wheat from chaff meta analysis as quantitative literature review abstract this paper presents and develops a quantitative method of literature reviewing and evaluating empirical research meta regression analysis or mra economics is theory driven yet we must learn empirically if economics is to advance mra offers a more objective statistical method to summarize our empirical knowledge and to explain the wide study to study variation in economic research mra is used to assess the evidence for ricardian equivalence and its findings are contrasted to those of conventional narrative review furthermore mra establishes a platform from which to distinguish genuine empirical effect from the exploitable specification error that infests applied econometrics

rational household labor supply traditionally household behavior is derived from the maximization of a unique utility function in this paper we propose an alternative approach in which the household is modeled as a two member collectivity taking pareto efficient decisions the consequences of this assumption are analyzed in a three good model in which only total consumption and each member s labor supply are observable if the agents are assumed egoistic i e they are only concerned with their own leisure and consumption it is possible to derive falsifiable conditions upon household labor supplies from both a parametric and nonparametric viewpoint if alternatively agents are altruistic restrictions obtain in the nonparametric context useful interpretation stems from the comparison with the characterization of aggregate demand for a private good economy

marriage market divorce legislation and household labor supply this paper provides a theoretical framework for analyzing the impact of the marriage market and divorce legislation on household labor supply in our approach the sex ratio in the marriage market and the rules governing divorce are examples of distribution factors these factors are defined as variables that affect the household members bargaining position but not preferences or the joint budget set we extend the collective labor supply model developed by chiappori to allow for distribution factors we show that our model imposes new restrictions on the labor supply functions and eases the identification of individual preferences and the intrahousehold decision process the model is estimated using psid data for the year 1988 our results do not reject the restrictions imposed by the model also the sex ratio and divorce laws deemed favorable to women are found to affect labor supply behavior and the decision process in the directions predicted by the theory and to have sizable effects

collective labor supply a single equation model and some evidence from french data in chiappori s 1988 collective model of labor supply hours of work are supposed flexible in many countries however male labor supply does not vary much in that case the husband s labor supply is no longer informative about the household decision process and individual preferences to identify structural components of the model additional information is needed we thus consider an approach in which the wife s labor supply is expressed as a function of the household demand for one specific good we demonstrate that the main properties of chiappori s initial model are preserved and apply our results on french data

collective labor supply and household production this paper emphasises the importance of incorporating household production into the collective model of the household and considers how and to what extent the results of chiappori 1992 can be extended to this case this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

efficient intra household allocations and distribution factors implications and identification this paper provides an exhaustive characterization of testability and identifiability issues in the collective framework in the absence of price variation it thus provides a theoretical underpinning for a number of empirical works that have been developed recently we first provide a simple and general test of the pareto efficiency hypothesis which is consistent with all possible assumptions on the private or public nature of goods all possible consumption externalities between household members and all types of interdependent individual preferences and domestic production technology the test is proved to be necessary and sufficient we then provide conditions for the identification of the sharing rule and the engel curves of individual household members for a variety of different observational schemes

comparing climate policies to reduce carbon emissions in china new huadu business school research fund national social science foundation of china 12zd059 shandong social science planning fund program 12djjj12 independent innovation foundation of shandong university iifsdu 2012gn038 ministry of education research of social sciences china postdoctoral science foundation 2013m530309

introducing household production in collective models of labor supply in a recent paper chiappori 1992 i proposed a model of labor supply based on a collective representation of household behavior in this framework each household member is characterized by his or her own utility function and decisions are only assumed to result in pareto efficient outcomes i showed that these simple assumptions were sufficient to i generate testable restrictions on labor supply functions and ii recover individual preferences and the outcome of the decision process from observed behavior for the sake of simplicity the results were derived in the simplest possible case namely a static labor supply model with private consumptions such a framework was appropriate only for the purpose of the paper that is a preliminary exploration of the properties of collective models of labor supply the next step is to evaluate the robustness of the results to various extensions of the basic model this opens a general research program and generates a wide range of particular problems that it is hoped will be considered in the future among the most serious shortcomings of the 1992 model is the absence of household production as in most labor supply models agents were assumed to divide their time between market activities and leisure as apps and rees 1997 in this issue very rightly point out in their comment the absence of domestic production is far from innocuous as soon as welfare issues are considered for instance a low level of market labor supply will automatically be interpreted as a large consumption of leisure whereas it may in fact reflect the specialization of one of the members in domestic

family time use leisure home production market work and work related travel this study analyzes the two person gronau type neoclassical model of the household where time use for each person is divided into three basic activities market work home production and pure leisure plus work related travel time the latter is treated as predetermined one contribution of this paper is that the economics of the gronau model is made clear and a complete comparative static analysis is provided a second contribution is that the model is subjected to a rigorous empirical test using data that permits the division of time into its four primary components most data sets do not permit this our empirical results do not accord well with the model s predictions or with previous findings by gronau in addition our results suggest that work related travel has an important influence on family time use

positive and normative judgments implicit in u s tax policy and the costs of unequal growth and recessions calculating the welfare implications of changes to economic policy or shocks requires economists to decide on a normative criterion one approach is to elicit the relevant moral criteria from real world policy choices converting a normative decision into a positive inference as in the recent surge of inverse optimum research we find that capitalizing on the potential of this approach is not as straightforward as we might hope we perform the inverse optimum inference on u s tax policy from 1979 through 2010 and argue that the results either undermine the normative relevance of the approach or challenge conventional assumptions upon which economists routinely rely when performing welfare evaluations

