labour market discrimination are there significant differences between the various decomposition procedures economists have usually called the proportion of the average wage gap between two groups which could not be explained by individual characteristics discrimination recently several theories have suggested that labour market discrimination on the one hand lowers the wages of the minority group and on the other leads to higher pay for the majority group in a recent survey of the various methods used to decompose the overall wage differential between two groups oaxaca and ransom compared five approaches in the contexts of race and gender discrimination this paper checks whether there are significant differences between the various decomposition procedures which have appeared in the literature the tests are based on bootstrap techniques

earnings and ethnicity in trinidad and tobago this study employs 1993 continuous sample survey of the population cssp data for trinidad and tobago to investigate the determinants of earnings by ethnicity the data organised into three ethnic groupings reveal lower levels of remuneration in the labour market for africans and indians than for individuals of other ethnicities taken as a whole while the larger portion of the earnings differentials generally appears to be explained by ethnic differences in characteristics valued by the labour market africans and indians would benefit substantially if they were to receive the same rates of remuneration for their educational endowments as workers of other ethnicities in the trinidad and tobago labour market notwithstanding indians lowest average earnings africans appear more likely to be discriminated against

discrimination and the unemployment durations of white and black males in this study we develop a model to decompose the longer unemployment duration of blacks into discriminatory and non discriminatory components by extending becker s theory of discrimination to job search theory the discriminatory component is seen to be the result of two separate effects first a white treatment advantage shortens the unemployment duration of whites because they receive more frequent and higher wage offers than would prevail in the absence of discrimination for working alongside blacks second a black treatment disadvantage lengthens the jobless spell of blacks because blacks receive lower wage offers than would prevail without discrimination as discriminating employers extract quasi rents from their labour we estimate our model using date from the cps displaced workers survey the results show that 3 81 of the 4 58 weeks longer unemployment spell for blacks is due to discrimination with 3 11 weeks resulting from the white treatment advantage and 0 7 weeks emanating from the black

estimating the gender wage gap in rawalpindi city studies estimating wage discrimination against women have rarely been conducted for third world countries and no research has been directed to this issue in pakistan at all this article uses data from rawalpindi city to calculate the magnitude of the male female earnings gap and identifies the proportion of this gap which results from discrimination as well as that which stems from differences between males and females in productivity characteristics in addition to the oaxaca model the recently developed cotton neumark model is also used to derive estimates in a new twist to such models adjustments are made for the presence of selectivity bias in the data the results indicate existence of high levels of discrimination against women as reflected in estimates of the earnings differentials

determinants of health care decisions insurance utilization and expenditures abstract this paper studies three interrelated health care decisions insurance utilization and expenditures the model treats insurance as an endogenous variable with respect to both utilization and expenditures addresses potential selection issues and takes into account that the decisions to use health care and the level of treatment are determined by different decision makers we employ semiparametric methods to avoid making distributional assumptions using the medical expenditure panel survey 2005 data the semiparametric approach predicts insurance to increase the level of expenditures by 48 a number in accord with an important experimental study and less than half that obtained using parametric methods

gender wage inequality during sri lanka s post reform growth a distributional analysis abstract this paper investigates gender wage inequality in sri lanka during 1992 2014 a period of robust economic growth following pro market reforms the gap in mean wages between men and women decreased steadily over this period unconditional quantile regression reveals the decline in gender wage inequality was driven by the upper half of the distribution and was due to improvements in women s observable human capital yet the pay structure became more unequal indicating widening gender gaps in the returns to labor market characteristics and in unobservable determinants of wages the gender gap in pay structure widened disproportionately in the lower half of the distribution coinciding with falling absolute and relative returns to women in manufacturing industries and production occupations facing greater international competition the study also demonstrates selection bias underestimates the gender wage gap and overestimates the gains in equality over time factors that hinder gender equality in the labor market are discussed along with policy implications

the influence of gender on faculty salaries in the united states 1969 89 this study estimates the earnings differential between the male and female faculty in the united states over a period of two decades 1969 1989 five micro level data sets are used for this purpose a modified version of the widely used oaxaca model is used in the estimations it is found that the racial earnings gap narrowed considerably more than did the gender earnings differential over this period a higher male female earnings gap at the professor level relative to junior ranks suggests that relatively recent entrants in the academic labour market face a less discriminatory environment than did their predecessors a controversial finding is that the discriminatory component of the earnings differential between male and female faculty fell between 1969 and 1984 but rose thereafter

the effects of competition and equal treatment laws on gender wage differentials discrimination if it is inefficient can be eliminated by competition in most countries it is also forbidden by law this paper evaluates the influence of economic and legal factors on the portion of male female wage differentials that is not explained by other worker characteristics and may be due to discrimination we use a new international data set of suitable gender wage gap measures constructed from the results of existing studies meta analysis of the data shows that increased competition and adoption of international conventions concerning equal treatment laws both reduce gender wage gaps while legislation that prevents women from performing strenuous or dangerous jobs tends to increase it doris weichselbaumer and rudolf winter ebmer

the effects of public sector hiring and compensation policies on the egyptian labor market this article examines the combined impact of the employment guarantee for graduates and public sector compensation policies on the egyptian labor market besides contributing to an unsustainable rate of growth in the government labor force these policies have encouraged queuing for government jobs contributed to high graduate unemployment rates and reduced the employment of graduates in the private sector despite substantial wage erosion in the public sector in recent years government wages when appropriately corrected for observed heterogeneity and sample selection are on a par with or higher than private sector wages especially for graduates when combined with the more desirable nonwage aspects of government jobs these compensation levels explain the attractiveness of public sector employment to graduates government pay scales are especially advantageous to female secondary school graduates who appear to face considerable discrimination in the private sector

