how general are time preferences eliciting good specific discount rates abstract this paper tests the commonly used assumption that people apply a single discount rate to the utility from different sources of consumption using survey data from uganda with both hypothetical and incentivized choices over different goods we elicit time preferences from about 2400 subjects we reject the null of equal discount rates across goods the average person in our sample is more impatient about sugar meat and starchy plantains than about money and a list of other goods we review the assumptions to recover discount rates from experimental choices for the case of good specific discounting consistently with the theoretical framework we find convergence in discount rates across goods for two groups expected to engage in or think about arbitraging the rewards traders and individuals with large quantities of the good at home as an application we evaluate empirically the conditions under which good specific discounting could predict a low asset poverty trap

state dependence and heterogeneity in fishing location choice to explore the distinction between state dependence and heterogeneity in repeated decisions this paper combines a mixed logit model with a state dependence parameterization from the marketing literature to study fishing location choices of commercial sea urchin divers in california it examines implications of ignoring either effect and finds in all cases that true state dependence is an important determinant of location choice consequently spatial policies like marine reserves can lead to differences in the short and long run behavioral responses of the fishing fleet under some specifications random preference parameters are statistically significant when state dependence is excluded from the model but when it is included random preference parameters are not significant in other specifications including state dependence only dampens the variability in preference parameters these results highlight the importance of gathering and analyzing diary type data for commercial fisheries as well as for similar choice problems in recreation demand

heterogeneity in fishers harvesting decisions under a marine territorial user rights policy abstract marine fisheries are in decline and the existence of poorly defined property rights is a contributory cause of this decline the allocation of property rights can bring benefits in terms of enhancing biological sustainability and economic profitability however to date few studies have analysed the behaviour of fishers who have been granted such property rights such studies are important if theoretical means of improving the sustainability of fisheries are to be tested in real world situations in this study we assessed the financial decision making behaviour of fishers when managing resources under a territorial user rights policy implemented in chile we used bidding games and semi structured interviews to assess fishers financial understanding and risk preferences we defined risk preferences as the amount of potential catch fishers are willing to leave unharvested in return for a potential future increase in income from the natural growth in the resource results indicated that fishers financial behaviour under similar revenue scenarios were largely determined by livelihood characteristics and not wealth this reflected two major financial adaptation strategies that were split between different fishery sectors a specialist fishers in our case divers became risk acceptant when confronted with a scenario in which the mean body size of the harvested species was small and they were willing to invest their natural resources by leaving some of their potential catch unharvested for a year and b more generalist fishers here fin fishers were less inclined to leave potential catches unharvested they preferred to have the money to invest in tangible assets such as fishing nets this suggest that fishers harvesting behaviour is heterogeneous and depends on whether fishers perceive themselves as facing potential gains or loses assessed against a personal expectation level the use of prospect theory may be appropriate to further elucidate fishers behaviour under territorial user right frameworks

renewable resource economists and policy what differences have we made abstract this paper surveys developments in fisheries economics and fisheries policy over the past half century early work clarified the nature of the economic issues associated with open access laying the groundwork for changes in policies after coastal nations expanded their jurisdictions in 1976 perhaps the most important point made by economists is that property rights matter and that open access conditions create economic as well as biological problems the policy process has begun to create property rights systems although many of the world s fisheries still operate under mixed systems of regulations and open access incentives

competition wages and teacher sorting lessons learned from a voucher reform this paper studies how local school competition affects teacher wages at markets where wages are set via individual wage bargaining using regional variation in private school entry generated by a swedish reform which allowed private schools to enter freely and a comprehensive matched employer employee data covering all high school teachers in sweden over 16 years i analyze the effects of competition on wages as well as labor flows the results suggest that competition translates into higher wages also for teachers in public schools while the average increases are modest new teachers gain 2 percent and high ability teachers in math and science receive 4 percent higher wages in the most competitive areas compared to areas without any competition from private schools several robustness checks support a causal interpretation of the results which together highlight the potential gains from school competition through a more differentiated wage setting of teachers

stochastic production and heterogeneous risk preferences commercial fishers gear choices we present a model of fishers gear choice which allows for heterogeneity both in production technology and risk preferences and apply it on a panel of swedish trawlers stochastic revenue functions are estimated and used to predict the mean and standard deviation of revenue for each trip in a random parameters logit model we test if these predicted values explain gear choice a majority of fishers respond positively to increased mean and negatively to increased variability of expected landing values indicating risk aversion but also show a strong tendency to choose the same gear used on the previous trip

estimating the employer switching costs and wage responses of forward looking engineers this article estimates worker switching costs and how much the employer switching of experienced engineers responds to outside wage offers i use data on engineers across swedish private sector firms to estimate the relative importance of employer wage policies and switching costs in a dynamic programming discrete choice model of employer choice the differentiated firms are modeled in employer characteristic space and each firm has its own age wage profile a majority of engineers have moderately high switching costs and a minority of experienced workers are responsive to outside wage offers younger workers are more sensitive to outside wage offers

women business owners a source of stability during the great recession during the period of the great recession previous research has found that women owned firms were less likely to lay off workers than were firms owned by men given that the individual firm behavio

estimating the firm s labor supply curve in a new monopsony framework school teachers in missouri in the context of certain dynamic models it is possible to infer the elasticity of labor supply to the firm from the elasticity of the quit rate with respect to the wage using this property we estimate the average labor supply elasticity to public school districts in missouri we leverage the plausibly exogenous variation in prenegotiated district salary schedules to instrument for actual salary these estimates imply a labor supply elasticity of about 3 7 suggesting that school districts possess significant market power the presence of monopsony power in this teacher labor market may be partially explained by its institutional features

