cost versus control understanding ownership through outsourcing in hospitals for profit hospitals in california contract out services much more intensely than either private nonprofit or public hospitals to explain why we build a model in which the outsourcing decision is a trade off between cost and control since nonprofit firms are more restricted in how they consume net revenues they experience more rapidly diminishing value of a dollar saved and they are less attracted to a low cost but low control outsourcing opportunity than a for profit firm is this difference is exaggerated in services where the benefits of controlling the details of production are particularly important but minimized when a fixed cost shock raises the marginal value of a dollar of cost savings we test these predictions in a panel of california hospitals finding evidence for each and that the set of services that private non profits are particularly interested in controlling physician intensive services is very different from those than public hospitals are particularly interested in labor intensive services these results suggest that a model of public or nonprofit make or buy decisions should be more than a simple relabeling of a model derived in the for profit context

determinants of donations in private nonprofit markets abstract we estimate the responsiveness of donations to a number of economic variables including price advertising and the availability of revenue from such other sources as government grants and program service sales utilizing a set of irs data on individual nonprofit organizations in each of seven industries including hospitals and higher education for the years 1982 1994 we find distinct overall patterns as well as notable variation across industries a nonprofit organization s fundraising expenditures are estimated to exert two countervailing effects on donations the direct advertising and information effect augments donations while the indirect effect on the price of donating has a negative effect we do not find evidence that fundraising is carried to the profit maximizing levels in some industries fundraising is substantially short of that level while in other industries it is excessive implying that the marginal return to fundraising is exceeded by the cost focusing on whether revenue from other sources affects donations to a nonprofit organization we find evidence that revenue from either government grants or from the organization s own program sales activity generally does not crowd out private donations to the contrary in most industries there are significant positive effects

effects of the price of charitable giving evidence from an online crowdfunding platform abstract a long literature has examined the effects of the price of giving that is the amount an individual must give for one dollar to accrue to the charitable activity itself on donative behavior we use data from donorschoose org an online platform linking teachers with prospective donors that are uniquely suited to addressing this question due to exogenous variation in overhead costs an increased price of giving results in a lower likelihood of a project being funded we also calculate the price elasticity of giving finding estimates between 0 8 and 2 finally we examine the effect of competition on giving and find that increased competition reduces the likelihood of a project being funded these results provide insight into the workings of the market for charitable gifts

are church and state substitutes evidence from the 1996 welfare reform abstract churches provide community services similar to those provided by the government but there has been no convincing analysis of the extent to which church activity can substitute for government activity to address this important issue this paper uses a new panel data set of presbyterian church usa congregations to regress both church member donations and a church s community spending on a number of variables including government welfare expenditures a provision of the 1996 welfare law that decreased the availability and use of welfare services by non citizens serves as an instrument to identify the causal effect of government spending on church activity the results show that church activities substitute for government activities extrapolating the findings to all denominations the estimated crowd out effect lies between 20 and 38 cents on the dollar the results are subjected to a number of robustness tests

public versus private governance a study of incentives and operational performance abstract this study explores incentives and performance in organizations governed by publicly elected boards of directors and subsidized by taxes such organizations are likely to underpay chief executive officers ceos resulting in selection and incentive problems and hence poor operating performance we compare municipal district hospitals to private nonprofit hospitals ceo compensation in district hospitals is significantly lower than in the nonprofits operating margins in district hospitals are lower and deteriorate more rapidly over time we rule out a number of other factors that could explain differences in performance we conclude that the weak governance structure hampers district hospitals

the supply of charity services by nonprofit hospitals motives and market structure this article studies provision of charity care by private nonprofit hospitals we demonstrate that in the absence of large positive income effects on charity care supply convex preferences for the nonprofit hospital imply crowding out by other private or government hospitals extending our model to include impure altruism rivalry provides a possible explanation for the previously reported empirical result that both crowding out and income effects on indigent care supply are often weak or insignificant empirical analysis of data for hospitals in maryland provides evidence of rivalry on the supply of charity care

input demand elasticities for heterogeneous labor firm level estimates and an investigation into the effects of aggregation labor economists have paid increasing attention to the estimation of demand elasticities for heterogeneous labor the majority of these studies investigate the effect on wage rates resulting from exogenous changes in factor quantities i e the measurement of elasticities of complementarity examples of these studies abound borjas for example investigates the impact of differences in labor market representation on the earnings of racial groups 8 in another paper borjas defines immigrants as a separate labor group and is able to determine the impact of immigration on the wages earned by natives 9 berger defines labor inputs along education and gender lines thereby allowing for the investigation of changes in the age education composition of the work force on wage rates 5 and grant and hamermesh study the effect of increasing female labor force participation on the wages earned by youth and adults 17 less attention has been paid to the study of the responsiveness of employment to exogenous changes in wage rates i e the measurement of elasticities of substitution less attention has been focused on this issue because the data requirements are more stringent since in order to presume that wage rates are exogenously determined the unit of observation must be small ideally establishmentor firm level data would be used the relative inaccessibility of these type of data has led researchers to use more aggregated figures such as smsa level or industry level data to address microissues as long as wage rates are determined exogenously the unit of observation chosen is appropriate there are real concerns however about the adequacy of more aggregated units to describe the behavior of firms 2 this study addresses the issue of whether micro level data are in fact needed to accurately measure elasticities of substitution among labor groups a firm level data set that includes input

demand for charity donations in private non profit markets the case of the u k abstract this paper presents estimates of the demand for donations for u k charities in 1985 these estimates make demand depend upon price fund raising expenditure a quality index and alternative revenue sources the price elasticity of donations found here shows for the most part an elastic response and is consistent with previous studies using u s data our empirical results suggest that non profits in the u k unlike their counterparts in the u s are net revenue maximisers we discovered no significant evidence that public donations crowded out private donations in our sample of 300 charities

does welfare spending crowd out charitable activity evidence from historical england under the poor laws this paper examines the relationship between government spending and charitable activity we present a novel way of testing the crowding out hypothesis making use of the fact that welfare provision under the old poor laws was decided on the parish level thus giving the heterogeneity we need to test for the impact of different levels of welfare support within a single country using data on poor relief spending combined with data on charitable incomes by county for two years before and after 1800 we find a positive relationship areas with more public provision also enjoyed higher levels of charitable income these results are confirmed when instrumenting for poor law spending using the distance to london and historical migration to london as well as when looking at first differences

