can the human capital approach explain life cycle wage differentials between races and sexes i introduction the trends in gender and racial wage gaps have continued to receive the attention of researchers and policy makers due to their mounting social significance substantial literature concludes that after world war ii the black white pay gap shrank rapidly until the mid 1970s this trend was reversed in the 1980s card and dinardo 2002 couch and daly 2002 darity and myers 1998 o neill 1990 smith and welch 1989 1 in contrast the gender pay gap persisted for four decades after world war ii only in the 1980s did it start to narrow yet it showed only a little progress in the 1990s blau ferber and winkler 2002 goldin 1990 o neill 2003 although a large number of studies have been purported to investigate the sources of male female and black white pay gaps most have not addressed the issue of whether or not the individuals being observed have changed their economic status over their lifetimes the major problem is that longitudinal data are not available over a long enough period to determine the age earnings profiles 2 by using the national longitudinal survey of youth data 1979 cohort nlsy79 this paper examines gender and racial wage gaps among individuals of the same age in an effort to eliminate major life cycle differences while at the same time tracking the changes in the wage gaps over their life spans in particular we would like to provide answers to the following questions what factors can account for the narrowing widening gender wage gaps among blacks whites as they age can the observed life cycle wage gaps be attributed to different paths of postschool human capital accumulation since today s individuals regardless of race or sex have on average completed similar years of schooling among the youth cohort the observed disparity in wages between races and sexes may simply reflect the differences in the quality of schooling family background and postschool investment 3 given that school quality and family background are essentially fixed for an individual as he or she ages in order to address the questions above this paper attempts to further examine the differences in postschool human capital investment behavior among individuals past estimates of the structural parameters for the model of postschool human capital accumulation have however not been fruitful benporath 1970 brown 1976 haley 1976 heckman 1976a 1976b rosen 1976 the major reasons as heckman 1976b points out are that dynamic models are difficult to solve explicitly and that the proportion of time spent investing in on the job training cannot be measured directly moreover to fulfill the dynamic concepts of human capital accumulation longer period longitudinal data must be used to explore the life cycle view of individual wages 4 the lack of empirical investigation in relation to the continuous time dynamic model using panel data therefore leads us to develop an alternative empirical version for estimating the structural parameters of the wage function over a lifetime in other words the purpose of our study is to estimate a dynamic structural model based on the theory of optimal human capital accumulation in accordance with this theory of human capital the wage and its life path can be viewed as the outcome of an optimal path of human capital investment over an individual s life cycle instead of comparing the differences in the outcome of this optimization process i e wages we estimate the key parameters in determining the life cycle wage path as well as further empirically identifying the sources of the wage gap our empirical results first suggest that the male female wage gap mainly arises from gender difference in the marginal costs of human capital production as men in general spend more time in the labor market and gain more work experience than women they tend to have lower marginal costs in the process of human capital production

efficient resource allocation on the basis of priorities many institutions allocate resources by non market mechanisms based on priorities in this paper we introduce a model of resource allocation on the basis of priorities and address the following questions is it possible to allocate resources on the basis of any priority structure if yes when can we do this pareto efficiently without creating incentives for manipulation and consistently across different groups of agents and resource levels we adopt a basic indivisible objects model with a finite number of object types and a finite quota of goods of each type some interesting examples are the determination of access to education allocation of graduate houses offices or tasks agents are assumed to have strict preferences over object types and remaining unassigned an assignment is an allocation of the objects to the agents such that every agent receives at most one object a rule associates an assignment to each preference profile we formalize a priority structure to be a collection of strict priority rankings of individuals indexed by the object types where i a j would be read as i has higher priority for object a than j we assume that the priority structure is exogenously fixed and allow the preferences of the agents to vary a rule is said to violate a priority of i for a if there is a preference profile under which i envies j who is assigned a and publication information econometrica 70 6 november 2002 2489 2497 the copyright to this article is held by the econometric society http www econometricsociety org it may be downloaded printed and reproduced only for personal or classroom use absolutely no downloading or copying may be done for or on behalf of any for profit commercial firm or other commercial purpose without the explicit permission of the econometric society for this purpose contact julie p gordon executive director of the society at jpg northwestern edu i would like to thank faruk gul wolfgang pesendorfer the co editor the four anonymous referees and the participants of the micro theory lunch seminar in princeton university for their comments and suggestions

monetary transmission through bank loans or bank liabilities interest in the transmission of monetary fluctuations to real output has dominated macroeconomics since at least the eighteenth century since then many observers have noted the tendency of a monetary expansion to be followed initially by an expansion of real output and later by an increase in prices while the reason for the long run price change is well understood understanding the short run impact of money on nominal output remains an active unresolved research topic most theoretical models explain the transmission of monetary fluctuations to real output as a consequence of sticky prices or expectations the stickiness is either due to informational imperfections or to contractual rigidities while the policy implications of the two types of stickiness differ both types of model predict a transitory response of real output to a shock in nominal money balances neither the informational imperfection nor the contractual rigidity story is completely compelling and both rely on the central role played by movements in real balances and perceived real interest rates yet for thirty five years following world war ii neither significant movements in the anticipated real rate nor large interest elasticities of spending were apparent despite this the empirical correlation of money and output fluctuations has been found in most time periods and countries consequently the need for alternative explanations of monetary transmission or a credible reverse causation story remains strong