a meta analysis of the export growth hypothesis abstract meta analysis is performed on a sample of seventy six studies that have empirically gauged the nexus between exports and economic growth the results show that studies that use aggregate exports report lower t ratios but studies that use oil and manufactured exports report higher t ratios the study also documents the existence of publication bias in the literature

welfare transfers in two parent families labor supply and welfare participation under afdc up this paper examines the effect of cash transfers and food stamp benefits on family labor supply and welfare participation among two parent families the aid to families with dependent children unemployed parent program has provided cash benefits to two parent households since 1961 despite recent expansions little is known about the program s effect on labor supply and welfare participation i develop a model of family labor supply in which hours of work for the husband and wife are chosen to maximize family utility subject to a family budget constraint accounting for afdc up benefits and other tax and transfer programs the husband s and wife s labor supply decisions are restricted to no work part time work and full time work maximum likelihood techniques are used to estimate parameters of the underlying hours of work and welfare participation equations the estimates are used to determine the magnitude of the work disincentive effects of the afdc up program and to simulate the effects of changes in afdc up benefit and eligibility rules on family labor supply and welfare participation the results suggest that labor supply and welfare participation among two parent families are highly responsive to changes in the benefit structure under the afdc up program

collective labor supply heterogeneity and nonparticipation in this paper we extend the collective model of labour supply developed by chiappori 1988 to allow for discrete choices censoring and nonparticipation in employment we derive the collective restrictions on labour supply functions that we contrast with restrictions implied by the usual unitary framework we apply our results to the estimation of a collective labor supply model for married couples without children using uk data from 1979 to 1993 taking into account unobserved heterogeneity we use the log linear labor supply framework the implications of the unitary framework are rejected while those of the collective approach are not the estimates of the sharing rule show that wages have a strong influence on bargaining power within couples

evaluating the public perceptions of nuclear power in china evidence from a contingent valuation survey national natural science foundation of china 71303199 71373218 ministry of education foundation of china 13yjc790123 11jbgp006 13jzd010 fundamental research funds for the central universities 201122g008 2014221001 national social science foundation of china 13zd167

collective labour supply heterogeneity and non participation we present identification and estimation results for the collective model of labour supply in which there are discrete choices censoring of hours and non participation in employment we derive the collective restrictions on labour supply functions and contrast them with restrictions implied by the usual unitary framework using the large changes in the wage structure between men and women in the u k over the last two decades we estimate a collective labour supply model for married couples without children the estimates of the sharing rule show that male wages and employment have a strong influence on bargaining power within couples

collective female labour supply theory and application this article deals with female labour supply in the collective framework it studies married couples and starting from the empirical observation that the husband s labour supply is generally fixed at full time it shows that in this case structural elements of the decision process such as individual preferences or the rule that determines the intra household distribution of welfare can be identified if household demand for at least one commodity together with the wife s labour supply is observed these theoretical considerations are followed by an application using french data

an empirical model of discrete and continuous choice in family labor supply because of the interdependent nature of family labor supply decisions the nonnegativity constrai nt on women s hours of work will spill over into other consumption an d labor supply decisions of the family here the author develops an e conometric model of family labor supply that captures this spillove r while addressing the usual censoring issues as well the model i s based on a flexible direct utility function and permits unobservabl e differences in tastes the model is estimated by the maximum likeli hood method on a sample of about 1 200 families from the panel study of income dynamics copyright 1987 by mit press

nonparametric estimation of the impact of taxes on female labor supply this paper proposes a simple extension of nonparametric estimation methods for nonlinear budget set models derived in blomquist and newey 2002 to censored dependent variables the nonparametric method is applied to estimate female labor supply elasticities using data on married women from the 1985 and 1989 waves of the panel study of income dynamics exploiting the substantial variation in budget sets caused by the tax reform act of 1986 as a source of identification the estimated wage elasticities from this new method are 0 56 overall and 0 27 on the intensive margin the income elasticity estimates are close to 0 67 overall and 0 13 on the intensive margin compared with the linear labor supply model the estimated elasticities are usually larger for the nonparametric specifications that account for nonlinear budget sets copyright 2010 john wiley sons ltd

time allocation within the family welfare implications of life in a couple a collective model of leisure demand generalised to the production of a household public good is estimated on the british household panel survey the sharing rule is identified by using an original parametric framework based on the change of family status from single living to couple or from couple to single living womens ratios of private household expenditures are 40 on average the level of intra household inequality appears highly dependent on the intra household wage gap omitting household production in the model would overestimate the ratio by 7 percentage points on average

household specialization and the male marriage wage premium empirical research has consistently shown that married men have substantially higher wages on average than otherwise similar unmarried men one commonly cited hypothesis to explain this pattern is that marriage allows one spouse to specialize in market production and the other to specialize in home production enabling the former usually the husband to acquire more market specific human capital and ultimately earn higher wages the authors test this hypothesis using panel data from the national survey of families and households the data reveal that married men spent virtually the same amount of time on home production as did single men albeit on different types of housework estimates from a fixed effects wage equation indicate that the male marriage wage premium is not substantially affected by controls for home production activities household specialization the authors conclude does not appear to have been responsible for the marriage premium in this sample