consumer information and competition between nonprofit and for profit nursing homes this paper develops implications of arrow s hypothesis that nonprofit organizations are prevalent in health care because of quality uncertainty the model analyzes the ability of nonprofits to mitigate market failures created by asymmetric information in an environment characterized by potential competition from both explicitly for profit firms and for profits in disguise profit motivated firms who obtain nonprofit status in order to exploit the perceived trustworthiness of the nonprofit sector under certain conditions it is shown that nonprofit status can serve as a credible signal of quality and that nonprofits can decrease the underprovision of quality both by providing high quality services and indirectly via a spillover effect on quality in the for profit sector applicability to long term care and implications for empirical research and policy towards nonprofits in health care are discussed

demand for collective goods in private nonprofit markets can fundraising expenditures help overcome free rider behavior abstract economic theory ascribes the primary role in the provision of public goods to government this emphasis on government overlooks the role of the not for profit sector in providing collective type goods in this paper we seek to determine the factors influencing charitable contributions to private nonprofit organizations by estimating a demand function for the output of these collective good providers specifically we test the hypothesis that voluntary giving is responsive to conventional market variables such as advertising expenditures price and quality overall the results are strongly supportive

a step back as donors shift institution building from the public to the private sector abstract frustrated with public sectors in developing countries donors have shifted support to nonprofit nongovernmental organizations this paper questions the preferability of the nonprofit or public sector from the donor and host country perspectives case study experience from agriculture and natural resource institutions in ecuador and the dominican republic is presented to expand upon current thinking about the role of the nonprofit sector nonprofits are found to possess substantially increased flexibility for donor purposes and avoid many of the pitfalls of the political process they are however subject to free rider problems and bear no responsibility to the general public

war and pestilence as labor market shocks u s manufacturing wage growth 1914 1919 there is not a single expert machinist in the labor market today if such a one exists he will be able to command his own wages the arkansas gazette october 22 1918 1 i introduction the possibility of a worldwide influenza pandemic in the near future is of growing concern for many countries around the globe the world bank estimates that a global influenza pandemic would cost the world economy 800 kill tens of millions of people 2 researchers at the u s centers for disease control and prevention calculate that deaths in the united states could reach 207 000 and the initial cost to the economy could approach 166 billion or roughly 1 5 of gdp 3 the u s department of health and human services paints a more dire picture up to 1 9 million dead in the united states and initial economic costs near 200 billion 4 while researchers and public officials can only speculate on the likelihood of a global influenza pandemic many of the worst case scenario predictions for a current pandemic are based on the global influenza pandemic of 1918 this global pandemic often termed the spanish flu killed 675 000 people in the united states nearly 0 8 of the 1910 population and nearly 40 million people worldwide 5 only the black death of 13481351 is estimated to have killed more people roughly 60 million over a similar time period 6 the global magnitude and spread of the 1918 influenza pandemic was exacerbated by world war i which itself is estimated to have killed roughly 10 million civilians and 9 million troops nicolson 1980 not only did the mass movement of troops from around the world lead to the spread of the disease tens of thousands of allied and central power troops died as a result of the influenza rather than combat although combat deaths in world war i did increase the mortality rates for participating countries civilian mortality rates from the 1918 influenza were typically much higher for the united states estimates of combat related troop mortalities are about one tenth that of civilian mortalities from the 1918 influenza given the magnitudes and the concurrence of both the 1918 influenza pandemic and world war i one would expect volumes of research on the economic effects of each event although there does exist a significant literature on the economic consequences of world war i rockoff 2004 the scope of published research on the economic effects of the 1918 influenza pandemic is scant 8 most research that has been done has focused on the health and economic outcomes of decedents of pandemic survivors almond 2006 keyfits and flieger 1968 and mortality differences across socioeconomic classes mamelund 2006 noymer and garenne 2000 this paper contributes to the literature on the economic effects of the 1918 influenza pandemic and world war i by exploring the influence of mortalities from these concurrent events on the growth of manufacturing wages in u s states and cities over the period 1914 1919 9 the general conceptual foundation for the paper is that ceteris paribus both of these events resulted in a large number of deaths which constituted a significant negative shock to manufacturing labor supply and thereby would have increased wages in the manufacturing sector immediately following both events a similar conceptual framework has been used in studies that explored the economic effects of the black death campbell 1997 karakacili 2004 and the effects of immigration on labor markets borjas 1987 card 1990 greenwood and mcdowell 1986 the analysis presented here is the first to separate the potential manufacturing labor market effects of world war i and the 1918 influenza this is an interesting exercise given that mortalities from the 1918 influenza were nearly ten times greater than world war i combat mortalities but world war i combat mortalities were more likely men aged roughly 18 44 prime ages for manufacturing workers

board composition and nonprofit conduct evidence from hospitals abstract this study uses data from hospitals to test the hypothesis that management representation on nonprofit boards leads to excessive ceo pay defined as compensation that exceeds the level predicted by a market wage model we document a relatively small but statistically significant positive association between ceo pay and insider boards that include the ceo and other employees as members additional tests confirm that this result is not driven by endogenous board structure and that excess pay is greater in the absence of competition from for profit hospitals we then examine whether management board representation is associated with larger underlying agency concerns that lead to reduced donations our tests do not support this hypothesis but do however reveal a negative correlation between donations and physician representation on the board suggesting a potential conflict between the interests of donors and non employee physicians our overall evidence provides empirical support for modeling nonprofit organizations as consisting of competing stakeholders

economics of alliances the lessons for collective action this essay provides an up to date summary of the findings of the literature on the economics of alliances we show that the study of the economics of alliances has played a pivotal role in understanding and applying public good analysis to real world applications we establish that the manner in which alliances address burden sharing and allocative issues is related to strategic doctrines weapon technology perceived threats and membership composition past contributions are evaluated and areas needing further development are identified the theoretical and empirical knowledge gained from the study of alliances is shown to be directly applicable to a wide range of international collectives

migration theories and evidence an assessment abstract this paper presents a critical survey of theories of migration their welfare and policy implications and their empirical relevance we also develop some extensions to the theory beginning with the harris and todaro ht model in particular the ht model is extended to examine risk averse behaviour within families where the migration of members of families serves to diversify risk the welfare implications of the individual migration decision and government intervention in the form of employment subsidies are examined recent evidence on international migration is presented it is shown that migration does not flow automatically in response to wage differentials characteristics of migrants and the process of self selection are found to be important determinants of the rate of migration