on two competing mechanisms for priority based allocation problems we consider the priority based allocation problem there is a set of indivisible objects with multiple supplies e g schools with seats and a set of agents e g students with priorities over objects e g proximity of residence area we study two well known and competing mechanisms the agentoptimal stable mechanism aosm allots objects via the deferred acceptance algorithm the top trading cycles mechanism ttcm allots objects via gale s top trading cycles algorithm we show that the two mechanisms are equivalent or ttcm is fair i e respects agents priorities or resource monotonic o rpopulation monotonic if and only if the priority structure is acyclic furthermore if aosm fails to be efficient consistent for a problem ttcm also fails to be fair consistent for it however the converse is not necessarily true

content based agendas and qualified majorities in sequential voting we analyze sequential binary voting schemes in settings where several privately informed agents have single peaked preferences over a finite set of alternatives and we focus on robust equilibria that do not depend on assumptions about the players beliefs about each other our main results identify two intuitive conditions on binary voting trees ensuring that sincere voting at each stage forms an ex post perfect equilibrium in particular we uncover a strong rationale for content based agendas if the outcome should not be sensitive to beliefs about others nor to the deployment of strategic skills the agenda needs to be built from the extremes to the middle so that more extreme alternatives are both more difficult to adopt and are put to vote before other more moderate options an important corollary is that under simple majority the equilibrium outcome of the incomplete information game is always the condorcet winner finally we aim to guide the practical design of schemes that are widely used by legislatures and committees and we illustrate our findings with several case studies

affirmative action and the racial wage gap among the many disturbing changes in the structure of wages in recent years the stagnation in the male racial wage gap may be the most disheartening race remains america s oldest and most persistent cause of social and economic disparity but many of us had been encouraged by the steady and significant economic progress since the second world war the recent stagnation challenges that optimism in this paper i attempt to identify the reasons why the wage stagnation took place many americans particularly those in the media and political arena believe they already know the reason according to them this stagnation is the predictable consequence of the affirmative action policies associated with the reagan administration one reason why many believe that the reagan era deserves principal responsibility for the racial stagnation is the belief that equal employment opportunity commission eeoc resources were gutted during this period eeoc inflation adjusted budgets grew almost 15 percent per year during the 1970 s while there was some slowdown in the last half of the decade constantdollar eeoc budgets expanded by 7 2 percent per year during the carter administration and almost 1 400 budgeted positions were added to the eeoc a growth of 50 percent between 1976 and 1980 there is no question that the reagan era witnessed an abrupt end to the growth in resources that would have taken place eeoc constant dollar budgets actually fell during this period and the number of positions declined by almost one thousand and as eeoc resources and personnel fell during the 1980 s so did the measurable outputs the sharp break in the 1980 s was not so much in the aggregate level of activity but in its composition and the resources available per case spurred by the passage of the age discrimination act in 1979 age came into its own during this decade starting with only 14 cases in the year after passage of the act the number of age cases rose at an astonishing pace to over 30 000 by 1992 even without this explosion in age related charges the significance of race was declining while the number of race charges increased by 10 percent after 1980 sex charges were expanding by 40 percent by 1992 only 40 percent of all cases involved race issues compared to 85 percent of all charges in 1970 and 61 percent in 1980 the declining importance of race in the eeoc s agenda reflects a more general dilution of race as the core civil rights labormarket concern since 1965 the road to equal rights has become very crowded the quest for racial justice was the clear moral force behind the civil rights act with women added in an unsuccessful attempt to scuttle the legislation subsequently hispanics have begun to rival blacks in their political clout and protected minority group status was extended to men over 40 those with a disability and gays the end result is that more than three quarters of today s labor force enjoy protected minority group status blacks are now a minority within the protected minority class which itself represents the majority

racial disparities in job finding and offered wages abstractthe extent to which discrimination can explain racial wage gaps is one of the most divisive issues in the social sciences using a newly available data set this paper develops a simple empirical test that under plausible but not innocuous conditions provides a lower bound on the extent of discrimination in the labor market taken at face value our estimates imply that differential treatment accounts for at least one third of the black white wage gap we argue that the patterns in our data are most naturally rationalized through a search matching model in which employers statistically discriminate on the basis of race when hiring unemployed workers but learn about their marginal product over time

on stable and strategy proof rules in matching markets with contracts abstract this paper studies stable and one sided strategy proof rules in many to one matching markets with contracts not assuming any kind of substitutes condition or the law of aggregate demand we obtain the following results first the number of stable and strategy proof rules is at most one second the doctor optimal stable rule whenever it exists is the unique candidate for a stable and strategy proof rule third a stable and strategy proof rule whenever it exists is second best optimal for doctor welfare in that no individually rational and strategy proof rule can dominate it this last result is further generalized to non wasteful and strategy proof rules due to the weak assumptions our analysis covers a broad range of markets including cases where a unique stable and strategy proof rule is not equal to the one induced by the cumulative offer process or the deferred acceptance algorithm

tests for parameter instability in regressions with i 1 processes this article derives the large sample distributions of lagrange multiplier lm tests for parameter instability against several alternatives of interest in the context of cointegrated regression models the fully modified estimator of phillips and hansen is extended to cover general models with stochastic and deterministic trends the test statistics considered include the supf test of quandt as well as the lm tests of nyblom and of nabeya and tanaka it is found that the asymptotic distributions depend on the nature of the regressor processes that is if the regressors are stochastic or deterministic trends the distributions are noticeably different from the distributions when the data are weakly dependent it is also found that the lack of cointegration is a special case of the alternative hypothesis considered an unstable intercept so the tests proposed here may also be viewed as a test of the null of cointegration against the alternative of no cointegration the tests are applied to three data se

