participation and commitment in voluntary coalitions to provide public goods this paper reports experimental evidence on the voluntary formation of coalitions to provide a public good participation and commitment in a coalition are either exogenously imposed or endogenously determined by the players themselves we find larger voluntary participation rates when commitments in the coalition are endogenously determined using a minimum contribution rule rather than exogenously determined however due to a trade off between participation and commitment coalitions with voluntary participation are less effective in facilitating cooperation compared to when all players are forced to participate this paper therefore confirms the rather pessimistic conclusions from coalition formation theories

empathy or antipathy the impact of diversity mixing across ethnic and class lines could potentially either spur understanding or inflame tensions between groups we find that white students at a large state university who were randomly assigned african american roommates in their first year are more likely to endorse affirmative action policies several years later whites who were randomly assigned black roommates are also more likely to say they have more personal contact with and interact more comfortably with members of minority groups whites who were assigned either black or low income roommates are more likely to view a diverse student body as essential for a high quality education students become less supportive of higher taxes for the wealthy when assigned roommates from high income families and they appear more likely to volunteer when assigned roommates from low income families taken together these results suggest that students become more empathetic with the social groups to which their roommates belong

ethnic discrimination evidence from china abstract we study the role of ethnicity in experimental labor markets where employers determine wages of workers who perform a real effort task this task requires a true skill which we show is not affected by minority status in some treatments we provide subtle priming to employers about minority status of workers as commonly depicted on chinese hukou identification system we conduct our experiments at two sites located in provinces that differ by their historical shares of ethnic groups in the population we find that 1 han and minority workers are equally productive in both provinces 2 in the diverse province there is no difference in the wages between han and minority workers 3 in the non diverse province minority workers receive 4 7 lower wages than han workers

marketing margins and price uncertainty the case of the u s wheat market this paper seeks to determine the effect of changes in output price risk on marketing margins a theoretical model of price determination in a marketing channel with risk averse firms is developed this model shows that if marketing firms are competitive and decreasingly absolute risk averse then an increase in output price risk should result in higher expected marketing margins empirical evidence from the wheat marketing channel supports the theoretical model increased price variability significantly increases wheat marketing margins for both the farm mill margin and the mill retail margin these results suggest a potential benefit from price stabilization programs

partial gift exchange in an experimental labor market impact of subject population differences productivity differences and effort requests on behavior we report a gift exchange experiment firms make wage offers workers respond by determining an effort level higher effort is more costly to workers and firms have no mechanism for punishing or rewarding workers consistent with the gift exchange hypothesis workers provide more effort at higher wages but undergraduates provide substantially less effort than mbas evidence suggests this results from differences in prior work experience firms nonbinding effort requests are at least partially honored resulting in increased overall effort for undergraduates although higher wages are relatively more costly for lower productivity firms workers do not provide them with more effort

the statistical distribution of exchange rates empirical evidence and economic implications the abundant evidence that changes in exchange rates have distributions with fatter tails than the normal distribution has led researchers to consider non normal distributions including the student the stable paretian and mixtures of distributions this paper compares the empirical fits of three non normal candidates and the normal distribution for daily changes in the logarithms of exchange rates using maximum likelihood estimation of the parameters and chi square goodness of fit tests the student and mixture of two normals provide the best fits but there is evidence that the distribution parameters may vary over time

the visible hand race and online market outcomes we examine the effect of race on market outcomes by selling ipods through local online classified advertisements throughout the us each advertisement features a photograph including a dark or light skinned hand or one with a wrist tattoo black sellers receive fewer and lower offers than white sellers and the correspondence with black sellers indicates lower levels of trust black sellers outcomes are particularly poor in thin markets suggesting that discrimination may not survive competition among buyers and those with the most racial isolation and property crime consistent with channels through which statistical discrimination might operate economic outcomes in the us are highly correlated with race but the causal mechanisms underlying these correlations are not well understood in particular it remains unclear how much of the correlation is due to discrimination and how much is due to other characteristics that are correlated with race such as education there is an extensive literature on the effect of race on market outcomes focusing on both labour and goods including housing markets however discrimination is not a monolithic phenomenon and it is important to investigate its extent and causes in a variety of different contexts across which they may differ our study asks the following question when the typical person engages in a consumer transaction usually as a buyer does he or she try to avoid dealing with minority sellers and does she treat minority sellers differently