the wage impact of the marielitos a reappraisal this article brings a new perspective to the analysis of the wage effects of the mariel boatlift crisis in which an estimated 125 000 cuban refugees migrated to florida between april and october 1980 the author revisits the question of wage impacts from such a supply shock drawing on the cumulative insights of research on the economic impact of immigration that literature shows that the wage impact must be measured by carefully matching the skills of the immigrants with those of the incumbent workforce given that at least 60 of the marielitos were high school dropouts this article specifically examines the wage impact for this low skill group this analysis overturns the prior finding that the mariel boatlift did not affect miami s wage structure the wage of high school dropouts in miami dropped dramatically by 10 to 30 suggesting an elasticity of wages with respect to the number of workers between 0 5 and 1 5

faith based charity and crowd out during the great depression abstract interest in religious organizations as providers of social services has increased dramatically in recent years churches in the u s were a crucial provider of social services through the early part of the twentieth century but their role shrank dramatically with the expansion in government spending under the new deal in this paper we investigate the extent to which the new deal crowded out church charitable spending in the 1930s we do so using a new nationwide data set of charitable spending for six large christian denominations matched to data on local new deal spending we instrument for new deal spending using measures of the political strength of a state s congressional delegation and confirm our findings using a different instrument based on institutional constraints on state relief spending with both instruments we find that higher government spending leads to lower church charitable activity crowd out was small as a share of total new deal spending 3 but large as a share of church spending our estimates suggest that benevolent church spending fell by 30 in response to the new deal and that government relief spending can explain virtually all of the decline in charitable church activity observed between 1933 and 1939

how to measure labour market effects of immigration a review abstract this paper surveys available empirical evidence on labour market effects of immigration many different approaches have been used already to try to find out whether immigration hurts the labour market opportunities of natives no doubt new approaches will follow in the future as globalization will keep the migration issue on the agenda this literature review discusses the different approaches concentrating on both the methodology and the results at the end it tries to summarize available evidence

cross country variation in the impact of international migration canada mexico and the united states using data drawn from the canadian mexican and u s censuses we find a numerically comparable and statistically significant inverse relation between immigrant induced shifts in labor supply and wages in each of the three countries a 10 labor supply shift is associated with a 3 4 opposite signed change in wages despite the similarity in the wage response theimpactofmigrationonthewagestructuredifferssignificantlyacrosscountries international migration narrowed wage inequality in canada increased it in the united states and reduced the relative wage of workers at the bottom of the skill distribution in mexico jel j31 j61

immigration and the labor market outcomes of natives in developing countries a case study of south africa abstractusing south african census data from 2001 2007 and 2011 i examine the effect that immigration had on labor market outcomes of native born black south africans using instrumental variables to control for the potential endogenous location choices of immigrants to south africa the results show that immigrant inflows decreased the employment to population ratios and total annual income of black native born south africans additionally results suggest a negative effect of immigrant inflows on the employment ratio and total annual income of black native born south africans employed in the formal sector results show that immigration caused an intersectoral employment shift for black male south africans the composition of the employed labor force shifted to the formal sector and for black female south africans the composition of the employed labor force shifted to the informal sector

regional labor markets and the determinants of wage inequality from 1972 to 1990 the united states experienced the largest increase in wage inequality of any developed country the spread in log wages between the 90th and 10th percentiles of the male wage distribution increased by about 60 points and inequality increased within virtually every demographic or skill category of the labor force see chinhui juhn et al 1993 various explanations have been offered including changes in the relative demand for skill intensive goods international trade immigration of less skilled workers and increased labor force participation of women yet attempts to quantify the relative importance of these factors have not met with much success this leaves skill biased technical change as the residual claimant that rationalizes the data this paper uses regional differences in the evolution of wage inequality to provide new evidence on the determinants of relative wages using a model of factor demand in geographic markets i isolate contributions of i changing skill ratios in the labor force ii increased participation of women iii technical change and iv changes in the industrial composition of labor demand the data indicate that changing skill ratios and women s labor supply have affected the wages of low skilled men in the west the data indicate that increased immigration of less skilled hispanic and asian workers has adversely affected the wages of natives causing a greater increase in inequality there than in any other region of the country i modeling wage inequality in regional markets

how giving affects giving a long term analysis of donations social preferences theories suggest that at least some people show altruistic behaviour however this philanthropic behaviour ranges from pure altruistic preferences to reluctant altruists the fa

crowd out and diversity abstract research has shown that altruism is lower in diverse communities can this phenomenon be counteracted by government intervention to answer this question this paper introduces diversity to the canonical model of warm glow giving diversity may have two effects on incentives it may attenuate individuals altruistic preferences for public goods and it may cool off the warm glow that individuals get from voluntarism either of these effects leads to diverse communities having lower levels of public goods consistent with prior research however these effects have opposite implications for the efficacy of government intervention i then empirically investigate whether government intervention is more effective in diverse communities for identification i exploit the supreme court mandated 1991 expansion of the ssi program using a new dataset of united methodist churches from 1984 to 2000 the results show that the expansion of ssi crowded out charitable spending by churches the crowd out estimate for the average church is reasonably large but this masks significant differences in crowd out between communities crowd out occurred almost entirely in relatively homogeneous communities there is only modest evidence of crowd out in racially diverse communities thus diverse communities while having the lowest levels of altruism are in this instance the most amenable to government intervention

the impact of immigration on the british labour market using data from the british labour force survey this article provides an empirical investigation of the way immigration affects labour market outcomes of native born workers in britain set beside a theoretical discussion of the underlying economic mechanisms we discuss problems arising in empirical estimation and how to address them we show that the overall skill distribution of immigrants is remarkably similar to that of the native born workforce we find no strong evidence that immigration has overall effects on aggregate employment participation unemployment and wages but some differences according to education

the substitutability of black hispanic and white labor this paper analyzes the extent of labor market competition among blacks hispanics and whites in the united states the specification of a generalized leontief production function leads to an empirically tractable system of input demand functions the estimation of the demand system using the 1976 survey of income and education reveals that a blacks and hispanics are complementary inputs b hispanics and whites may also be complements and c blacks and whites are not complements and may be substitutes

income inequality and international migration the purpose of this paper is to analyse the impact of international factor movements on the personal distribution of income in order to get clearcut results we use a simple model of trade and migration in which there are two traded goods and three factors for any given country one of the traded goods corresponds to exports and the other to imports the three factors include capital and two types of labour skilled and unskilled we focus mainly on the alternative results of international migration of the two types of labour the geographical focus is worldwide excerpt