competitive positioning in markets with nonuniform preferences we investigate the nature of competitive equilibrium for brands competing in a multi attribute product space when consumer preferences for product attributes follow nonuniform distributions we establish subgame perfect equilibria in a two stage game where firms choose positions in the first stage and prices in the second stage two types of entry scenarios are investigated in the first the number of brands is given exogenously and all of them choose positions simultaneously in the second scenario firms enter in sequence and the early entrants can choose strategies to deter the entry of later entrants we find the equilibria for two three and four brands for consumer preferences that follow a beta distribution nonuniform distributions result in equilibrium configurations that are substantially different from those obtained for uniform consumer distributions in the two brands case for sufficiently concentrated distributions we find asymmetric position equilibria with one firm at the corner of the market and one firm at an interior position in the case of three brands for sufficiently concentrated preferences we find symmetric equilibria that do not yield maximal differentiation we also establish an equilibrium for the case of four competing brands in addition we characterize entry deterring positioning strategies and examine how they vary with the distribution of consumer preferences

on the decomposition of wage differentials the often used method for decomposing wage differentials into human capital and discrimination components is reformulated so that both t he disadvantage or cost discrimination it imposes on a black or minority wage earner and the advantage or benefit it bestows on a white or majority wage earner can be estimated copyright 1988 by mit press

chaotic behaviour in exchange rate series first results for the peseta u s dollar case abstract we test for the presence of deterministic chaos on daily data for the spot and forward spanish peseta u s dollar exchange rates the finding of a chaotic behaviour in the series allows us to make short run predictions which in general outperform those from the random walk model

two stage perfect equilibrium in hotelling s model hotelling i 929 suggests that his spatial competition model can be used to describe a wide range of differentiation problems he points to the selection of product variety within an industry as a potential application most of the subsequent work in his tradition has taken the equivalence of the two problems for granted in this note we look more closely at this equivalence we distinguish between two types of differentiated products according to the variety of preferences assumed with respect to those products building on this distinction we recognize that the demand faced by a firm locating on hotelling s line is analogous to the demand faced by a firm selecting a horizontally differentiated product it should be emphasized thus that the equivalence between the geographical and the product selection problem is by no means general and relies on specific assumptions about consumers preferences next we formulate a small model close to hotelling s one in which firms select a horizontally differentiated product within this model it will be shown that a pure strategy price equilibrium exists for every pair of products this statement is to be contrasted with the results of d aspremont et al i979 who have shown that in the original hotelling s setting an equilibrium fails to exist when firms are too close together 1 in addition we will examine the product selection problem faced by firms in a two stage game in the first stage each firm selects a product in the second stage the firm defines a price for its product we will seek the existence of a perfect equilibrium in this game a perfect equilibrium in this context can be viewed as a nash equilibrium in a game in which firms select a product aware of the non cooperative price equilibrium that will occur for each of their choices it will be shown that contrary to hotelling s principle the two firms will maximise their differentiation i e firms will locate at opposite ends of the market

gender wage discrimination in the thai labor market in thai this paper investigates the presence of gender wage differentials in the thai labor market a two step approach heckman 1979 was applied in estimating wage equations to avoid sample selection bias the wage differential decomposition methods oaxaca 1973 cotton 1988 oaxaca and ransom 1994 were used the data used were obtained from the labor force survey july september 2008 conducted by the national statistical office of thailand the findings indicate that female workers received lower wages than male workers because of their gender not because they are less productive on the contrary the female workers were shown to be more productive than the men the analysis indicates they would have earned higher wages than men this is especially true in the age groups 15 24 and 25 54 years old although the wage gap was partly explained by a lower productivity of workers 55 60 years old wage discrimination played a substantial role wage discrimination was worse in the younger than the older worker groups

product differentiation and profitability an asymmetric model the purpose of this paper is to develop a model of product differentiation in which there is an asymmetry namely that some customers are easier to serve than others it turns out that profits are negatively related to difficulty of service and that profits and market share are negatively related the results of this model are used to shed light on some aspects of the collusion versus differential efficiency debate and are also compared with vertical product differentiation models copyright 1990 by blackwell publishing ltd

the use of quantile regressions in estimating gender wage differentials a case study of the philippines quantile regressions are used to analyse the size components and nature of the gender earnings differentials as well as the returns to education by gender in the philippines over the entire conditional distribution of earnings using data from the 1999 apis survey this approach allows more focused conclusions about the nature of gender earnings differentials incorporating the quantile regression approach to the oaxaca blinder decomposition allows the localization of gender discrimination to particular quantiles of the earnings distribution and permits more targeted policy intervention

discrimination in the payment of full time wage premiums this study investigates how many hours must be worked per week in order for workers in different race and gender groups to receive a high hours full time wage premium an analysis of 1989 current population survey data shows that across occupations both white and black men received a full time wage premium for working at least 33 hours per week whereas white women had to work at least 37 hours and black women at least 39 hours to receive the premium controlling for occupation changes the threshold for black women to 33 hours but does not change the results for the other groups the authors find that the observed differences account for at most two percentage points of the wage differentials across race and gender

a decomposition method on employment and wage discrimination and its application in urban china 2002 2013 abstract labor market discrimination is an important issue in developing countries where path dependent institutions have been dominant while effective institutional arrangements and policies have been hidden by local customs and culture however the existing applications of classical blinder oaxaca decomposition face criticism for their imprecise understanding of the factors affecting institutional discrimination in labor markets as well as for their lack of power in formulating well targeted anti discrimination policies following oaxaca 1973 we propose a new method to decompose the total discrimination index tdi to analyze employment and wage discrimination in the labor markets of developing countries the tdi is decomposed into the employment discrimination index edi and the wage discrimination index wdi then into the underpayment index to majorities upi and the overpayment index to minorities opi we apply this method to the institutional discrimination against rural migrants in china s urban areas using national representative data from 2002 to 2013 we have found that 1 the tdi increased quickly after china entered the wto then dropped after anti discrimination policies were implemented 2 the tdi is mainly determined by the upi while the tdi s fluctuation is mainly determined by the wdi our method provides insights into the changing composition of employment and wage discrimination and their respective labor market outcomes in developing countries as a result appropriate policy measures may be developed accordingly