job queues discrimination and affirmative action james r fain if employers have different becker type discrimination coefficients for different demographic groups then the implementation of affirmative action may have a differential impact on those groups we estimate two vector autoregressive models of the us economy including the unemployment rates of four demographic groups we find that a job queue existed before the implementation of affirmative action and that affirmative action changed the ordering of the job queue in manner that had a negative impact on nonwhite males we find evidence that affirmative action may have increased the unemployment rate of nonwhite males by increasing their duration of unemployment jel j71 j78 j64 j68 i introduction the relative status of demographic groups in the labor force has been undergoing significant change since the early 1960s throughout this period white females and racial minorities have experienced changes not only relative to white males but also relative to one another one such change is exhibited in relative unemployment rates figure 1 shows differentials in the smoothed unemployment rates using a 12 x 2 centered moving average for white females nonwhite males and nonwhite females for the years 1959 83 one can easily see that the relative unemployment burdens have varied over time focusing first on the two lines that are positive over the entire range one may see that prior to the late 1960s the status of nonwhite individuals especially nonwhite males relative to white females was improving however beginning in the late 1960s this trend reversed the unemployment rate differential between nonwhite males and white females increased from a low of 1 03 in july 1969 to a high of 11 12 in march 1983 similarly after declining during the 1960s the unemployment rate differential between nonwhite females and white females increased from a low of 3 49 in october 1969 to a high of 9 16 in august 1983 these reversals in trend indicate the status of white females relative to both nonwhite males and nonwhite females began improving in the late 1960s figure 1 also shows the status of nonwhite females improved relative to that of nonwhite males during the same time period the unemployment rate differential between nonwhite males and nonwhite females increased from a low of 3 13 in february 1968 to a high of 2 38 in february 1983 these three unemployment rate differentials all declined in the 1960s a time of tremendous social change and strong economic growth but all of these trends reversed direction in the 20 month period from february 1968 to october 1969 after the trend reversal the status of white females improved relative to both nonwhite males and nonwhite females and the status of nonwhite females improved relative to that of nonwhite males to put it another way nonwhite males lost ground relative to both nonwhite females and white females our goal is to examine what role if any the implementation of affirmative action in 1968 had in reversing these trends other possible explanations of the above noted reversal in trends certainly exist but several factors point to affirmative action as a potential cause of these changes first the timing is correct the trends reversed in close proximity to the implementation of affirmative action second whatever caused these reversals affected all minority groups did so within a short 20 month time span and its impact was sustained over a number of years a new federal policy designed to change the way firms hire minorities should have exactly this type of effect finally as we will argue below imposing affirmative action on discriminating employers will not benefit all demographic groups equally discriminating employers will continue to discriminate though the pattern of discrimination may change many of the traditional explanations of changes in relative unemployment rates are unlikely candidates to explain these significant and sustained reversals of longstanding trends

detecting spot price forecasts in futures prices futures markets are often described as having two important social functions first they facilitate the transfer of commodity price risk and second they provide forecasts of commodity prices the evidence that futures markets transfer price risk is irrefutable however there is some debate about the markets forecasting ability in particular forecasts based on the current spot price are often as good as those based on the futures price some economists cite a failure to detect superior forecast power in futures prices as evidence of market inefficiency see e g leuthold 1974 and martin and garcia 1981 there are at least two other explanations first there may be nothing for the futures market to forecast if the current spot price equals the true expectation of the future spot price the futures market cannot provide a better forecast second a superior futures market forecast may be obscured by the unexpected component of the realized spot price the true expectation of the future spot price is unobservable one must approximate this expectation with the actual future spot price

white discrimination in provision of black education plantations and towns abstract we present a model of public provision of education for blacks in two discriminatory regimes white plantation controlled and white yeoman town controlled we show that the ability to migrate to a non discriminating district constrains the ability of both types of regimes to discriminate the model produces time series of educational outcomes for whites and blacks that mimic the behavior seen in post reconstruction south carolina to the onset of the civil rights act it also fits the post world war ii black white income differentials

interpreting the macroeconomic time series facts the effects of monetary policy existing theory and evidence on the effects of monetary policy are reviewed substantial room for disagreement among economists remains new evidence based on multivariate time series studies of several countries is presented while certain patterns in the data consistent with effective monetary policy are strikingly similar across countries others particularly the tendency of interest rate increases to predict high inflation are harder to reconcile with effective monetary policy

detecting and removing discrimination under equal opportunities policies abstract this paper surveys part of the recent voluminous literature on the economics of discrimination focusing on two key questions first how should discrimination be measured and can in fact unambiguous estimates be derived as the basis for detecting where discrimination is present and setting in train measures to eliminate it second to what extent has the implementation of equal opportunities legislation improved the relative standing of women and minority workers in the labour force this section includes a discussion of the likely effects of recent changes in the law such as the equal value amendment in the uk or the introduction of comparable worth in the usa the survey concludes that our ability to detect discrimination at all precisely is still rudimentary and consequently policy measures are likely to be inefficient for this reason

electoral competition with uncertainty averse parties abstract the non existence of equilibria in models of electoral competition involving multiple issues is one of the more puzzling results in political economics in this paper we relax the standard assumption that parties act as expected utility maximizers we show that equilibria often exist when parties with limited knowledge about the electorate are modeled as uncertainty averse what is more these equilibria can be characterized as a straightforward generalization of the classical median voter result

women and affirmative action abstract this paper reviews evidence indicating that as it has been enforced so far affirmative action has contributed negligibly to women s progress in the workplace affirmative action can be modeled as a tax on employers whose female employment growth falls below a certain rate clearly if labor supply shifts result in female employment growth greater than the regulatory standard the tax constraint will not be binding as we shall see this may help explain an affirmative action program that is generally ineffective for women although it has been effective for minorities federal anti bias policies in general and the system of affirmative action goals in particular have been accused of instituting employment quotas this paper reviews evidence on the homogenization of the workplace predicted by the quota theory as well as considering more direct evidence on whether affirmative action goals are really quotas in lambs clothing i shall also review the slim evidence on the most fundamental and co

