sources of intra industry wage dispersion how much do employers matter observed human capital explains less than half of wage variation in bls industry wage surveys establishment based wage differentials controlling for occupation account for 20 70 percent of intra industry wage variation this corresponds to a standard deviation in wages of 14 percent of the mean almost as large as interindustry wage variation investigation suggests that establishment wage differentials are not random variations or returns to usual measures of human capital

the social structure of a national securities market in this article a national securities market the stock options market is characterized as a social structure represented by the networks of actors who traded options on the floor of a major securities exchange trading among actors exhibited distinct social structural patterns that dramatically affected the direction and magnitude of option price volatility the argument that this market is socially structured is constructed in four parts behavioral assumptions about the nature of economic actors models of micronetworks models of macronetworks and price consequences in the ideal typical model of the market actors are assumed to be hyperrational and never to act opportunistically with these behavioral assumptions the micronetworks of actors should be expansive a condition which would result in undifferentiated and homogeneous macronetworks such macronetworks would tend to reduce the volatility of option prices but in the empirical market studied here actors are subject to bounded rationality a

testing the s s model the s s model has enjoyed tremendous popularity over the past decade it has been employed almost everywhere that discrete adjustment is observed today microeconomic rigidities are seen as an important influence on aggregate dynamics in this paper we quickly characterize the microeconomic evidence for the model to narrow the scope of our discussion we will focus our attention on real variables and we will comment on price inertia where appropriate we conclude that in spite of its popularity the evidence for the importance of the s s adjustment is surprisingly weak we argue that discrete adjustment is in and of itself of little macroeconomic interest to be important these frictions must coordinate agents to act together thereby exacerbating deviations from the neoclassical benchmark to date there have been few attempts at empirically identifying such interactions in the last section we present some results of our own we test one of the main implications of s s adjustment that a greater variance in the forcing process leads to more frequent adjustment using data on automobiles from the consumer expenditure survey we find that more variable income leads to less frequent adjustment we speculate that this correlation is indicative of a link between discrete adjustment and imperfect capital markets this interaction could provide an important role for s s frictions

discrete equilibrium price dispersion an explicit solution of an equilibrium model with price setting firms and searching customers makes possible a number of comparativestatics predictions about how cost differences among firms search costs of customers and taxes will affect the mean and variance of the distribution of market prices another implication of the model is that a firm s demand depends on the difference between its price and the average price in the market

understanding the costs of consumer durable adjustments this article examines whether adjustment frictions help account for the patterns of household consumption expenditures observed in the consumer expenditure survey namely that the variance of log durable expenditure is four times larger than that of log nondurable expenditure for annual data and this gap substantially widens for quarterly data estimating a structural model of household consumption with nondurable and durable goods with the simulated method of moments i find that the fixed costs associated with durable adjustments are important in matching the cross sectional moments using the estimated model i also examine the response of nondurable and durable expenditures to income shocks jel d12 d91 e21

slow information diffusion and the inertial behavior of durable consumption this paper studies the aggregate dynamics of durable and nondurable consumption under slow information diffusion sid due to noisy observations and learning within the permanent income framework we show that sid can significantly improve the model s predictions on the joint behavior of income durable consumption and nondurable consumption at the aggregate level specifically we find that sid can significantly improve the model s predictions for i smoothness in durable and nondurable consumption ii autocorrelation of durable consumption and iii contemporaneous correlation between durable and nondurable consumption furthermore we discuss that incorporating a fixed cost into our sid model does a better job of reproducing the infrequent adjustments of durable consumption at the individual level and the slow adjustments at the aggregate level

permanent income liquidity and adjustments of automobile stocks evidence from panel data a recent article by bernanke 1984 tests the rational expectations permanent income hypothesis using panel data on automobile expenditures he finds no evidence refuting the hypothesis this paper incorporates a threshold adjustment process into bernanke s model estimations based on a subset of the data used by bernanke reveal evidence that resale market imperfections and credit market constraints have important effects on automobile expenditures