the sexual orientation wage gap the role of occupational sorting and human capital using data from the 2000 u s census the authors explore two alternative explanations for the sexual orientation wage gap occupational sorting and human capital differences they find that lesbian women earned more than heterosexual women irrespective of marital status while gay men earned less than their married heterosexual counterparts but more than their cohabitating heterosexual counterparts results of a oaxaca blinder decomposition indicate that the relative wage advantages observed for some groups of lesbians and gay men were mainly owing to greater levels of human capital accumulation particularly education while occupational sorting had little or no influence the relative wage penalties that were observed in other cases however cannot be attributed either to differences in occupational sorting or to human capital an analysis employing a dinardo fortin and lemieux decomposition which allows for variation in the wage gap at different points along the wage distribution broadly confir

r d and subsidies at the firm level an application of parametric and semi parametric two step selection models this paper analyzes the effects of public r d subsidies on r d expenditure in the german manufacturing sector the focus is on the question whether public r d funding stimulates or crowds out private investment cross sectional data at the firm level is used by apllying parametric and semiparametric selection models it turns out that public funding increases firms r d expenditure altough the magnitude of the treatment effect depends on the assumpions imposed by the particular selection model

panel estimates of the earnings gap in norway do female immigrants experience a double earnings penalty this study explores the possibility that being both a female and an immigrant will impose an earnings disadvantage on immigrant women in norway well known techniques are used to decompose the earnings gap between norwegian men and immigrant women into portions attributable to productivity differentials portions attributable to a gender effect and portions attributable to an ethnic effect the analysis supports the following conclusions first there is evidence of a double negative effect on female immigrant earnings second gender effect is more important than ethnic effect finally the discrimination estimates are robust to the alternative methods used in decomposing norwegian men immigrant women earnings gap

recent two stage sample selection procedures with an application to the gender wage gap recently developed two stage estimation methods of sample selection models are used in the context of data from the 1989 labor market activity survey to examine labor supply decisions and wage outcomes for employed men and women recent hypothesis test procedures are used to test for no sample selection and to test for a parametric against a semiparametric selection correction procedure we conclude that selection is indeed an issue for the sample at hand and that the semiparametric specification is appropriate we also present the standard decomposition of the gender wage gap into its explained and unexplained portions

human capital discrimination and the gender wage gap in bangladesh summary this paper investigates changes in the gender wage gap in bangladesh over the period 1999 2009 the gap in average wages between men and women decreased by 31 over this period this paper shows that a key driver of this change was an improvement in female educational qualifications it also demonstrates that the gender wage gap across the wage distribution narrowed much more at the lower end of the wage distribution than at the upper end it attributes this mainly to a decline in discrimination against women implications for policies aimed at more equal access to education and enforcement of equal pay legislation in bangladesh are also identified

estimating engel curves under unit and item nonresponse summary this paper estimates food engel curves using data from the first wave of the survey on health aging and retirement in europe share our statistical model simultaneously takes into account selectivity due to unit and item nonresponse endogeneity problems and issues related to flexible specification of the relationship of interest we estimate both parametric and semiparametric specifications of the model the parametric specification assumes that the unobservables in the model follow a multivariate gaussian distribution while the semiparametric specification avoids distributional assumptions about the unobservables copyright 2011 john wiley sons ltd

a selectivity model of employer size wage differentials this article investigates wage differentials for employees of different size firms utilizing an econometric methodology that allows the size of employer to be treated as endogenous in the context of discrete ordered employer size data as a result we are able to estimate i employer size wage gaps which are corrected for selectivity bias and ii the magnitude and direction of the selection bias decompositions of the resulting wage differentials are computed with comparisons of the conditional on sorting across employer size and unconditional wage gaps

career duration in the nhl pushing and pulling on europeans abstractusing a panel of national hockey league players from 2000 through 2013 we analyse the determinants of career length in the league in our analysis we include both performance variables and nationality of origin to determine their importance in determining career length we find that european born players have shorter careers than north american born players holding performance constant and russian born players have even shorter careers than other europeans we further find that russian born players have even shorter careers than other players after the 2005 lockout these shorter careers are consistent with both exit discrimination against european and russian players who are pushed out of the league as well as voluntary exit by european and russian players who are pulled out of the league due to opportunities in their home countries

gender wages and discrimination in the ussr a study of a russian industrial town male and female wage equations are estimated from survey data from the city of taganrog in 1989 the first such estimates on data collected in the ussr reductions in working hours for low paid female professionals resulting in relatively high hourly rates encouraged women to acquire higher education while maintaining an unequal and conservative gender division of labour decomposition of the wage gap shows strong indications of discrimination a wage function estimated from the pooled sample as in oaxaca and ransom 1994 explains a larger share of the gender gap but does so because it disregards aspects of discrimination

testing nonlinear forecastability in time series theory and evidence from the ems abstract this paper proposes a procedure based on nearest neighbour predictors for testing the existence of nonlinear forecastable dependencies in time series an empirical application to ems exchange rates illustrates the performance of the test

applying the copula approach to sample selection modelling the limited availability of tractable multivariate distributions undermines the validity of the standard parametric approach to sample selection modelling copula distributions can be very useful in situations where the applied researcher has a prior on the distributional form of the margins since the modelling of the latter is separated from that of the dependence structure the present article first presents an application to female work data afterwards the approach is analysed in an application to contingent valuation data on recreational values of forests it is shown that the copula approach is especially beneficial in case of strong departures from the hypothesis of normality