measuring the extent of earnings discrimination an update ordinary least squares ols regression and data from the march 1990 current population survey are used to estimate yearly earnings averages for white males white females black males and black females in order to test for the possible existence or gender and or race discrimination earnings estimates are decomposed using the tradional oaxaca 1973 and blinder 1973 methodology in comparing these results with those from carlson and swartz 1988 using 1979 data we find that overall and unexplained residual differences have declined quite substantially but that they still favour white males we then incorporate an extension of the traditional methodology jackson and lindley 1989 which allows for testing for the significance of enexplained residuals and for jointly testing for the significance of residual effect components the constant and coefficient effects these results call into question the unambiguous conclusion that earnings differentials uniformly favour white males strong support is

empirical analysis of corn and soybean basis in canada the article examines the factors affecting the basis for corn and soybeans using several time series techniques to account for potential structural breaks seasonality residual serial correlation and structural breaks as well as potential endogeneity and nonstationarity the spatio temporal empirical framework is based on storage and trade theories which assume the relationship between nondelivery location s spot price and futures price of a storable commodity depends on opportunity cost of capital warehousing costs a convenience yield and shipping costs the interest rate effect is strong for both crops with shipping costs also affecting soybean basis and own inventory levels positively correlated with corn basis the effect of the wedge between the price of carrying physical grain and the maximum storage rate on basis is positive for both crops the empirical results which are robust to multiple estimators provide stronger evidence of a structural break for the soybean basis than for the corn basis

a dynamic school choice model this paper inspires from a real life assignment problem faced by the mexican ministry of public education we introduce a dynamic school choice problem that consists in assigning positions to overlapping generations of teachers from one period to another teachers can either retain their current positions or choose a preferred one in this framework a solution concept that conciliates the fairness criteria with the individual rationality condition is introduced it is then proved that a solution always exists and that it can be reached by a modified version of the deferred acceptance algorithm of gale and shapley we also show that the mechanism is dynamically strategy proof and respects improvements whenever the set of orders is lexicographic by tenure

does temporary affirmative action produce persistent effects a study of black and female employment in law enforcement abstract this paper exploits variation in the timing and outcomes of employment discrimination lawsuits against u s law enforcement agencies to estimate the cumulative and persistent employment effects of temporary externally imposed affirmative action aa we find that aa increased black employment at all ranks by 4 5 to 6 2 percentage points relative to national trends we also find no erosion of these employment gains in the fifteen years following aa termination although black employment growth was significantly lower in departments after aa ended than in departments whose plans continued for women in contrast we find only marginal employment gains at lower ranks

generalized median voter schemes and committees abstract we define a multidimensional analogue of a single peaked preference and generalize the notion of a median voter scheme every onto strategy proof social choice function on a single peaked domain is a generalized median voter scheme since a single peaked preference can be identified unequivocally with its bliss point one can view a social choice function as an arrowian social welfare function we show that a social choice function is strategy proof iff viewed as a social welfare function it satisfies a monotonicity property finally we investigate strategic decision making in hierarchical committees journal of economic literature classification numbers c72 d71

black white earnings ratios the role of cohort size effects abstract while black white earning ratios have been rising over time across cohorts there is some evidence that they have been dropping over time within cohorts of recent entrants to the labor market this has coincided with the entry of the large baby boom cohorts into the labor market this paper examines the role of race differences in cohort size effects on black white earnings ratios for male high school graduates using current population survey data in larger cohorts the black white earnings ratio is lower at entry and falls as the cohort progresses through the career consistent with recent evidence

trends in the male female wage gap the 1980s compared with the 1970s 1 introduction an interesting pattern emerges when contrasting men s and women s wage growth in the 1970s and 1980s from 1979 to 1989 female wages grew 1 7 per annum faster than male wages this wage growth in the 1980s resulted in a 17 narrowing of the gender wage gap on the other hand from 1969 to 1979 female wages grew at a rate only 0 39 per year faster than male wages resulting in very little narrowing of the gender wage gap blau 1998 as noted by smith and ward 1989 these contrasting trends puzzled many because it is well known that female work behavior shot up more dramatically in the 1970s than in the 1980s if female wage growth is related to increasing labor force activity one would have expected the male female wage gap to narrow more in the 1970s than in the 1980s the purpose of this paper is to identify some of the reasons why the male female wage gap narrowed more quickly in the 1980s than in the 1970s despite a deceleration of the growth in female labor force activity in the 1980s what appears to be the case is that predominantly younger and less experienced females entered the labor force in the 1970s the entry of women with relatively little human capital brought down the growth in women s average human capital o neill 1985 so that despite the upsurge of women s labor force participation in the 1970s women s average human capital relative to men s increased more slowly in the 1970s than in the 1980s this relatively slower growth in women s human capital appears to have played itself out in the 1980s both because the number of women joining the labor force slowed and because women s labor force attachment as measured by the proportion of potential work years actually worked increased blau 1998 with these trends average female human capital increased in the 1980s resulting in greater overall wage gains because of the stark differences between the 1970s and 1980s this paper concentrates on distinguishing the factors that contribute to men s and women s wage growth in the two decades despite the substantial literature on the male female wage gap the interdecade difference in the trend has not been adequately examined in what follows this paper uses the panel study of income dynamics psid to illustrate the effects of the demographic changes alluded to above 1 first it presents wage trends for the 1970s and 1980s second it provides direct measures of changes in human capital growth within each decade third to illustrate the importance of these demographic trends especially how new young labor market entrants bring down wages it shows that the higher relative female wage growth in the 1980s is reduced and the relatively slower female wage growth in the 1970s is enhanced when one controls for individual human capital characteristics these effects are illustrated first by including actual experience type variables in a regression whose coefficients measure wage growth and second by eliminating new entrants from 1970s and 1980s regression analysis the paper shows that with these controls increases in female average growth in both the 1970s and 1980s were more comparable than previously thought 2 recent literature on trends in the male female wage gap this is not the first paper to recognize the trend in male female wage convergence o neill 1985 blau and beller 1988 smith and ward 1989 goldin 1990 katz and murphy 1992 wellington 1993 o neill and polachek 1993 blau and kahn 1997 and blau 1998 all note that women s wages have risen relative to men smith and ward 1989 find that female relative wages rose between 1920 and 1980 when adjusting for worker skills goldin 1990 piecing together various data sources finds a similar long term narrowing according to her the ratio of female to male earnings in the economy as a whole rose from 0 46 to 0 56 during the period 1890 to 1930 but was virtually stable from 1950 to around 1980 p

