We estimate the impact of school characteristics on house prices using data from Chicago for 1987–1991. We merge information from the American Housing Survey and the Illinois School-Report Cards and ...assign to each house the school-level data for the closest school. The evidence suggests that the school-level variables are significantly better in describing house values than the district-level data. We find that controlling for unobserved, temporally-stable determinants of house values is necessary to obtain unbiased estimates of the impact of school characteristics on house prices. Using this specification, we find that homeowners pay attention to school outputs, i.e., test scores (the elasticity is approximately one), and not to inputs, i.e., per-pupil expenditures.
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Leon Aron considers the "mystery of the Soviet collapse" and finds answers in the intellectual and moral self-scrutiny of glasnost that brought about a profound shift in values. Reviewing the entire ...output of the key glasnost outlets in 1987-1991, he elucidates and documents key themes in this national soul-searching and the "ultimate" questions that sparked moral awakening of a great nation: "Who are we? How do we live honorably? What is a dignified relationship between man and state? How do we atone for the moral breakdown of Stalinism?"Contributing both to the theory of revolutions and history of ideas, Aron presents a thorough and original narrative about new ideas' dissemination through the various media of the former Soviet Union. Aron shows how, reaching every corner of the nation, these ideas destroyed the moral foundation of the Soviet state, de-legitimized it and made its collapse inevitable.
"Swedish data on workers matched with firms' balance-sheet reports are used to examine the relation between wages and firms' ability to pay. Results indicate that experienced and highly educated ...workers are sorted into profitable firms. Wages are positively correlated with profits and the capital-labor ratio, after controlling for worker quality, degree of effort supervision, job characteristics, local unemployment, firms' employment history, and employer size. Lester's 'range of pay' due to rent sharing is around 12%24% of the mean wage in Sweden, which is close to the estimates for the United States and United Kingdom." Die Untersuchung enthält quantitative Daten. Forschungsmethode: empirisch-quantitativ; empirisch. Die Untersuchung bezieht sich auf den Zeitraum 1981 bis 1991. (author's abstract, IAB-Doku).
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Why do female physicians earn less than their male counterparts? Data from the Young Physicians Survey yields an answer. Young male and female physicians respond differently to the reference incomes ...(RIs) they state. Males (revealing prospect-theoretic preferences) respond strongly, particularly if below RIs. Females do not respond. Males also set higher RIs. That, combined with males’ greater responsiveness to RIs, fully explains the significant gender gap in earnings and earnings growth rates. Together, productivity measures and prejudice play at most a modest role. To boost their incomes, males raise their hourly incomes, not their hours of work.
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Russian Orthodoxy Resurgentis the first book to fully explore the expansive and ill-understood role that Russia's ancient Christian faith has played in the fall of Soviet Communism and in the rise of ...Russian nationalism today. John and Carol Garrard tell the story of how the Orthodox Church's moral weight helped defeat the 1991 coup against Gorbachev launched by Communist Party hardliners. The Soviet Union disintegrated, leaving Russians searching for a usable past. The Garrards reveal how Patriarch Aleksy II--a former KGB officer and the man behind the church's successful defeat of the coup--is reconstituting a new national idea in the church's own image.
In the new Russia, the former KGB who run the country--Vladimir Putin among them--proclaim the cross, not the hammer and sickle. Meanwhile, a majority of Russians now embrace the Orthodox faith with unprecedented fervor. The Garrards trace how Aleksy orchestrated this transformation, positioning his church to inherit power once held by the Communist Party and to become the dominant ethos of the military and government. They show how the revived church under Aleksy prevented mass violence during the post-Soviet turmoil, and how Aleksy astutely linked the church with the army and melded Russian patriotism and faith.
Russian Orthodoxy Resurgentargues that the West must come to grips with this complex and contradictory resurgence of the Orthodox faith, because it is the hidden force behind Russia's domestic and foreign policies today.
"This paper analyzes how much of the gender earnings gap among physicians is due to women's greater family responsibilities. Women physicians earn 11 percent less for being married plus 14 percent ...less for having one child and 22 percent less for having more than one child. Before marrying/having children, women physicians who later became wives or mothers had higher earnings than those who remained single and childless, but sharply reduced their hours of work after marrying/having children. The results suggest that these earnings gaps do not reflect adverse selection but rather individual choices given time constraints imposed by family responsibilities." Die Untersuchung enthält quantitative Daten. Forschungsmethode: empirisch-quantitativ; empirisch; Längsschnitt. Die Untersuchung bezieht sich auf den Zeitraum 1987 bis 1991. (author's abstract, IAB-Doku).
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Firms have different motives for investing abroad, most notably to exercise existing capabilities, but also to build new capabilities by accessing knowledge located abroad. Recognizing this ...heterogeneity helps determine whether foreign investments transfer technology to their host industries. Using host industries' initial level of competition to differentiate when each of these dichotomous motives is more likely, I examine change in productivity resulting from inward FDI in US manufacturing industries for 1987 through 1991. While controlling for change in industry competition, I find that relatively uncompetitive industries experience productivity growth while competitive industries experience productivity stagnation from FDI. This differential outcome is consistent with heterogeneous investment motives.
In stochastic frontier analysis, firm-specific efficiencies and their distribution are often main variables of interest. If firms fall into several groups, it is natural to allow each group to have ...its own distribution. This paper considers a method for nonparametrically modelling these distributions using Dirichlet processes. A common problem when applying nonparametric methods to grouped data is small sample sizes for some groups which can lead to poor inference. Methods that allow dependence between each group's distribution are one set of solutions. The proposed model clusters the groups and assumes that the unknown distribution for each group in a cluster are the same. These clusters are inferred from the data. Markov chain Monte Carlo methods are necessary for model-fitting and efficient methods are described. The model is illustrated on a cost frontier application to US hospitals.
The absolute and relative impact of current quality and reputation variables on consumer decisions are examined using data from the market for Bordeaux wine. The estimates indicate that a model of ...consumer decision making which incorporates information on reputation (past quality) and collective reputation (average-group-quality) rejects alternative models that include current quality. The results also indicate that reputation has a large impact on the willingness to pay of consumers, that long-term reputation is considerably more important than short term quality movements, and that consumers react slowly to changes in product quality. Collective reputation is shown to have an impact on consumer willingness to pay that is as large as that of individual firm reputation. If firm reputation and collective reputation effects are ignored, the estimated impact of current quality and short term changes in quality on consumer behavior are overstated.
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