the effect of salaries and opportunity costs on duration in teaching evidence from michigan this paper demonstrates that salaries and opportunity costs have important influences on how long teachers stay in teaching the empirical work is based on a new longitudinal dataset providing information on the careers of 7800 michigan public school teachers the generalized least squares estimation technique accommodates censored observations time varying covariates and fixed effects one implication of the result is that predictions from the current generation of teacher supply and demand models are likely to be misleading copyright 1989 by mit press

dynamic inconsistency in food choice experimental evidence from two food deserts despite the great deal of research on dynamic inconsistency in time preferences few studies have ventured into investigating the question in a natural context to address this gap we conduct a natural field experiment with over 200 customers at a grocery store to investigate dynamic inconsistency and the demand for commitment in food choice over a 3 week time period subjects are invited to allocate and re allocate food items received as part of a grocery delivery program we observe substantial dynamic inconsistency in our experiment as well as a demand for commitment among a non negligible number of subjects interestingly individuals who demand commitment are more likely to be dynamically consistent in their prior behavior for academics our work provides direct evidence of dynamic inconsistency in consumption choices in the field and points towards potential extensions to models of temptation for policy makers our findings provide insights on innovations to alter food choices

simulating the effects of environmental and market variability on fishing industry structure abstract an agent based model comprising a fish stock a fishing fleet and a fish market is used to investigate the combined effects of environmental and market variability on the structure of a fishery over 15 year simulations agents make daily fishing decisions and annual entry exit and investment decisions based on the fishery s past economic outcomes and their individual risk preferences and opportunity costs e g an alternative source of income environmental variability is simulated through fishing success variability while market variability is simulated through changes in the elasticity of the demand curve i e the responsiveness of market prices to changes in daily landings our findings indicate that changes in variability lead to changes in economic and biological conditions of the fishery by influencing the composition of risk preferences within the fleet counter to expectations market stability did not dampen the negative impacts of environmental variability but rather stimulated over investment and increased harvesting by a small number of risk seeking fishers results from this research suggest that climate driven increases in fisheries variability coupled with increases in market integration that act to reduce local price signals may lead to inefficient investments and reduced fishery resources

storage and viability of a fishery with resource and market dephased seasonalities in this study we analyse the role of the storageregulation in a fishery s production process when theresource exploited and the market to which theproduction is exported are characterized by seasonaldephased oscillations for this purpose we built up adynamic model drawn from the french guyana shrimpfishery example the underlying objective of the modelis not the maximisation of a given criterion as wouldbe in the optimal control approach but merely themaintenance of the fishery s economical viability thefundamental principle is here to try to preserve asmany as possible viable control options theconditions to achieve and maintain this viability arecaptured in a certain number of constraints theanalysis points out periods and situations within theseason where the fishermen must anticipate theevolution of their storage to avoid violating thoseviability constraints the study also indicates howthe fishery s viability can be ensured even if theexploitation costs exceed the commercial value of thelandings for a finite part of the year however whenthe resource s and or market s oscillations are toolarge the fishery may be not viable any longer and itappears that the crisis can not be removed byinvesting in larger storage capacities

fishermen markets and population diversity fishing impacts biodiversity on multiple levels potentially resulting in unintended feedbacks to the economic performance of the fishery over time for example targeting observable traits within a population can impact genetic diversity and targeting valuable species can impact biodiversity at the ecosystem level the bioeconomic literature however has given little attention to the effect of fishing on population diversity even though population diversity contributes to ecosystem services and estimates of population extinction rates are three orders of magnitude higher than species extinction rates here we develop a stochastic bioeconomic model that links the harvest of multiple salmon populations in a single commercial fishery to the trajectory of population diversity in a salmon stock complex we parameterize our model with biological and economic data from the copper river chinook salmon fishery we show that markets can incentivize the degradation of population diversity reducing infra marginal fishery rents and increasing variability in economic returns we also show that second best management can conserve population diversity and improve welfare furthermore depending on fishermen s time preferences this management strategy is potentially self financing

an empirical equilibrium job search model with search on the job and heterogeneous workers and firms in this article we present and estimate a synthesis of previous equilibrium search models allowing for continuous distributions of workers opportunity costs of employment as well as firms productivities the model allows for on the job search and we assume that job offer arrival rates for workers are independent of their labor market state we derive the theoretical implications of these assumptions we provide simulations and we develop a semiparametric estimation procedure that we apply to a dataset of individual labor market histories

labor market monopsony there has been a renewed interest in monopsony in labor markets in recent years that includes both the traditional static approach to monopsony ably reviewed by boal and ransom 1997 and the new approach to monopsony with more attention paid to dynamic issues developed in detail by manning 2003 the articles presented in this supplement highlight both approaches and illustrate the range of labor market settings in which the exercise of monopsony power may be important the first use of the term monopsony in economics is widely attributed to robinson 1969 robinson conceived of monopsony as analogous to monopoly whereas monopoly refers to the case of a single seller confronted in a market by many buyers monopsony refers to the case of a single buyer confronted in a market by many sellers just as the monopolist faces a downward sloping demand curve for his product and

a viability analysis for a bio economic model abstract this paper presents a simple dynamic model dealing with the management of a marine renewable resource but instead of studying the ecological and economic interactions in terms of equilibrium or optimal control we pay much attention to the viability of the system or in a symmetric way to crisis situations these viability crisis situations are defined by a set of economic and biological state constraints the analytical study focuses on the compatibility between the state constraints and the controlled dynamics using the mathematical concept of viability kernel we reveal the situations and if possible management options to guarantee a perennial system going further we define overexploitation indicators by the time of crisis function in particular we point out irreversible overexploitation configurations related to the resource extinction

monopsonistic competition low wage labour markets and minimum wages an empirical analysis abstractthis article investigates the degree of monopsony power of employers in different industries against the background of a statutory minimum wage introduction in germany in january 2015 a semi structural estimation approach is employed based on a dynamic model of monopsonistic competition the empirical analysis relies on a linked employer employee data set which allows to control for observed heterogeneity both on the worker and on the firm side the results show important differences in monopsonistic competition among low wage industries while retailing the hotel and restaurant industry as well as agriculture can be described as monopsonistic labour markets this is not true for other services and manufacturing of food products from a policy point of view the introduction of a uniform minimum wage may therefore lead to different employment reactions in industries with a similar minimum wage bite