family labor supply and the timing of cash transfers evidence from the earned income tax credit abstract this paper exploits the unique disbursement timing and benefit rules of the earned income tax credit eitc to provide new evidence on how families adjust their labor supply in response to receiving anticipated cash transfers i find that income seasonality caused by eitc receipt leads to changes in the intra year labor supply patterns of married women on average receiving a 1 000 payment significantly reduces the proportion of married women who work by 1 3 percentage points in the month when the eitc is received additionally this labor supply response is mainly driven by those who are secondary earners or liquidity constrained

is corruption grease grit or a gamble corruption increases variance of productivity across countries the effect of corruption on economic growth has attracted interest in empirical development economics the conventional view of corruption as impediment for growth has been challenged by the grease on the wheels hypothesis we take a new perspective on the issue and suggest corruption as macro risk referred to as a gamble hypothesis using cross country data and two alternative indicators of corruption we find corruption to be a significant driver of heteroscedasticity in total productivity this supports the new gamble hypothesis we also note some misleading interpretations in the previously published frontier applications to avoid these shortcomings we apply a flexible semi nonparametric estimator

post fukushima public acceptance on resuming the nuclear power program in china abstract this study investigates social perceptions electricity preference management instruments towards nuclear power in china and evaluates the extent of opposing nuclear power by estimating public willingness to pay wtp to prevent a nuclear power plant from being constructed in their local cities and the neighboring cities it is pretty important to understand the public sentiment towards recommencement of nuclear programs since public acceptance of nuclear energy is one of the determinants for government establishment of a new nuclear project especially the chinese government has resumed the approval of new nuclear power plants and planned to expand this industry in the post fukushima world the findings show that most of the respondents care about the development of nuclear power in china the publics are a bit skeptical about the security of nuclear power since they are worried about nuclear accidents in addition the government is requested to improve policy transparency which is seen as an essential way of alleviating the public nuclear anxieties in china

what has been learned about labor supply in the past twenty years the main advance in the study of labor supply in the past 20 years has come in recognizing and interpreting the variety of different labor supply functions that coexist in the empirical literature a crucial theoretical distinction with important empirical payoff is that between labor supply choices at the extensive margin i e labor force participation and employment choices and choices at the intensive margin i e choices about hours of work or weeks of work for workers another important distinction is the one between a descriptive labor supply function and a structural supply function that can be the basis for out of sample policy investigations concerning responses to tax and welfare programs and evaluations of welfare losses a full understanding of the participation hours dichotomy leads to an appreciation of the importance of the problem of selection bias what is the wage to impute to a nonworking person these distinctions are a legacy of the research conducted on labor supply over the past 20 years many important empirical questions have been addressed i how strong are the effects of taxes welfare and transfer programs on labor supply ii how important is intertemporal substitution can life cycle labor supply models explain business cycle labor supply behavior iii has the consensus view of the 1960 s of high labor supply elasticities for married women and low labor supply elasticities for married men held up all of the empirical evidence assembled on labor supply must be called into question in the light of important research on the basic quality of the data conducted by analysts at the university of michigan i discuss this evidence in a concluding section except for my discussion of measurement issues i focus only on the major discoveries about which a general consensus has emerged

estimating consumption economies of scale adult equivalence scales and household bargaining power how much income would a woman living alone require to attain the same standard of living that she would have if she were married what percentage of a married couple s expenditures are controlled by the husband how much money does a couple save on consumption goods by living together versus living apart we propose and estimate a collective model of household behaviour that permits identification and estimation of concepts such as these we model households in terms of the utility functions of its members a bargaining or social welfare function and a consumption technology function we demonstrate generic non parametric identification of the model and hence of a version of adult equivalence scales that we call indifference scales as well as consumption economies of scale the household s resource sharing rule or members bargaining power and other related concepts copyright 2013 oxford university press

estimating labour supply responses using tax reforms the 1980 s tax reforms and the changing dispersion of wages offer one of the best opportunities yet to estimate labor supply effects nevertheless changing sample composition aggregate shocks the changing composition of the tax paying population and discontinuities in the tax system create serious identification and estimation problems we develop grouping estimators that address these issues our results reveal positive and moderately sized wage elasticities we also find negative income effects for women with children

semiparametric estimation of selection models some empirical results among the central theoretical developments in the econometric analysis of nonexperimental microeconomic data has been the analysis of selectivity bias following the work of james heckman 1974 statistical techniques were developed in the 1970s to consistently estimate the parameters of these models one potential drawback to the application of these techniques is their sensitivity to the assumed parametric distribution of the unobservable error terms in the model in recent years a number of estimation methods for selection models have been developed which do not impose parametric forms on error distributions these methods are termed semiparametric since only part of the model of interest the regression function is parametrically specified while the statistical theory of these semiparametric estimators has received much attention practical applications of the methods are lacking an exception being the paper by joel horowitz and george neumann 1987 in this paper we use semiparametric methods to reanalyze data on the labor supply of married women first studied by thomas mroz 1987 using parametric methods the object of this reanalysis is to determine whether mroz s results are sensitive to his parametric assumptions