disability and the labour market an analysis of british males this paper attempts using data from the british labour force survey 1996 to examine to what extent differences in labour market outcomes between able bodied and disabled men may be attributed to differences in endowments of human capital and associated productivity differences both labour force participation and selectivity corrected human capital equations are estimated and decomposition techniques applied to them using the methodology of baldwin and johnson baldwin m johnson w g 1994 labor market discrimination against men with disabilities journal of human resources xxix 1 winter 1 19 the employment effects of wage discrimination against the disabled are also estimated evidence of both substantial wage and participation rate differences between able bodied and disabled men are found which have implications for the operation of the 1995 disability discrimination act

racial wage gaps and differences in human capital this paper uses the cotton neumark decomposition methodology and 1990 cps data to investigate the relative importance of labour market structure and human capital in explaining the white male asian white male black white male hispanic wage gaps we find that labour market structure is more important than human capital in explaining the white minority wage gaps moreover most of the labour market structural effects are due to differential returns to white structural characteristics our result is robust to the specification of human capital our results contradict the results of research that indicate that the white minority wage gaps can be explained solely by differences in the endowment of human capital our results have implications for narrowing the wage gaps between whites and racial minorities

a simple adjustment for bandwidth snooping kernel based estimators such as local polynomial estimators in regression discontinuity designs are often evaluated at multiple bandwidths as a form of sensitivity analysis however if in the reported results a researcher selects the bandwidth based on this analysis the associated confidence intervals cis may not have correct coverage even if the estimator is unbiased this article proposes a simple adjustment that gives correct coverage in such situations replace the normal quantile with a critical value that depends only on the kernel and ratio of the maximum and minimum bandwidths the researcher has entertained we tabulate these critical values and quantify the loss in coverage for conventional cis for a range of relevant cases a conventional 95 ci has coverage between 70 and 90 and our adjustment amounts to replacing the conventional critical value 1 96 with a number between 2 2 and 2 8 our results also apply to other settings involving trimmed data such as trimming to ensure overlap in treatment effect estimation we illustrate our approach with three empirical applications

on hotelling s competition with non uniform customer distributions abstract hotelling s competition in a two stage location price game is examined with increasing densities of consumers towards the centre it is shown that there is a range of rather even distributions for which firms locate at opposite ends of the market as the distribution becomes more concentrated duopolists will tend to move inside the market

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

the gender earnings differential in the russian transition economy using data from the russia longitudinal monitoring survey rlms the first nationally representative household survey in the russian federation the author examines the gender earnings differentia

strategic information disclosure the case of multi attribute products with heterogeneous consumers we examine the incentives for firms to voluntarily disclose otherwise private information about quality attributes of differentiated products in particular we focus on the case of differentiated products with multiple attributes and consumers that are heterogeneous in their preferences over these attributes we show that there exist certain configurations of consumer preferences under which a firm producing a high quality product even with zero costs of disclosure may choose not to reveal the quality of its product this failure of firms to voluntarily disclose the quality of their products will arise when providing consumers with more information results in more elastic demands for these products which in turn triggers more intensive price competition and leads to lower prices and profits for all firms as a result the equilibrium in which disclosure is voluntary may diverge from that in which disclosure is mandatory

target zones and exchange rate dynamics this paper develops a simple model of exchange rate behavior under a target zone regime it shows that the expectation that monetary policy will be adjusted to limit exchange rate variation affects exchange rate behavior even when the exchange rate lies inside the zone and is thus not being defended actively somewhat surprisingly the analysis of target zones turns out to have a strong formal similarity to problems in option pricing and investment under uncertainty

estimating wage discrimination in the labor market if labor supply curves are not perfectly inelastic wage discrimination induces some minority workers to leave the labor force studies of discrimination that focus only on wage differentials overlook these disincentive effects on minority employment

bootstrapping statistical inferences of decomposition methods for gender earnings differentials applying the standard bootstrapping technique with corrections for heteroskedasticity for a sample of the 1997 urban household survey in china the present article attempts to test 1 whether the commonly used decomposition methods for gender earnings differentials give significantly different results and 2 whether the explained component is significantly different from the unexplained component which is commonly referred to as discrimination within each decomposition method based on a national data set the empirical results indicated some significant differences in both tests the implication of the results is that the proposed bootstrapping technique can be regarded as a guideline on applying which approach to decompose gender earnings differentials among different methods without losing important information and on evaluating the relative importance of the decomposition components for any chosen method

subject of degree and the gender wage differential evidence from the uk and germany abstract we show that controlling for subject of degree explains a significant part of the male female gender wage differential amongst graduates using data from the labour force surveys of the united kingdom and germany we find similar results in these two countries subject of degree explains about 2 4 higher wages of male over female graduates after controlling for age industry region part time and public sector employment this is a significant part between 8 and 20 of the overall male female gender wage gap and an even larger amount of the part explained by factors entered into wage equations at around 24 30 of the explained component

time varying risk premia volatility and technical trading rule profits evidence from foreign currency futures markets abstract this paper re examines the efficiency of foreign currency futures markets by evaluating the role of time varying risk premia and volatility in explaining technical trading rule profits the results show that large parts of the technical rule profits can be explained by the time varying risk premia estimated from a general model for the conditional capm the bootstrap distributions for the profits under the null model average one third to one half of the actual profits and enclose the actual profits well within the 90 confidence intervals time varying conditional volatility explains an additional 10 of the profits

racial disparities in life insurance coverage we evaluate the extent to which there are racial disparities in life insurance coverage using multiple years of the survey of income and program participation between 2001 and 2010 we find that african americans hold significantly more life insurance after controlling for other factors especially employer sponsored and whole life insurance we demonstrate that our findings diverge from prior work because we examine all households instead of focusing exclusively on married and cohabitating households the findings on life insurance coverage and composition imply that earnings shocks due to mortality are not a contributing factor to racial disparities in wealth