controlling stock externalities in a common property fishery subject to uncertainty abstract two methods are examined for regulating stock externalities under uncertainty quotas and taxes dynamic programming is used to characterize the externalities precisely the accuracy with which the current size of the resource stock can be monitored is found to be of crucial importance in the choice between tax and quota regulation if the current stock is observed without error taxes are capable of outperforming any quota

spillovers in regional fisheries management do catch shares cause leakage regional councils manage u s fisheries fishermen can participate in fisheries managed by multiple councils and effort controls in one region could lead to effort leakage into another theoretical modeling demonstrates that positive negative and no leakage are possible using difference in differences we test for leakage across regional boundaries for a catch share program in new england and find evidence that the new england groundfish sector program caused spillover into adjacent mid atlantic fisheries aggregate mid atlantic harvest volume increased among sector members after the policy change we find leakage in individual fisheries with similar gear and high market substitutability with sector species

intraseason harvest regulation for fish and wildlife recreation an application to fishery policy resource managers often ignore economic information in decisions about recreational use of fish and wildlife resources by evaluating within season harvest regulations economists can identify strategies to improve recreational benefits without compromising management objectives represented in an annual harvest quota theoretical analysis raises a potential for bias in applied welfare analysis if regulations inefficiently trade off fishing quality and exogenous seasonality in anglers demand simulations demonstrate that efficient regulations may limit daily harvests during the best fishing season or during the peak season of demand inadequate knowledge of recreationists behavioral responses to quality and regulations currently limits policy assessments

econometric modeling of fisheries with complex life histories avoiding biological management failures abstract economics of the fishery has focused on the wastefulness of common pool resource exploitation pure open access fisheries dissipate economic rents and degrade biological stocks biologically managed fisheries also dissipate rents but are thought to hold biological stocks at desired levels we develop and estimate an empirical bioeconomic model of the gulf of mexico gag fishery that questions the presumptive success of biological management unlike previous bioeconomic life history studies we provide a way to circumvent calibration problems by embedding our estimation routine directly in the dynamic bioeconomic model we nest a standard biological management model that accounts for complex life history characteristics of the gag biological intuition suggests that a spawning season closure will reduce fishing pressure and increase stocks and simulations of the biological management model confirm this finding however simulations of the empirical bioeconomic model suggest that these intended outcomes of the spawning closure do not materialize the behavioral response to the closure appears to be so pronounced that it offsets the restriction in allowable fishing days our results indicate that failure to account for fishing behavior may play an important role in fishery management failures

a bioeconomic analysis of marine reserves for paua abalone management at stewart island new zealand traditional fisheries management relies on the imposition of gear and or effort restrictions in spite of much experience with such techniques the danger of fishery collapse is ever present biologists have advocated an alternative strategy the establishment of marine reserves however it is possible that the benefits of marine reserve creation can be overstated if economic behaviour is ignored in spite of being managed under a system of transferable quotas the stewart island paua abalone fishery has been in decline for some time we develop an integrated economic and biological model of this fishery and use it to predict biomass levels in a number of scenarios including the imposition of a network of no take areas we identify circumstances under which the marine reserve solution outperforms traditional management techniques we show that the benefit of a marine reserve is highest when a fishery is heavily exploited and when accounting for stochastic recruitment

state sponsored violence as a tragedy of the commons england s privateering wars with france and spain 1625 1630 the tragedy of the commons is the familiar problem that open access to a common property resource leads to overexploitation and to zero profits a commons model is applied to an example of state sponsored private violence the practice of privateering or licensed piracy it is predicted that the presence of uncertainty about the value of the prey will reduce the amount of exploitation effort and that industry profits may be positive due to both uncertainty and heterogeneous exploiters using data from england s wars with france and spain between 1625 and 1630 the model suggests that the commons represented by enemy merchant shipping was not overexploited and that privateering profits were positive the dynamic paths of privateering effort ships seized and individual firm profits were however consistent with the normal expectation that commons exploitation will peak and fall as competition drives down returns through entry

location choice in new england trawl fisheries old habits die hard in his seminal work on common property resources h scott gordon proposed that in a fishery with multiple grounds effort would be distributed such that profit rates would be equal among them gordon s model relies on implicit assumptions that are inaccurate and lead to false conclusions in many cases in this paper we present an empirically estimated model of fishery and location choice for large trawlers in new england using a random utility framework with a nested logit model specification we use the model to test the validity of a behavioral model developed from ethnographic interviews with skippers

environmental bonds and environmental research in innovative activities abstract this paper considers the incentive to uncover potential future social costs of activities having no historical precedents since ex ante markets in the future external effects of historically unique activities are non existent the private incentives to uncover the possibility of thalidomide type results in such activities is weak the paper discusses the value of sequentially determined environmental bonds as mechanisms for the generation of research funds in these cases and derives measures for the calculation of such bonds

prices versus quantities in fisheries models this paper discusses the conditions for generalizing the analysis in weitzman 1974 to fisheries it is shown that it is straightforward to generalize the analysis if the cost function is direct additively separable in stock size and catches this leads to the conclusion that the analysis holds for a schooling fishery with and without search costs but it might not hold for a search fishery a further result is that for a schooling fishery without search costs where the marginal cost function is steeper than the marginal benefit function taxes are likely to be preferred over individual transferable quotas