on the intertemporal behavior of the short term rate of interest this paper examines the intertemporal behavior of the short term rate of interest in a mean reverting model vasicek s elastic random walk model using the goldfeldquandt switching regressions technique we show that the mean reverting model switched regimes three times over the sample period march 1959 to december 1985 and that two of these switches coincide with the 1979 and 1982 changes in federal reserve monetary policy on interest rates parameter estimates prove to be unstable over the sample period there is evidence of slow mean reversion over the entire sample period yet significant mean reversion emerges only in the 1979 1982 regime

dynamic stability and reform of political institutions abstract this paper examines endogenous institutional change in a class of dynamic political games the political aggregation rules used at date t 1 are instrumental choices under rules at date t effectively rules are players who can strategically delegate future policy making authority to different rules a political rule is stable if it selects itself a reform occurs when an alternative rule is selected the stability of a political rule is shown to depend on whether its choices are dynamically consistent for instance simple majority rules can be shown to be dynamically consistent in many common environments where wealth weighted voting rules are not the result extends to political rules that incorporate private activities such as extra legal protests threats or private investment the approach is one way of understanding various explanations of institutional change proposed in the literature a parametric model of public goods provision gives an illustration

affirmative action and labor markets affirmative action remains controversial the controversy extends from the original antidiscrimination legislation and its interpretation to estimates of affirmative action s effect on the labor market this paper provides a progress report on our recent efforts at detecting the effects of affirmative action on minority wages and employment although we find a substantial increase in wages for black men and black women over our sample period the timing of these wage changes is surprising most of the wage gains came prior to 1974 before the establishment of an effective monitoring structure for affirmative action indeed when the powers of the eeoc and ofcc are greatest the wage effects for young blacks are somewhat perverse using eeo 1 reports we find a major shift in black employment toward firms most vulnerable to the monitoring and potential sanctions of the affirmative action programs as with wages the shift in minority employment came prior to the expansion of the powers and budgets of the ee

will affirmative action policies eliminate negative stereotypes a key question concerning affirmative action is whether the labor market gains it brings to minorities can continue without it becoming a permanent fixture in the labor market the authors argue that this depends on how the policy affects employers beliefs about the productivity of minority workers they study the joint determination of employer beliefs and worker productivity in a model of statistical discrimination in job assignments the authors prove that even when identifiable groups are equally endowed ex ante affirmative action can bring about a situation in which employers correctly perceive the groups to be unequally productive ex post copyright 1993 by american economic association

you can t always get what you need organizational determinants of diversity programs while some u s corporations have adopted a host of diversity management programs many have done little or nothing we explore the forces promoting six diversity programs in a national sample of 816 firms over 23 years institutional theory suggests that external pressure for innovation reinforces internal advocacy we argue that external pressure and internal advocacy serve as alternatives such that when external pressure is already high increases in internal advocacy will not alter the likelihood of program adoption moreover institutional theory points to functional need as a driver of innovation we argue that in the case of innovations designed to achieve new societal goals functional need as defined in this case by the absence of workforce diversity or the presence of regulatory oversight is less important than corporate culture our findings help explain the spotty coverage of diversity programs firms that lack workforce diversity are no more likely than others to adopt programs but firms with large contingents of women managers are more likely to do so pro diversity industry and corporate cultures promote diversity programs the findings carry implications for public policy

the impact of federal civil rights policy on black economic progress evidence from the equal employment opportunity act of 1972 the equal employment opportunity act eeoa of 1972 extended civil rights coverage to employers with 15 24 employees while leaving unaffected the civil rights protection for employees of larger firms in conjunction with pre existing state fair employment practice fep laws the eeoa provides a natural experiment in which the treatment and control groups are defined by differences across industries in the fraction of workers employed in the newly covered establishments and across states in the scope of the fep laws applying the treatment and control group methodology to current population survey data the author finds that there were large shifts in the employment and pay practices of the industries most affected by the amendment the timing of the relative gains and their concentration by industry and region provide evidence that the eeoa had a positive impact on the labor market status of african americans

strategyproof assignment by hierarchical exchange we give a characterization of the set of group strategyproof pareto optimal and reallocation proof allocation rules for the assignment problem where individuals are assigned at most one indivisible object without any medium of exchange although there are no property rights in the model the rules satisfying the above criteria imitate a trading procedure with individual endowments in which individuals exchange objects from their hierarchically determined endowment sets in an iterative manner in particular these assignment rules generalize gale s top trading cycle procedure the classical rule for the model in which each individual owns an indivisible good