the gender pay gap fringe benefits and occupational crowding using data from the 1991 national longitudinal survey of youth the authors estimate earnings equations for each of seven occupational categories and the aggregate sample when fringe benefits are excluded from the compensation measure a gender coefficient is statistically significant that is women are found to have received significantly lower compensation than men within six of the seven occupational categories the exception being the most female dominated category when an index of compensation that includes fringe benefits is used however a gender coefficient is significant in only one category which contains relatively heterogeneous jobs gender specific regressions are used to estimate what part of the earnings gap between men and women is due to differences in traits the results indicate that occupational assignment is the primary determinant of the pay gap a result that is consistent with a crowding explanation of that gap

note competitive price and positioning strategies brand positioning and brand pricing are important strategic decisions for marketing managers such decisions are interrelated and depend upon competitive brand positions and prices however any unilateral decisions may encourage repositioning and price adjustment by competitors thus leading to either new market equilibria or a price positioning war this paper examines such price and positioning decisions in a competitive environment by extending the defender consumer model to more complex equilibria we assume that the brands are already in the market and that positions are sticky in the sense that brands cannot leapfrog one another among the insights for such incumbent brands are if prices are symmetric and held constant firms seek to reposition toward the center of the market but price advantages by central firms can mediate that central tendency such that an equilibrium exists with positive profits if brand positions are held constant the nash equilibria for prices exist and are unique and category profits the sum of brand profits are maximized for maximum brand differentiation for two and three brand markets the subgame perfect nash equilibrium where positioning decisions are made with foresight on the price equilibria causes firms to unilaterally seek maximum brand differentiation but for four or more brands greater foresight and or cooperation appears necessary to reach the point of maximum brand differentiation these results apply where the defender consumer model is an exact description of consumer response and where the competitive reaction assumptions hold in any empirical situation such forces might be softened resulting in differentiated but not maximally differentiated brands

wage determination of registered nurses in proprietary and nonprofit nursing homes this study explores why registered nurses employed in nonprofit nursing homes earn higher wages than those employed in proprietary facilities previous studies have explained this finding in a property rights context where higher wages were posited to result from the weaker incentives for cost minimization accompanying nonprofit status this paper tests an alternative explanation of sectoral wage differences which is predicated on the reason for the coexistence offor profit and nonprofit firms in a given industry informational constraints concerning the quality of care are posited to cause the long term health care market to fail to provide care at the upper levels of a quality of care continuum nonprofits are viewed as a response to this form of market failure acting to fulfill customers demand for higher quality and higher cost long term care with attendant demand for higher quality nurses than in for profit homes both the observed sectoral pattern in selectivity and wage decompositions based on selectivity corrected wage regressions call into question the property right explanation yet are consistent with an asymmetric information explanation

measuring the gender wage gap a methodological note we propose to estimate the blinder oaxaca decomposition by a single equation model augmented with interactions between the group membership and other predictors the relative importance of predicto

parametric and semiparametric estimation of sample selection models an empirical application to the female labour force in portugal this paper applies both parametric and semiparametric methods to the estimation of wage and participation equations for married women in portugal the semiparametric estimators considered are the two stage estimators proposed by newey 1991 and andrews and schafgans 1998 the selection equation results are compared using the specification tests proposed by horowitz 1993 horowitz and hardle 1994 and the wage equation results are compared using a hausman test significant differences between the two approaches indicate the inappropriateness of the standard parametric methods to the estimation of the model and for the purpose of policy simulations the greater departure seems to occur in the range of the low values of the index corresponding to a specific group of women copyright 2001 john wiley sons ltd

labor market discrimination against men with disabilities in the year of the ada the americans with disabilities act ada provides civil rights protections to persons with disabilities but the debate that preceded passage of the act was not based on empirical estimates that could be used to measure its performance this article estimates the extent of wage discrimination against men with disabilities in 1990 providing a reference that can be used to evaluate the impact of the ada the results show large productivity standardized wage differentials between disabled and nondisabled men that are weakly correlated with the strength of prejudice against different impairments physical limitations explain part but not all of the wage differentials the results also show that low employment rates are a more serious problem than wage discrimination for workers with disabilities provide civil rights protections to persons with disabilities the act s supporters promised that it would increase the employment and wages of persons with disabilities and reduce their dependency on public programs the promises were not based on empirical estimates of discrimination and there is no empirical base against which to compare the promises to the performance of the ada this article estimates the extent of wage discrimination against men with disabilities in 1990 providing a reference that can be used to evaluate the impact of the act the ada does not grant a right to employment to all persons with disabilities it requires that persons with disabilities be able to perform the jobs they seek subject to reasonable accommodations by employers this article therefore considers men who are able to work even though their health limits the amount or kind of work they can perform the ada s provisions assume that low wages and low employment rates for persons with disabilities are the result of discrimination caused by prejudice prejudice against persons with disabilities is well documented but so are the limiting effects of physical impairments on workplace productivity hahn 1987 margolis and shapiro 1987 clogston 1990 the core of the debate concerning the value of the ada is whether the poor labor market outcomes of persons with disabilities are the result of discrimination or the limiting effects of health con

product differentiation with multiple qualities abstract we study subgame perfect equilibria of the classical quality price multistage game of vertical product differentiation each of two firms can choose the levels of an arbitrary number of qualities consumers valuations are drawn from independent and general distributions the unit cost of production is increasing and convex in qualities we characterize equilibrium prices and the effects of qualities on the rival s equilibrium price in the general model equilibrium qualities depend on what we call the spence and price reaction effects for any equilibrium we characterize conditions for quality differentiation

semiparametric estimation of the intercept of a sample selection model this paper provides a consistent and asymptotically normal estimator for the intercept of a semiparametrically estimated sample selection model the estimator uses a decreasingly small fraction of all observations as the sample size goes to infinity as in heckman 1990 in the semiparametrics literature estimation of the intercept has typically been subsumed in the nonparametric sample selection bias correction term the estimation of the intercept however is important from an economic perspective for instance it permits one to determine the wage gap between unionized and nonunionized workers decompose the wage differential between different socioeconomic groups e g male female and black white and evaluate the net benefits of a social programme

