the effect of income taxation on the labor supply of married men in sweden abstract this paper presents labor supply functions estimated on a sample of prime age swedish males the model used takes account of the nonlinear character of individuals budget sets caused by the progressive income tax it also allows preferences to vary between individuals calculations with the estimated functions using a partial equilibrium framework indicate a sizeable effect of the income tax on hours of work the average expected deadweight loss of the income tax is found to be approximately 20 percent of tax revenue

a critical evaluation of rate of return analysis since the development of the concept of human capital schultz i 96 i becker i964 analysis of rates of return has been a standard means of assessing education the conventional way of measuring the return to education is to take a snap shot view of the earnings of people with differing educational experiences it is then possible to calculate the average income earned at different stages of a working life the rate of return to education can then be calculated as the internal discount rate which equates the discounted increment to average earnings to the costs involved in obtaining education both private and social rates of return can be calculated provision of education is often subsidised so that the private cost is lower than the social cost and this will tend to raise the private return above the social return taxation of the private benefit of education offsets this at least partly however ziderman i 973 records that in developed countries private returns normally exceed social returns this pattern is confirmed by psacharopoulos i985 in many cases it is not possible to calculate a full rate of return but one can look at the incremental effect of schooling on earning power thus denison i 967 suggests that in the united states each year of education raises earning power by an average of around 5 6 with the effect tending to rise with the duration of education card and kruger i992 identify effects of similar magnitude it need not be the case that education goes on raising earning power overeducation is clearly possible rudd i990 suggests that in the social sciences education beyond degree level is very damaging to earnings prospects tarsh i992 questions aspects of rudd s study but agrees that higher education graduates do suffer some pay disadvantage rate of return calculations can form the basis for policy decisions in principle social returns to investment in human capital could be compared with those on physical capital so as to give a basis for the allocation of resources between the two types of investment estimates of social rates of return to different types of education could also be used to guide expenditure decisions between these different types however there are many possibly offsetting biases entering into the calculations of rates of return and it is perhaps concern with these that has

the quality of schooling quantity alone is misleading although much research discusses the quantity of schooling as an effective impact on productivity and earnings most such research leaves out the idea of the quality of schooling which may cause biases in the estimated returns to schooling this paper consequently attempts to extend the standard mincerian approach to incorporate school quality as well as quantity it demonstrates how exclusion of quality in the standard procedure may cause biases in the estimated returns to years of schooling probably in the upward direction the paper explores the implications of this extension of the standard model for the case of young brazilian males it shows that the estimate of the private return to years of schooling using the preferred quality inclusive specification is only one half the estimate using the standard procedure indicating substantial upward bias in the standard estimates it further outlines a method for estimating a social return to quality and finds that it exceeds substantially the social return to quantity the paper then shows why this in turn suggests there may be an equity productivity trade off in schooling investments

family ties and labor markets in the united states and brazil we use comparable surveys from brazil and the united states to examine vertical and horizontal connections between families motivated by a model of assortative mating and intergenerational transmission of schooling and earnings we include the schooling of relatives in male wage equations we find that the effect offather in law s schooling is larger than the effect offather s schooling in brazil while the opposite is observed in the united states we interpret these effects as indicators of unobservable worker characteristics with differences in assortative mating and female labor market activity explaining the differences in the apparent effect of fathers and fathers in law in the two countries

sectoral labour supply choice restrictions and functional form this is the authors submitted article version which is the pre peer reviewed version of the article the article changed title in the peer reviewing process from analyzing labor supply behavior with latent job opportunity sets and institutional choice constraints later published as discussion paper no 399 http brage bibsys no ssb handle urn nbn no bibsys brage 21006

a model of female labour supply in the presence of hours restrictions abstract we develop a discrete choice model of female labour supply in finland using a data set constructed by merging the 1980 labour force survey and housing and population census this contains observations on the perceived incidence of constraints in the labour market and allows us to identify the effects of such constraints on observed labour supply approximately one in five women appears to be seriously constrained in her choice of hours of work our estimated model implies that the response of labour supply to variation in tax and wage rates is rather small