excess sensitivity of consumption to current income liquidity constraints or myopia this paper asks whether the empirical rejection of the rational expectations permanent income hypothesis occurs because agents are myopic in the sense that the marginal propensity to consume out of transitory income is non zero or because some agents face liquidity constraints the finding that the estimate of the mpc out of transitory income is dramatically affected in both magnitude and statistical significance by the inclusion of a proxy for liquidity constraints suggests that liquidity constraints are an important part of the explanation of the observed excess sensitivity of consumption to current income la sensibilite excessive de la consommation au revenu courant contraintes sur la liquidite ou myopie ce memoire examine la question a savoir pourquoi l hypothese du revenu permanent avec anticipations rationnelles n est pas v6rifiee empiriquement est ce parce que les agents economiques sont myopes i e que leur propension marginale a consommer a partir de leur revenu transitoire n est pas nulle ou bien est ce que certains agents economiques font face a des contraintes sur leur liquidite le fait que l estimation de la propension marginale a consommer le revenue transitoire est affectee par l inclusion d une variable qui tente de capturer l importance des contraintes sur la liquidit6 tant dans l 6valuation de sa taille que dans sa signification statistique suggere que ces contraintes jouent un role important dans l explication de cette sensibilite excessive qu on observe de la consommation aux changements dans le niveau de revenu courant almost all the recent empirical tests of the rational expectations permanent income hypothesis re pih have rejected the hypothesis using a rich variety of data sets and estimation methods the empirical work indicates that the failure of the re pih is significant both statistically and quantitatively the null hypothesis in this empirical literature typically consists of the joint hypothesis that 1 agents expectations are formed rationally 2 desired consumption is determined by permanent income and 3 capital markets are perfect in the sense that agents can lend or borrow against 1 studies rejecting the re pih include blinder 1981 flavin 1981 hall and mishkin 1982 hayashi 1982 and sargent 1978 in his original paper hall 1978 did not reject the re pih decisively however flavin 1981 showed that with a minor alteration in the specification of the alternative hypothesis the re pih could be rejected using hall s test and data set bernanke 1981 studying panel data on automobile expenditures did not find evidence against the hypothesis for an extensive survey of the empirical literature on the rational expectations permanent income hypothesis see king 1983 canadian journal of economics revue canadienne d economique xviii no 1 february fevrier 1985 printed in canada imprime au canada 0008 4085 85 117 36 1 50 canadian economics association this content downloaded from 157 55 39 17 on wed 31 aug 2016 05 08 58 utc all use subject to http about jstor org terms

not by productivity alone how visibility and specialization contribute to academic earnings the popular adage publish or perish has long defined individual career strategies as well as scholarly investigations of earnings inequality in academe as researchers have relied heavily on rese

durable goods and the forward looking theory of consumption estimates implied by the dynamic effects of money abstract in this paper we analyze the effects of money on the market for durable goods using quarterly us data we estimate the dynamic responses of the price and quantity of durable goods and housing to money supply shocks assuming only that money is neutral in the long run we then match these responses to those predicted by an equilibrium model of the markets for durable goods the model relies on the standard theory of intertemporal consumer choice and the trade off between durable and non durable goods we find that money has important dynamic effects on the markets for durable goods and that the theory provides a reasonable framework for interpreting these responses for plausible parameter values

post institutionalism in labor economics the forties and fifties revisited this paper describes and evaluates the analytical model of the labor market developed by prominent labor economists of the 1940s and 1950s the author argues that the post institutionalist model made significant and lasting contributions to the analysis of labor mobility and the process of job search to the formulation of models of union policies and the evaluation of the impact of collective bargaining to the analysis of the factors that shape internal wage structure and contribute to the rise of internal labor markets and by its emphasis on the critical role played by the forces of demand to the analysis of the wage determination process

saving out of different income categories in greece abstract the aim of the present paper is to investigate whether in the case of greece and within the framework of the existing national accounting system significantly different marginal propensities to save are attached to different income categories we establish that the marginal propensity to save out of property income is significantly higher in fact double than the marginal propensity to save out of agricultural income and income from wages and salaries of the other sectors of the economy

paying the professor sources of salary variation in academic labor markets using a set of 58 academic fields as distinct labor markets we examined the extent of wage variation within markets the degree to which wages vary is an indicator of market efficiency and of whether a market wage exists holding constant differences in human capital we found that the degree of wage variation in an academic labor market is negatively related to mobility within that market and positively related to the oversupply of labor we also found that as wage variation increases male female wage differentials also increase