what has 20 years of public private pay gap literature told us eastern european transitioning vs developed economies this paper surveys the literature on public private sector pay differentials based on 20 years of research in transitioning countries of eastern europe ee and compares the results with estimates obtained from developed market economies the majority of empirical studies from ee economies found evidence of public sector pay penalties during the period of economic transition from a communist to market based economy in developed economies however the average differential is usually around zero or positive the public sector pay inequality reducing effect relative to the private sector is greater in transitioning economies than in developed economies nevertheless there is evidence that the sign of the public sector pay gap as well as the relative public sector pay distribution change with the progress of economic transition towards those usually observed in developed economies different pay setting arrangements between private and public sectors and competition for workers seem to be major arguments for the existence of systematic pay differences between the two sectors

fairness and frictions the impact of unequal raises on quit behavior we analyze how separations responded to arbitrary differences in own and peer wages at a large us retailer regression discontinuity estimates imply large causal effects of own wages on separations and on quits in particular however this own wage response could reflect comparisons either to market wages or to peer wages estimates using peer wage discontinuities show large peer wage effects and imply the own wage separation response mostly reflects peer comparisons the peer effect is driven by comparisons with higher paid peers suggesting concerns about fairness separations appear fairly insensitive when raises are similar across peers suggesting search frictions and monopsony are relevant in this low wage sector

limited entry licensing insights from a duration model limited entry is used to manage many fisheries effectiveness depends on a program s ability to control aggregate fishing power which fleet size and composition both affect this article analyzes fleet composition and attrition in a limited entry fishery the california red sea urchin fishery it explores the dynamics of heterogeneity in catch and revenue and applies duration analysis to study individual fisherman attrition using both individual level and time varying covariates the results show that the fleet is becoming more homogenous but also more potent and spatially mobile regulations such as size limits and season restrictions tend to increase attrition

did regional economic diversity influence the effects of the great recession using data for u s counties from 2005 to 2012 we test whether higher levels of economic diversity mediated the effects of the great recession via four measures of stability spatial spillover effects are modeled by the use of the spatial durbin estimator with heteroscedastic errors the data generally support the central hypothesis that higher levels of diversity within a county are associated with enhanced employment stability across all counties as well as subsets of metro and nonmetro counties results for wage stability however appear to contradict our other findings we suggest that underlying labor elasticities can bridge these apparent contradictory results jel r11 r12 o47

dissecting the tragedy a spatial model of behavior in the commons abstract much of the discussion of the tragedy of the commons focuses on aggregate impacts often in data poor developing country settings few non experimental empirical studies shed light on contextual circumstances driving the extent of rent dissipation and overexploitation we utilize a high resolution data set to estimate a behavioral model of fishermen s spatial choices a unique policy setting allows us to measure the degree to which individual fishermen s choices appear aimed at mitigating the tragedy of the commons in a small numbers setting we find evidence of partial mitigation in excess of what we would expect under pure self interest but short of what would occur under group maximizing behavior we also examine how contextual factors in the fishery shape the degree of cooperation within the fishing season and find evidence that competition for the common pool resource distorts fishermen s implicit cost of distance creating a form of common property inertia

monopsony mobility and sex differences in pay missouri school teachers we examine the sex differences in the pay of school teachers in missouri in missouri school districts pay is determined by a salary schedule that maps teaching experience and education level of an individual to a salary level in spite of this apparently mechanical rule for determining pay female teachers earn less than male teachers after controlling for experience and education we explore how such a difference could arise from differential job mobility and find some evidence to support this idea however within district differences in pay are a more important source of differences in pay between men and women

a dual self model of impulse control we propose that a simple dual self model gives a unified explanation for several empirical regularities including the apparent time inconsistency that has motivated models of quasi hyperbolic discounting and rabin s paradox of risk aversion in the large and small the model also implies that self control costs imply excess delay as in the o donoghue and rabin models of quasi hyperbolic utility and it explains experimental evidence that increased cognitive load makes temptations harder to resist the base version of our model is consistent with the gul pesendorfer axioms but we argue that these axioms must be relaxed to account for the effect of cognitive load

the elasticity of labor supply at the establishment level monopsonistic wage setting power requires that the supply of labor directed toward individual establishments is upward sloping this study utilizes institutional features to identify the supply curve the elasticity of labor supply is estimated using data for the norwegian teacher labor market in a period where the only variation in the wage level was determined centrally and with information on whether there is excess demand or not at the school level in fixed effects models the supply elasticity faced by individual schools is estimated to about 1 4 and is in the range 1 0 1 9 in different model specification

poverty and economic decision making evidence from changes in financial resources at payday we study the effect of financial resources on decision making low income u s households are randomly assigned to receive an online survey before or after payday the survey collects measures of cognitive function and administers risk and intertemporal choice tasks the study design generates variation in cash checking and savings balances and expenditures before payday participants behave as if they are more present biased when making intertemporal choices about monetary rewards but not when making intertemporal choices about non monetary real effort tasks nor do we find before after differences in risk taking the quality of decision making the performance in cognitive function tasks or in heuristic judgments

wages and recruitment evidence from external wage changes in this article the author estimates the causal effect of the wage level on the recruitment rate in establishments during the 1990s the wage setting for certified teachers in norway was completely centralized with a state paid wage premium of about 10 at some schools with severe recruitment problems the empirical approach exploits within school variation in wage premium eligibility and that actual teacher supply is empirically observed at schools with excess demand for teachers in a difference in differences framework the wage premium increases the recruitment rate by 6 to 7 percentage points this finding is robust to model specification and indicates that the recruitment elasticity to the wage is equal to the separation elasticity in absolute terms the implied short run labor supply elasticity for individual establishments is about 1 4 it is also evidence of a diminishing return to scale in recruitment activity a central assumption in search theoretic models of imperfect competition in the la

commercial fisheries under price uncertainty abstract the deterministic models applied in economics of fisheries are extended to comprise price uncertainty and risk aversion among the fishing units it is proved that in the open access fishery both the total fishing effort and the number of fishing units are reduced as the variance of the price increases that the total fishing effort may be smaller in the open access fishery than in the optimal fishery at a high variance that only a fixed producer price system can create a first best optimum and that a tax on revenue is more efficient than both fishing unit quotas or tax on catch