mexican enclaves and the price of culture abstract studies of mexican immigrant earnings consistently find a negative relationship between concentration of mexicans and earnings smith and newman economic inquiry 15 51 66 1977 and yuengert journal of human resources 30 194 204 1995 among others attribute this enclave effect as the compensating differential for culture however the existence of a land market suggests that the price of culture may also depend on culture s effect on the price of land adopting a model developed by roback economic inquiry 26 23 41 1988 i first show that the price of mexican culture is a function of culture s effect on both earnings and rents second using data for california and texas from the 1990 census i estimate the price for mexican culture consistent with the model culture lowers earnings and increases rents in enclaves with larger concentration of mexicans in fact land s share of the price of culture is as much as 42 therefore studies that attribute the lower earnings in enclaves as the compensating differential for enclave externalities underestimate the value of culture this paper also tests several predictions implied by the theoretical model satisfying the general equilibrium conditions the earnings of other workers are higher in enclaves furthermore except for mexican americans the assumption that culture is not an amenity to other workers is supported by the data

immigrants minorities and labor market competition this paper investigates the extent of labor market competition among immigrants minorities and the native population an analysis of 1980 u s census data reveals that immigrants tend to be substitutes for some labor market groups and complements for others the effects of shifts in immigrant supply on the earnings of native born men are however very small on the other hand increases in the supply of immigrants do have a sizable impact on the earnings of immigrants themselves an increase of 10 percent in the supply of immigrants for example reduces the immigrant wage by about 10 percent

the revealed objective functions of nonprofit firms although assertions have often been made about the objectives underlying the behavior of nonprofit firms there has been no empirical confirmation of these assertions this article proposes a way to infer a nonprofit organization s objective function by estimating the marginal donative product of its fundraising panel data estimates derived by using hildreth and houck s 1968 random coefficients model suggest that welfare education and arts firms are service maximizers that health firms are budget maximizers and that the objective of research firms cannot be ascertained within the family of objective functions considered

voluntary contributions and local public goods in a federation abstract this paper considers nonneutral effects of government spending in a federation of multiple jurisdictions both government spending and private donations finance local public goods redistributive programs that provide transfers for the poor in the standard model government spending has no effect on the public goods as donors reduce their donations one for one in response to an increase in government spending in a federation donors of a jurisdiction donate through federal charities to help the poor in the jurisdiction and the poor in other jurisdictions as well jurisdictions are thus linked through donations such linkage influences donors behavior beyond the traditional crowding out effect as a result government spending has nonneutral effects on the level of public goods

the demise of hospital philanthropy the demise of hospital philanthropy i introduction until the beginning of this century most hospitals primarily served the poor and derived a major portion of their revenue from private philanthropy the more affluent avoided hospital care and were treated in doctors offices and at home starr 1982 rosenberg 1987 this situation changed largely because of technological improvements such as anesthesia and asepsis and the nonpoor began to demand care in hospitals private insurance plans offering the nonpoor nearly complete coverage for hospital care began in the 1930s and spread rapidly after world war ii major health legislation medicare and medicaid was enacted in 1965 extending hospital insurance to the elderly and the poor by the late 1960s hospitals derived nine tenths of their revenue from insurance real donations for medical facility construction rose from 76 million in 1935 to a peak of 2 1 billion in 1965 and fell to 603 million by 1981 1984 dollars 1 in 1984 only 5 percent of the total spent on such construction was funded by philanthropy levit et al 1985 the conventional wisdom has it that private and public hospital insurance has crowded out philanthropic support of hospitals the public insurance argument is consistent with that of abrams and schmitz 1978 and roberts 1984 who maintain that public welfare expenditures reduce or eliminate private giving to the poor this argument appears to extend to private insurance as well this article describes the decline in donations to hospitals from conceptual as well as empirical perspectives we first describe a simple one period model of hospital and donor behavior hospitals choose utility maximizing levels of output while altruistic donors decide how much to contribute to hospitals and how much to spend on other goods the model is used to analyze how insurance various government subsidies and other factors affect hospital and donor behavior the major insight from this model is that although rising insurance coverage tends to increase hospital output in the same way as a lump sum government subsidy the two have different effects on donations to the hospital growing insurance coverage may increase or decrease donations while lump sum subsidies to the hospital will unambiguously crowd out private donations the empirical work following the model incorporates empirical counterparts of the exogenous and donation variables examined in the theoretical section data come from 1 a time series spanning 1935 81 and 2 a single cross section of nonprofit hospitals in 1978 the results indicate that increased insurance coverage for hospital care especially the enactment of medicare and medicaid in the mid 1960s reduced giving to hospitals the contribution of public subsidies for construction varied depending on whether the subsidy more closely resembled a matching or a lump sum subsidy ii model the model consists of a single not for profit hospital and a single representative donor 2 the hospital chooses output n to maximize its utility from output 3 while the donor chooses donations d to maximize utility from total hospital output and other goods y the donor behaves altruistically in that he does not use hospitals himself the behavior of hospital patients is not explicitly modeled although their presence will be felt the output and donation decisions are interrelated since the donor likes hospital output and the level of donations affects the hospital s budge get constraint to untangle the endogenous feedback effects between output and donations the problem is described as a two stage sequential game in the first stage the donor decides how much to donate in the second stage the hospital chooses how much output to produce given the previously determined level of donation of course the donor is acutely aware that the hospital s subsequent output decision will affect his utility

not for profit entrepreneurs abstract entrepreneurs who start new firms may choose not for profit status as a means of committing to soft incentives such incentives protect donors volunteers consumers and employees from ex post expropriation of profits by the entrepreneur we derive conditions under which completely self interested entrepreneurs opt for not for profit status despite the fact that this status limits their ability to enjoy the profits of their enterprises we also show that even in the absence of tax advantages unrestricted donations would flow to non profits rather than for profit firms because donations have more significant influence on the decisions of the non profits

the impact of immigration on the structure of wages theory and evidence from britain immigration to the uk particularly among more educated workers has risen appreciably over the past 30 years and as such has raised labor supply however studies of the impact of immigration have failed to find any significant effect on the wages of native born workers in the uk this is potentially puzzling since there is evidence that changes in the supply of educated natives have had significant effects on their wages using a pooled time series of british cross sectional micro data on male wages and employment from the mid 1970s to the mid 2000s this paper offers one possible resolution to this puzzle namely that in the uk natives and foreign born workers are imperfect substitutes we show that immigration has primarily reduced the wages of immigrants and in particular of university educated immigrants with little discernable effect on the wages of the native born

