delays in claiming social security benefits this paper focuses on social security benefit claiming behavior a takeup decision that has been ignored in the previous literature using financial calculations and simulations based on an expected utility maximization model we show that delaying benefit claim for a period of time after retirement is optimal in a wide variety of cases and that gains from delay may be significant we find that approximately 10 of men retiring before their 62nd birthday delay claiming for at least one year after eligibility we estimate hazard and probit models using data from the new beneficiary data system to test four cross sectional predictions while the data suggest that too few men delay we find that the pattern of delays by early retirees is generally consistent with the hypotheses generated by our theoretical model

growth accumulation and unproductive activity an analysis of the postwar u s economy preface 1 introduction 2 unproductive activity in a capitalist society 3 a marxian accounting framework 4 a growth model of accumulation and unproductive labor 5 rise of unproductive activity in postwar economy 6 absorption of labor and capital and rate of surplus value 7 absorption of new resources and growth in real income 8 conclusions and speculations appendix data sources and methods references index

a new theoretical analysis of deindustrialisation the analysis of deindustrialisation has been led by heterodox economists especially those in the structuralist and kaldorian traditions based on a conception of sectoral specificity and the role of manufacturing in growth sectors are not the units of marxian economic analysis but thinking through the meaning of sectors in marxian terms allows for an analysis of the meaning and implications of a change in sectoral structure deindustrialisation is the sectoral shift that has been most prominent in recent decades and which is likely to have significant implications for the future of capitalism this article develops an original marxian theorisation of deindustrialisation this conceptualisation includes a distinction between two forms of deindustrialisation as well as taking into account changes in sectoral structure the proposed typology considers whether such changes are associated with a shift between those activities that produce surplus value and those that do not or only a shift in the composition of surplus value producing activities the distinction between different forms of deindustrialisation allows for an arguably richer analysis of this phenomenon than in more narrowly sector based approaches

the autonomisation of abstract wealth new insights on the labour theory of value we theorise the forms of value in the marxist system in a way that challenges the dominant tradition the standard procedure has been to read marx s capital as an analysis that begins at a high level of abstraction and moves towards more concrete concepts our alternative approach posits that the forms of value in the marxist system evolve from more concrete towards more abstract forms of wealth that increasingly separate from and obscure labour exploitation our procedure therefore replaces the dominant interpretation of successive approximations employed by most scholars we develop a broader account of marx s project alongside textual evidence retrieved from many of his writings we also provide a new way to incorporate the monetary financial and rentier forms of wealth into marx s labour value theory the proposed alternative approach can potentially open a research agenda on the contemporaneous dynamics of abstract and concrete forms of wealth in advanced capitalism

the link between pensions and retirement timing lessons from california teachers abstract i exploit a major unanticipated reform of the california teachers pension to provide quasi experimental evidence on the link between pension features and retirement timing using two large administrative data sets i conduct a reduced form analysis that leverages the nonlinearities in the return to work generated by the pension features and the reform induced shifts of these nonlinearities for identification the implied estimates of the elasticity of lifetime labor supply with respect to the return to work are centered around 0 04 in the medium run and are less than 0 1 in the long run

the roles of ownership ecology and economics in public wetland conservation decisions abstract scholars have studied the problem of optimal reserve site selection however the actual conservation choices made by government decision makers may yield reserve networks that are far from optimal this paper uses data on patterns of wetland conservation in austria in order to identify patterns in government decisions regarding which wetlands to protect we find that conservation decisions are guided at least in part by variation in ecological value and economic cost however there is also a marked bias against conserving lands that happen to be privately owned this bias against protecting private land is likely to be cost ineffective driven by asymmetric information and political pressure

social security unanticipated benefit increases and the timing of retirement between 1969 and 1972 real u s social security retirement benefits rose by 20 the rise was unanticipated and followed over 15 years of relatively constant real benefits this paper proposes a model of retirement behaviour in which workers respond differently although in a theoretically consistent manner to the anticipated and unanticipated components of the social security benefit they can receive upon retirement the retirement age decision in the presence of unanticipated benefit changes is shown to be a special case of utility maximization under a nonlinear budget constraint the model is estimated using the longitudinal retirement history survey between 1969 and 1973 real social security benefits for u s workers with fixed earnings histories were raised by more than 20 these increases were the first significant increases in social security since the early 1950 s at the same time that retirement benefits were rising the trend toward early retirement among older american men accelerated in the period from 1965 to 1970 the labour force participation rate of men aged 55 to 64 fell 1 6 percentage points from 84x6 to 83 0 but in the five years after 1970 the rate fell an additional 7 4 points to 75 6 the participation rate of men over 65 fell by 1 1 points in the five years after 1965 but by 5 2 points during the mid 1970 s 1 not surprisingly a large share of this labour force decline has been attributed to the effects of the social security increases enacted in 1969 and 1972 the purpose of this paper is to determine the precise effect of the unanticipated benefit increases on the timing of retirement the effect of social security on the age at retirement has been the subject of lively debate in recent years the literature has been reviewed in two recent papers by mitchell and fields 1982 and hurd 1983 who reach nearly opposite conclusions about the lessons that can be drawn from past empirical research mitchell and fields find that no definite judgment can be reached about the effects of social security on retirement while hurd argues that more careful studies have all found a significant and meaningful effect of social security on early retirement certainly the earlier studies by boskin 1977 and boskin and hurd 1978 found very large social security effects with boskin concluding that the social security system has been the major factor in the explosion in earlier retirement boskin 1977 p 1 very recent studies by burkhauser and quinn 1983 burtless and moffitt 1984 diamond and hausman 1984 fields and mitchell 1984 and hausman and wise 1985 have found smaller social security effects however none of them dealt explicitly with the rapid rise in real benefits during the early 1970 s the approach taken in this paper differs significantly from that in the earlier research just cited the proposed econometric model takes full account of the nonlinear relationship between goods consumption and the age at retirement introduced by social security

