Brothers in Arms Bingley, Paul; Lundborg, Petter; Lyk-Jensen, Stéphanie Vincent
The Journal of human resources,
2021, Letnik:
56, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
While family members tend to have similar labor market outcomes, measuring the contribution of behavioral spillovers is difficult. To identify spillovers between brothers, we exploit Denmark's ...largest random assignment of young men-to eight months of military service, where service status of brothers is correlated, but draft lottery numbers are not. We find average spillovers of elder brother service on younger brother service of 7 percent, and as high as 55 percent for closely spaced brothers without sisters. Elder brother's military service affects his own occupational choice and his younger brother's service by discouraging any refusal to serve.
Using a calibrated general equilibrium overlapping generations model, which explicity accounts for differences between immigrants and natives, this paper investigates whether a reform of immigration ...policies alone could resolve the fiscal problems associated with the aging of the baby boom generation. Such policies are found to exist and are characterized by an increased inflow of working‐age high‐and medium‐skilled immigrants. One particular feasible policy involves admitting 1.6 million 40–44‐year‐old high‐skilled immigrants annually. These findings are illustrated by computing the discounted government gain of admitting additional immigrants, conditional on their age and skills.
We model the invention of new technologies and their diffusion across countries. In our model all countries grow at the same steady-state rate, with each country's productivity ranking determined by ...how rapidly it adopts ideas. Research effort is determined by how much ideas earn at home and abroad. Patents affect the return to ideas. We relate the decision to patent an invention internationally to the cost of patenting in a country and to the expected value of patent protection in that country. We can thus infer the direction and magnitude of the international diffusion of technology from data on international patenting, productivity, and research. We fit the model to data from the five leading research economies. A rough summary of our findings is that the world lies about two-thirds of the way from an extreme of technological autarky to an extreme of free trade in ideas. Research performed abroad is about two-thirds as potent as domestic research. Together the United States and Japan drive at least two-thirds of the growth in each of the countries in our sample.
Economic theory points to five parties disciplining management of poorly performing firms: holders of large share blocks, acquirers of new blocks, bidders in takeovers, nonexecutive directors, and ...investors during periods of financial distress. This paper reports the first comparative evaluation of the role of these different parties in disciplining management. We find that, in the United Kingdom, most parties, including holders of substantial share blocks, exert little disciplining and that some, for example, inside holders of share blocks and boards dominated by nonexecutive directors, actually impede it. Bidders replace a high proportion of management of companies acquired in takeovers but do not target poorly performing management. In contrast, during periods of financial constraints prompting distressed rights issues and capital restructuring, investors focus control on poorly performing companies. These results stand in contrast to the United States, where there is little evidence of a role for new equity issues but nonexecutive directors and acquirers of share blocks perform a disciplinary function. The different governance outcomes are attributed to differences in minority investor protection in two countries with supposedly similar common law systems. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Number: G3.
Using a recently released confidential data set from the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES), we find some evidence of "white flight" from public schools into private schools partly in ...response to minority schoolchildren. We also examine whether white flight is from all minorities or only from certain minority groups, delineated by race or income. We find that white families are fleeing public schools with large concentrations of poor minority schoolchildren. In addition, the clearest flight appears to occur from poor black schoolchildren. The results for white flight from Asians and Hispanics are less clear.
Much of the research on the role of firm-specific advantages on firms' subsidiary ownership preferences has been undertaken in the context of advanced-country multinationals, specifically U.S. MNCs. ...Research has found that U.S. firms derive ownership advantages from their size, experience, and technological and marketing superiority. Perhaps having operated in the most-developed and sophisticated home market, many U.S. firms generate unique skills that give them absolute advantage over firms in almost all foreign host locations. Developing-country MNCs do not have absolute ownership advantages similar to those of the U.S. firms. The relevance of a particular firm-specific characteristic for a developing-country MNC may be contingent not only upon the home-country characteristics, as in the case of U.S. MNCs, but also upon host-country characteristics. This study investigates the subsidiary ownership preferences among Korean MNCs and finds that the influence of three firm-specific advantages-technological intensity, product differentiation and capital intensity-on subsidiary ownership levels is contingent upon whether the subsidiary is located in a relatively less-developed or a more-developed country as compared to the home country. Although some authors have suggested that the influence of firm-specific advantages may be contingent upon the characteristics of both home- and host-country locations, empirical investigations to this effect have been nonexistent.