individual versus group strategy proofness when do they coincide a social choice function is group strategy proof on a domain if no group of agents can manipulate its final outcome to their own benefit by declaring false preferences on that domain there are a number of economically significant domains where interesting rules satisfying individual strategy proofness can be defined and for some of them all these rules turn out to also satisfy the stronger requirement of group strategy proofness we provide conditions on domains guaranteeing that for all rules defined on them individual and group strategy proofness become equivalent we also provide a partial answer regarding the necessity of our conditions

do alternative opportunities matter the role of female labor markets in the decline of teacher quality abstract this paper documents the widely perceived but little investigated notion that teachers today are less qualified than they once were evidence of a marked decline in the quality of young women going into teaching between 1960 and 1990 is presented using standardized test scores undergraduate institution selectivity and positive assortative mating characteristics as indicators of quality in contrast the quality of young women becoming professionals increased the roy model of self selection highlights how occupational differences in the returns to skill determine teacher quality estimates suggest the significance of increasing professional opportunities for women in affecting the decline in teacher quality

strategy proofness and essentially single valued cores in this paper we search for solutions to various classes of allocation problems we hand results pertaining to housing markets are much more encouraging roth 1982b shows that in the context of housing markets the core correspondence which is shown to be single valued by roth and postlewaite 1977 is strategy proof moreover ma 1994 shows that it is the only solution that is pareto efficient individually rational and strategy proof

the impact of affirmative action on labor demand a test of some implications of the le chatelier principle this paper presents an alternative approach to measuring the impact of affirmative action on firms affirmative action is modeled as a series of hiring quotas if the quotas are binding then a firm subject to affirmative action will operate with greater costs of production have less elastic demand for inputs and be less able to substitute between most inputs the results are consistent with the hypothesis that affirmative action regulations significantly constrain firms behavior own wage elasticities are less elastic and most inputs are less substitutable for constrained firms further affirmative action raises costs by 6 5 percent for firms subject to the program copyright 1992 by mit press

promotion signaling discrimination and positive discrimination policies this article studies discrimination in a model in which promotions are used as signals of worker ability the model can account for statistical and taste based discrimination in the short run a positive discrimination policy is beneficial for workers in the middle of the ability distribution because these workers are promoted if and only if the policy is in place instead workers of either high or low ability suffer from the policy in the long run the policy benefits all targeted workers the model can explain empirical findings about the effects of a gender quota on the boards of norwegian companies

efficiency and income redistribution in the single peaked preferences model with several commodities abstract we consider the problem of allocating m infinitely divisible commodities among agents with single peaked preferences we propose a variation on the mas colell s walrasian solution with slacks to characterize the efficient allocations our solution allows us to associate with each efficient allocation an income redistribution we prove that the original solution proposed by mas colell is the efficient selection which requires an income redistribution where the maximum payoff and the maximum subsidy are smallest this generalizes a derivation of the uniform rule by schummer and thomson

interest rates and the channels of monetary transmission some sectoral estimates abstract we estimate a small sectoral var model of the uk macroeconomy this model is then used to simulate the effects of an exogenous monetary policy shock upon asset prices bank balance sheet variables and final target variables activity and prices for the personal and corporate sectors significant sectoral differences are found among the channels of monetary transmission in addition the use of sectoral data facilitates the identification of distinct money and credit channels in the transmission of monetary policy these results contrast with the ambiguous findings on the roles of money and credit in the literature to date

voting by committees under constraints we consider social choice problems where a society must choose a subset from a set of objects specifically we characterize the families of strategy proof voting procedures when not all possible subsets of objects are feasible and voters preferences are separable or additively representable

strategyproof collective choice in economic and political environments this paper surveys some recent results characterizing strategyproof collective choice rules when preferences satisfy conditions that are meaningful in economic or political environments

optimal voting rules we study dominant strategy incentive compatible dic and deterministic mechanisms in a social choice setting with several alternatives the agents are privately informed about their preferences and have single crossing utility functions monetary transfers are not feasible we use an equivalence between deterministic dic mechanisms and generalized median voter schemes to construct the constrained efficient optimal mechanism for an utilitarian planner optimal schemes for other welfare criteria such as say a rawlsian maximin can be analogously obtained

optimal storage and marketing over space and time borrowing from the theory of optimal resource extraction we develop the mechanism guiding efficient commodity storage and marketing over producing regions through the crop year optimal storage occurs at producing areas and time in storage varies directly with distance to market prices grow with interest rates in locations where storage is efficient but more slowly elsewhere which explains why market prices i e prices at the market grow more slowly than interest rates the model is empirically supported by examining storage in the corn belt rates of price growth at various points and quarterly grain marketings

on the operation of multiple matching markets abstract we provide a new perspective on how to operate matching markets when there are many types of markets our finding is that the market wise adaptation of strategy proof and non wasteful rules yields a strategy proof rule with the following efficiency property no strategy proof rule pareto dominates the rule such rules are abundant as they include the market wise use of the well known priority based rules of the top trading cycles and the deferred acceptance this result gives theoretical support to the independent operation of markets observed in real life markets as well as our practice in market design that separately treats each market for its design