disentangling retirement and savings responses in january 2006 the dutch government implemented a pension reform that substantially reduced the public pension wealth of workers born in 1950 or later at the same time a tax facilitated savings plan was introduced that implied a large savings subsidy for all workers irrespective of birth year this paper uses linked administrative and survey data to assess the effect of the reform on the savings and retirement expectations and realizations of two virtually identical male cohorts that differ only in treatment status the treated having been born in 1950 and the controls having been born in 1949 we show that retirement expectations are in line with realizations and that the reform increased the labor supply for the larger part of the workers namely those without sufficient means to substantially increase private savings to counter the effect of the reform these workers have zero substitution rates between private and public wealth on the other hand there is a group of mostly high wage workers who participate in the tax facilitated savings plan and increase their private savings to fully counter the impact of the drop in public wealth an unintended side effect of the introduction of the tax facilitated savings plan is that high wage earners who are not affected by the drop in pension wealth retire even sooner than initially planned

the effect of pension design on employer costs and employee retirement choices evidence from oregon abstract we use administrative data from oregon s public employees retirement system pers to study the effect of pension design on employer costs and employee retirement timing decisions during our 1990 2003 sample period pers calculates each member s retirement benefit using up to three different formulas defined benefit db defined contribution dc and a combination of db and dc and pers pays the maximum benefit for which the member is eligible we show that this maximum benefit calculation results in average ex post retirement benefits that are 54 higher than if they had been calculated using only the db formula and that employees receiving dc benefits are significantly more likely than employees receiving db benefits to retire before the plan s normal retirement age monte carlo simulations verify that the higher costs could have been predicted at the start of our sample period exploiting exogenous plan changes we show that employees respond to within year variation in their retirement incentives and consistent with peer effects that they respond more strongly to these incentives when more of their coworkers face similar incentives finally consistent with the emerging literature on financial mistakes by households we show that a small but noteworthy fraction of retirees would have benefited from shifting their retirements by as little as one month

the role of intangible assets in explaining the investment profit puzzle starting around the early 2000s and especially after the 2008 crisis the rate of capital accumulation for us nonfinancial corporations has slowed down despite relatively high profitability indicating a weakening of the link between profitability and investment while the literature mostly focuses on financialisation and globalisation as the reasons behind this slowdown i suggest adding another layer to these explanations and argue that in conjunction with financialisation and globalisation we need to pay attention to the increased use of intangible assets by nonfinancial corporations in the last two decades intangibles such as brand names trademarks patents and copyrights play a role in the widening of the profit investment gap as the use of these assets enables firms to increase market power and profitability without necessarily generating a corresponding increase in fixed capital investment after discussing the ways nonfinancial corporations use intangible assets i look at large corporations in the usa and find the following i the ratio of intangible assets to the capital stock increased in general this increase is highest for firms in high technology healthcare nondurables and telecommunications ii industries with higher intangible asset ratios have lower investment to profit ratios iii industries with higher intangible asset ratios have higher markups and profitability iv the composition of the nonfinancial corporate sector has changed and the weight of high technology and healthcare firms has increased but this increase did not correspond to an equal increase in their investment share the decline in the investment share of durables nondurables and machinery is matched by an increase in the investment share of location specific industries with low intangible asset use most notably firms in energy extraction in general these firms have steadier markups and higher investment to profit ratios v yet intangible intensive industries profitability has increased faster than their share of investment or total assets all in all these findings are in line with the suggestion that the increased use of intangible assets enables firms to have high profitability without a corresponding increase in investment

an empirical model of labor supply in a life cycle setting this paper formulates and estimates a structural intertemporal model of labor supply using theoretical characterizations derived from an economic model of lifetime behavior a two step empirical analysis yields estimates of intertemporal and uncompensated substitution effects which provide the information needed to predict the response of hours of work to life cycle wage growth and shifts in the lifetime wage path

financial globalisation and crisis institutional transformation and equity this paper comprises the long introduction to the symposium of five papers on financial globalisation published in the cambridge journal of economics volume 34 no 2 the paper discusses the impact of financial globalisation in a variety of spheres and shows how the five papers link together to provide a coherent view of the current economic and financial crisis in this paper we also examine the globalisation of finance more broadly both in historical terms as well as in relation to the current widespread failure in the financial markets we take up the policy question of how the interests of the poor in particular and developing countries in general could be safeguarded from the vagaries of financial globalisation questioning how much choice communities and countries have and what can the international community do to extend these choices

spatial heterogeneity contract design and the efficiency of carbon sequestration policies for agriculture abstract in this paper we develop methods to investigate the efficiency of alternative contracts for carbon c sequestration in cropland soils taking into account the spatial heterogeneity of agricultural production systems and the costs of implementing more efficient contracts we describe contracts being proposed for implementation in the united states and other countries that would pay farmers for adoption of specified practices per hectare contracts we also describe more efficient contracts that would pay farmers per tonne of soil c sequestered and we show how to estimate the costs of implementing these more efficient contracts in a case study of a major agricultural region in the united states we confirm that the relative inefficiency of per hectare contracts varies spatially and increases with the degree of spatial heterogeneity the results also show that per hectare contracts are as much as five times more costly than per tonne contracts a degree of inefficiency similar to that found in assessments of command and control industrial emissions regulations measurement costs to implement the per tonne contracts are found to be positively related to spatial heterogeneity but are estimated to be at least an order of magnitude smaller than the efficiency losses of the per hectare contract for reasonable error levels this finding implies that contracting parties could afford to bear a significant cost to implement per tonne contracts and achieve a lower total cost than would be possible with the less efficient per hectare contracts

distributive shares in the us economy 1964 2001 specifying the labour theory of value in a way that distinguishes both productive from unproductive labour and production workers from supervisory workers this paper considers distributive shares in the us economy between 1964 and 2001 trends in productive and unproductive labour are explored in full time equivalents hours and money after 1979 there was a large shift of money value not matched by a shift in either hours or employment from the wages paid to productive labour to those paid to supervisory labour since the wage share in money value added of non supervisory labour in unproductive sectors was approximately constant the 1980s and 1990s also saw the profits share squeezed by the rising wage share of supervisory workers some implications of this are explored in the construction of a class rather than a factor approach to distributive shares

does outlawing mandatory retirement reduce public pension benefit claim exploiting the 2011 abolishment of the mandatory retirement provision that had allowed employers to force retirement of their 65 or older employees in the uk this paper estimates the effect of out

