Skill Bias of World Trade Epifani, Paolo; Gancia, Gino
The Economic journal (London),
July 2008, Letnik:
118, Številka:
530
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This article suggests that international trade, even between identical countries, can raise the relative demand for skilled labour. It shows that a simple generalisation of Krugman's (1979) model of ...trade in differentiated products has implications for the skill premium, through economies of scale rather than Hecksher-Ohlin effects, that are consistent with a number of stylised facts. It provides new evidence in support of these results by showing that increases in market size lead to higher returns to education, skill premia and income inequality.
This study examines the effects of air quality regulation on economic activity. Anecdotal evidence and some recent empirical studies suggest that an inverse relationship exists between the stringency ...of environmental regulations and new plant formations. Using a unique county-level data set for New York State from 1980 to 1990, we revisit this conjecture using a seminonparametric method based on propensity score matching. Our empirical estimates suggest that pollution-intensive plants are responding to environmental regulations; more importantly, we find that traditional parametric methods used in previous studies may dramatically understate the impact of more stringent regulations.
Using data from the 1986 oil price decrease, I examine the capital expenditures of nonoil subsidiaries of oil companies. I test the joint hypothesis that 1) a decrease in cash/collateral decreases ...investment, holding fixed the profitability of investment, and 2) the finance costs of different parts of the same corporation are interdependent. The results support this joint hypothesis: oil companies significantly reduced their nonoil investment compared to the median industry investment. The 1986 decline in investment was concentrated in non oil units that were subsidized by the rest of the company in 1985.
We examine long-run firm performance following open market share repurchase announcements, 1980–1990. We find that the average abnormal four-year buy-and-hold return measured after the initial ...announcement is 12.1%. For ‘value’ stocks, companies more likely to be repurchasing shares because of undervaluation, the average abnormal return is 45.3%. For repurchases announced by ‘glamour’ stocks, where undervaluation is less likely to be an important motive, no positive drift in abnormal returns is observed. Thus, at least with respect to value stocks, the market errs in its initial response and appears to ignore much of the information conveyed through repurchase announcements.
This volume, the first scholarly study of Labour and the left in the age of Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock, opens up a whole new area of historical inquiry, and demonstrates why the 1980s political ...inheritance has become timely once more.
Real estate agents typically charge a 6 percent commission, regardless of the price of the house sold. As a consequence, the commission fee from selling a house will differ dramatically across cities ...depending on the average price of housing, although the effort necessary to match buyers and sellers may not be that different. We use a simple economic model to show that if barriers to entry are low, the entry of real estate agents in cities with high housing prices is socially inefficient. Consistent with our model, we find that when the average price oflandin a city increases, (1) the fraction of real estate brokers in a city increases, (2) the productivity of an average real estate agent (houses sold per hour worked) falls, and (3) the real wage of a typical real estate agent remains unchanged. We cannot completely rule out the alternative explanation that these results reflect unmeasured differences in the quality of broker services. However, we present evidence that as the average price of housing in a city increases, there is only a small increase in the amount of time a buyer spends searching for a house, and the average time a house for sale stays on the marketfalls.
Peru's indigenous peoples played a key role in the tortured tale of Shining Path guerrillas from the 1960s through the first decade of the twenty-first century. The villagers of Chuschi and Huaychao, ...high in the mountains of the department of Ayacucho, have an iconic place in this violent history. Emphasizing the years leading up to the peak period of violence from 1980 to 2000, when 69,000 people lost their lives, Miguel La Serna asks why some Andean peasants chose to embrace Shining Path ideology and others did not.Drawing on archival materials and ethnographic field work, La Serna argues that historically rooted and locally specific power relations, social conflicts, and cultural understandings shaped the responses of indigenous peasants to the insurgency. In Chuschi, the guerrillas found indigenous support for the movement and dreamed of sparking a worldwide Maoist revolution. In Huaychao, by contrast, villagers rose up against Shining Path forces, precipitating more violence and feeding an international uproar that took on political significance for Peru during the Cold War.The Corner of the Livingilluminates both the stark realities of life for the rural poor everywhere and why they may or may not choose to mobilize around a revolutionary cause.
This article examines the determinants of the mix of private and public debt using detailed information on the debt structure of 250 publicly traded corporations from 1980 through 1990. We find that ...the relationship between bank borrowing and the importance of growth opportunities depends on the number of banks the firm uses and whether the firm has public debt outstanding. For firms with a single bank relationship, the reliance on bank debt is negatively related to the importance of growth opportunities. In contrast, among firms borrowing from multiple banks, the relationship is positive.
This paper examines the spatial patterns of unemployment in Chicago between 1980 and 1990. We study unemployment clustering with respect to different social and economic distance metrics that reflect ...the structure of agents' social networks. Specifically, we use physical distance, travel time, and differences in ethnic and occupational distribution between locations. Our goal is to determine whether our estimates of spatial dependence are consistent with models in which agents' employment status is affected by information exchanged locally within their social networks. We present non-parametric estimates of correlation across Census tracts as a function of each distance metric as well as pairs of metrics, both for unemployment rate itself and after conditioning on a set of tract characteristics. Our results indicate that there is a strong positive and statistically significant degree of spatial dependence in the distribution of raw unemployment rates, for all our metrics. However, once we condition on a set of covariates, most of the spatial autocorrelation is eliminated, with the exception of physical and occupational distance. Racial and ethnic composition variables are the single most important factor in explaining the observed correlation patterns.
This paper uses spatial econometric methods to investigate property-tax competition among local governments. The theoretical model is drawn from the literature on tax competition, in which local ...jurisdictions choose property—tax rates taking into account the migration of mobile capital in response to tax differentials. Using a "spatial lag" econometric model, the paper estimates the reaction function of the representative community, which relates the community's property-tax rate to its own characteristics and to the tax rates in competing communities. A nonzero reaction-function slope indicates the presence of strategic interaction in the choice of tax rates. The estimation uses cross-section data on property taxes and other socio-economic variables for cities in the Boston metropolitan area. The results, which are presented for two periods before and after imposition of Proposition 2½ (a tax limitation measure), indicate the presence of strategic interaction.
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