endogenous time preferences of forest goods and community based forest management abstract in the economic analysis of cbfm people s discount rates are assumed exogenous and same for all goods we examined the validity of this assumption by eliciting the discount rates of households for grass timber fuelwood and money and analyzed the impacts of various personal and economic factors on households discount rates we found that time preferences are endogenous and good specific a good proportion of households have infinite discount rates for forest goods the mean values of monthly discount rates for households that indicated finite discount rates are 0 67 for timber 6 83 for fuelwood 55 49 for grass and 3 47 for money the availability of alternative sources and current consumption of the forest goods are two main determinants of a household s discount rates the study provides many useful insights for the design and implementation of cbfm programs the concept of mental accounting should be used for economic analyses of cbfm programs different management strategies should be adopted for different forest goods and alternative sources should be provided to meet the current needs of the households

dynamic random utility modeling a monte carlo analysis applied studies of commercial fishing have largely ignored the intertemporal aspects of repeated site choices for many fisheries fishermen might choose a dynamically optimal cruise trajectory rather than myopic day to day strategies and a model that ignores these considerations will likely lead to biased parameter estimates and poor policy guidance a dynamic random utility model is developed that utilizes the same information as static site choice models but is entrenched in the principles of dynamic optimization using monte carlo analysis we evaluate the performance of this estimator as compared to the static model for a variety of simulated fishery types

vessel entry exit behavior in the gulf of mexico shrimp fishery given the heterogeneous nature of the fishing fleet and complex vessel behavior traditional marginalist supply models are not well suited for modeling vessel mobility a discrete choice model is utilized here to predict the probability that a vessel will enter exit or remain in the gulf of mexico shrimp fishery based on a myopic profit maximization criterion the multinomial logit model indicates that fisherman behavior is not influenced by stock variability the crowding externality as represented by size of fishing fleet exhibits a strong negative impact on the probability of entry independent of changes in abundance exvessel prices or harvest costs the gulf of mexico shrimp fishery was not an autonomous system of fishing vessels as initially believed

spatial search and fishing location choice methodological challenges of empirical modeling recent work in ecology emphasized the spatial patchiness of marine resources fish and shellfish populations often occur in clumps or discrete patches of habitat with different population levels and dynamics in each patch patches are linked through a set of complex biological and oceanographic factors this new view has given rise to spatial marine management proposals including permanent marine reserves and rotating spatial closures reserve proposals are particularly popular among ecologists because closed areas can presumably augment the biomass in areas that were overharvested due to stochas

discounting behavior a reconsideration we re evaluate the theory experimental design and econometrics behind claims that individuals exhibit non constant discounting behavior theory points to the importance of controlling for the non linearity of the utility function of individuals since the discount rate is defined over time dated utility flows and not flows of money it also points to a menagerie of functional forms to characterize different types of non constant discounting behavior the implied experimental design calls for individuals to undertake several tasks to allow us to identify these models and to several treatments such as multiple horizons and the effect of allowing for a front end delay on earlier payments the implied econometrics calls for structural estimation of the theoretical models allowing for joint estimation of utility functions and discounting functions using data collected from a representative sample of 413 adult danes in 2009 we draw striking conclusions assuming an exponential discounting model we estimate discount rates to be 5 6 on average this is significantly lower than all previous estimates using controlled experiments we also find no evidence to support quasi hyperbolic discounting or fixed cost discounting and only modest evidence to support other specifications of non constant discounting furthermore the evidence for non constant discounting while statistically significant is not economically significant in terms of the size of the estimated discount rates we undertake extensive robustness checks on these findings including a detailed review of the previous comparable literature

temporal stability of time preferences abstract the preferences assumed to govern intertemporal trade offs are generally considered to be stable economic primitives though evidence on this stability is notably lacking we present evidence from a large field study conducted over two years with around 1 400 individuals using incentivized intertemporal choice experiments aggregate choice profiles and corresponding estimates of discount parameters are unchanged over the two years and individual correlations through time are high by existing standards however some individuals show signs of instability by linking experimental measures to administrative tax records we showthat identified instability is uncorrelated with both levels and changes in sociodemographic variables

is there monopsony in the labor market evidence from a natural experiment recent theoretical and empirical advances have renewed interest in monopsonistic models of the labor market however there is little direct empirical support for these models we use an exogenous change in wages at department of veterans affairs va hospitals as a natural experiment to investigate the extent of monopsony in the nurse labor market we estimate that labor supply to individual hospitals is quite inelastic with short run elasticity around 0 1 we also find that non va hospitals responded to the va wage change by changing their own wages

do wages rise with job seniority many previous studies have found a strong positive effect of job seniority tenure on wages this paper re examines the evidence using a simple instrumental variables scheme to deal with the fact that tenure is likely to be related to unobserved individual and job characteristics that affect the wage we use the variation of tenure over a given job match as the principal instrumental variable for tenure the variation in tenure over the job is uncorrelated by construction with the fixed individual and job match specific components of the error term of the wage equation our main finding is that the partial effect of tenure on wages is small and that general labour market experience and job shopping account for most wage growth over a career the strong cross section relationship between tenure and wages is due primarily to heterogeneity bias prior researchers see mincer and jovanovic 1981 bartel and borjas 1981 borjas 1981 cline 1979 and mellow 1981 and many others have established that job seniority has a strong positive relationship with wage rates in a cross section or a cross section time series of individuals in this paper we re evaluate the evidence concerning the partial effects on wages of job seniority tenure and total labour market experience the extent to which wages rise with tenure is important for several reasons first and foremost the wage tenure profile is a fundamental question about the structure of earnings over careers second the wage tenure profile is a key determinant of the extent to which the earnings power of individuals is tied to specific jobs and it is important for assessment of the losses suffered by displaced workers hamermesh 1984 third evidence that wages rise with job tenure has been used to explain the decline in quits with tenure since the wage growth on the current job lowers the probability that the worker will locate a superior alternative a growing theoretical literature surveyed in parsons 1984 has taken the evidence of a strong wage tenure profile at face value and sought to provide an explanation for the relationship the most prominent explanation is the theory of specific human capital oi 1962 becker 1962 mincer 1974 parsons 1972 kuratani 1973 and hashimoto 1980 in which the growth of wages with tenure holding experience constant is attributed to the worker s share of investments in firm specific skills more recently lazear 1981 has presented a supervision model of wage growth in which firms defer compensation as a means of inducing workers not to shirk freeman 1977 and harris and holmstrom 1982 provide an explanation for wage growth based on an insurance motive salop and salop 1976 nickell 1976 and guasch and weiss 1982 present adverse selection models of wage growth in which firms use a wage tenure profile as a