minimum wage impacts on han minority workers wage distribution and inequality in urban china abstract this paper examines the distributional impacts of the minimum wage on the urban wages of han minority workers and the implications for urban inequality county level minimum wage data is combined with recent proprietary household survey data representative of china s ethnically diverse areas the identification strategy relies on an unconditional quantile regression framework that takes into account policy endogeneity using an instrument variable approach the findings show that minimum wages lead to wage compression along the bottom and middle parts of the urban wage distribution the minimum wage effects are larger for lower skilled workers located in ethnic minority counties or that belong to an ethnic minority group counterfactual analysis further shows that minimum wages help to significantly reduce aggregate urban wage inequality increasing minimum wages from a counterfactual benchmark to their observed levels an average increase of 26 reduces the gini coefficient of wages by 10 12

the perils of democracy abstract in this work we examine a common social dilemma in experimental economics the public goods game to determine how voting impacts pro social behavior as noted in markussen et al 2014 a democratic dividend exists couching the public goods game in a phenomenon that is playing out in much of the world drastic income inequality we examine the decision of groups to share local public goods with groups that have effectively no endowment to contribute toward public nor private consumption our results show the perils of democracy in that subjects in the position to vote use their advantageous situation to reward the ingroups at the expense of the less endowed outgroup members

are emily and greg more employable than lakisha and jamal a field experiment on labor market discrimination we study race in the labor market by sending fictitious resumes to help wanted ads in boston and chicago newspapers to manipulate perceived race resumes are randomly assigned african american or white sounding names white names receive 50 percent more callbacks for interviews callbacks are also more responsive to resume quality for white names than for african american ones the racial gap is uniform across occupation industry and employer size we also find little evidence that employers are inferring social class from the names differential treatment by race still appears to still be prominent in the u s labor market jel j71 j64

the effects of real exchange rate risk on international trade abstract by assuming real profit maximization and uncertain prices as well as exchange rates we conclude that it is uncertain percentage changes in the real exchange rate that are risky in international trade empirical estimation of fourteen bilateral trade flows among industrialized countries finds a significant negative effect on trade quantity from such risk in a number of these cases the expectation variable has a positive effect in a larger number of cases significant price effects from the expectation variable are fewer and from risk are negligible

the integration of the market for soybeans and soybean products abstract this article addresses the question of whether soybeans soybean meal and soybean oil produced in the usa and exported were part of a single world geographic market during the decade of the 1980s an answer to this question is sought using an approach to defining a geographic market based on the notion of instantaneous causality the empirical results based on prices for soybeans soybean meal and soybean oil for three spatially diffuse locations suggest that there was but a single identifiable world market for these commodities over the period of study this has implications for the continued presence of soybean production subsidies and discussions on international agreements designed to reduce or eliminate these subsidies

measuring and analysing the effects of short term volatility in real exchange rates this paper examines short term volatility in the real effective exchange rates of industrial countries and its impact on their imports it yields three conclusions first volatility has not diminished as markets have gained experience with floating exchange rates the trend appears to be in the opposite direction for some countries second exposure to short term volatility has differed among countries japan and sweden have experienced much more than most other industrial countries third volatility appears to depress the volume of international trade this third finding is consistent with results reported by cushman and by akhtar and hilton and challenges earlier findings by hooper and kohlhagen

does diversity pay race gender and the business case for diversity the value in diversity perspective argues that a diverse workforce relative to a homogeneous one is generally beneficial for business including but not limited to corporate profits and earnings this is in contrast to other accounts that view diversity as either nonconsequential to business success or actually detrimental by creating conflict undermining cohesion and thus decreasing productivity using data from the 1996 to 1997 national organizations survey a national sample of for profit business organizations this article tests eight hypotheses derived from the value in diversity thesis the results support seven of these hypotheses racial diversity is associated with increased sales revenue more customers greater market share and greater relative profits gender diversity is associated with increased sales revenue more customers and greater relative profits i discuss the implications of these findings relative to alternative views of diversity in the workplace