a theory of dual labor markets with application to industrial policy discrimination and keynesian unemployment this paper develops a model of dual labor markets based on employers need to motivate workers in order to elicit effort from their workers employers may find it optimal to pay more than the going wage this changes fundamentally the character of labor markets the model is applied to a wide range of labor market phenomena it provides a coherent framework for understanding the claims of industrial policy advocates it also can provide the basis for a theory of occupational segregation and discrimination that will not be eroded by market forces finally the model provides the basis for a theory of involuntary unemployment

permanent income liquidity and expenditure on automobiles evidence from panel data several recent papers have tested the permanent income cum rational expectations hypothesis using data on nondurable or semidurable consumption we show how this approach can be extended to the case of durables an application to panel data on automobile expenditures reveals no evidence against the permanent income hypothesis this result is unchanged in subsamples segregated by family holdings of liquid assets

union wage practices and wage dispersion within establishments this study analyzes establishment level data primarily to examine the effect of unionism on the wage structure within establishments the major finding is that within establishment dispersion of wages is significantly narrower in unionized than in nonunionized establishments a pattern the author attributes in large part to unions wage practices such as single rate or automatic progression modes of wage payment as opposed to merit reviews and individual wage determination the data also show that dispersion in average wages is narrower among organized plants but by more modest amounts than the within establishment differential overall the evidence suggests a major role for explicit union wage policies in explaining the dispersion of wages within firms and in the economy as a whole

housing equity withdrawal and the average propensity to consume this study explains the behaviour of the average propensity to consume for durable and non durable expenditure in the uk during 1980 91 explicit attention is paid to the role of housing wealth and in particular equity withdrawal which has become more prominent as a result of financial deregulation long run relationships are estimated using the johansen procedure and from this reasonable short run equations are obtained the results indicate positive impact from housing equity withdrawal on the average propensity to consume

balladurette and juppette a discrete analysis of scrapping subsidies this paper studies the effects of subsidies on durable goods markets in particular we focus on a recent policy in france in which the governments of balladur and juppe subsidized the replacement of old cars with new ones to study this policy we construct a dynamic stochastic discrete choice model of car ownership at the household level the resulting decision rules and equilibrium conditions are used to estimate the underlying parameters of the model using aggregate data these policy functions are used to evaluate the short and long run effects of the french policies we find that these policies do stimulate the automobile sector in the short run but through the induced changes in the cross sectional distribution of car ages create the basis for subsequent low activity further while these policies increase government revenues in the short run revenues in the long run are lower relative to a baseline without intervention

markets in hierarchies organizational and market influences on gender inequality in a state pay system a pivotal issue in sociological theories of labor markets as well as legal and policy debates on pay equity is the relative importance of market and organizational forces in determining pay differences between jobs held predominantly by men and those held predominantly by women this article develops two models of the market organization relationship an administered efficiency model and a bureaucratic politics model quantitative analyses of individual and job level data in a state government pay system indicate that the administered efficiency model does not adequately explain malefemale earnings differences documentary testimonial and interview data strongly suggest the significance of bureaucratic politics in the pay determination process we conclude that market forces influence wage rates but are heavily mediated by organizational factors unrelated to efficiency considerations in the type of organization studied here

a theory of wage dispersion and job market segmentation job market segmentation refers to the idea that there tends to be a correlation among high wages high productivity high capital intensity high value added few quits relative to layoffs and low labor turnover this paper develops a model of wage dispersion and job market segmentation based on the very sparse assumption that the only departure from a strictly orthodox neoclassical world consists of wages being sticky in the short run implications of the model are explored and discussed

uncertainty and consumer durables adjustment we characterize infrequent durables stock adjustment by consumers who also derive utility from non durable consumption flows in the presence of idiosyncratic income uncertainty the data we analyse include subjective future income uncertainty measures which we use as instruments in the estimation of relevant parameters of heterogeneous consumers dynamic adjustment problems the data feature two conceptually distinct sources of variation cross sectional heterogeneity of the sampled households dynamic problems and history dependent heterogeneity in their situation during the observation period we note that the latter should affect the likelihood but not the size of stock adjustment decisions and find broad support for theoretical predictions in formal selection controlled regressions based on this insight