the effect of physician board membership on uncompensated care provision previous studies indicate that nonprofit and for profit hospitals provide comparable levels of uncompensated care when taking into account their sizes this evidence suggests that for profit hospitals extract some indirect benefit when providing uncompensated care our article investigates how physician board membership affects uncompensated care provision with data for hospitals in california from 1997 to 2010 we estimate a fixed effect model where uncompensated care is a function of physician board membership other board attributes as well as hospital characteristics our results indicate that physician board membership in for profit hospitals relates positively with uncompensated care provision prior evidence such as goldstein and ward 2004 and molinari et al 1995 has shown that involving physicians in strategic decisions improves hospitals financial performance our results reinforce the notion that having physicians in leadership or strategic positions benefits for profit hospitals in

hospital ownership and public medical spending the hospital market is served by firms that are private for profit private not for profit and government owned and operated i use a plausibly exogenous change in hospital financing that was intended to improve medical care for the poor to test three theories of organizational behavior i find that the critical difference between the three types of hospitals is caused by the soft budget constraint of government owned institutions the decision makers in private not for profit hospitals are just as responsive to financial incentives and are no more altruistic than their counterparts in profit maximizing facilities my final set of results suggests that the significant increase in public medical spending examined in this paper has not improved health outcomes for the indigent i introduction the hospital market is served by firms that are private for profit private not for profit and publicly owned and operated in this paper i examine how a hospital s type of ownership influences its response to profitable opportunities that are created by changes in government policy the policy change that i exploit was designed to improve the quality of medical care for lowincome individuals by significantly increasing hospitals financial incentives to treat them this program also substantially increased the revenues of those hospitals that had been serving a disproportionate share of the indigent i use this plausibly exogenous change in government policy to test three different theories of organizational behavior and then to assess the impact of hospital behavioral responses on health outcomes the response of organizations to changes in government policy will have an important impact on the consequences of these policies this is likely to be especially true in the medical sector in which the federal state and local governments contract directly

a reinterpretation of the modern theory of forward exchange rates the modern theory of forward exchange rate determination mt has been widely although not unanimously accepted as an improvement over the traditional interest rate panty theory irpi the latter theory contends that in equilibruim the forward rate f will equal except for transactions costs the interest panty forward rate f 1 covered interest arbitrage cia is a pnmary but as shall be seen not the only force insunng this equilibnum condition for the forward market for example if f exceeds f then covenng arbitrageurs borrow or forego lending in the domestic country purchase the foreign currency on the spot market lend abroad at the foreign interest rate and simultaneously sell the foreign currency including interest on the forward market these transactions cause f to decline and or f to increase until equilibnum is restored motivated in part by early empincal studies of the irpi which found evidence of apparent deviations of f from f and by the intuitively appealing argument that expectations or speculation can also influence f the mt suggests that the equilibrium forward rate is better explained as a weighted average of f and the expected

what exactly is corporate responsibility towards nature ecological responsibility or management of nature abstract the paper analyses the motives and consequences of including environmental protection in good managerial practices driven by a concern of responsible corporate behaviour corporate social responsibility is increasingly discussed in economics and management studies today this idea is fairly recent and stems from a philosophical school of thought attributed to hans jonas which says that nature must be preserved for anthropocentric as well as biocentric reasons in this respect the consequences that these two visions imply for men and companies will be developed corporate leaders often make use of this concept which finds its origins in philosophy in order to analyse the normative behaviour of their companies in this respect we shall favour a jonasian interpretation hans jonas will help us question the fundamental meaning of responsibility we will attempt to investigate this meaning using csr more specifically this article tries to answer the question what exactly is corporate responsibility is it a mere concept currently in fashion or is it a new structural approach which could indeed take responsibility into account in so far as long term environmental preservation is concerned in order to answer this question we shall first propose a reading of stakeholders this approach poses several problems when dealing with corporate responsibility regarding the preservation of nature secondly we shall present a more detailed analysis of such corporate social responsibility and the problems it poses the debate regarding action with the interest of its outcome and action in the interest of the action itself shall be the focal point of our discussion this article will adopt a narrative and critical methodology so as to achieve this goal we propose to critically analyse theoretical paradigms and test them through case studies

ideals versus dollars donors charity managers and government grants this paper demonstrates how changes in untied lump sum government grants or income from unrestricted endowments will affect the behavior of charities operated by managers with strong philosophical or professional commitments an increase in such funds will reduce the charity s accountability to private donors and lower its fund raising activities the grant will not be spent entirely on raising the quantity of output instead it will permit the charity manager to reduce his or her dependence on the costly solicitation of donors who do not completely share the manager s preferences in order to understand nonprofit charities one must recognize both their diversity and the independent role of their managers in furthering this diversity we will miss much of their special character if we view them as mere conduits seeking faithfully to reify the wishes of their contributors in this paper i demonstrate how an increase or a fall in untied lump sum government grants or income from unrestricted endowments will affect the behavior of charities operated by managers with strong philosophical or professional commitments to some service mixes rather than others an increase in such funds will reduce the charity s accountability to private donors and lower its fund raising activities the grant will not be spent entirely on raising

managerial rewards and the behavior of for profit governmental and nonprofit organizations evidence from the hospital industry abstract studies of mixed industries frequently focus on differential behavior between for profit and either nonprofit or governmental producers substantially less is known about differences among governmental religious nonprofit and secular nonprofit organizations we examine the compensation of hospital ceos to assess the extent to which these three organizational forms pursue similar objectives compensation levels the use of salaries versus bonuses as proxies for weak versus strong incentives and the criteria organizations use to determine bonuses are analyzed we conclude that the ceo incentive contracts at religious nonprofit secular nonprofit and governmental hospitals imply substantive differences in the behavior of these organizations

spot versus forward speculation and hedging a diagrammatic exposition abstract it has recently been recognized that the controversial implication of the modern theory of forward exchange that the forward rate can differ from the rate required for interest parity no longer holds when speculators are allowed to choose between spot and forward speculation this paper shows this result within the diagrammatic apparatus usually used to describe the modern theory the paper also shows the effect of importers and exporters choosing between spot and forward hedging it is observed that when either speculators or traders can choose between money market and forward speculation hedging forward rates equal interest parity rates the diagram can be adapted to consider borrowing lending spreads etc

attenuation bias in measuring the wage impact of immigration although economic theory predicts an inverse relation between relative wages and immigration induced supply shifts it has been difficult to document such effects the weak evidence may be partly due to sampling error in a commonly used measure of the supply shift the immigrant share of the workforce after controlling for permanent factors that determine wages in specific labor markets little variation remains in the immigrant share we find significant sampling error in this measure of supply shifts in canadian and u s census data correcting for the resulting attenuation bias can substantially increase existing estimates of the wage impact of immigration