financialization and u s income inequality 1970 2008 focusing on u s nonfinance industries we examine the connection between financialization and rising income inequality we argue that the increasing reliance on earnings realized through financial channels decoupled the generation of surplus from production strengthening owners and elite workers negotiating power relative to other workers the result was an incremental exclusion of the general workforce from revenue generating and compensation setting processes using time series cross section data at the industry level we find that increasing dependence on financial income in the long run is associated with reducing labor s share of income increasing top executives share of compensation and increasing earnings dispersion among workers net of conventional explanations such as deunionization globalization technological change and capital investment the effects of financialization on all three dimensions of income inequality are substantial our counterfactual analysis suggests that financial

new evidence on pensions social security and the timing of retirement using a unique dataset that links the economic and demographic information of households with the details of their pension formulas i estimate the combined effect of social security and pension benefits on the probability of retirement in a cross section of the population near retirement age the accrual rate of retirement wealth is shown to be a significant determinant of the probability of retirement simulations of extensions in pension coverage comparable to those that occurred in the early postwar period can account for one fourth of the contemporaneous decline in labor force participation rates 1998 elsevier science s a all rights reserved

health longevity and retirement reform abstract in this paper we study alternative retirement reforms designed to achieve fiscal sustainability in the face of demographic change we are particularly interested in the heterogeneous effects across demographic groups as improvements in health and longevity have not been uniform across the population to this end we develop a dynamic structural life cycle model of heterogeneous agents who face health mortality and income risk we consider the following policy reform measures 1 increasing the early access age to old age retirement 2 raising income taxes 3 lowering old age retirement benefits and 4 lowering old age retirement and disability benefits we find that of the considered policies proportionally lowering old age retirement and disability benefits results in the highest average welfare for all education categories it is also the most successful at boosting employment

housing wealth property taxes and labor supply among the elderly we investigate the relationship between housing wealth property taxes and elderly labor supply using longitudinal data from the health and retirement survey spanning the recent boom bust housing cycle when combined with msa specific house price indexes the data provide plausibly exogenous variation in housing wealth identified through within msa renter homeowner comparisons our findings suggest that elderly households respond to variation in housing wealth and property taxes in the predicted opposing directions that wealth influences labor supply to a lesser extent than factors like health and marital status and that the effect of housing wealth on labor supply varies by gender and age

financialisation and capital accumulation in the non financial corporate sector a theoretical and empirical investigation on the us economy 1973 2003 recent research has explored the growing financialization process in the u s and other advanced economies the term is a catch all phrase used to denote important changes in the structure of non financial corporations balance sheets including the growth of income from financial subsidiaries and investment as well as growth in the transfer of earnings to financial markets in the forms of interest payments dividend payments and stock buybacks this paper seeks to empirically explore the relationship between financialization in the u s economy and real investment at the firm level using data from a sample of non financial corporations from 1973 to 2003 i find a negative relationship between real investment and financialization first increased financial investment and increased financial profit opportunities may have crowded out real investment by changing the incentives of firm managers and directing funds away from real investment second increased payments to the financial markets may have impeded real investment by decreasing available internal funds shortening the planning horizons of the firm management and increasing uncertainty these two channels can help explain the negative relationship i find between investment and financialization

quasi experimental analysis on the effects of adoption of a value added tax i introduction the value added tax vat has displaced many different trade sales and manufacturing taxes in the past half century becoming a major source of government revenue for an increasing number of countries the tax has all the desirable non distortionary theoretical properties of a sales tax its incidence ultimately falling on consumers but it is much harder to avoid as the tax is collected at all intermediate steps during the production of a finished retail good rather than at the final sale as a result it has proven incredibly popular as it can collect a great deal of revenue keen and lockwood 2010 toder and rosenberg 2010 while this tax is theoretically less distorting than other taxes for each dollar of revenue collected there is limited analysis regarding its overall impact on the economy demonstrating that the tax also has few negative side effects would make it invaluable for developing countries looking for an effective tax instrument showing that a vat is associated with increases in growth trade or investment would be solid evidence in favor of its adoption however empirical studies of vat are rare this study seeks to fill a hole in the literature analyzing the overall economic impact of a vat which will allow policy makers to make informed decisions of the costs and benefits of this tax understanding the effects of the vat is vital as the importance of the vat is unlikely to decline in the future the imf increasingly suggests that countries raise more revenue through adopting a vat or raising vat rates bird 2010 many countries facing rising pressures on pension programs as a result of changing demographics are funding social programs from general revenues rather than payroll taxes which usually means shifting the overall tax composition of government revenues toward vats bird and smart 2012 a vat is a requirement for eu membership and other international organizations are considering their own mandatory vats with a unified set of rules and repayment systems at an international rather than national level such as the gulf cooperation countries cnossen 1998 kapur 2012 as more countries adopt vats international payment mechanisms for collecting vats will become more efficient ebrill et al 2001 and vats will become more popular in the future as a country chooses when to enact a vat simply estimating the effect of adoption on macroeconomic variables such as trade or growth through normal regression techniques will result in biased estimates as countries that choose to adopt a vat may be fundamentally different from those who do not in order to solve this selection problem i use survival analysis to generate probabilities of vat adoption to be used as propensity score for 192 countries from 1967 to 2012 i then employ matching methods to obtain the causal effects of vat adoption among 112 countries 90 of which do eventually adopt from 1986 to 2007 in the year of adoption and for 5 years after 1 the results of this study reveal that vat adoption is associated with increases in investment and less robustly increases in growth as well as decreases in inflation and government spending there is no evidence of changes in trade once controlling for selection 2 this study is organized as follows section ii covers background on previous studies on the vat and other tax policies section iii describes the adoption equation using survival analysis both its determinants and results section iv introduces the matching process section v describes the results of the matching as well as some robustness checks section vi concludes ii background starting with france in 1954 and reaching its first developing country in 1960 when it was enacted by the cote d ivoire 166 countries have at some point implemented a vat as of january 2013 and once passed nearly all countries retain it figure 1 shows aggregate vat adoption over time and figure 2 shows the adoptions in each year