social identity and preferences social identities prescribe behaviors for people we identify the marginal behavioral effect of these norms on discount rates and risk aversion by measuring how laboratory subjects choices change when an aspect of social identity is made salient when we make ethnic identity salient to asian american subjects they make more patient choices when we make racial identity salient to black subjects non immigrant blacks but not immigrant blacks make more patient choices making gender identity salient has no effect on intertemporal or risk choices

why beauty matters we decompose the beauty premium in an experimental labor market where employers determine wages of workers who perform a maze solving task this task requires a true skill which we show to be unaffected by physical attractiveness we find a sizable beauty premium and can identify three transmission channels a physically attractive workers are more confident and higher confidence increases wages b for a given level of confidence physically attractive workers are wrongly considered more able by employers c controlling for worker confidence physically attractive workers have oral skills such as communication and social skills that raise their wages when they interact with employers our methodology can be adopted to study the sources of discriminatory pay differentials in other settings

top incomes in the long run of history a recent literature has constructed top income shares time series over the long run for more than twenty countries using income tax statistics top incomes represent a small share of the population but a very significant share of total income and total taxes paid hence aggregate economic growth per capita and gini inequality indexes are sensitive to excluding or including top incomes we discuss the estimation methods and issues that arise when constructing top income share series including income definition and comparability over time and across countries tax avoidance and tax evasion we provide a summary of the key empirical findings most countries experience a dramatic drop in top income shares in the first part of the twentieth century in general due to shocks to top capital incomes during the wars and depression shocks top income shares do not recover in the immediate postwar decades however over the last thirty years top income shares have increased substantially in english speaking countries and in india and china but not in continental european countries or japan this increase is due in part to an unprecedented surge in top wage incomes as a result wage income comprises a larger fraction of top incomes than in the past finally we discuss the theoretical and empirical models that have been proposed to account for the facts and the main questions that remain open

exchange rate uncertainty and us bilateral fresh fruit and fresh vegetable trade an application of the gravity model in order to analyse the effect of exchange rate uncertainty we apply an empirical gravity equation to two sets of us bilateral trade data fresh fruit over the period 1976 1999 for a panel of 26 countries and fresh vegetables over the period 1976 2006 for a panel of nine countries based on panel estimation methods and using both a moving sd measure and the peree and steinherr 1989 measure of exchange rate uncertainty the results show that us bilateral fresh fruit trade has been negatively affected by exchange rate uncertainty we also find some evidence that the exchange rate between the us dollar and the currencies of latin american trading partners accounts for most of the negative impact of exchange rate uncertainty on bilateral trade flows in fresh fruit in contrast when using panel estimation methods and both measures of exchange rate uncertainty we find no statistically significant evidence for any negative effect of exchange rate uncertainty on us bilateral fresh vegetable trade however

institutions and behavior experimental evidence on the effects of democracy a novel experiment is used to show that the effect of a policy on the level of cooperation is greater when it is chosen democratically by the subjects than when it is exogenously imposed in contrast to the previous literature our experimental design allows us to control for selection effects e g those who choose the policy may be affected differently by it our finding implies that democratic institutions may affect behavior directly in addition to having effects through the choice of policies our findings have implications for the generalizability of the results of randomized policy interventions

bilateral trade flows the linder hypothesis and exchange risk bilateral trade flows are used to examine the linder hypothesis and the effect of exchange rate variability in a gra vity type trade model derived from an underlying demand and supply mo del a behavioral model is used to justify examining these issues joi ntly the model performs well empirically using a sample of seventeen countries for the period 1974 82 the authors find overwhelming supp ort for the linder hypothesis and this version of the gravity model moreover they find strong support for the hypothesis that increased exchange rate variability affects bilateral trade flows copyright 1987 by mit press