native internal migration and the labor market impact of immigration this paper presents a theoretical and empirical study of how immigration influences the joint determination of the wage structure and internal migration behavior for native born workers in local labor markets using data from the 1960 2000 decennial censuses the study shows that immigration is associated with lower in migration rates higher out migration rates and a decline in the growth rate of the native workforce the native migration response attenuates the measured impact of immigration on wages in a local labor market by 40 to 60 per cent depending on whether the labor market is defined at the state or metropolitan area level

the impact of mass migration on the israeli labor market mass migration from the former soviet union increased the israeli population by 12 in the first half of the 1990s this exodus was precipitated by the lifting of emigration restrictions in an unstable ussr and by the open immigration policy of israel toward soviet jews who faced more restrictive entry policies elsewhere i use this natural experiment to study the impact of immigration on the labor market outcomes of native israelis ols yields significant reductions in wages and small reductions in employment however ols is biased if the distribution of immigrants across occupations in israel was not exogenous to relative wage and employment conditions i instrument for the entry of russians into an occupation in israel using information on their former occupations in the ussr there is a significant positive correlation between the former presence of the immigrants in an occupation in the ussr and their presence in that occupation in israel but the previous occupational choices of russians abroad were independent of israeli wage and employment growth subsequent to their migration iv estimates indicate that immigration did not have an adverse impact on native israeli labor market outcomes

a theory of yardstick competition in the typical regulatory scheme a franchised monopoly has little incentive to reduce costs this article proposes a mechanism in which the price the regulatedfirm receives depends on the costs of identical firms in equilibrium each firm chooses a socially efficient level of cost reduction the mechanism generalizes to cover heterogeneous firms with observable differences medicare s prospective reimbursement of hospitals by using diagnostically related groups is a scheme very similar to the one outlined here

charity donations in the uk new evidence based on panel data abstract this paper presents a set of panel data estimates for 159 of the most prominent uk charities for the period 1983 1990 in evaluating alternative specifications we settle on a fixed effects estimation social welfare charities are shown to fund raise short of the point at which net revenues are maximized whereas health and overseas charities are found to net revenue maximize religious charities maximize total revenues estimates of price and fund raising elasticities are presented for charities overall and for four cohorts for alternative income sources no evidence of crowding out is found

exemption or taxation for profits of non profits an answer from a model incorporating managerial discretion many non profit organizations engage in bothcharitable and purely commercial activities whereprofits from the latter are used to finance theformer should business income be tax exempted becauseof its cross subsidization function the effects ofexemption on the product mix are analysed using amodel incorporating managerial discretion acrucially different assumption from that of thecurrent literature under given assumptions tax exemption of commercial income emerges as a lessefficient means of supporting the charitable productthan alternative government measures such as anoutput subsidy

the robustness of kingma s crowd out estimate evidence from new data on contributions to public radio we revisit kingma s kingma 1989 journal of political economy 97 1197 1207 widely cited study of charitable contributions to public radio kingma s estimate of partial but statistically significant crowd out remains a benchmark in the literature because he was able to match household level contributions data with station level data on revenue including revenue from government grants to the best of our knowledge no comparable data have become available until now we replicate kingma s estimates with the original data and then apply the same methodology to very similar data from 1996 kingma s estimates are not robust to the use of the newer data

assimilation changes in cohort quality and the earnings of immigrants this paper reexamines the empirical basis for two facts that seem to be found in most cross section studies of immigrant earnings 1 the earnings of immigrants grow rapidly as they assimilate into the united states and 2 this rapid growth leads to many immigrants overtaking the earnings of the natives within 10 15 years after immigration using the 1970 and 1980 u s censuses this paper studies the earnings growth experienced by specific immigrant cohorts during the period 1970 80 it is found that within cohort growth is significantly smaller than the growth predicted by cross section regressions for most immigrant groups this differential is consistent with the hypothesis that there has been a secular decline in the quality of immigrants admitted to the united states

discretionary profit in subsidised housing markets in the subsidised housing sector building corporations can use their market power as purchasers to raise output of subsidised housing to a level higher than it is with perfect competition on both sides of the market this holds true if the building society is perfectly x efficient the proposition is not necessarily true if the corporation maximises a utility function in which discretionary profit or organisational slack is an argument the x inefficient building society may set output higher or lower than with perfect competition if the government grants a fixed subsidy per house and tries to constrain x inefficiency by imposing a maximum price this might be an incentive for the building corporation to maintain a planned shortage of subsidised houses however housing shortages will be smaller and welfare possibly greater than it is with perfect competition the existence of a perfectly competitive non subsidised housing sector is for the building corporation an incentive to increase strategically the output of subsidised housing and reduce planned shortages but it does not necessarily eliminate such shortages

immigration reform the effects of employer sanctions and legalization on wages the immigration reform and control act of 1986 irca represents an attempt to use labor market regulation to control illegal migration into the united states by imposing fines on employers who hire unauthorized workers sanctions lower wages directly because they act as a tax on hiring additional workers in addition irca legalized many longtime illegal aliens legalization affects wages by changing the relative supply of authorized and unauthorized workers this study estimates irca s impact on wages of manufacturing production workers in metropolitan areas and finds small but statistically significant effects sanctions lower wages while legalization raises them

private donations government grants commercial activities and fundraising cointegration and causality for ngos in international development cooperation ngos could help scale up foreign aid efforts by mobilizing private donations however fundraising activities do not necessarily result in higher donations and substitution effects between different sources of revenue may diminish the overall pool of ngos resources this paper examines the determinants of private donations to us based ngos engaged in international development cooperation we employ panel cointegration and causality techniques to analyze the interactions between private donations government grants commercial revenues and fundraising expenditures according to our results a marginal dollar spent on fundraising yields almost five dollars in new donations in the long run government grants crowd in private donations in the long run whereas commercial revenues crowd out donations in the long run moreover our panel vector error correction model reveals complex short run dynamics

immigration and wages evidence from construction to identify relative wage impacts of immigration we make use of certification and licensing requirements in the norwegian construction sector that give rise to exogenous variation in immigrant employment shares across trades individual panel data reveal substantially lower wage growth for workers in trades with rising immigrant employment than for other workers selective attrition from the sector masks the causal wage impact unless accounted for by individual fixed effects for low and semi skilled workers effects of new immigration are comparable for natives and older immigrant cohorts consistent with perfect substitutability between native and immigrant labor within trade finally we present evidence that immigration reduces price inflation as price increases over the sample period were significantly lower in activities with growth in the immigrant share than in activities with no or small change in immigrant employment