an empirical model of collective household labour supply with non participation i present a structural empirical model of collective household labour supply that includes the non participation decision i specify a simultaneous model for hours participation and wages of husband and wife i discuss the problems of identification and statistical coherency that arise in the application of the collective household labour supply model the model includes random effects and it is estimated using a panel data set of dutch couples the estimates allow me to check the underlying regularity conditions on individual preferences and to obtain estimates of the sharing rule that governs the division of household income between husband and wife

changes in the labor supply behavior of married women 1980 2000 using march current population survey data we investigate married women s labor supply from 1980 to 2000 we find a large rightward shift in their labor supply function for annual hours in the 1980s with little shift in the 1990s these shifts account for most of the slowdown in the growth of labor supply during this period a major development was the dramatic decrease in the responsiveness of married women s labor supply to their own and husbands wages their own wage elasticity fell by 50 56 while their cross wage elasticity fell by 38 47 in absolute value

japan s post fukushima challenge implications from the german experience on renewable energy policy the japanese electricity sector is facing serious challenges in the aftermath of the fukushima nuclear disaster the government has responded to the crisis with a new feed in tariff to promote increased utilization of renewable energy and proposed to reduce the dependence on nuclear power in this viewpoint we liken the transition implied by recently updated goals for the diffusion of renewables in japan to the transition in germany in the last decade we argue that some of the lessons learned in germany might prove valuable for the steps japan considers taking in particular we focus on the new japanese feed in tariff for solar photovoltaics in view of the recent developments in germany we emphasize the importance of the scheme s political legitimacy which needs to be maintained through adequate design of both policy instrument and political process we conclude with policy implications and a targeted research agenda

is china different a meta analysis of export led growth we examine whether china has benefited more from exports than other countries the results show that exports have been more significant for growth in china than in other countries even when china is compared with other transition economies

trade and poverty in the poor countries now widely regarded as economically benign in the sense that it increases the size of the pie the recent anti globalization critics have suggested that it is socially malign on several dimensions among them the question of poverty 2 their contention is that trade accentuates not ameliorates and that it deepens not diminishes poverty in both the rich and the poor countries the theoretical and empirical analysis of the impact of freer trade on poverty in the rich and in the poor countries is not symmetric of course we focus here only on the latter in doing so we distinguish between two different strands of argumentation static and dynamic

static and intertemporal household decisions we discuss the most popular static and dynamic models of household behavior our main objective is to explain which aspects of household decisions different models can account for using this insight we describe testable implications identification results and estimation findings obtained in the literature particular attention is given to the ability of different models to answer various types of policy questions

labour supply household production and intra family welfare distribution abstract this paper demonstrates the importance in conceptual and empirical terms of incorporating household production in models of labour supply to avoid misleading results concerning the intra family distribution of income and behavioural responses to economic policy

structural estimation of family labor supply with taxes estimating a continuous hours model using a direct utility specification this paper proposes a new method for estimating family labor supply in the presence of taxes this method accounts for continuous hours choices measurement error unobserved heterogeneity in tastes for work the nonlinear form of the tax code and fixed costs of work in one comprehensive specification estimated on data from the 2001 psid the resulting elasticities for married males are consistent with those found elsewhere in the literature but female wage elasticities are substantially smaller than those found in most of the literature simulations of recent tax acts predict small effects on the labor supply of married couples

a superior measure of consumption from the panel study of income dynamics abstract this paper provides a simple technique for assigning a measure of total consumption to households in the panel study of income dynamics psid using regressions from the consumer expenditure surveys of 1972 1973 and 1983 linear predictions of total consumption are estimated which are stable over time and explain up to 78 percent of the total variance in consumption

energy savings potential in china s industrial sector from the perspectives of factor price distortion and allocative inefficiency abstract china s industrial energy consumption accounted for 70 82 of national and 14 12 of world energy usage in 2011 in the context of energy scarcity and environmental pollution the industrial sector in china faces unsustainable growth problems by adopting the stochastic frontier analysis sfa framework this paper analyzes the factor allocative efficiency of china s industrial sector and estimates the energy savings potential from the perspective of allocative inefficiency this paper focuses on three issues the first is examining the factor allocative inefficiency of china s industrial sector the second is measuring factor price distortion by the shadow price model the third is estimating the energy savings potential in china s industrial sector during 2001 2009 major conclusions are thus drawn first factor prices of capital labor and energy are distorted in china due to government regulations moreover energy price is relatively low compared to capital price while is relatively high compared to labor price second the industry wide energy savings potential resulted from energy allocative inefficiency was about 9 71 during 2001 2009 the downward trend of energy savings potential implies the increasing energy allocative efficiency in china s industrial sector third a transparent and reasonable pricing mechanism is conducive to improving energy allocative efficiency