quality of the business environment versus quality of life do firms and households like the same cities this paper develops a new measure of the quality of business environment that complements existing measures of the quality of life an annual panel of these measures is constructed and analyzed for 37 cities from 1977 to 1995 findings indicate that many cities attractive to firms are unattractive to households and vice versa in addition the size of a city s workforce increases with improvements in the quality of the business environment in contrast cities most likely to be dominated by retirees are those that are less attractive to firms additional specifications support theoretical arguments that retirees are drawn to cities in which local attributes are capitalized into lower wages rather than higher rents

the definition of part time employment a switching regression model with unknown sample selection rejecting the standard less than thirty five hours per week categorization of part time workers this paper offers an empirically justified definition of the part time employed the definition is based on the distinction through wage payments that employers make between a high hours full time and a low hours part time group of workers a switching regression model of wage equations with deterministic but unknown sample selection is estimated resulting in a significant split between high hours and low hours workers that is higher than the standard definition wage differentials are calculated and decomposed and estimates from the structural choice model are presented copyright 1991 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

semiparametric three step estimation methods for simultaneous equation systems this paper proposes a new method for estimating a structural model of labour supply in which hours of work depend on log wages and the wage rate is considered endogenous the main innovation with respect to other related estimation procedures is that a nonparametric additive structure in the hours of work equation is permitted though the focus of the paper is on this particular application a three step methodology for estimating models in the presence of the above econometric problems is described in the first step the reduced form parameters of the participation equation are estimated by a maximum likelihood procedure adapted for estimation of an additive nonparametric function in the second step the structural parameters of the wage equation are estimated after obtaining the selection corrected conditional mean function finally in the third step the structural parameters of the labour supply equation are estimated using local maximum likelihood estimation techniques the paper concludes with an application to illustrate the feasibility performance and possible gain of using this method copyright 2005 john wiley sons ltd

gender wage differences in malaysia parametric and semiparametric estimation this paper is an empirical study on the labor force in peninsular malaysia parametric and semiparametric estimated wage equations which correct for sample selection bias are used to assess the returns to education and extent of gender discrimination to estimate in the semiparametric case the wage equation intercept which is needed for the oaxaca wage decomposition consistently we apply the newly developed andrews schafgans andrews d w k schafgans m m a 1998 semiparametric estimation of the intercept of a sample selection model review of economic studies 65 497 518 estimator the results suggest that discrimination favoring men in malaysia is still quite prevalent while for malays the sons of the soil the strong level of discrimination favoring malay men is negated by the semiparametric estimation results

training wages and sample selection estimating sharp bounds on treatment effects this paper empirically assesses the wage effects of the job corps program one of the largest federally funded job training programs in the u s even with the aid of a randomized experiment the impact of a training program on wages is difficult to study because of sample selection a pervasive problem in applied microeconometric research wage rates are only observed for those who are employed and employment status itself may be affected by the training program this paper develops an intuitive trimming procedure for bounding average treatment effects in the presence of sample selection in contrast to existing methods the procedure requires neither exclusion restrictions nor a bounded support for the outcome of interest identification results estimators and their asymptotic distribution are presented the bounds suggest that the program raised wages consistent with the notion that the job corps raises earnings by increasing human capital rather than solely through encouraging work the estimator is generally applicable to typical treatment evaluation problems in which there is nonrandom sample selection attrition copyright wiley blackwell

nonparametric estimation of sample selection models sample selection models provide an important way of accounting for economic decisions that combine discrete and continuous choices and of correcting for nonrandom sampling nonparametric estimators for these models are developed in this paper these can be used for estimating shapes and important economic quantities as in standard nonparametnc regression endogeneity of regressors of interest is allowed for series estimators for these models are developed which are useful for imposing additivity restnctions that arise from selection corrections convergence rates and asymptotic normality results are derived an application to returns to schooling among australian young females is given

selection investment and women s relative wages over time in theory growing wage inequality within gender should cause women to invest more in their market productivity and should differentially pull able women into the workforce our paper uses heckman s two step estimator and identification at infinity on repeated current population survey cross sections to calculate relative wage series for women since 1970 that hold constant the composition of skills we find that selection into the female full time full year workforce shifted from negative in the 1970s to positive in the 1990s and that the majority of the apparent narrowing of the gender wage gap reflects changes in female workforce composition we find the same types of composition changes by measuring husbands wages and national longitudinal survey iq data as proxies for unobserved skills our findings help to explain why growing wage equality between genders coincided with growing inequality within gender

chapter 4 competitive marketing strategies game theoretic models publisher summary this chapter reviews the key developments in the understanding of competitive marketing strategies product price advertising and distribution competition are all addressed while the emphasis is on models the chapter surveys the empirical literature as well there is a significant amount of empirical work to report but the ratio of theoretical to empirical work is nevertheless unpleasantly large much progress has been made in the last ten years or so in the study of competitive marketing strategies most of this chapter has been theoretical using simple models of firm and consumer behavior these models serve the function of demonstrating rigorously the existence of certain effects factors which need to be considered in analyzing real world competition

cost differences and survival in declining industries a case for picking winners abstract in this paper we examine the relationship between firms cost structures and the order of exit from declining industries we distinguish between two fundamental causes of demand decline namely a shrinkage of the consumer base and a decrease in consumers willingness to pay we show that it is not necessarily best to be small and flexible the order of exit in a market driven outcome depends on the manner in which demand shrinks we find that from a welfare perspective the order of exit determined by market forces is not necessarily desirable however simple rules for picking winners based on current unit cost profitability or productive efficiency do not provide sound guidance for policy

price matching policy and the principle of minimum differentiation this paper shows that if duopolists are allowed to choose their product locations a price matching policy and their prices sequentially and independently both tacit collusion and minimum differentiation occur copyright 1995 by blackwell publishing ltd