an experimental test of warm glow giving abstract this paper reports the results of an experimental test of the warm glow hypothesis a participant is presented with the opportunity to contribute from her own endowment to a charity of choice the experiment is designed so that a pure altruist has no incentive to donate the amount the designated charity will receive is preset any contribution by the participant crowds out dollar for dollar giving by the proctor we find that participants on average donated 20 of their endowments and that approximately 57 of the participants made a donation

migration and imperfect labor markets theory and cross country evidence from denmark germany and the uk we investigate the labor market effects of immigration in denmark germany and the uk three countries which are characterized by considerable differences in labor market institutions and welfare states institutions such as collective bargaining minimum wages employment protection and unemployment benefits affect the way in which wages respond to labor supply shocks and hence the labor market effects of immigration we employ a wage setting approach which assumes that wages decline with the unemployment rate albeit imperfectly we find that the wage and employment effects of immigration depend on wage flexibility and the composition of the labor supply shock in germany immigration involves only moderate wage but large unemployment effects since immigrants are concentrated in labor market segments with low wage flexibility the reverse is true for the uk and denmark

labor market discrimination against hispanic and black men h ispanic american men have lower average wage rates than white non hispanics in 1975 the average white non hispanic male wage earner in the united states earned 5 97 an hour mexican men earned 4 31 72 as much as white non hispanics puerto rican men earned 4 52 76 as much and cuban men earned 5 33 89 as much as white non hispanics by way of comparison black men s average wages in 1975 were 4 65 78 of the white male wage several possible reasons for the hispanics lower wages come to mind among them are age and education geographic location immigration language difficulties and discrimination for example as shown in table 1 mexicans and puerto ricans are younger on average than the white non hispanic population and earnings tend to rise with age hispanics have lower average levels of education than white non hispanics and wages are positively associated with education many mexican americans live in the southwest where prices are relatively low moreover hispanics are more likely to be recent immigrants and to lack fluency in english than white non hispanics and so to be at a disadvantage in the labor market in addition there is a widespread belief that hispanics suffer from employment discrimination and cannot obtain the wages that their human capital would command if they were non hispanic whites how much of the wage differentials described above are due to each of these factors and to other inter group differences in wage related characteristics in particular how much impact does labor market discrimination have on the average hispanic man s wage and how does this compare with discrimination against blacks this paper provides answers to these questions a few other efforts have been made to analyze the relative earnings of hispanic and white nonhispanic men using 1960 and 1970 census data fogel 1966 poston and alvirez 1973 poston alvirez and tienda 1976 long 1977 and gwartney and long 1978 we use more recent data from the 1976 survey of income and education this data set enables us to measure wage rates more accurately and to specify the wage function more completely than does the census unlike previous analysts in estimating the wage function we take account of possible selectivity bias due to the distinction between average wage offers and average observed wages thus we hope to obtain a more accurate and up to date measure of labor market discrimination against hispanic men section ii explains the method used to separate the minority white non hispanic wage differential into the portions due to differences in average characteristics and the portion due to differences in unobserved factors and discrimination taking into account the possibility of selectivity bias in the observed wage sample section iii describes the data used in the study and the specification of the wage equation the breakdown of the observed wage differentials into components due to differences in participation in the wage and salary sector local price levels average characteristics and discrimination are presented in section iv section v summarizes our findings and discusses their implications for efforts to improve the economic situation of hispanics in the united states

charitable giving in the german welfare state fiscal incentives and crowding out there are two ways that government activities influence private charitable giving 1 government spending on the provision of public goods may cause crowding out of private charitable contributions and 2 tax incentives may boost private charitable giving from a sample of german income tax returns we estimate the elasticity of charitable giving relative to tax incentives income and government spending using censored quantile regression analysis we derive results for different points of the underlying distribution of charitable giving evaluating overall treasury efficiency the tax deductibility of charitable donations fosters enough private giving to offset foregone tax revenues

organizational slack in subsidized nonprofit institutions informal objectives of managers next to the formal objective of the organization can be a source of organizational slack or x inefficiency in nonprofit organizations if the organization is subsidized the donor can restrain organizational slack by choosing an appropriate subsidy system four subsidy systems are discussed output input revenue and lump sum subsidy output subsidy reduces slack most the ranking of input subsidy compared with lump sum subsidy depends on the elasticity of demand for output revenue subsidy equals input subsidy changes in the subsidy regime for residential adult educations in the netherlands turn out to have been inconsistent

partners in giving the crowding in effects of uk government grants abstract this study examines the determinants of voluntary donations to uk charities using empirical specifications that combine error component and simultaneous equations methods in a series of tests we identify the one way fixed effects endogenous representation for government grants as the best empirical model when this endogeneity is taken into account government grants cause significant crowding in for the full sample and the two largest cohorts price coefficients are negative and fund raising coefficients are positive religion charities are net revenue maximizers whereas other charity cohorts fund raise short of net revenue maximization

how do nonprofit hospitals manage earnings abstract we hypothesize that unlike for profit firms nonprofit hospitals have incentives to manage earnings to a range just above zero we consider two ways managers can achieve this they can adjust discretionary spending hoerger t j 1991 profit variability in for profit and not for profit hospitals journal of health economics 10 259 289 and or they can adjust accounting accruals using the flexibility inherent in generally accepted accounting principles gaap to test our hypothesis we use regressions as well as tests of the distribution of earnings by burgstahler and dichev burgstahler d dichev i 1997 earnings management to avoid earnings decreases and losses journal of accounting and economics 24 99 126 on a sample of 1 204 hospitals and 8 179 hospital year observations our tests support the use of discretionary spending and accounting accrual management like hoerger 1991 we find evidence that nonprofit hospitals adjust discretionary spending to manage earnings however we also find significant use of discretionary accruals e g adjustments to the third party allowance and allowance for doubtful accounts to meet earnings objectives these findings have two important implications first the previous evidence by hoerger that nonprofit hospitals show less variation in income may at least partly be explained by an accounting phenomenon second our findings provide guidance to users of these financial statements in predicting the direction of likely bias in reported earnings

estimating labor supply with panel data abstract we investigated the robustness of linear labor supply functions incorporating income taxes using recently developed techniques for estimating simultaneous equations with latent heterogeneity using panel data our results suggest an econometric model acknowledging the intertemporal progressive taxation of labor and non labor income