directly unproductive profit seeking dup activities this paper propses directly unproductive profit seeking dup activities as a general concept that embraces a wide range of recently analyzed economic activities including the subset of rent seeking activities considered by krueger it then proceeds to provide a synthesis and generalization of the welfare theoretic analysis of such activities by developing a fourfold categorization of cases depending on the levels of distortions before and after the dup activity thus a unification and overview of the subject are achieved

on measuring the wealth of nations the us economy 1964 2001 this paper examines the methodology of shaikh and tonak measuring the wealth of nations 1994 underlying their calculation of estimates of productive labour in the us economy from 1964 to 2001 the focus is not on the results but on the methods that generate them the paper finds that the compromises made by shaikh and tonak because of data unavailability are unreliable and that better approximations are possible on this latter basis the shaikh and tonak methodology can be used to provide the labour and wage estimates needed for empirical investigations in the surplus based tradition copyright 2005 oxford university press

optimal land development with endogenous environmental amenities a spatially explicit model of the optimal timing and location of land development is presented that incorporates dynamic interactions between land development and water quality ignoring two way interactions leads to a lower level of water quality more development and lower social welfare the optimal pace and pattern of development can be achieved through the assessment of an impact fee that internalizes pollution damages and irreversibility costs our results demonstrate the importance of accounting for the spatial dimension of land use the interdependence between land use and environmental quality and development irreversibility in models of urbanization and amenity driven growth copyright 2008 oxford university press

prioritizing payment for environmental services using nonmarket benefits and costs for optimal selection abstract this article provides a practical applied analysis of optimal targeting in agricultural land preservation comparing the performance of four alternative targeting strategies nonmarket benefit data and hedonic cost estimates are used for parcels in sussex county delaware the results show that branch and bound optimization opt does not significantly outperform the much simpler benefit cost ratio targeting bcrt however significant losses of potential net benefits occur when applied methods overlook either benefits or costs in this application benefit targeting bt and cost targeting ct significantly underperform both opt and bcrt with bt underperforming all other methods

the impact of age pension eligibility age on retirement and program dependence evidence from an australian experiment abstract governments around the world are reforming their social security systems in light of the challenges posed by population aging we study the 1993 australian age pension reform which progressively increased the eligibility age for women from 60 to 65 years we find economically significant responses to the reform an increase in the eligibility age of one year induced a decline in the probability of retirement by 12 to 19 percentage points in addition the reform induced significant program substitution with increases in enrollment in other social insurance programs particularly the disability support pension which effectively functioned as an alternative source of retirement income

the effect of social security on labor supply a cohort analysis of the notch generation this article uses aggregate birth year calendar year level data derived from the current population survey cps to estimate the effect of social security wealth on the labor supply of older men in the 1970s and 1980s the analysis focuses on measuring the impact of the 1977 amendments to the social security act which created a substantial unanticipated reduction in social security wealth for individuals born after 1916 this differential in benefits has become known as the benefit notch results indicate that labor supply continued to decline for the notch babies who received lower social security benefits than earlier cohorts

targeting conservation efforts in the presence of threshold effects and ecosystem linkages abstract the prevailing federal policy of targeting conservation programs on the basis of physical criteria tends to ignore the threshold effect of conservation efforts and the correlation between alternative environmental benefits in this article we examine the extent to which conservation funds will be misallocated when threshold effects and correlated benefits are ignored we show that targeting conservation efforts based on physical criteria or political equity concerns may actually lead to the lowest possible benefits to society from conservation expenditure ignoring correlated benefits may lead not only to misallocation of conservation funds among watersheds but also to incorrect resources e g land streams being targeted for conservation the empirical analysis focuses on riparian habitat investments for salmon restoration in the pacific northwest we show that a large portion of conservation benefits would be lost when threshold effects and correlated benefits are ignored and argue that funds should be allocated so that the total value of environmental benefits is maximized not the total amount of resources protected

policy variation labor supply elasticities and a structural model of retirement this paper exploits a combination of policy variation from multiple pension reforms in austria and administrative data from the austrian social security database using the policy changes for identification we estimate social security wealth and accrual elasticities in individuals retirement decisions next we use these elasticities to estimate a dynamic programming model of retirement decisions finally we use the estimated model to examine the labor supply and welfare consequences of potential social security reforms

labor supply responses to marginal social security benefits evidence from discontinuities abstract a key question for social security reform is whether workers respond to the link on the margin between the social security taxes they pay and the social security benefits they will receive we estimate the effects of the marginal social security benefits that accrue with additional earnings on three measures of labor supply retirement age hours and labor earnings we develop a new approach to identifying these incentive effects by exploiting five provisions in the social security benefit rules that generate discontinuities in marginal benefits or non linearities in marginal benefits that converge to discontinuities as uncertainty about the future is resolved we find that individuals approaching retirement age 52 and older respond to the social security tax benefit link on the extensive margin of their labor supply decisions we estimate that a 10 increase in the net of tax share reduces the two year retirement hazard by a statistically significant 2 0 percentage points from a base rate of 15 the evidence with regard to labor supply responses on the intensive margin is more mixed we estimate that the elasticity of hours with respect to the net of tax share is 0 42 and statistically significant but we do not find a statistically significant earnings elasticity though we lack statistical power to estimate results within subsamples precisely the retirement response is driven mostly by the female subsample while the hours response comes from the male subsample

social security and cross country differences in hours a general equilibrium analysis abstract i develop a general equilibrium life cycle model with an intensive and extensive margin of labor supply and endogenous human capital accumulation i use the model to assess the effects of changes to various features of social security on labor supply outcomes of particular interest are changes to the scale of the program and to the relevant eligibility rules i find that the cross country differences in social security programs account for at least 79 of the differences in employment rates of people aged 55 64 and 17 31 of the differences in aggregate hours worked between the us and continental europe

a life cycle model of health and retirement the case of swedish pension reform abstract sweden is one of the few western economies to have undertaken a large pension reform in recent years this was done with great expectations but little formal analysis in this paper we develop a life cycle labor supply model to quantify the predicted labor supply implications of this reform in our framework individuals choose when to stop working and given eligibility criteria when if to apply for disability and pension benefits agents are heterogeneous in skills and receive exogenous shocks to health throughout their life we find that the new pension system creates large incentives for the continued employment of older workers this is promising news for countries grappling with pension reform and indicates that there are significant lessons to be learned from the swedish case

