This article estimates worker switching costs and how much the employer switching of experienced engineers responds to outside wage offers. I use data on engineers across Swedish private sector firms ...to estimate the relative importance of employer wage policies and switching costs in a dynamic programming, discrete choice model of employer choice. The differentiated firms are modeled in employer characteristic space, and each firm has its own age‐wage profile. A majority of engineers have moderately high switching costs and a minority of experienced workers are responsive to outside wage offers. Younger workers are more sensitive to outside wage offers.
This paper develops a methodology for consistently estimating the relative weights in senator utility functions, despite the fact that senator ideologies are unobserved. The empirical results suggest ...that voter preferences are assigned only one quarter of the weight in senator utility functions. The national "party line" also has some influence, but the senator's own ideology is the primary determinant of roll-call voting patterns. These results cast doubt on the empirical relevance of the median voter theorem. Estimation of the model requires only roll-call voting data, making it widely applicable.
ON THE LIVING ARRANGEMENTS OF ELDERLY WIDOWS Bethencourt, Carlos; Ríos-Rull, José-Víctor
International economic review (Philadelphia),
August 2009, Letnik:
50, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Between 1970 and 1990, the share of elderly widows living alone grew by 23.2% in the United States, whereas those living with their children decreased by a similar amount. We pose a variety of models ...for determining the living arrangements in which living together increases consumption because of economies of scale and may also provide utility directly. We estimate these models using the 1970 data and obtain an excellent fit. The estimated models predict that changes in the incomes of both the widow and her offspring generate three-quarters of the increase in the number of widows living alone.
I present the fact that wage gaps due to firm size increase with job responsibility. I use Swedish data to determine whether wage gaps increase with a direct measure of job responsibility, to compare ...the age patterns of the wage gaps for blue‐ and white‐collar workers, and to compare wages by job responsibility and spans of control. With U.S. data, I compare supervisory to nonsupervisory occupations and find that wage gaps increase with job responsibility for most occupational ladders. This fact is consistent with hierarchical matching models in which the larger number of subordinates amplifies managerial talent.
Immigrants in the United States who acquire U.S. schooling earn higher wages than other immigrants. Using data from the U.S. censuses and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we show that this ...wage advantage results from both greater educational attainment and higher returns to education. The higher returns are not the consequence of ability bias or greater English proficiency of those who acquire U.S. schooling. Returns to years of non-U.S. education are higher for immigrants who complete their schooling in the United States, consistent with the view that U.S. schooling upgrades or certifies education received in the source country. For those without U.S. schooling, returns are higher for immigrants from highly developed countries and countries for which English is an official language.
Anecdotal evidence shows that despite extensive restrictions on the hiring of African workers, these workers were increasingly employed in semi-skilled occupations throughout the apartheid era. This ...article shows that White skill acquisition throughout the apartheid era reduced the supply of White semi-skilled workers and led to the removal of job reservation, the process of reserving skilled and semi-skilled jobs for Whites. Although job reservation declined, there is little evidence of a decline in racial segregation in the labour market. It is concluded that the transformation in the labour market was driven by White economic incentives rather than any evident change in White preferences regarding racial segregation.
A fundamental shift in monetary policy occurred around 1980: the Fed went from a “passive” policy to an “active” policy. We study a model in which government bonds provide transactions services. We ...present two calibrations of our model, using pre- and post-1980 data. We show that estimates of pre- and post-1980 policy rules all lie within our determinacy regions. But, the pre-1980 policy was a very bad monetary policy, even if it avoided sunspot equilibria. Model simulations suggest that household welfare would have increased by 3.3 percent of permanent consumption in this period under an active policy.
Recent political and economic transformations in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe have brought about a renewed interest in the incentives and capabilities of different types of ...political regimes to implement policies that are deemed necessary for economic development, in particular, policies aimed at increasing tax revenue. One central question is whether democracies can collect as much in taxes as dictatorships. This article addresses this question by examining whether regime type, classified as democracy or dictatorship, has a causal impact on a government's capacity to mobilize resources through taxation. On the basis of data gathered for 108 countries for the period between 1970 and 1990, the article concludes that observed differences across countries regarding the level of taxes collected by the government are not due to the fact that some are under a democracy and others under a dictatorship. Concerns about the inability of democratic regimes to collect taxes are, therefore, unfounded.
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