customer discrimination and affirmative action i introduction beginning with the work of becker 1957 economists have been concerned with the relationship between competitive market forces and the persistence of labor market discrimination 1 a major insight of becker and the literature that followed is that competition could tend to eliminate discriminatory pay differentials if competitive forces do eliminate discrimination then empirical findings of persistent discrimination are either a result of faulty testing or market imperfections economic analysis of the link between competition and discrimination depends on the origins of prejudice becker identified at least three possible sources employers co workers and consumers 2 in each of these instances the group against which prejudice is directed e g women or minorities which will be termed minorities in this paper may be able to escape discrimination first minorities can work for nondiscriminatory employers if there are any moreover stiglitz 1973 shows that with constant returns to scale such employers will take over markets from the discriminators eliminating any pay gap based on prejudice 3 second if there is co worker prejudice then minorities can work in segregated firms which under constant returns to scale may have a cost advantage over integrated or all majority firms again discrimination will be driven away 4 third minorities can theoretically escape customer discrimination by specializing in the production of goods for which there is no contact between producers and consumers a case discussed by cain 1986 while competitive forces may in some cases erode discriminatory wage differentials the rate of decline of race and sex wage differentials has evidently not been rapid enough in the eyes of policymakers u s anti discrimination policy has been guided by two major vehicles title vii of the 1964 civil rights act and the office of federal contract compliance programs ofccp 5 the equal employment opportunity commission eeoc was created to enforce title vii and is empowered to aid plaintiffs or bring suit itself against employers the commission monitors the employment practices of federal contractors not only are contractors barred from discrimination against protected groups these firms are also required to take affirmative action not to discriminate the purpose of this paper is twofold first it demonstrates that in a general equilibrium framework the case of customer discrimination is theoretically distinct from employer or co worker prejudice in particular while constant returns to scale and the existence of nondiscriminatory firms can eliminate the latter two forms of discrimination customer discrimination may persist even under such conditions the persistence of discriminatory wage differentials is shown to depend on consumer demand technology and the relative size of the minority labor force 6 second the general equilibrium framework is then used to evaluate the impact of government anti discrimination policy where customers are the source of discrimination it is shown that if the government requires equal pay and proportional representation for minorities then the resulting allocation of resources will under particular assumptions be the same as if customers did not discriminate i then contrast these theoretical results with the predicted general equilibrium impact of affirmative action when there is employer or co worker prejudice among previous general equilibrium models of affirmative action welch 1976 assumed no discrimination while freeman 1978 did not specify the source of discrimination it is shown here that the source of prejudice markedly affects one s conclusions about affirmative action further even in some cases where segregation has eliminated discriminatory wage differentials the introduction of affirmative action has allocative effects finally evidence from studies evaluating the impact of affirmative action is used to distinguish among the various equilibrium models

determinants of commodity prices a panel of annual information between 1960 and 2006 for approximately 50 different commodity prices and some other variables and sources is used to tests the determinants of commodity prices according to the evidence interest rates seem to maintain a negative relationship with commodity prices

matching with branch of choice contracts at the united states military academy branch selection is a key decision in a cadet s military career cadets at usma can increase their branch priorities at a fraction of slots by extending their service agreement this real life matching problem lls an important gap in market design literature although priorities fail a key substitutes condition the agent optimal stable mechanism is well dened and in contrast to the current usma mechanism it is fair stable and strategy proof adoption of this mechanism benets cadets and the army this new

labor market dropouts and trends in the wages of black and white men there is continuing debate over whether and to what degree estimations of black white wage convergence are biased because they leave labor market dropouts out of the picture if a high proportion of blacks become discouraged and cease searching for jobs and if those dropouts have on average poor job prospects the average wage of black workers who remain in the labor market will be an upwardly biased estimate of the average wage across the population this paper introduces a simple method of imputing wages to non workers when non workers are accounted for in the calculations real wage growth for prime age black men over the 1969 98 period is reduced approximately 40 and black white wage convergence is reduced by approximately one third the author finds that a source of bias as important as falling employment rates is the growing gap between wages of workers and potential wages of non workers

strategy proof stochastic assignment abstract i study strategy proof assignment mechanisms where the agents reveal their preference rankings over the available objects a stochastic mechanism returns lotteries over deterministic assignments and mechanisms are compared according to first order stochastic dominance i show that non wasteful strategy proof mechanisms are not dominated by strategy proof mechanisms however non wastefulness is highly restrictive when the mechanism involves randomization in fact the random priority mechanism i e the random serial dictatorship and a recently adopted school choice mechanism deferred acceptance with random tie breaking are wasteful i find that both these mechanisms are dominated by strategy proof mechanisms in general strategy proof improvement cannot be due to merely reshuffling objects and therefore must involve assigning more objects

male female wage differentials and policy responses without implicating them for any of the contents of the paper i am grateful to the following for helpful discussions or comments andrea beller university of illinois david bloom harvard and columnbia glen cain university of wisconsin ron ehrenberg cornell victor fuchs stanford bob gregory australian national university jonathan leonard university of california berkeley roberta robb brock university and paul weiler harvard financial support of the humanities and social sciences committee of the research board of the universitu of toronto is eratefullu acknowlede ed

impossibility of strategy proof mechanisms in economies with pure public goods this paper investigates the structures of strategy proof mechanisms in general models of economies with pure public goods under the assumptions that the set of allocations is a subset of some finite dimensional euclidean space and that the admissible preferencees are continuous and convex i establish that any strategy proof mechanism is dictatorial whenever the decision problem is of more than one dimension furthermore i establish a similar result when preference relations also satisfy the additional assumption of monotonicity these results properly extend the gibbard satterthwaite theorem to economies with pure public goods

on strategy proofness and symmetric single peakedness we characterize the class of strategy proof social choice functions on the domain of symmetric single peaked preferences this class is strictly larger than the set of generalized median voter schemes the class of strategy proof and tops only social choice functions on the domain of single peaked preferences characterized by moulin 1980 since under the domain of symmetric single peaked preferences generalized median voter schemes can be disturbed by discontinuity points and remain strategy proof on the smaller domain our result identifies the specific nature of these discontinuities which allow to design non onto social choice functions to deal with feasibility constraints