time to retire the effect of state fiscal policies on retirement decisions our research addresses the importance of state fiscal policies on the probability of retirement using a panel of individual tax return data results indicate that a one percentage point increase in the income or sales tax rate reduces the probability of retirement by about 8 7 percent the evidence suggests that state spending might also affect retirement decisions but magnitudes are inconclusive in general the results suggest that the income effect dominates that is higher tax rates at the state level reduce disposable income and decrease the probability of retiring results are similar in models examining single and married filers separately

health insurance and the labor supply decisions of older workers evidence from a u s department of veterans affairs expansion this paper exploits a major mid 1990s expansion in the u s department of veterans affairs health care system to provide evidence on the labor market effects of expanding health insurance availability using data from the current population survey we employ a difference in differences strategy to compare the labor market behavior of older veterans and non veterans before and after the va health benefits expansion to test the impact of public health insurance on labor supply we find that older workers are significantly more likely to decrease work both on the extensive and intensive margins after receiving access to non employer based insurance workers with some college education or a college degree are more likely to transition into self employment a result consistent with job lock effects however less educated workers are more likely to leave self employment a result suggesting that the positive income effect from receiving public insurance dominates the job lock effect for these workers some relatively disadvantaged sub populations may also increase their labor supply after gaining greater access to public insurance consistent with complementary positive health effects of health care access or decreased work disincentives for these groups we conclude that this reform has affected employment and retirement decisions and suggest that future moves toward universal coverage or expansions of medicare are likely to have significant labor market effects

pension enhancements and the retention of public employees the authors use data from workers in the largest public sector occupation in the united states teaching to examine the effect of pension enhancements on employee retention specifically they study

targeting incentives to reduce habitat fragmentation the fragmentation of wildlife habitat has long been recognized as a principal threat to terrestrial biodiversity in this paper we develop a theoretical model to analyze the spatial targeting of incentives for the restoration of forested landscapes when land quality is spatially heterogeneous and wildlife habitat can be enhanced by reducing fragmentation we consider a regulator who uses subsidies to encourage the conversion of private agricultural land to forest on a pre defined set of landscapes the regulator can observe land use choices but not the opportunity costs on individual land parcels the important insight to emerge from the theoretical analysis is that solutions at or near corners are a strong possibility on each landscape either none or all of the agricultural land should be converted to forest corner solutions are directly linked to the spatial process determining habitat benefits to verify the theoretical insight we present a simulation of the effects of incentive based policies on the spatial distribution of forests in south carolina the empirical methodology integrates an econometric model of land use change with gis based landscape simulations the empirical findings strongly support our conjecture regarding corner solutions and the optimal targeting policy is shown to produce substantial welfare gains over a spatially uniform incentive

the role of information for retirement behavior evidence based on the stepwise introduction of the social security statement abstract in 1995 the social security administration started sending out the annual social security statement it contains information about the worker s estimated benefits at the ages 62 65 and 70 i use this unique natural experiment to analyze the retirement and claiming decision making first i find that despite the previous availability of information the statement has a significant impact on workers knowledge about their benefits these findings are consistent with a model where workers need to gather costly information in order to improve their retirement decision second i use this exogenous variation in knowledge to analyze the optimality of workers decisions several findings suggest that workers do not change their retirement behavior i workers do not change their expected age of retirement after receiving the statement ii monthly claiming patterns do not show any change after the introduction of the social security statement iii workers do not become more sensitive to social security incentives after receiving the statement more research is needed to establish whether workers are already behaving optimally but the information contained in the statement is not sufficient to improve their retirement behavior

economic determinants of workers retirement decisions the landscape for older workers has changed dramatically in recent decades governments have made cuts to public pension programs private pensions have shifted from defined benefit to defined contribution plans equity and housing markets have been unusually volatile and workers have experienced declining morbidity and mortality at the same time the labor force participation rate for older men and women has been rising over the past two decades implying later retirement are these phenomena related this paper reviews the large and growing body of literature exploring the economic determinants of workers retirement decisions including public and private pensions wealth and savings health and health insurance and labor demand

labor market shocks and retirement do government programs matter abstract this paper argues that labor market conditions are an important and often overlooked determinant of retirement transitions in our analysis we examine how the unemployment rate affects retirement and whether the social security ss system and unemployment insurance ui system influence how older workers respond to labor market shocks we use pooled cross sectional data from the march current population survey cps in our analysis we find that downturns in the labor market increase retirement transitions and that the magnitude of this effect is comparable to that associated with moderate changes in financial incentives to retire and to the threat of a health shock facing older workers interestingly retirements only increase in response to an economic downturn once workers become ss eligible suggesting that retirement benefits may help to alleviate the income loss associated with a weak labor market we also estimate the impact of ui generosity on retirement and find little consistent evidence of an effect this suggests that in some ways ss may serve as a more effective form of unemployment insurance for older workers than ui

labor force dynamics of older men this paper describes and analyzes movements of older men among labor force states in the united states using quarterly observations derived from the retirement history survey rhs the results indicate substantial undercounts in the biannual data indicating that the prevalence of labor force movements at older ages has been underestimated previously the results show that labor force dynamics at older ages are important including duration and spell occurrence dependence and work experience effects these effects are robust to nonparametric controls for unobserved heterogeneity the estimates indicate that social security benefits have strong effects on the timing of labor force transitions at older ages but that changes in social security benefit levels over time have not contributed much to the trend toward earlier labor force exit excerpt

economic determinants of workers retirement decisions economic determinants of workers retirement decisions the landscape for older workers has changed dramatically in recent decades governments have made cuts to public pension programs private pensions have shifted from defined benefit to defined contribution plans equity and housing markets have been unusually volatile and workers have experienced declining morbidity and mortality at the same time the labor force participation rate for older men and women has been rising over the past two decades implying later retirement are these phenomena related this paper reviews the large and growing body of literature exploring the economic determinants of workers retirement decisions including public and private pensions wealth and savings health and health insurance and labor demand