choice and procrastination author s o donoghue ted rabin matthew abstract recent models of procrastination due to self control problems assume that a procrastinator considers just one option and is unaware of her self control problems we develop a model where a person chooses from a menu of options and is partially aware of her self control problems this menu model replicates earlier results and generates new ones a person might forego completing an attractive option because she plans to complete a more attractive but never to be completed option hence providing a non procrastinator additional options can induce procrastination and a person may procrastinate worse pursuing important goals than unimportant ones

differences in labor supply to monopsonistic firms and the gender pay gap an empirical analysis using linked employer employee data from germany this article investigates women s and men s labor supply to the firm within a semistructural approach based on a dynamic model of new monopsony using methods of survival analysis and a large linked employer employee data set for germany we find that labor supply elasticities are small 1 9 3 7 and that women s labor supply to the firm is less elastic than men s which is the reverse of gender differences in labor supply usually found at the level of the market our results imply that at least one third of the gender pay gap might be wage discrimination by profit maximizing monopsonistic employers

harvest uncertainty and the tragedy of the commons abstract this paper demonstrates that a fixed number of risk averse firms faced with harvest uncertainty owing to resource stock uncertainty will typically reduce their exploitation of a commons in addition the total exploitation of the industry will decrease when entry is permitted and uncertainty is compared with certainty this result holds for perfectly competitive output markets and also characterizes imperfectly competitive output markets with linear market demand and risk neutral firms in the latter case the socially optimum number of firms is determined based upon the degree of uncertainty the price elasticity of market demand and the elasticity of input productivity

tax versus quota regulation a stochastic model of the fishery in a deterministic setting it has been demonstrated that taxes and quotas can be equivalent regulatory instruments and that both can in principle induce an optimal allocation of resources in markets where externalities are problematic in this paper we consider growth harvest and demand uncertainty within the context of canada s pacific halibut fishery and find that while taxes remain the preferred instrument the welfare losses arising from the use of individual boat quotas are minor

minimum wages for ronald mcdonald monopsonies a theory of monopsonistic competition recent empirical work on the effects of minimum wages has called into question the conventional wisdom that minimum wages invariably reduce employment we develop a model of monopsonistic competition with free entry to analyse the effects of minimum wages and our predictions fit the empirical results closely under monopsonistic competition we find that a rise in the minimum wage raises employment per firm causes firm exit and may increase or reduce industry employment minimum wages increase welfare if they raise industry employment but welfare effects are ambiguous if employment falls

the drivers of income inequality in rich countries rising income inequality has recently come centre stage as a core societal concern for rich countries the diagnosis of the forces driving inequality upwards and their relative importance remains hotly contested notably with respect to the roles of globalization versus technology and of market forces versus institutions and policy choices this survey provides a critical review and synthesis of recent research the focus is on income inequality across the entire distribution rather than only on what has been happening at the very top we pay particular attention to including what has been learned from the analysis of micro data to ensuring that the coverage is not unduly us centric and to analyses of the interrelations between the different drivers of inequality the marked differences in inequality trends across countries and time periods reflect how global economic forces such as globalisation and technological change have interacted with differing national contexts and institutions major analytical challenges stand in the way of a consensus emerging on the relative importance of different drivers in how income inequality has evolved in recent decades

judging experimental evidence on dynamic inconsistency abstract this article briefly summarizes and judges recent experimental developments exploring the predictions of dynamically inconsistent models an opinion is provided as to how the literature ma

nudging farmers to use fertilizer theory and experimental evidence from kenya we model farmers as facing small fixed costs of purchasing fertil izer and assume some are stochastically present biased and not fully sophisticated about this bias such farmers may procrastinate post poning fertilizer purchases until later periods when they may be too impatient to purchase fertilizer consistent with the model many farmers in western kenya fail to take advantage of apparently profit able fertilizer investments but they do invest in response to small time limited discounts on the cost of acquiring fertilizer free deliv ery just after harvest calibration suggests that this policy can yield higher welfare than either laissez faire policies or heavy subsidies

risk aversion experimental evidence from south african fishing communities we estimate the risk attitudes of a large sample of individuals from various fishing communities along the west coast of south africa female fishers and rights holders are found to be more risk averse than their male counterparts while rights holders are found to be less risk averse relative to subjects without fishing rights risk attitudes are found to be correlated with compliance with fisheries regulations in particular a greater degree of risk aversion translates into a reduction in compliance furthermore in the case of gender female fishers and rights holders are more likely to comply with fisheries regulations

on input market frictions and estimation of factors demand in this article we explore the impact of imperfectly competitive input markets on production function estimation first order profit maximizing conditions are altered when frictions in input markets cause the elasticity of input supply to the firm to be finite a consequence of this is that the standard econometric model used for production function estimation will be misspecified we prove that in all nontrivial cases finite elasticities of supply to the firm will lead to inconsistent estimates of production function parameters monte carlo simulations show that the resulting bias can be economically significant