investments in schooling in two generations in pre revolutionary nicaragua the roles of family background and school supply abstract family background and school supply underlie the demand and supply for schooling but are usually ignored in empirical estimates these considerations are investigated for two generations in nicaragua using unique data on adult sisters and their offspring to identify inter versus intrafamilial effects and to control for unobserved family background the results suggest that the standard interpretations are misleading 1 unobserved family background and school supply factors are important in schooling determination 2 omission of these factors leads to overestimates of impacts of parental schooling and family size 3 both parental schooling and family size primarily represent unobserved family background and school supply in standard estimates

nutrients impacts and determinants understanding the determinants of nutrient intake and the influence of nutrition on performance is critical in designing policies to alleviate hunger and malnutrition a series of studies undertaken by the authors which are synthesized here analyzes the influence of prices income and women s schooling on the nutrient intake of those in developing countries and the effect of nutrition on health productivity wages and fertility these studies suggest that the impact of food price increases may be strong particularly among those with the lowest incomes that the growth of income may be less likely to improve nutrient intake than has been suggested by others and that womzen s schooling is important in improving nutrition these studies also indicate that nutrition exerts a positive influence on wages productivity and fertility our limited knowledge of the role and determinants of nutrition is reflected in the finding of unduly strong effects of seasonalitv on price nutrition relations and the lack of a direct association between nutrition and health the nutrition of poor populations is of substantial interest because of the widespread and plausible presumption that better nutrition improves the welfare of individuals in such populations nutrition also is of interest because of the common conjecture that better nutrition improves productivity a series of our studies have analyzed the relations between nutrition and health labor productivity and fertility and the relations between prices income women s schooling and nutrition intake here we synthesize the results of these studies and address some of the puzzles and policy implications that have arisen

the long run macroeconomic impacts of fuel subsidies abstract many developing and emerging market countries have subsidies on fuel products using a small open economy model with a non traded sector i show how these subsidies impact the steady state levels of macroeconomic aggregates such as consumption labor supply and aggregate welfare these subsidies can lead to crowding out of non oil consumption inefficient inter sectoral allocations of labor and other distortions in macroeconomic variables across steady states aggregate welfare is reduced by these subsidies this result holds for a country with no oil production and for a net exporter of oil the distortions in relative prices introduced by the subsidy create most of the welfare losses how the subsidy is financed is of secondary importance aggregate welfare is significantly higher if the subsidies are replaced by lump sum transfers of equal value

labor supply responses and welfare effects of tax reforms during the late 1 980s and early 1 990s taxation of wage income has undergone a change towards a proportional tax regime in many countries our analysis shows that gradual tax reforms in norway may have removed some of the distortions on worker behavior moreover we find that proportional taxes may reduce the inequality in the distribution of disposable household income yet when the distributional consequences are related to changes in individual welfare we find that rich households may benefit far more than households at the other tail of the income distribution because they earn more without any significant increase in effort

labor supply and housing demand for one and two earner households the jointness of labor and housing decisions is explicitly modelled in a consumer demand framework behavior of seven demographic groups differentiated by marital status employment status and the presence of children is estimated from a micro data set results indicate that 1 decisions regarding work hours and housing consumption are interdependent choices and 2 responses to market signals differ significantly by demographic group results are likely to be superior to single equation studies or studies based on aggregate data

economic policy changes and wage differentials in latin america abstract this article presents estimates of the impact of changes in liberalization policies on wage differentials by schooling level using a new high quality data set for 18 latin american countries for 1977 98 the method controls for all fixed and time varying country characteristics some of which may affect the policies themselves the results indicate that liberalizing policy changes overall have had a short run disequalizing effect of expanding wage differentials although this effect tends to fade away over time this disequalizing effect is due to the strong impact of domestic financial market reform capital account liberalization and tax reform however privatization contributed to narrowing wage differentials and increasing trade openness had no significant effect on wage differentials technological progress rather than trade flows appears to be a channel through which policy changes are affecting inequality