reconsidering the social security notch and retirement wealth and incentive effects using the health and retirement study we show that studies using the social security notch cannot separately identify the effects of retirement wealth and forward looking incentives on retirement because the notch natural experiment changed both factors in offsetting ways

biological conservation in dynamic agricultural landscapes effectiveness of public policies and trade offs with agricultural production article i nfo land use change and land management intensification are major drivers of biodiversity loss especially in agricultural landscapes that cover a large and increasing share of the world s surface incentive based agri environmental policies are designed to influence farmers land use decisions in order to mitigate environmental degradation this paper evaluates the effectiveness of agri environmental schemes for biological conservation in a dynamic agricultural landscape under economic uncertainty we develop a dynamic ecological economic model of agricultural land use and spatially explicit population dynamics we then relate policies subsidies to grassland taxation of agricultural intensity to the ecological outcome probability of persistence of a species of interest we also analyze the associated trade offs between agricultural production in value and biological conservation in probability of persistence at the landscape scale

economic determinants of the optimal retirement age an empirical investigation in this paper we examine how the structures of earnings social security and pension benefits affect retirement behavior we use an intertemporal model of labor supply paying special attention to the institutional features of private pensions and social security benefits this theoretical formulation produces comparative dynamic predictions and guides empirical modeling data from a new survey of workers and their income opportunities are used to implement the empirical model on the basis of empirical retirement estimates we conclude that 1 people with higher base wealth retire earlier and 2 those who expect to gain more by postponing retirement retire later

future social security entitlements and the retirement decision abstract a critical question for social security policy is how program incentives affect retirement behavior we use the health and retirement survey hrs to examine the impact of social security incentives on male retirement we implement forward looking models whereby individuals consider the incentives to work in all future years we find that forward looking incentive measures for social security are significant determinants of retirement we also find that private pension incentives have roughly similar effects our findings suggest that social security policies that increase the incentives to work at older ages can significantly reduce the labor force exit rate of older workers

the optimal allocation of conservation funds abstract this paper presents a framework to evaluate alternative designs of conservation programs and their implications for the allocation of conservation funds we show that the efficient allocation of conservation funds must consider two important pooling effects cumulative effects and interrelationships among alternative environmental benefits ignoring the cumulative effects of environmental benefits may cause conservation funds to be overly dispersed geographically and as a result may result in minimum environmental benefits when the budget is small ignoring the interrelationships among alternative environmental benefits may result in not only misallocation of conservation funds among geographical areas but also incorrect resources being targeted for conservation practices implications of these results for the design of conservation programs are discussed

money in contemporary capitalism and the autonomisation of capitalist forms in marx s theory if we adopt a dialectical reading of marx s theory of money we can see that money contains within it the contradiction of commodity itself between use value and value and in so doing it contains different strata of contradiction that logically and historically have come to the fore in this process the capitalist forms e g money means of circulation inconvertible money seem to be stronger than their counterparts social forms and because of this there is a movement towards an autonomisation of these forms this article aims to show that these movements may be behind some of the contemporary phenomena we are currently observing in the circulation of capital recent literature dealing with these themes will also be discussed

honey i shrunk the kids benefits revisiting intergenerational conflict in oecd countries intergenerational conflict may arise when the interests of different age groups do not align we examine cross country data to find evidence for this conflict in oecd countries we derive our results from a fgls estimation model which is complemented by a system gmm estimation to account for potential endogeneity the data are from a panel of 22 oecd countries over the time period 1985 2005 we find little support for intergenerational conflict in general however those who are close to statutory retirement age dislike public expenditure on families and education because once they retire they will have less income compared to their work income this effect is transitory however implying a change in voting behavior during retirement age

secular changes in the work and retirement patterns of older men this paper examines trends in the work and retirement patterns of males aged 58 to 63 in 1969 and 1989 respectively the labor force attachments of this group have fallen for reasons unrelated to changes in individual characteristics or occupational attainment especially sharp reductions at age 62 hint at an increasingly important role for the early retirement provisions in social security attachments to longest jobs have also declined substantially beginning at age 55 although pension incentives may be significant the observed correlations between pensions and employment status may also reflect the role of confounding factors such as poorly measured nonpension wealth

designing frameworks to deliver unknown information to support market based instruments this article reports on an australian auction to procure multiple environmental outcomes ecotender ecotender uses a catchment modelling framework cmf to estimate the impact landholder actions have on carbon terrestrial biodiversity aquatic function water quality and quantity and saline land area this framework solves the problem of linking paddock scale land use and management to catchment scale environmental outcomes this is the first time a market based instrument has been fully integrated from desk to field with a biophysical model for the purchase of multiple environmental outcomes a multiple outcome auction provides several new economic and scientific challenges this article discusses the ecotender approach to incorporating agency preferences modeling the joint production of environmental outcomes and reporting environmental scores results indicate that linking ecotender to the carbon market reduced the cost of procuring the environmental goods by 26 further preliminary estimates show that the environmental gains from scoring the joint production of multiple outcomes are between 30 and 50 to the agency

how does social security claiming respond to incentives considering husbands and wives benefits separately abstract most women receive some social security benefits based upon their husbands earnings history but husbands benefit claiming is inconsistent with maximizing lifetime benefits for the couple i show that husbands claiming behavior responds to the actuarial incentives from their retired worker benefits not responding to incentives from spouse and survivor formulas reduces wives lifetime benefits rule changes to the social security benefit calculation the age difference between spouses and the relative strength of the wife s labor force history creates variation in incentives segments of the population predicted to be more responsive to incentives provides similar results to the main specification