efficiency and equity tradeoffs incentive compatible contracts revisited abstract while the efficiency of certain contractual choices has been well established less attention has been given to the distributional outcomes of contracting in natural resource based industries data from a case study of seed gatherers in honduras demonstrates that workers paid under a relative payment system receive an earnings premium of about 25 of which 40 cannot be explained by observed differences in worker productivity a theoretical agency model is outlined in the appendix to explain why workers under tournaments necessarily enjoy a higher return than those under piece rates implying a more skewed income distribution as suggested in the efficiency wage literature

job satisfaction trade unions and exit voice revisited many studies have found that unionized workers express less job satisfaction than nonunion workers the exit voice explanation of this phenomenon is that dissatisfied nonunion workers tend to qui

survival at the center the stability of minimum differentiation abstract we model a hotelling market with multidimensional product differentiation in an evolutionary framework both evolutionary stability in the sense of schaffer 1989 and stochastic stability following kandori et al 1993 young 1993 are analyzed it is shown that firms move towards the center in product space i e a principle of minimum differentiation on all dimensions of the product space applies

a meta analysis of the international gender wage gap abstract since the early 1970s a number of authors have calculated gender wage differentials between women and men of equal productivity this meta study provides a new quantitative review of this vast amount of empirical literature on gender wage differentials as it concerns not only differences in methodology data and time periods but also different countries we place particular emphasis on a proper consideration of the quality of the underlying study which is done by a weighting with quality indicators the results show that data restrictions i e the limitation of the analysis to new entrants never marrieds or one narrow occupation only have the biggest impact on the resulting gender wage gap moreover we are able to show what effect a misspecification of the underlying wage equation like the frequent use of potential experience has on the calculated gender wage gap over time raw wage differentials worldwide have fallen substantially however most of this decrease is due to better labor market endowments of females

asymmetric equilibria in spatial competition abstract the main purpose of this paper is to study the impact of consumer concentration around the market center on the equilibrium locations of location price games in the case of symmetric triangular density it is shown that no symmetric equilibrium exists however we demonstrate the existence of asymmetric equilibria in pure strategies these equilibria are also characterized our secondary purpose is to study the sequential entry of two firms when the location space is not restricted to the market space this leads us to uncover a substantial first mover advantage which has been neglected in the literature

superior forecasts of the u s unemployment rate using a nonparametric method we use a nonlinear nonparametric method to forecast unemployment rates this method is an extension of the nearest neighbor method but uses a higher dimensional simplex approach we compare these forecasts with several linear and nonlinear parametric methods based on the work of montgomery et al 1998 and carruth et al 1998 our main result is that due to the nonlinearity in the data generating process the nonparametric method outperforms many other well known models even when these models use more information this result holds for forecasts based on quarterly and on monthly data

male white black wage gaps 1979 1994 a distributional analysis 1 introductionnumerous studies show that during the 1980s the mean white black wage gap among new entrant 0 10 years of potential experience males expanded 1 juhn murphy and pierce 1991 jmp attribute the mean gap s expansion to a widening of the overall u s wage distribution caused by a host of economy wide race neutral changes that led to labor demand shifts toward better educated and better skilled workers regardless of race because african americans tend to be at lower levels of the overall skill distribution the shifts adversely impacted african american men more than white men leading to an expansion in the mean wage gap to arrive at this conclusion jmp decompose the expansion in the mean new entrant wage gap into four components the first two components measure the wage gap s increase because of a widening in observable racial differences in measured characteristics and their prices for example educational attainment and the returns to education the third component captures the contribution of growing racial discrimination and widening differences in unmeasured skills to the wage gap s expansion this term s contribution is measured by the drop in the mean percentile rank of blacks in the white residual wage distribution the fourth component identifies the role of increases in the prices of unmeasured skills and is measured by the increase in the variance of the white residual wage distribution when applied to the march annual demographic files of the current population survey jmp find that from 1979 to 1987 increases in the price of unmeasured skills explain all of the new entrant mean wage gap s expansion indicating that factors that adversely impacted less skilled workers regardless of race are the primary cause of the wage gap s expansion in related work reardon 1997 uses a national sample of white and african american men from the 1980 and 1990 decennial censuses and shows that the mean racial wage gap s expansion is caused by increased variance in the distribution of residual wages generated by labor demand shifts toward high skilled whites and away from medium skilled whites and high skilled african american men the wage gap expands because high skilled african american men earn wages that are similar to those of whites in the middle and upper third of their wage distribution the labor demand shifts led to a stretching or increased variance in the wage distribution that favored high skilled whites relative to high skilled african americans and medium skilled whites this paper makes several contributions to the literature on racial wage gaps and the technical literature on wage decompositions first i examine whether jmp s 1991 results hold up when the analysis is disaggregated by experience and educational attainment this is an important extension for two reasons bound and freeman 1992 rodgers 1997a and others have found that the racial wage gap among high school graduates and particularly among college graduates expanded significantly after the late 1970s over the same time period the variance of wages within these educational categories increased second it is important to determine the extent to which racial inequality that was generated while a cohort was a new entrant persists as it ages the paper s technical innovation is the development of a distribution or skill specific decomposition that identifies whether the stretching of the white wage distribution uniformly contributes to an expansion in racial inequality at all skill levels or quantiles of the wage distribution or whether the contribution of the wage distribution s stretching is specific to a skill level for example does the increase in the price of unmeasured skills explain a greater portion of the increase in the racial wage gap between high skilled african americans and whites than it does between medium skilled african americans and whites

competition in the presence of individual demand uncertainty this article offers a tractable model of oligopolistic competition in differentiated product markets characterized by individual demand uncertainty the main result shows that in equilibrium firms offer advance purchase discounts and that these discounts are larger than in the monopolistic benchmark competition reduces welfare by increasing the fraction of consumers who purchase in advance that is without full knowledge of their preferences