what you don t know can hurt you or at least mislead you family behaviors unobserved heterogeneities and the determinants and impacts of human resources over the life cycle what one does not know in the form of unobserved heterogeneity can mislead one in empirical estimates a simple model of intrahousehold allocations illustrates the possible importance of unobserved factors such as abilities in determining human resources and their impacts the author reviews over forty years of studies primarily from latin america and the caribbean but also from elsewhere to illustrate the substantial empirical importance of unobserved heterogeneity with regard to preferences and intrahousehold allocations schooling returns school quality early life nutrition and program evaluation

a comparison of the labor force behavior of married women in the united states and canada with special attention to the impact of income taxes estimation results are presented for the probability of working the hourly wage rate and the annual hours of work for wives in seven different age groups in both the u s and canada federal and state or provincial taxes are incorporated into the analysis an iterative estimation method is employed to circumvent the statistical problems resulting from the dependence of the hours of work on the tax rate and the dependence of the tax rate on the hours of work authors

aggregation in matching markets this article develops aggregate relations for a matching market of heterogeneous suppliers and demanders under particular assumptions about the distribution of preferences and the matching game asymptotic aggregate relations for the number of realized matches of different types in the presence of flexible contracts such as a price are derived simulation experiments demonstrate that the model also provides excellent predictions in small populations the potential for applications within demographic labor market and welfare analyses is discussed

labour supply in italy an empirical analysis of joint household decisions with taxes and quantity constraints this study applies an econometric framework which allows for complex non convex budget sets highly non linear labour supply curves and imperfect markets with institutional constraints a married couple s version of the model is estimated on italian microdata the empirical results show that male labour supply is rather inelastic while labour supply among females especially participation is considerably more elastic the elasticities depend strongly on household income the largest elasticities are found for females living in poor households the results of the tax simulations suggest that there are only modest labour supply responses from replacing the 1987 system by proportional taxes copyright 1999 john wiley sons ltd

the equity productivity tradeoff public school resources in brazil abstract a governmental welfare function is specified to explore the equity productivity tradeoff in the allocation of governmental schooling resources the constrained maximization model is estimated for brazil using expected incomes in each geographical area as the outcome of interest and governmental resources for each area as the input the equity productivity tradeoff in brazillian governmental preferences is estimated to be considerable with a welfare curvature close neither to the utilitarian nor to the rawlsian extremes but close to the intermediate cobb douglas value this implies neutral rather than reinforcing or compensating behavior in the allocation of governmental resources with the result that the distribution of such resources across areas is more equal than is that of expected incomes

financial deregulation and household saving the last decade has seen widespread domestic financial deregulation in the industrial world particularly in the united states united kingdom and the nordic countries resulting in an increase in competition both between banks and saving institutions thrifts or building societies as they moved into each others services and within each sector this opened up new financial options particularly for households the sector that was probably most affected by government regulation for example there was a significant increase in equity withdrawals from personal housing wealth in both the united kingdom and united states over the ig8os 2 this period also saw a significant change in household consumption behaviour the most dramatic illustration being the fall in the household saving ratio in those countries where the process of deregulation has gone furthest this paper reports the results from estimating a model of household saving using regional data for the united kingdom with a particular emphasis on the interaction between household saving and financial deregulation the estimates are used to calculate the relative importance of different factors in the fall in personal saving over the i98os i conclude that deregulation lowered the equilibrium level of saving over the i98os probably 2 percentage points per annum as well as making saving significantly more dependent on changes in wealth income and real interest rates there have been a number of earlier empirical studies looking at the interaction between financial deregulation and household behaviour manchester and poterba i 989 miles i 992 and koskela et al i 992 present empirical evidence on the interaction between deregulation the housing market and saving in the united states united kingdom and finland respectively others have estimated saving functions which include variables representing the effects of financial deregulation or have considered the impact of financial deregulation on liquidity constraints in consumption 3 the