how social security and medicare affect retirement behavior in a world of incomplete markets this paper provides an empirical analysis of how the u s social security and medicare insurance system affect the labor supply of older males in the presence of incomplete markets for loans annuities and health insurance we estimate a detailed dynamic programming dp model of the joint labor supply and social security acceptance decision focusing on a sample of males in the low to middle income brackets whose only pension is social security the dp model delivers a rich set of predictions about the dynamics of retirement behavior and comparisons of actual vs predicted behavior show that the dp model is able to account for wide variety of phenomena observed in the data including the pronounced peaks in the distribution of retirement ages at 62 and 65 the ages of early and normal eligibility for social security benefits respectively we identify a significant fraction of health insurance constrained individuals who have no form of retiree health insurance other than medicare and who can only obtain fairly priced private health insurance via their employer s group health plan the combination of significant individual risk aversion and a long tailed pareto distribution of health care expenditures implies that there is a significant security value for these individuals to remain employed until they are eligible for medicare coverage at age 65 overall our model suggests that a number of heretofore puzzling aspects of retirement behavior can be viewed as artifacts of particular details of the social security rules whose incentive effects are especially strong for lower income individuals and those who do not have access to fairly priced loans annuities and health insurance

a science driven market based instrument for determining the cost of environmental services a comparison of two catchments in australia abstract an auction based approach or mbi for market based instrument was used to purchase environmental services from landowners and to establish a long term economic resource forest plantations in two catchments in the state of victoria australia the policy goal of the mbi was to encourage the conversion of cleared land to forest plantations it was desired to achieve this while also reducing the amount of land affected by dryland salinity with minimum impact on water available for irrigation operationally interested landowners identified areas on which they would be willing to establish forest plantations and stated the amount of money they would require from the government to undertake plantation establishment this constituted a landowner bid the proposed planting area associated with each bid was processed through a quantitative hydrological model to estimate off site impacts on dryland salinity and the change in water yield resulting from the conversion of individual non forested areas to forest plantations landowner bids were then accepted or not based on the economic trade offs among dollars requested by a landowner reduction in water yield and decrease in dryland salinity to enable a comparison of costs the mbi was independently trialled in two catchments for both the cost to government of a hectare of plantation and or a hectare of salinity benefit was calculated a number of ways assuming the existence of a calibrated hydrological model costs associated with distributing money via such an mbi were publicity fieldwork processing the bids through the model probity legal and administration in the gippsland catchment the total cost to establish forest plantations was 5340 per ha whereas it was 1635 per ha in the corangamite catchment no salinity benefit was obtained in gippsland but in corangamite if considered in isolation of the economic forest plantation benefit the cost per hectare of salinity benefit was 5020 operational aspects of the mbi are presented and discussed and a comparison is made to the expected costs of a conventional non science driven approach to landowner incentives

training and retirement patterns life cycle theory predicts that employers enter into implicit contracts with newly hired employees to ensure rent sharing and to decrease turnover after firm specific training investments typically these implicit contracts would include both upward sloping earning profiles and mandatory retirement in this article we empirically test the prediction that workers with firm specific skills are restrained in their options to continue working therefore they are more likely to retire at common mandatory retirement dates than those with general skills using the us national longitudinal survey of older men we find that workers who participated in firm specific training in their early careers do indeed retire earlier than those with general skills the results show that compulsory retirement plans force these older workers to retire when they reach the common mandatory retirement age of 65 the results presented in this article are highly relevant for public policies in european and other industrialized cou

worker retirement responses to pension incentives do they respond to pension wealth abstract pension enhancements generate pension wealth spikes at the eligibility milestones i analyze two major enhancements that generated different gains in pension wealth for eligible workers the responsiveness of retirement behavior to these enhancements depends on how well workers understand their pension incentives to test the retirement response to pension wealth i use administrative data from missouri teachers and leverage variation in enhancement impacts on teacher pension wealth owing to differences in teachers entering ages i find that retirements respond strongly to pension enhancements but the strength of the response does not align with their pecuniary value my findings contribute to a growing body of research showing that workers have imperfect knowledge of their pension benefits and they use imprecise information to make retirement timing decisions

voluntary conservation of endangered species when does no regulatory assurance mean no conservation abstract voluntary conservation agreements are becoming increasingly important in implementing the endangered species act on private land we analyze when such agreements arise and what level of conservation they generate in the presence of uncertainty about future conservation benefits and irreversibility of habitat loss and species extinction our results suggest that the likelihood of an agreement and the resulting conservation levels depend on the background threat of regulation the cost advantage offered by voluntary agreements and the availability of assurances regarding future regulation under conditions likely to hold in practice conservation agreements that offer assurances may generate higher levels of conservation and higher net social benefits than agreements that do not offer assurances however the resulting level of conservation will not be optimal and may be lower than that attainable under regulation

the 1983 social security reforms and labor supply adjustments of older individuals in the long run a structural life cycle retirement model with an improved specification over previous models is used to analyze and compare the long run effects on the labor supply of older workers of the 1983 social security reforms the effects of separate provisions from the 1983 amendments are examined these include the raising of the normal retirement age to 67 the increase in the delayed retirement credit to 8 and the lowering of the reduction rate for earnings over the test amount to 1 00 for every 3 00 of earnings

a structural retirement model the life cycle model analyzed here constrains most work on the main job to be full time partial retirement entails a wage reduction and frequently a job change maximum likelihood estimates of utility function parameters are designed to incorporate information on the age of leaving full time work and the age of full retirement the model closely tracks retirement behavior including peaks in retirement activity at 62 and 65 the paper explores the relation of these peaks to nonlinearities in the budget constraint created by various retirement programs policy analyses based on this and on earlier models with simpler structures are compared the retirement choice is one of the more prominent manifestations of life cycle behavior the decision is the result of an interplay between an individual s preferences and a set of incentives which change in complicated ways as the individual progresses through his or her late 50 s and 60 s the purpose of this study is to formulate and estimate a structural model which incorporates in a fundamental way this interplay between lifetime preferences and incentives and to illustrate how such a model may be used to investigate retirement behavior a structural model of this type is essential for analyzing potential policy changes which can be expected to affect incentives in varying ways over a number of years in the life cycle the current study incorporates two structural features which have frequently been omitted from previous studies first the model requires that an individual who wishes to reduce work effort below full time must accept a reduced hourly wage rate in order to do so this reflects empirical evidence from micro data sets which indicates that around one third of older individuals engage in part time work at one time or another and that regardless of whether or not these older workers change jobs to obtain part time work they usually take wage cuts as compared to their previous full time work 2 the fact that an individual is willing to accept a lower wage rate in return for the opportunity to work fewer than full time hours contains important information about the preferences of the