estimating the elasticity of substitution between restricted and unrestricted inputs in a regulated fishery a probit approach abstract catch effort vessel and skipper characteristic data for a sample of boats involved in the tasmanian rock lobster fishery in the 1983 1984 season are used to estimate a fishing effort production function nested in a cobb douglas fishery production function the initial effort function is translog but tests suggest that the ces form cannot be rejected the vessel s choice of fishing ground is modeled by a probit equation the output from which is included in the ols estimation of the production function the elasticity of substitution between the inputs which are restricted by regulation and the other inputs is of particular interest as it determines whether input restriction is an efficient form of regulation for the fishery the results suggest a value significantly less than unity

do employers have more monopsony power in slack labor markets this article confronts monopsony theory s predictions regarding workers wages with observed wage patterns over the business cycle using german administrative data for the years 1985 to 2010 and a

teacher mobility and merit pay evidence from a voluntary public award program abstract this paper analyzes the effect on teacher mobility of a program that rewards excellence in teaching practices in chile successful applicants receive a 6 annual wage increase for up to 10 years and an award that publicly recognizes their excellence the paper uses a regression discontinuity design to identify the causal effect of the public merit award the program does not alter transitions out of teaching however it increases the mobility of awardees within the school system this is consistent with the program providing a credible public signal of teacher quality

time preferences and food choices evidence from a choice experiment time preferences have been recognized by numerous studies as an important driver of a number of healthy and environmentally friendly behaviors in this study we first examined if healthy and environmentally friendly food labels e g usda organic carbon trust health claim and calories are relevant in driving food choices second using the consideration of future consequences cfc scale we analyzed if individuals with different time preferences have different choice behavior and valuations in relation to these labels results indicate that consumers value both healthy and environmentally friendly attributes displayed on labels results also suggest that time preferences can significantly influence consumers valuation for the usda organic label the presence of health claims and the calorie amount attribute

monopsony in the labor market this paper surveys recent theoretical and empirical research on monopsony in labor markets broadly defined as upward sloping labor supply to an employer we compare older monopsony models based on small numbers of employers with newer models based on labor market frictions such as moving costs and search we also compare older econometric approaches that focus on static wage concentration relationships with newer approaches that focus on dynamics our review of empirical estimates suggests that monopsony power based on small numbers of employers is probably rare but occasionally large while monopsony power based on frictions is probably widespread but small on average

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

estimating individual discount rates in denmark a field experiment we estimate individual discount rates with respect to time streams of money using controlled laboratory experiments these discount rates are elicited by means of field experiments involving real monetary rewards the experiments were carried out across denmark using a representative sample of 268 people between 19 and 75 years of age individual discount rates are estimated for various households differentiated by socio demographic characteristics such as income and age our conclusions are that discount rates are constant over the 12 month to 3 year horizons used in these experiments and that discount rates vary substantially with respect to several socio demographic variables hence we conclude that it would be reasonable to assume constant discount rates for specific household types but not the same rates across all households

timing disturbances in labor market contracting roth s findings and the effects of labor market monopsony this paper addresses alvin roth s findings of market contracting at times earlier than optimal for market participants which roth describes as market unraveling a market failure he proposes to solve by designing centralized buyer seller matching programs this paper shows that while roth s engineering solutions are ingenious the early contracting phenomena derive from labor market monopsony under monopsony price is unavailable to clear the market time of contract becomes the currency for working out market forces roth s matching serves to shore up the monopsony and would be unnecessary if the monopsony were removed a superior solution is to end the monopsony

estimating time preferences from convex budgets experimentally elicited discount rates are frequently higher than what seems reasonable for economic decision making such high rates are often attributed to present biased discounting a well known bias of standard measurements is the assumption of linear consumption utility attempting to correct this bias using measures of risk aversion to identify concavity researchers find reasonable discounting but at the cost of exceptionally high utility function curvature we present a new methodology for identifying time preferences both discounting and curvature from simple allocation decisions we find reasonable levels of both discounting and curvature and surprisingly dynamically consistent time preferences jel c91 d12 d81 understanding and estimating time preferences is obviously of great importance to economists marketers and policy makers consumers decide how much to invest in savings education real estate and life insurance how much to diet exercise and smoke whether to marry when to have children and what to leave in their wills while there has been substantial research estimating time preferences using aggregate consumption data 1 the bulk of the effort has occurred in laboratory environments 2 among the many laboratory techniques employed recent studies have favored multiple price lists mpl with monetary payments 3 with mpls individuals are asked multiple times to choose between smaller payment amounts closer to the present and larger amounts further into the future the interest rate increases monotonically in a price list such that the point where an individual switches from preferring sooner payments to later payments carries interval

monopsony power pay structure and training although interest in monopsonistic influences on labor market outcomes has revived in recent years only a few empirical studies provide direct evidence on this topic in this article the authors analyze the effect of monopsony power on pay structure using a direct measure of labor market thinness the authors find evidence of monopsony power as firms facing fewer local competitors offer lower wages to skilled labor and trainees but not to unskilled labor the findings have important implications for the economic theory of training as most recent models assume monopsonistic pay setting for skilled labor but not for trainees

location choice of commercial fishermen with heterogeneous risk preferences location choice of commercial fishermen with heterogeneous risk preferences author s johan a mistiaen and ivar e strand reviewed work s source american journal of agricultural economics vol 82 no 5 proceedings issue dec 2000 pp 1184 1190 published by oxford university press on behalf of the agricultural applied economics association stable url http www jstor org stable 1244248 accessed 25 01 2012 20 19