taxes and the labor market participation of married couples the earned income tax credit a distinguishing feature of recent changes to the us system of public assistance is its increasing focus on working families and reliance on the tax system to transfer dollars to needy families after a decade in near total obscurity the earned income tax credit eitc was expanded to become the largest cash transfer program for lower income families with children advocates of the eitc argue that unlike traditional welfare the credit helps promote both the values of family and work indeed empirical evidence consistent with economic theory suggests that the eitc promotes employment among eligible unmarried women with children to target benefits to lower income families however the eitc is based on family income leading to traditional welfare type disincentives for most eligible secondary earners in fact the eitc is likely to reduce overall family labor supply among married couples this paper examines the labor force participation response of married couples to eitc expansions between 1984 and 1996 the effect of the credit is estimated using both quasiexperimental and traditional reduced form labor supply models results from both models show the same qualitative conclusion that the eitc expansions reduced total family labor supply of married couples in all cases we find a decline in labor force participation by married women that more than offsets any rise in participation by their spouses while the labor force participation rate of married men increased by about 0 2 percentage points that of married women decreased by just over a full percentage point these aggregate effects mask substantial heterogeneity in the population women facing the strongest disincentives were more than 2 percentage points less likely to work after the expansions these findings imply that the eitc is effectively subsidizing married mothers to stay home and therefore have implications for the design of the program d 2003 elsevier b v all rights reserved

promise and pitfalls in the use of secondary data sets income inequality in oecd countries as a case study this paper examines the role of secondary data sets in empirical economic research taking the field of income distribution as a case study we illustrate problems faced by users of secondary statistics showing how both cross country comparisons and time series analysis can depend sensitively on the choice of data after describing the genealogy of secondary data sets on income inequality we consider the main methodological issues and discuss their implications for comparisons of income inequality across oecd countries and over time the lessons to be drawn for the construction and use of secondary data sets are summarized at the end of the paper

the sensitivity of an empirical model of married women s hours of work to economic and statistical assumptions this study undertakes a systematic analysis of several theoretic and statistical assumption s used in many empirical models of female labor supply using a singl e data set psid 1975 labor supply data the author is able to replic ate most of the range of estimated income and substitution effects fo und in previous studies in this field he undertakes extensive specif ication tests and finds that most of this range should be rejected du e to statistical and model misspecifications the two most important assumptions appear to be the tobit assumption used to control for sel f selection into the labor force and exogeneity assumptions on the wi fe s wage rate and her labor market experience copyright 1987 by the econometric society

estimating the parameters of a household production function with joint products by estimating the parameters of a production function whose inputs consist of family time and market goods the authors offer some new microeconomic estimates of the value of production that takes place in the home and also examine the concept of joint production that is the degree to which time devoted to home production simultaneously serves as leisure they find evidence of substantial jointness between home production time and leisure the degree of which is greater for wives than for husbands and that both husband and wife possess human capital skills more productive in market work than in home work

measuring the social value of nuclear energy using contingent valuation methodology abstract as one of the promising energy sources for the next few decades nuclear energy receives more attention than before as environmental issues become more important and the supply of fossil fuels becomes unstable one of the reasons for this attention is based on the rapid innovation of nuclear technology which solves many of its technological constraints and safety issues however regardless of these rapid innovations social acceptance for nuclear energy has been relatively low and unchanged consequently the social perception has often been an obstacle to the development and execution of nuclear policy requiring enormous subsidies which are not based on the social value of nuclear energy therefore in this study we estimate the social value of nuclear energy consumers willingness to pay for nuclear energy using the contingent valuation method cvm and suggest that the social value of nuclear energy increases approximately 68 5 with the provision of adequate information about nuclear energy to the public consequently we suggest that the social acceptance management in nuclear policy development is important along with nuclear technology innovation

collective labor supply and welfare the paper develops a general collective model of household labor supply in which agents are characterized by their own possibly altruistic preferences and household decisions are only assumed to be pareto efficient an alternative interpretation is that there are two stages in the internal decision process agents first share nonlabor income according to some given sharing rule then each one optimally chooses his or her own labor supply and consumption this setting is shown to generate testable restrictions on labor supplies moreover the observation of labor supply behavior is sufficient for recovering individual preferences and the sharing rule up to a constant finally the traditional tools of welfare analysis can be adapted to the new setting

married with children a collective labor supply model with detailed time use and intrahousehold expenditure information we propose a collective labor supply model with household production that generalizes an original model of blundell chiappori and meghir 2005 in our model adults individual preferences not only depend on own leisure and individual private consumption of market goods they also depend on the consumption of domestic goods which are produced by combining goods bought on the market with individuals time we apply our model to new and unique data on dutch couples with children the data contains detailed information about the spouses time use and the intrahousehold allocation of all expenditures our application uses a novel estimation strategy that builds upon the familiar two stage allocation representation of the collective model we obtain interesting and plausible empirical results spouses preferences depend on the consumption of domestically produced goods including children s welfare in addition pareto weights depend on variables like the individual wages and the share in the household s nonlabor income finally and perhaps surprisingly we do not nd evidence that mothers care more for their children than fathers this paper draws on data of the liss panel of centerdata special thanks go to marika de bruijne and arthur van soest who helped to construct the questionnaire and to guillaume schollier