refugees asylum seekers and policy in oecd countries refugees and asylum seekers are only a small proportion of the 60 million forcibly displaced persons but those seeking asylum in the developed world have received much of the attention as western governments have struggled to develop a policy response an analysis of asylum applications by origin and destination indicates that these flows are largely driven by political terror and human rights abuses poor economic conditions in origin countries and tough asylum policies in destination countries matter too in the light of the findings i suggest that greater coordination among oecd countries could improve the lot of those fleeing from persecution but even this would make only modest inroads into the sum of human misery that displaced people exemplify

exchange rate uncertainty and the demand for u s soybeans this study examines the effects of exchange rate uncertainty on bilateral soybean trade flows and finds that imports for japan france and spain are sensitive to short term variations in nominal bilateral exchange rates this research extends previous work by focusing on bilateral trade for a single commodity using a longer sample period and testing over a variety of model specifications the results suggest that the effects vary across countries depending on access to forward markets the availability of alternative soybean suppliers the degree of market concentration in the domestic soybean processing sector and the degree of currency risk importers are willing to assume the decline in u s agricultural exports during the 1980s has been explained by numerous factors including stagnant world income increased foreign competition the existence of trade barriers and the level of the exchange rate an additional factor exchange rate volatility has received less attention in agricultural trade models since the adoption of the flexible exchange rate system in the early 1970s variability in exchange rates has had a potentially destabilizing impact on trade disruptions in trade can occur because exchange rate variations change the actual price paid or received for traded goods causing adjustments in quantities traded domestic prices or in the timing of sales in order to avoid the effects of variability on profits other longer term effects may occur if exchange rate uncertainty persists to the extent that goods are substitutable such adjustments can be manifested as a sustained preference for domestic suppliers over foreign suppliers or alternative sources of foreign supply may be explored the magnitude of the effect of exchange rate uncertainty on quantity imported is dependent upon inter alia the respective exchange rate elasticities and the importer s response to variability for some goods this magnitude can be substantial the objective of this study is to determine

the behavior of an open economy firm under flexible exchange rates most proponents and opponents of floating believe that greater variability of foreign exchange rates will increase uncertainty in international transactions and hence that the volume of international trade and financial flows will be curtailed without well developed facilities for hedging against exchange uncertainty the effects of exchange risk on merchant exporters and importers have been studied by some authors under the assumption of fixed production ethier 1973 clark 1973 hodder 1977 etc others have investigated the production behaviour of an export firm in a static context see for example baron 1976a b however the impact of the greater volatility of exchange rates upon domestic employment and capital accumulation on the one hand and upon international financial transactions on the other has received scant attention in the literature this paper establishes a dynamic model of a small competitive firm which is engaged in domestic production foreign trade through exports of its products and or imports of its inputs and financial transactions in domestic and foreign currencies since the firm faces uncertainty about future exchange rates and future prices of outputs and inputs it attempts to hedge against the risk if it is risk averse a forward foreign exchange market is assumed to exist the firm s decisions on production investment forward contracting and financing which are closely related in the model are based on exogenously given probability distributions of exchange rates and prices the paper is planned as follows section i presents a model of the firm and formulates its objective function and constraints section ii solves its maximization problem and interprets the first order conditions for short run equilibrium in particular three different roles of the firm in the forward exchange or financial market are emphasized pure hedging speculative hedging and pure speculation section iii analyses the dynamic behaviour of a typical open economy firm section iv conducts comparative dynamic exercises of the firm in a long run steady state equilibrium and discusses how exchange rate uncertainty affects the firm s optimal decisions the implications of the purchasing power parity condition are also developed section v summarizes our conclusions

the effects of exchange rate variability on international trade a meta regression analysis the trade effects of exchange rate variability have been an issue in international economics for the past 30 years the contribution of this article is to apply meta regression analysis mra to the empirical literature on average exchange rate variability exerts a negative effect on international trade yet mra confirms the view that this result is highly conditional by identifying factors that help to explain why estimated trade effects vary from significantly negative to significantly positive mra evidence on the pronounced heterogeneity of the empirical findings may be instructive for policy first by establishing that average trade effects are not sufficiently robust to generalize across countries and second by suggesting the importance of hedging opportunities hence of financial development for trade promotion for the practice of mra we make a case for checking the robustness of results with respect to estimation technique model specification and sample