spatially uniform versus spatially heterogeneous compensation payments for biodiversity enhancing land use measures the importance of compensation payments for biodiversity enhancing land use measures has grown over the past decade particularly in connection with agri environmental policy given that both the costs and the benefits of biodiversity enhancing land use measures are subject to spatial variation the criterion of cost effectiveness calls for spatially heterogeneous compensation payments however when deciding whether to implement uniform or heterogeneous compensation payments the regulator has to compare the disadvantage of uniform payments in terms of cost effectiveness with the disadvantages of spatially heterogeneous payments to help resolve this issue this paper provides a simple ecological economic model that allows the reduced cost effectiveness associated with uniform payments for biodiversity enhancing land use measures to be assessed for different types of benefit and cost functions

the economics of a public fund for environmental amenities a study of crp contracts the problem of targeting crp purchases to buy environmental amenities under productivity and environmental heterogeneity is considered gini coefficients and lorenz curves are used to measure the effectiveness of spending under alternative targeting criteria the environmental benefits considered are water erosion wind erosion surface water quality and wildlife habitat the three alternative targeting criteria examined include purchasing land according to i the benefit to cost ratio ii the level of benefits and iii the level of cost results indicate that the degree of variability and correlation determine the extent to which suboptimal targeting achieves a significant portion of available environmental benefits

does raising the early retirement age increase employment of older workers two pension reforms in austria increased the early retirement age era from 60 to 62 for men and from 55 to 58 25 for women we find that raising the era increased employment by 9 75 percentage points among affected men and by 11 percentage points among affected women the reforms had large spillover effects on the unemployment insurance program but negligible effects on disability insurance claims specifically unemployment increased by 12 5 percentage points among men and by 11 8 percentage points among women the employment response was largest among high wage and healthy workers while low wage and less healthy workers either continued to retire early via disability benefits or bridged the gap to the era via unemployment benefits taking spillover effects and additional tax revenues into account we find that for a typical birth year cohort a one year increase in the era resulted in a reduction of net government expenditures of 107 million euros for men and of 122 million euros for women

industrial output restriction and the kyoto protocol an input output approach with application to canada the objective of this paper is to assess the economic impacts of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by decreasing industrial output in canada to a level that will meet the target set out in the kyoto protocol the study uses an ecological economic input output model combining economic components valued in monetary terms with ecologic components ghg emissions expressed in physical terms economic and greenhouse gas emissions data for canada are computed in the same sectoral disaggregation three policy scenarios are considered the first one uses the direct emission coefficients to allocate the reduction in industrial output while the other two use the direct plus indirect emission coefficients in the first two scenarios the reduction in industrial sector output is allocated uniformly across sectors while it is allocated to the 12 largest emitting industries in the last one the estimated impacts indicate that the results vary with the different allocation methods the third policy scenario allocation to the 12 largest emitting sectors is the most cost effective of the three as the impacts of the kyoto protocol reduces gross domestic product by 3 1 compared to 24 and 8 1 in the first two scenarios computed economic costs should be considered as upper bounds because the model assumes immediate adjustment to the kyoto protocol and because flexibility mechanisms are not incorporated the resulting upper bound impact of the third scenario may seem to contradict those who claim that the kyoto protocol would place an unbearable burden on the canadian economy c 2008 elsevier b v all rights reserved

the rate of surplus value in the postwar us economy a critique of weisskopf s estimates the rate of surplus value is one of the three key variables in marx s theory of capitalist crises along with the rate of profit and the composition of capital marx expected a secular tendency for the rate of surplus value to increase owing to the rise in labour productivity under capitalism in marx s theory the necessary condition for an increase in the rate of surplus value is that the productivity of labour increases faster than the average real wage marx argued that in general this condition would be fulfilled because of downward pressure on wages exerted by a large and growing reserve army of unem ployed workers marx 1977 chs 17 and 25 moseley 1982 ch 4 marx argued further that this increase in the rate of surplus value would delay but not prevent the tendency of the rate of profit to fall owing to a rise in the composition of capital marx 1982 part 3 weisskopf 1979 argued that the profit share of total income is a reasonable proxy for marx s concept of the rate of surplus value p 343 he estimated the profit share in the non financial corporate business nfcb sector of the us economy over the period 1949 1975 1 showing a secular decline of 28 over the period of study p 351 table 2 contrary to marx s expectation of a secular increase in the rate of surplus value 2 however there is a fundamental theoretical problem with weisskopf s estimates namely that they do not take into account marx s distinction between productive labour and unproductive labour a number of authors have argued that marx s distinction between productive labour and unproductive labour is an integral part of his theory of value and surplus value and that his concepts of surplus value and variable capital the

the effects of pension funds on markets performance a review the worldwide reforming process of pension systems triggered by the demographic transition and globalization has led several countries to implement multi pillar pension systems and enhance pension funds for this reason the studies on the effects that pension funds exert on markets performance have been flourishing in the last decades in this paper we provide an updated review of the empirical advances in this field of study with particular focus on the effects that pension funds produce on labour markets financial markets and economic growth

do immigrants delay retirement and social security claiming we use data from the health and retirement study hrs to examine how immigrants retirement and social security claiming patterns compare to those of natives we find that immigrants retire and cl

unproductive accumulation in the usa a new analytical framework in this paper i offer an innovative analysis of unproductive accumulation in the united states economy from 1947 to 2011 i develop a new theoretical and empirical framework to analyze the accumulation of capital in its productive and unproductive forms i also develop a methodology to compute marxist categories predicated on the idea that the production of knowledge and information is an unproductive activity that relies on the creation of knowledge rents in particular i provide new empirical estimates to uncover the shifting balance between productive and unproductive forms of accumulation the accumulation pattern observed during the 1947 1979 phase that prioritized productive accumulation gave way after the 1980s to a contrasting pattern prioritizing unproductive accumulation unproductive activity has been growing at a fast pace in terms of incomes fixed assets and employment among all forms of unproductive activity my approach places special attention on how the production of knowledge and information has constituted a rising share of total unproductive income and capital stock additionally productive stagnation and rapid unproductive accumulation have been related to greater exploitation of productive workers and to widening income inequality