income taxes and the labor supply of married women in quebec in recent years a substantial literature has developed for the most part in the u s concerning labor supply behavior of particular interest is the labor force behavior of married women since this raises a set of interesting theoretical and empirical issues despite the extensive research in both the u s and the u k there has been relatively little empirical investigation in canada this is surprising given the increasing importance of women in the canadian labor force and the concern expressed by policy makers 2 this study presents some empirical results on the labor supply behavior of married women in quebec using data on 2439 husband wife families for 1979 in estimating labor supply responses of married women we take into account the effect of income taxes and address the question of tax perception 3 the impact of taxes on labor supply is particularly important in the quebec context since quebec marginal tax rates are the highest in canada and it appears in north america the study also compares the results of alternative methods of estimation married women s labor supply functions are estimated using standard ols techniques a procedure suggested by heckman 12 13 which corrects for selectivity bias a two stage gls technique which also corrects for selectivity bias and a gls method applied to a system of equations the conceptual framework of labor supply determination is briefly reviewed in section ii section iii describes the data the empirical specification and the estimation strategy

selection criteria for a microeconometric model of labour supply the wide variety of observed behaviour that is displayed in survey data suggests that microeconometric models should allow a reasonable degree of flexibility in specification however since these models are generally used for policy analysis they are required to satisfy some degree of theoretical consistency this requirement has generally led to the adoption of rather simple inflexible models based on additive preferences or linear labour supply responses we estimate and test a sequence of models for the labour supply of married working women emphasizing the importance of testing both the thecretical and statistical assumptions underlying the models

collective household labor supply nonparticipation and income taxation in this paper we adopt the usual assumptions of the collective approach i e individualism and efficiency to study household labor supply the theoretical innovation is 2 fold first we incorporate the decision to participate in the labor market in the initial setting second we abandon the assumption of linearity of the budget constraint we show that i structural elements such as preferences or the outcome of the decision process can be recovered and ii testable restrictions are generated from the observation of the household labor supplies we also examine for this model how to simulate the incidence of fiscal reforms

japan s energy security predicament post fukushima if energy security is defined as the availability of energy at all times in various forms in sufficient quantities and at affordable prices without unacceptable or irreversible impact on the economy and the environment japan is facing an energy security predicament for a country that was already uneasy about energy security the march 11 2011 earthquake and tsunami which caused a nuclear catastrophe in tepco s fukushima daiichi nuclear power plant turned this unease into outright anxiety with the temporary and or permanent closure of many nuclear reactors japan has had to replace lost power tokyo has had no choice but to secure additional fossil fuels a strategy that has negatively affected japan s economy due to rising fuel costs the increase in japan s fossil fuel consumption has also caused a significant increase in greenhouse gas emissions and affected tokyo s commitment to kyoto targets this paper analyzes the consequences of the 2011 nuclear disaster for japan s energy security recognizing that japan s future energy policy choices are constrained and path dependent the paper outlines energy policy recommendations for japan s government

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

the wage elasticity of informal care supply evidence from the health and retirement study author affiliation olena nizalova nizalova kse org ua acknowledgment i gratefully acknowledge steven haider jeff biddle john strauss and john goddeeris for their helpful comments throughout the process of working on the project and important comments from the anonymous referees i am also greatly indebted to michael nolte and his colleagues from the isr data enclave for making possible the revision of this article 1 introductionfor the past two decades the policy debate on issues related to the aging population has been growing at unprecedented rates throughout the world on one hand policy measures suggested in the debate include removal of the disincentives for labor force participation for the near elderly u s dhhs 1997 apfel 2004 cbo 2004 this would have effectively raised the wage rate faced by the targeted group as in the case of the elimination of the social security earnings test for those older than 65 in the united states friedberg 2000 on the other hand the role of informal caregiving is emphasized as a means to keep many individuals at home who would otherwise require expensive institutional care u s dhhs 1997 p 6 policies targeting these two objectives may turn out to conflict with each other higher wages may decrease hours devoted to informal care for elderly parents while policies encouraging informal care may lead to fewer working hours research on the effects of the social security earnings test mostly focuses on labor supply and claiming behavior of the affected group burtless and moffitt 1984 baker and benjamin 1999 gruber and orszag 1999 friedberg 2000 haider and loughran 2008 with little attention being paid to the potential interaction between incentives for paid employment and caregiving choices this interaction may have adverse implications for the well being of the oldest old given that the prevalence of caregiving is highest among individuals in their late midlife central to the analysis of this interaction is the concept of the wage elasticity the labor supply literature suggests a positive wage elasticity of labor supply smaller for males larger for females therefore if the wage elasticity of informal care supply is close to zero as has been found in earlier studies higher wages would lead to more labor supplied with negligible effects on the provision of informal care in this case one might hope that benefits from increased labor supply will not be offset along other dimensions if on the contrary the wage elasticity of informal care supply is relatively large and negative one should be more cautious when evaluating the effects of fiscal policies on labor supply among individuals in their late midlife a substantial negative wage elasticity of informal care supply would mean that along with increasing labor supply the near elderly would cut back on the hours of informal care they provide to their elderly parents this may potentially lead to more people turning to the government in their quest for help with covering formal long term care costs the goal of this article is to study the wage elasticity of informal care supply and contribute to the literature by directly addressing the issue of omitted variables in the time allocation and monetary transfer equations informal care supply is defined as annual time spent helping elderly parents with basic personal needs as well as household chores errands and transportation this article uses a unique opportunity of access to the restricted geographic identifiers for the health and retirement study hrs respondents to instrument hourly wages with the industry structure in the state of residence allowing for differential impact by education 1the primary finding of the article suggests that the wage elasticity of informal care supply is negative and substantially larger in magnitude than previously estimated due to the weakness of the instruments there is still a significant remaining bias in the estimates of the wage elasticity