Disclosing environmental information in annual reports may affect the perceptions of an enterprise's earnings and cash flows. Our study investigates the changes in the levels of environmental ...disclosures subsequent to the 1989 Alaskan
Exxon Valdez oil spill in four industries including the oil industry. Environmental disclosure data were obtained for 53 firms, using a computerized search of corporate annual reports for years 1988, 1989, and 1990. Our study uses two methods of enumeration, a quantity assessment and a quality assessment. The objective of our study is to determine if there are significant positive differences between years. Findings suggest significant positive differences in the levels of environmental disclosures from year 1988 to 1989 and from year 1989 to 1990, using both assessment measures. These findings lend support to environmental disclosures being time- or event-specific, and made in the firm's self-interest in response to public policy pressure.
We provide empirical support for the hypothesis that the lower the opportunity costs of individuals, the more likely they are to undertake entrepreneurial activity. This prediction emerged from ...earlier theoretical work in which we modeled the decision of individuals to develop new ventures on their own, seek the backing of a venture capitalist, or remain as paid employees. We use a large sample, drawn from the 1992 Canadian Labor Market Activity Survey. We find that paid employees who choose to leave their employment to become entrepreneurs earned, prior to leaving, substantially less on average then those whose employment status did not change and who remained paid employees throughout the survey period. Specifically, we establish that the wages of those workers who chose to remain paid employees throughout the survey period were, on average, 12% higher than the wages of those who left their employment to become entrepreneurs. To obtain this result, we performed a multivariate regression analysis in which we isolated the effect of employment status by controlling for gender, age, education, marital status, and region of the country. The employment-status coefficient was 2349 (
t = 2.644;
p = .008), indicating that new entrepreneurs earned in 1988, on average, $2349 less than paid workers, ceteris paribus. In other words, 1988 paid employees who chose to become entrepreneurs in 1989 and/or 1990 earned, at the time they made the decision to switch, significantly less than those whose employment status did not change and who remained paid employees throughout the survey period.
The causality in our result has not been established. It is possible that would-be entrepreneurs are not doing well in their current jobs for reasons that are unrelated to their entrepreneurial attributes or inclination. Their performance may be adversely affected by some coincidental factors. Given that their wages are relatively low, some of these individuals may be seriously considering the development of their own business.
Conversely, it is possible that their entrepreneurial abilities and attitudes are such that they do not fit into a corporate setting. These behavioral dimensions may have contributed to poor job performance, relative to their peers. Thus, it is the very fact that they are independent entrepreneurs that causes the compensation differential.
If the latter explanation is incorrect and we are left with the former, then it is likely that inasmuch as earnings can be used as a rough indication of the competence or ability of different individuals, our findings could imply that, on average, those employees who choose to become entrepreneurs are less capable than other employed individuals. This could in part explain the high failure rate of new ventures. Future work should be directed at establishing causality more definitely. Such research would contribute to a deeper understanding of some of the reasons for the high failure rate of newly established enterprises.
In this study we compare the traditional OLS approach applied to the log-linear form of the gravity model with the Poisson Quasi Maximum Likelihood (PQML) estimation procedure applied to the ...non-linear multiplicative specification of the gravity model. We use the trade flows for all products, for all manufacturing products as well as for manufacturing products broken down by three-digit ISIC Rev.2 categories. We base our conclusions on the gravity model of Bergstrand (Rev Econ Stat 71(1):143--153, 1989) for disaggregate trade flows that allows us to investigate differences in factor-proportions and home-market effects at the industry level. In addition, we compare the effects of other explanatory variables such as exporter and importer total income, distance, preferential trade agreements, common border, historical ties, and common language on the volume of trade. Our main conclusion is that both estimation results as well as results of the regression mis-specification tests provide supporting evidence for the PQML estimation approach over the OLS estimation method.
Performance Pay and Job Satisfaction Heywood, John S.; Wei, Xiangdong
Journal of industrial relations,
09/2006, Letnik:
48, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This article estimates the direct effect of performance pay schemes on job satisfaction for a representative sample of US workers. Both individual performance pay and profit sharing are routinely ...associated with higher satisfaction even as the level of pay and a long list of other determinants are held constant. This result holds in panel estimates designed to control for fixed effects. When individual performance pay is disaggregated into five specific schemes, all but one associate with higher satisfaction and piece rates associate with lower satisfaction. The role of gender is explored as an explanation for the results.
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