feldstein model with endogenous wages the marginal tax rate in optimum income taxation on the more skilled is negative and that on the less skilled is positive in contrast to the standard results see seade 1977 with exogenous wages