a test of the unitary and collective models of household labour supply this paper tests the unitary and the collective household labour supply models within a structural framework a nonlinear unrestricted household labour supply system is postulated and the set of parametric restrictions imposed by each model is derived our results generally reject the income pooling restrictions embodied in the unitary model also the symmetry of cross wage effects is rejected however the collective model is not rejected for groups with no pre school children

financial liberalization and economic growth a meta analysis this study provides a systematic analysis of the empirical literature on the relationship between financial liberalization and economic growth by conducting a meta analysis based on 441 t statistics reported in 60 empirical studies we focus on explaining the heterogeneity of results in our sample in terms of study data and method specific characteristics although our findings indicate that on average there is a positive effect of financial liberalization on growth the significance of this effect is only weak moreover we find that most of the variables that may help explain the heterogeneity of results are insignificant there are two exceptions first studies carried out based on data from the 1970s on average find a statistically less significant relationship between financial liberalization policies and growth i e they report lower t statistics as compared to studies using data from the 1980s second studies controlling for the level of development of the financial system report lower t statistics for the relationship between liberalization and growth

reform of refined oil product pricing mechanism and energy rebound effect for passenger transportation in china new huadu business school research fund china sustainable energy program of the energy foundation g 1203 15828 national social science foundation of china 12zd059 ministry of education 10gbj013

on the empirical implementation of some game theoretic models of household labor supply this paper discusses some issues in the empirical implementation of game theoretic models of household labor supply in particular we focus on the identification problems inherent in many of these models as an illustration we estimate a game theoretic model which uses data on preferred working hours as additional identifying information

wage inequality and family labor supply using the march current population surveys and the 1960 census this article describes earnings and employment changes for married couples in different types of households stratified by the husband s hourly wage while declines in male employment and earnings have been greatest for low wage men employment and earnings gains have been largest for wives of middle and high wage men these findings cast doubt on the notion that married women have increased their labor supply in the recent decades to compensate for the disappointing earnings growth of their husbands

collective decisions household production and labor force participation in this paper we generalize the collective model of household labor supply with domestic production to allow for the possibility of nonparticipation in the labor market we also relax the marketability assumption according to which domestic goods and market goods are perfectly substitutable our results are twofold first we show that the main structural components of the decision process can be retrieved from observed behavior second we estimate a system of market and domestic labor supply using the panel study of income dynamics and apply the theoretical results to recover the intra household sharing of resources

gender identity and relative income within households band s income we argue that this pattern is best explained by gender identity norms which induce an aversion to a situation where the wife earns more than her husband we present evidence that this aversion also impacts marriage formation the wife s labor force participation the wife s income conditional on working marriage satisfaction likelihood of divorce and the division of home production within marriage markets when a randomly chosen woman becomes more likely to earn more than a randomly chosen man marriage rates decline in couples where the wife s potential income is likely to exceed the husband s the wife is less likely to be in the labor force and earns less than her potential if she does work in couples where the wife earns more than the husband the wife spends more time on household chores moreover those couples are less satisfied with their marriage and are more likely to divorce these patterns hold both cross sectionally and within couples over time

the relative earnings of young mexican black and white women this analysis of data from the national longitudinal survey of youth indicates that young mexican women and young black women earned respectively 9 5 and 13 2 less than young white women in 1994 differences in education appear to be the most important explanation for the mexican white wage gap whereas differences in labor force attachment are the most important determinant of the black white wage gap the authors show that accounting for actual labor market experience rather than simply imputing experience based on years since leaving school is crucially important in such analyses recent research has renewed interest in the relatively poor labor market performance of mexican men trejo 1997 1998 reimers 1994 chavez 1991 chapa 1990 trejo 1997 found that lower levels of education english deficiencies and the relative youth of mexican men explain 75 of the gap between mexican and white wages in contrast these factors explain less than 30 of the wage gap between black and white men despite the flurry of recent research exploring the poor performance of mexican men we are aware of

the incredible shrinking elasticities married female labor supply 1978 2002 this paper demonstrates the extent to which married women s labor supply elasticities have changed over the past quarter century estimates from march current population survey data suggest that these elasticities have decreased substantially by 60 percent for the hours wage elasticity from 0 36 to 0 14 70 percent for the hours income elasticity from 0 053 to 0 015 95 percent for the participation wage elasticity from 0 66 to 0 03 and 60 percent for the participation income elasticity from 0 13 to 0 05 changing demographic characteristics explain little of the drop in these elasticities suggesting that preferences toward work have changed across birth cohorts

securing a bioenergy future without imports the uk has legally binding renewable energy and greenhouse gas targets energy from biomass is anticipated to make major contributions to these however there are concerns about the availability and sustainability of biomass for the bioenergy sector a biomass resource model has been developed that reflects the key biomass supply chain dynamics and interactions determining resource availability taking into account climate food land and other constraints the model has been applied to the uk developing four biomass resource scenarios to analyse resource availability and energy generation potential within different contexts the model shows that indigenous biomass resources and energy crops could service up to 44 of uk energy demand by 2050 without impacting food systems the scenarios show residues from agriculture forestry and industry provide the most robust resource potentially providing up to 6 5 of primary energy demand by 2050 waste resources are found to potentially provide up to 15 4 and specifically grown biomass and energy crops up to 22 of demand the uk is therefore projected to have significant indigenous biomass resources to meet its targets however the dominant biomass resource opportunities identified in the paper are not consistent with current uk bioenergy strategies risking biomass deficit despite resource abundance