dynamically consistent voting rules abstract this paper studies preference aggregation in a dynamic choice context voters face menus of options in stages and the source of dynamics is that menus possibly get smaller across each stage we call the family of stage voting rules dynamic voting rules and provide an axiomatic characterization on the domain of single peaked preferences of dynamic voting rules that are strategy proof and satisfy a second property inspired from choice theory which we call dynamic consistency

the effect of statistical discrimination on black white wage inequality estimating a model with multiple equilibria this article presents the structural estimation of the parameters of a statistical discrimination model although the model is capable of displaying multiple equilibria an estimation strategy that identifies both the model parameters and the equilibrium selected by the economic agents is developed and empirically implemented a comparison between the selected equilibria and the other potential equilibria reveals that the decline in wage inequality experienced in the u s economy cannot be attributed to changes in the equilibrium selection nonetheless a counterfactual experiment shows that in a color blind society blacks wage would have been on average more than 20 higher

women in the labor market and in the family t here are two themes in this paper the first an exercise in revisionist history argues that the conventional wisdom of an absence of any substantial labor market progress for women is mistaken instead throughout this century women s wages have been steadily rising relative to those of men a progress likely to accelerate in the next few decades our second theme contends that this labor market progress is not enough alongside their labor market advances the relative economic plight of many women is worsening the downside news is the increasing feminization of poverty a reflection of the growing instability of the american family

does monetary policy lose effectiveness during a credit crunch this article investigates the effectiveness of monetary policy during a credit crunch by estimating a vector autoregression on the us economy we present evidence that interest rate cuts have a diminished impact on growth due to impairment in the relationship between monetary policy and the supply of intermediated credit

a cure for discrimination affirmative action and the case of california s proposition 209 proposition 209 enacted in california in 1996 and made effective the following year ended state affirmative action programs not only in education but also for public employment and government contracting this paper uses cps data and triple difference techniques to take advantage of the natural experiment presented by this change in state law to gauge the labor market impacts of ending affirmative action programs employment among women and minorities dropped sharply a change that was nearly completely explained by a decline in participation rather than by increases in unemployment this decline suggests that either affirmative action programs in california had been inefficient or that they failed to create lasting change in prejudicial attitudes

the effects of living wage laws evidence from failed and derailed living wage campaigns abstract living wage campaigns have succeeded in about 100 jurisdictions in the united states but have also been unsuccessful in numerous cities these unsuccessful campaigns provide a better control group or counterfactual for estimating the effects of living wage laws than the broader set of all cities without a law and also permit the separate estimation of the effects of living wage laws and living wage campaigns we find that living wage laws raise wages of low wage workers but reduce employment among the least skilled especially when the laws cover business assistance recipients or are accompanied by similar laws in nearby cities

the role of human capital in earnings differences between black and white men d uring the past 50 years the earnings of black men have increased substantially both in absolute terms and relative to those of white men as shown in figure 1 in 1940 the black white weekly earnings ratio among men ages 25 34 was 49 percent by 1980 it had increased to 79 percent during the 1980s however the overall black white earnings gap did not narrow and at younger ages the gap actually widened although the 1980s is not the first decade since 1940 in which black men made little or no gains in relative earnings the 1950s was another the lack of progress in the 1980s is nevertheless puzzling and a source of concern this article examines the factors underlying the differential in earnings between black men and white men with a focus on the role of human capital since 1940 successive generations of black men entering the labor force have been increasingly more educated relative to white men both in terms of years of school completed and in the quality of schooling obtained as the education and income levels of black parents increased racial differences in the transmission of human capital in the home were also likely to have narrowed this convergence in educational differences combined with the migration of blacks out of the south contributed to the narrowing in the racial gap in earnings over the 1940 80 period particularly in the first half of the period but human capital factors education and migration were not the only source of convergence in black white differences in earnings the patterns of change in the earnings gap support the contention that declining labor market discrimination against blacks has also contributed to the rise in the black white earnings ratio moreover the acquisition of human capital itself has been strongly affected by societal and governmental discrimination since blacks were long provided with greatly inferior schooling resources

the impact of employment quotas on the economic lives of disadvantaged minorities in india abstract india has the world s biggest and arguably most aggressive employment based affirmative action policy for minorities this paper exploits the institutional features of a federally mandated employment quota policy to examine its causal impact on the economic lives of the two distinct minority groups scheduled castes and scheduled tribes my main finding is that a 1 percentage point increase in the employment quota for scheduled castes increases the likelihood of obtaining a salaried job by 0 6 percentage points for male scheduled caste members residing in the rural sector the employment quota policy has no impact for scheduled tribes contrary to popular notion i do not find evidence of elite capture among the scheduled castes the impact is concentrated among members who have completed less than secondary education consistent with the employment results i find that the policy improved the well being of scheduled castes members in rural areas who have completed less than secondary education finally the impact of the employment quota policy varies by state characteristics

some evidence on the empirical significance of credit rationing this paper examines the credit rationing debate using detailed contract information on over one million commercial bank loans from 1977 to 1988 while commercial loan rates are sticky consistent with rationing this stickiness varies with loan contract terms in ways that are not predicted by equilibrium credit rationing theory in addition the proportion of new loans issued under commitment does not increase significantly when credit markets are tight despite the fact that borrowers without commitments can be rationed whereas commitment borrowers are contractually insulated from rationing overall the data suggest that equilibrium rationing is not a significant macroeconomic phenomenon

black white wage convergence the role of public sector wages and employment this paper assesses the relative contribution of the public and private sectors through their employment and wages to the black white wage convergence that occurred in the u s economy over the 1