a meta analytic assessment of the effect of immigration on wages in our increasingly interconnected and open world international migration is becoming an important socio economic phenomenon for many countries since the early 1980s many studies have been undertaken of the impact of immigration on host labour markets borjas 2003 noted that the estimated effect of immigration on the wage of native workers varies widely from study to study and sometimes even within the same study in addition these effects cluster around zero such a small effect is a rather surprising outcome given that in a closed competitive labour market an increase in labour supply may be expected to exert a downward pressure on wages we revisit this issue by applying meta analytic techniques to a set of eighteen papers which altogether generated 348 estimates of the percentage change in the wage of a native worker with respect to a one percentage point increase in the ratio of immigrants over native workers while many studies in our database employ us data estimates are also obtained from germany the netherlands france norway austria israel and australia our analysis shows that results vary across countries and are inter alia related to the type of modelling approach technical issues such as publication bias and quality of the estimates are addressed as well

public goods hidden income and tax evasion some nonstandard results from the warm glow model abstract a large literature explores crowd out in situations where public goods are jointly provided work in this area typically depicts a tax system where individuals take taxes as given but in some settings such as those in developing economies efforts to evade or avoid taxes may be widespread using the canonical warm glow model this paper considers joint public good provision in a setting where individuals can evade taxes by hiding their income the model s implications change significantly in this setting with hidden income stronger warm glow will lead to greater crowd out not less using research on crowd out and inter family transfers i present suggestive evidence that the model s results may help to reconcile divergent estimates of crowd out in the literature

is the new immigration really so bad this article reviews the recent evidence on us immigration focusing on two key questions 1 does immigration reduce the labour market opportunities of less skilled natives 2 have immigrants who arrived after the 1965 immigration reform act been successfully assimilated overall evidence that immigrants have harmed the opportunities of less educated natives is scant on the question of assimilation the success of the us born children of immigrants is a key yardstick by this metric post 1965 immigrants are doing reasonably well even children of the least educated immigrant origin groups have closed most of the education gap with the children of natives

factor proportions and relative wages the supply side determinants of wage inequality supply side factors may contribute to rising wage inequality first certain changes in the supply of skills allegedly exacerbate wage inequality women s increased labor force participation and increased immigration are the leading candidates both allegedly reduce the wages of less skilled men however immigration s impact on wage inequality has been minor and the effects of women s participation is inconclusive second in evaluating the likelihood that human capital investment will mitigate future inequality evidence suggests that rising returns to education have increased the proportion of young people attending college limiting the growth of inequality among high wage workers

the effect of internal migration on local labor markets american cities during the great depression the great depression offers a unique laboratory to investigate the causal impact of migration on local labor markets we use variation in the generosity of new deal programs and extreme weather events to instrument for migrant flows to and from u s cities in migration had little effect on the hourly earnings of existing residents instead in migration prompted some residents to move away and others to lose weeks of work or access to relief jobs for every 10 arrivals we estimate that 1 9 residents moved out 2 1 were prevented from finding a relief job and 1 9 shifted from full time to part time work

the impact of immigration on the labor market the literature on the impact of immigration on the labor market is highly controversial the aim of this paper is to review the existing literature and draw some general conclusions on how wages and employment respond to immigration economic studies indicate that the impact of immigration on the average wage and employment of native workers is null or slightly positive however because adjustments take time the immediate labor market effects of unexpected as opposed to expected migration episodes can be detrimental immigration also can have distributional consequences in particular the skill composition of immigrants matters in determining their impact on native labor market outcomes an inflow of immigrants will tend to reduce the wages of competing native workers with skills similar to those of the migrants and increase those of complementary workers with skills that complement those of immigrants by affecting the skill composition of the workforce immigration can create winners and losers among native workers via changes in the wage structure

us based ngos in international development financial and economic determinants of survival summary the accountability of non governmental organizations ngos has various dimensions from an economic perspective official financiers private donors as well as aid recipients could expect more charitable output from ngos if less efficient organizations were squeezed out of international development activities we consider administrative overheads as an important aspect of ngo efficiency our empirical analysis focuses on the effects of administrative overheads public funding and the interrelations between these two factors on the probability of market exit for almost 900 us based ngos with overseas aid activities since the mid 1980s we find that larger administrative overheads increase the probability of exit for ngos receiving any public funding however this effect weakens with increasing shares of public funding of ngos

the social role of not for profit organizations hospital provision of charity care during the 1980s the state of new york shifted from a straight block grant to a matching grant method for reimbursing hospitals with the matching rate varying from 0 to 75 percent across years these changes allow estimation of pure income and price effects for hospitals supply of uncompensated care charity and bad debts the price efrect is positive and significant but no income effect was found hospitals in more concentrated markets provide more charity care as do teaching hospitals and the presence of public hospitals in a market reduces private hospitals provision of charity care

the substitutability of occupational groups using firm level data abstract labor demand elasticity estimates are presented for a model in which labor groups are defined by occupation while most studies construct labor groups according to non productive characteristics such as race or gender the results corroborate much of the existing research

immigration and inequality immigration is often viewed as a proximate cause of the rising wage gap between highand low skilled workers nevertheless there is controversy over the appropriate theoretical and empirical framework for measuring the presumed effect and over the precise magnitudes involved this paper offers an overview and synthesis of existing knowledge on the relationship between immigration and inequality focusing on evidence from cross city comparisons in the u s while some researchers have claimed that a cross city research design is inherently flawed i argue that the evidence from cross city comparisons is remarkably consistent with recent findings based on aggregate time series data in particular cross city and aggregate time series comparisons provide support for three key conclusions 1 workers with below high school education are perfect substitutes for those with a high school education 2 high school equivalent and college equivalent workers are imperfect substitutes with an elasticity of substitution on the order of 2 3 within education groups immigrants and natives are imperfect substitutes together these results imply that the average impacts of recent immigrant inflows on the relative wages of u s natives are small the effects on overall wage inequality including natives and immigrants are larger reflecting the concentration of immigrants in the tails of the skill distribution and higher residual inequality among immigrants than natives even so immigration accounts for a small share 5 of the increase in u s wage inequality between 1980 and 2000

pareto optimal redistribution and private charity abstract when private charity exists and is motivated by utility interdependence a non pareto optimal outcome the free rider problem typically arises nevertheless incremental fiscal redistribution cannot achieve a paretian welfare improvement so long as private charity continues at positive levels donors respond to incremental fiscal redistribution by reducing their voluntary contributions by exactly a dollar for every dollar transferred in this way no net transfer is achieved unless incremental fiscal redistribution is pursued to the point where private contributions have been driven to zero alternatively a net transfer may be achieved by fiscal measures which affect donors marginal incentives to donate