china s regional balanced development based on the investment in power grid infrastructure abstract due to the stark reality of regional development disparities china has to confront the sustainable development challenges brought about by social inequality to compensate for these regional differences in natural resource endowments effective investment in power grid infrastructure pgi and improvement of power grids might prove helpful in reducing poverty and narrowing the development gap this paper constructs a peripheral degree index pdi of power grid to measure the effective distance between electricity delivering areas and receiving regions moreover we discuss how to efficiently locate the investment in pgi and optimize the allocation of limited financial resources the results show investment in pgi has higher marginal benefit for less developed provinces in energy delivering regions and more importantly improvement of the grid infrastructure in central areas which connect energy receiving and delivering regions particularly to improve the grid facilities in the central areas could reduce electricity transmission cost and help to alleviate the railway strain for coal transportation therefore our findings suggest that it is more advisable to locate the investment of power grid infrastructure in the central provinces that are located at strategic conjunctions of the nationwide power grid including shanxi henan hubei and hebei

the public perceptions and willingness to pay from the perspective of the smog crisis in china the deteriorating air quality which is linked to human actions related to energy resources has become an urgent global problem china s air pollution has reached the hazardous level since 2000s in consideration of the serious health and social problems residential demand for clean air is increasing this paper applies the contingent valuation method to estimate public s willingness to pay wtp for reducing air pollution in the urban area of china open ended scenarios through face to face surveys are used to elicit public s wtp the two part model is employed for the estimation the probit model is used to estimate the probability of respondents who have positive wtp values and the interval regression model is employed to estimate the specific wtp level of those with nonzero wtp values the results show that nearly 90 of the respondents are willing to pay for reducing air pollution and the average amount of wtp per individual is 382 6rmb per year household income is found to be positively correlated with people s wtp and those who trust the government are more willing to share the cost of reducing air pollution this study recommends designing some effective mechanisms to tap the potentially available source of money for smog mitigation and improving the transparency of smog governance to enhance the government credibility as solutions to cope with smog crisis

labor supply home production and welfare comparisons abstract we consider the collective model of labor supply with marketable domestic production we first show that if domestic production is mistakenly ignored the collective indirect utility functions that are retrieved from observed behavior will be unbiased if and only if the retrieved from observed behavior will be unbiased if and only if the profit function is additive otherwise in the non additive case the direction and the size of the bias will depend on the complementarity substitutability of spouses time inputs in the production process we then show that even if domestic labor supply functions are not observed valid welfare comparisons are possible this identification result generalizes that in chiappori chiappori p a 1992 collective labor supply and welfare journal of political economy 100 437 467

why do mexican americans earn low wages using current population survey data from november 1979 and 1989 i find that mexican americans earn low wages primarily because they possess less human capital than other workers not because they

price and expenditure elasticities of residential energy demand during urbanization an empirical analysis based on the household level survey data in china abstract urbanization one of the most obvious characteristics of economic growth in china has an apparent lock in effect on residential energy consumption pattern it is expected that residential sector would become a major force that drives china s energy consumption after urbanization process we estimate price and expenditure elasticities of residential energy demand using data from china s residential energy consumption survey crecs that covers households at different income levels and from different regional and social groups empirical results from the almost ideal demand system model are in accordance with the basic expectations the demands for electricity natural gas and transport fuels are inelastic in the residential sector due to the unreasonable pricing mechanism we further investigate the sensitivities of different income groups to prices of the three types of energy policy simulations indicate that rationalizing energy pricing mechanism is an important guarantee for energy sustainable development during urbanization finally we put forward suggestions on energy pricing reform in the residential sector based on characteristics of china s undergoing urbanization process and the current energy consumption situations

eliciting public preference for nuclear energy against the backdrop of global warming one of the most important issues related to sustainability is to reduce the use of fossil fuels due to the reduction in greenhouse gases ghg emission nuclear power results in low carbon emissions and is thus important to mitigating the adverse effects of global warming and climate change however the downside of nuclear power cannot be overlooked and consequently nuclear power is a controversial issue in many countries around the world thus an important question concerns how people should support nuclear power do the climate and energy security benefits of nuclear power outweigh its risks and costs therefore we use a modified double bounded contingent valuation model to explore the attitudes and the willingness to pay wtp of a country in order to demonstrate its implications for policy we confirm that supporters and opponents of nuclear power are balanced both in terms of their numbers and in terms of their wtp the policy implication is that people do not support any dramatic increase or reduction in nuclear power and that nuclear power should still be an important means of generating electricity in taiwan the current share of nuclear power in electricity generation of 20 should be maintained in the near future

time series minimum wage studies a meta analysis time series minimum wage studies a meta analysis author s david card and alan b krueger reviewed work s source the american economic review vol 85 no 2 papers and proceedings of the hundredth and seventh annual meeting of the american economic association washington dc january 6 8 1995 may 1995 pp 238 243 published by american economic association stable url http www jstor org stable 2117925 accessed 04 11 2011 15 46