is gender pay discrimination on the wane evidence from panel data 1968 1989 previous studies of the gender pay gap in the united states have found a narrowing of that gap in the past two decades but have differed substantially in the reported magnitude of that change this study calculates gender earnings differences using panel study of income dynamics data for 1968 89 a longer time series than has been examined by any similar study it also employs improved statistical techniques notably an adjustment for selection bias and a recently recommended modification of the most commonly used decomposition technique the author finds a significant decline both in the portion of the differential due to observed differences between men s and women s characteristics and in the unexplained component which is often attributed to discrimination the results of one analysis show that over the 1968 89 period the gender pay gap narrowed to as little as 47

gender and ethnicity differentials in school attainment and labor market earnings in ecuador summary indigenous people in ecuador are most likely to be disadvantaged and live in poverty this paper reports on the findings of an econometric analysis which explores the extent to which lower educational attainment and labor market discrimination contribute to these disparities the analysis utilizes a proportional hazard regression model to examine which factors raise the probability of early school departure it also employs a classic regression model to explore the relationship between low educational attainment and earnings together with an oaxaca decomposition which parses out the extent to which earning differentials can be attributed to differences in human capital or to discrimination

exchange rates forecasting local or global methods exchange rates forecasters usually assume that local methods nearest neighbour dominate the global ones neural networks or genetic programming for example in this article first we use different generalizations of the standard nearest neighbours to predict the dynamic evolution of the yen us and pound sterling us exchange rates one period ahead second we compare our results with those employing global methods such as neural networks genetic programming data fusion and evolutionary neural networks finally we find out the existence of predictable structures periods ahead our results reveal a slightly but significant forecasting ability for one period ahead which is lost when more periods ahead are considered and no important predictive differences between local and global methods have been found

a distributional analysis of the gender wage gap in bangladesh this article empirically investigates the gender wage gap in bangladesh during the period 2005 2009 applying unconditional quantile regression models the article demonstrates that women are paid less than men throughout the wage distribution and the gap is higher at the lower end of the distribution discrimination against women is the primary determinant of the wage gap the article also demonstrates that the observed gender wage gap is likely to be underestimated if we ignore selection in full time employment a number of policy implications are discussed

a multinomial logit nondiscriminatory approach to estimating racial wage and occupational discrimination this paper combines a technique to measure nondiscriminatory wage structures with a multinomial logit model to estimate both occupational racial discrimination and within occupation racial wage underpayment and overpayment using a recent south african october household survey it is found that racial discrimination against blacks and in favour of whites still persists in the south african labour market implying the persistence of white employer nepotism and or white employee discrimination

alternative approaches to evaluation in empirical microeconomics four alternative but related approaches to empirical evaluation of policy interventions are studied social experiments natural experiments matching methods and instrumental variables in each case the necessary assumptions and the data requirements are considered for estimation of a number of key parameters of interest these key parameters include the average treatment effect the treatment on the treated and the local average treatment effect some issues of implementation and interpretation are discussed drawing on the labour market programme evaluation literature

decomposing two values of a binary variable application to the unemployment differential in hungary this paper presents a study of the individual determinants of unemployment in hungary it seeks to understand the reasons why hungarian women were in 1992 less likely to be unemployed than their male counterparts it estimates first the probability of being in the stock of unemployment and secondly one particular inflow into unemployment adapting standard discrimination analysis to the case of binary variables the paper decomposes the differential in average unemployment rates by gender the paper shows that differences in individual endowments account for very little of the gender gap in the stock of unemployment on the other hand slightly less than half the unemployment gap could come from differences in one digit occupations and sectors of employment between male and female employees

interstate commodity tax differentials and the distribution of residents abstract this paper considers the manner in which an unequal distribution of consumers affects the commodity tax policies of neighboring jurisdictions the paper uses a spatial model in which the residents of two states are distributed non uniformly and employs a variety of assumptions about the behavior of governments and firms throughout the paper shows that at a nash equilibrium in tax levels the sparsely populated state imposes a lower tax than does its densely populated neighbor the paper also demonstrates how equilibrium state taxes differ depending on whether firms employ marginal cost or profit maximizing pricing

market structure and multiple equilibria in airline markets we provide a practical method to estimate the payoff functions of players in complete information static discrete games with respect to the empirical literature on entry games originated by bresnahan and reiss 1990 and berry 1992 the main novelty of our framework is to allow for general forms of heterogeneity across players without making equilibrium selection assumptions we allow the effects that the entry of each individual airline has on the profits of its competitors its competitive effects to differ across airlines the identified features of the model are sets of parameters partial identification such that the choice probabilities predicted by the econometric model are consistent with the empirical choice probabilities estimated from the data we apply this methodology to investigate the empirical importance of firm heterogeneity as a determinant of market structure in the u s airline industry we find evidence of heterogeneity across airlines in their profit functions the competitive effects of large airlines american delta united are different from those of low cost carriers and southwest also the competitive effect of an airline is increasing in its airport presence which is an important measure of observable heterogeneity in the airline industry then we develop a policy experiment to estimate the effect of repealing the wright amendment on competition in markets out of the dallas airports we find that repealing thewright amendment would increase the number of markets served out of dallas love

semiparametric estimation of consumer demand systems with micro data maximum likelihood and two step estimators of censored demand systems yield biased and inconsistent parameter estimates when the assumed joint distribution of disturbances is incorrect this paper proposes a semiparametric estimator that retains the computational advantage of the two step approach but is immune to distributional misspecification the key difference between the proposed estimator and the two step estimator is that the parameters of the binary censoring equations are estimated using a distribution free single index model we implement the proposed estimator using household level data obtained from the hainan province in china specification test lends support to our approach

an equilibrium search model with coworker discrimination this article analyzes the effect of coworker discrimination on wage and unemployment differentials between males and females using a search model an increase in female participation drives up the wage offer to female workers and raises female employment moreover an increase in the degree of discrimination by males results in gains to them in terms of higher wages and lower unemployment but results in losses to females in terms of lower wages and higher unemployment the benefit to males provides an explanation for the persistence of discrimination