accounting for spatial heterogeneity and autocorrelation in spatial discrete choice models implications for behavioral predictions the random utility model rum is commonly used in the land use and fishery economics literature this research investigates the affect that spatial heterogeneity and spatial autocorrelation have within the rum framework using alternative specifications of the multinomial logit multinomial probit and spatial multinomial probit models using data on the spatial decisions of fishermen the results illustrate that ignoring spatial heterogeneity in the unobservable portion of the rum dramatically affects model performance and welfare estimates furthermore accounting for spatial autocorrelation in addition to spatial heterogeneity increases the performance of the rum

time consistency stationarity and time invariance a sequence of experiments documents static and dynamic preference reversals between sooner smaller and later larger rewards when the sooner reward could be immediate the theoretically motivated design permits separate identification of time consistent stationary a ndtime invariant choices at least half of the subjects are time consistent but only three quarters of them exhibit stationary choices about half of subjects with time inconsistent choices have stationary preferences these results chal lenge the view that present bias preferences are the main source of time inconsistent choices the past twenty years have seen a surge of interest in time inconsistent preferences mostly this has been motivated by psychological experiments and introspection that have suggested the existence of present bias a decision maker prefers smaller immediate reward to a larger delayed reward but when she is asked about her preferences between these two alternatives when both are equally shifted into the future her preferences are reversed although there is no inconsistency per se in her answers this behavior has been taken to suggest that when the decision maker will be asked to update her choices in the future she will generally deviate from her ex ante plans our goal in the present study is to perform a dynamic preference reversal experiment as such one is required to extend the standard framework of pref erences over temporal payments to a dated collection of such preferences this extension allows us to formally define three distinct properties stationarity im plies that ranking of temporal payments depends only on the time distance and payment distance between the alternatives time invariance assumes that the decision maker evaluates each temporal payment relative to the evaluation pe

risk preferences are not time preferences risk and time are intertwined the present is known while the future is inherently risky this is problematic when studying time prefer ences since uncontrolled risk can generate apparently present biased behavior we systematically manipulate risk in an intertemporal choice experiment discounted expected utility performs well with risk but when certainty is added common ratio predictions fail sharply the data cannot be explained by prospect theory hyperbolic discounting or preferences for resolution of uncertainty but seem consistent with a direct preference for certainty the data suggest strongly a difference between risk and time preferences jel c91 d81 d91 understanding individual decision making under risk and over time are two foundations of economic analysis 1 in both areas there has been research to suggest that standard models of expected utility eu and exponential discounting are flawed or incomplete regarding time experimental research has uncovered evidence of a present bias or hyperbolic discounting frederick loewenstein and o donoghue 2002 regarding risk there are number of well documented departures from eu such as the allais 1953 common consequence and common ratio paradoxes an organizing principle behind expected utility violations is that they seem to arise as so called boundary effects where certainty and uncertainty are combined camerer 1992 harless and camerer 1994 and starmer 2000 indicate that violations of expected utility are notably less prevalent when all choices are uncertain this observation is especially interesting when considering decisions about risk taking over time in particular certainty and uncertainty are combined in intertemporal decisions the present is known and certain while the future is inherently risky this observation is problematic if one intends to study time preference in isolation from

discrete modelling of supply response under uncertainty the case of the fishery abstract in the absence of complete control in a regulated industry effective management requires prediction of firms behavioral responses to public policy this paper develops a discrete choice model of supply response under uncertainty and applies it to fishery choice problems of new england fishing firms while fishermen demonstrate a bias towards remaining within the same fishery sufficient incentives in terms of changes in expected returns and risk are shown to elicit response due to extreme uncertainty concerning population dynamics of fish stocks a satisficing approach to management facilitated by this type of modelling may be more appropriate than bioeconomic optimization

wage differentials employer size and unemployment the unique equilibrium solution to a game in which a continuum of individual employers choose permanent wage offers and a continuum of workers search by sequentially sampling from the set of offers is characterized wage dispersion is a robust outcome provided that workers search while employed as well as when unemployed the unique nondegenerate equilibrium distribution of wage offers is constructed for three cases 1 identical workers and employers 2 identical employers and an atomless distribution of worker supply prices and 3 identical workers and an atomless distribution of job productivities copyright 1998 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

is there monopsonistic discrimination against immigrants the authors investigate immigrants and natives labor supply to the firm within an estimation approach based on a dynamic monopsony framework applying duration models that account for unobserved worker heterogeneity to a large administrative employer employee data set for germany they find that immigrants supply labor less elastically to firms than do natives under monopsonistic wage setting the estimated elasticity differential predicts a 7 7 log points wage penalty for immigrants thereby accounting for the entire unexplained native immigrant wage differential of 5 8 to 8 2 log points when further distinguishing immigrant groups differing in their time spent in the german labor market their immigration cohort and their age at entry the authors find that the observed unexplained wage differential is larger for those groups that show a larger elasticity differential relative to natives these findings not only suggest that search frictions are a likely cause of employers more pronounced monopsony

an expected profit model for monetizing fishing location choices abstract we develop and analyze the properties of a new type of discrete choice model which jointly estimates the expected value of catch and location choice this model implicitly monetizes location choices and can be used to predict costs and effort redistribution of creating marine protected areas or of implementing other policy changes that either increase travel costs or alter expected revenue we illustrate our approach by considering the closing of the steller sea lion conservation area in the united states bering sea to pollock fishing

teacher mobility responses to wage changes evidence from a quasi natural experiment low mobility responses to wage changes imply rents associated with existing employment relationships for example continued employment after a wage cut all else equal reflects rents in the hand of the worker at the outset and symmetrically voluntary quits after a

new market power models and sex differences in pay in the context of certain models it is possible to infer the elasticity of labor supply to the firm from the elasticity of the quit rate with respect to the wage we use this strategy to estimate the elasticity of labor supply for men and women workers at a chain of grocery stores identifying separation elasticities from differences in wages and separation rates across different job titles within the firm we estimate that women have lower elasticities so a robinson style monopsony model can explain reasonably well the lower relative pay of women in the retail grocery industry