Educational homogamy Nielsen, Helena Skyt; Svarer, Michael
The Journal of human resources,
10/2009, Letnik:
44, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Individuals match on length and type of education. We find that around half of the systematic sorting on education is explained by the tendency of individuals to marry someone who went to the same ...educational institution or to an institution near them. This may be due to low search frictions or selection of people with the same preferences into the same institutions. The residual half of the systematic sorting on education is a direct effect of partners education, which is potentially explained by complementarities in household production in couples with same education.
The U.S. defense industry provides a natural experiment for examining how changes in growth opportunities affect the level and structure of corporate debt. The growth opportunities of defense firms, ...compared with other firms, increased substantially during the Reagan defense buildup of the early 1980s but then declined significantly with the end of the cold war and associated defense budget cuts in the late 1980s and early 1990s. We examine how the level and structure of corporate debt changed for a sample of 61 defense firms and a benchmark sample of 61 manufacturing firms during 1980–95, a period spanning the changes in growth opportunities. The debt levels of weapons manufacturers, which were most affected by the changes in growth opportunities, increased significantly as their growth opportunities declined. In addition, these firms lengthened the maturity structure of their debt, decreased the ratio of private to public debt, and decreased the use of senior debt as their growth opportunities declined. The results complement other studies that have found cross-sectional relations between proxies for growth opportunities and leverage variables and validate the prominent role played by growth opportunities in the theory of corporate finance.
Specialization in primary product exports reduces growth, but why? Adverse trends in, and the high variance of, primary product prices are possible explanations. The impact on investment and growth ...of the level and volatility of the terms of trade and the real effective exchange rate is estimated for a panel of 14 sub-Saharan African countries over 1980–1995. Growth is negatively affected by terms of trade instability, and investment by real exchange rate instability. Both growth and investment increase when the terms of trade improve and real exchange rate overvaluation is eliminated.
We investigate the relationship between industrial de-licensing, trade liberalization, and skill upgrading during the 1980s and 1990s among manufacturing plants in India. We use a unique dataset on ...India's industrial licensing regime to test whether industrial de-licensing during the 1980s and 1990s played a role in skill upgrading, as measured by the employment and wagebill shares of white-collar workers. In addition, we assess the relative contribution of industrial de-licensing and trade liberalization to skill upgrading. We identify two main channels through which industrial de-licensing affects skill upgrading: capital- and output-skill complementarities. Using both difference-in-differences as well as regression discontinuity techniques, we find two important results. First, after controlling for the size-based exemption rule that determined whether or not a plant faced licensing restrictions, industrial de-licensing during the 1980s appears to have increased the relative demand for skilled workers via capital- and output-skill complementarities. Capital- and output-skill complementarities exist for plants in both licensed and de-licensed industries but were stronger in de-licensed industries during the 1980s, prior to India's massive trade liberalization reforms in 1991. Second, regardless of de-licensing, capital- and output-skill complementarities are generally weaker after trade was liberalized during the early 1990s. Together, capital- and output-skill complementarities contributed 75% (57%) and 31% (29%), respectively, of the growth in the employment and wagebill shares of white-collar workers in de-licensed (licensed) industries before trade was liberalized. After trade liberalization, these contributions were smaller. This suggests that trade liberalization may not have played a major role in raising the relative demand for skilled labor during the early 1990s.
We examine the determinants of control rights in biotechnology alliances through three case studies and a quantitative analysis. Aghion and Tirole 1994 argue that control rights will be assigned so ...as to maximize the value of the final output, as long as the R&D firm has sufficient financial resources. Consistent with this framework, the allocation of control rights to the R&D firm increases with the firm's financial resources. The empirical evidence regarding the relationship between control rights and the stage of the project at the time the alliance is signed is more ambiguous.
Many studies have measured productivity change and efficiency when an undesirable output is a by-product. We flexibly treat the bad as a technology shifter of an input distance function and model a ...system of nonlinear equations subject to endogeneity. Theory dictates that we impose monotonicity on all inputs, outputs, and the bad. Since a Bayesian full-information likelihood approach can easily be misspecified, we utilize the Kim (J. Econometrics 107 (2002) 175) limited-information likelihood (LIL) derived by minimizing the entropy distance subject to the moment conditions from the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) estimator. This represents an extension of the Bayesian Method of Moments approach of Zellner and Chen (Macroeconom. Dyn. 5 (2001) 673), Zellner and Tobias (Int. Econom. Rev. 42 (2001) 121), and Zellner (in: Bayesian Analysis in Econometrics and Statistics: The Zellner View and Papers, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, 1997; J. Econometrics 83 (1998) 185) which uses entropy maximization but does not incorporate a specific likelihood. Using Bayes’ Theorem we combine traditional priors with the LIL, which has a mode at the standard multiple-equation GMM estimator, yielding a limited-information posterior distribution. We generalize the approach of Kim (J. Econometrics 107 (2002) 175) by incorporating an unknown covariance matrix in a Gibbs sampling framework and applying the methodology to nonlinear equations. This allows us to estimate shadow prices, technical efficiency, and productivity change for a panel of electric utilities, yielding results that differ substantially from those obtained using standard GMM.
We analyze the interaction between bank and market finance in a model where bankers gather information through monitoring and screening. We show that if a market characterized by a disclosure law is ...established such that entrepreneurs wishing to raise market finance can credibly disclose their sources of financing, this might undermine bankers' incentive to screen, even when screening is efficient. Correspondingly, other things being equal, the change from a bank-based system to one in which market-finance and bank-finance coexist might have an adverse affect on economic growth. Consistent with this result, our empirical findings suggest that both bank and stock market development have a positive effect on growth, but the growth impact of bank development is lower the higher is the level of stock market development.
We develop a positive theory of how interest-group competition shapes the organization of Congress and use it to explain campaign contribution patterns in financial services. Since interest groups ...cannot enforce fee-for-service contracts with legislators, legislators have an incentive to create specialized, standing committees which foster repeated dealing between interests and committee members. The resulting reputational equilibrium supports high contributions and high legislative effort for the interests. Contribution patterns by competing interests in the congressional battle over whether banks can enter new businesses support the theory, which also has implications for term limits and campaign reform.
Why does the fiscal burden of the welfare state inspire more protest in some societies than others? Quantitative analysis of fiscal protest in 13 European countries from 1980 to 1995, combined with ...in-depth comparative-historical analysis of selected countries, shows that fiscal protest was most prevalent where there was a poor fit between tax policy and social spending commitments. Policy incoherence produced pressure for fiscal reforms, which in turn provoked protest. The findings are consistent with the theory that the choice of appropriate tax instruments may help to explain why welfare states persist. They also imply that scholars should not conflate tax protest with welfare backlash, nor assume that tax protest in welfare states is aligned with neoliberal interests. Adapted from the source document.
Patent analysis seems to become more difficult in the age of globalisation. Starting from microlevel observations, it is evident that multinational enterprises pursue different technological, ...marketing and strategic aims. In effect, they cover world markets in a distinctly different manner with patent intellectual property. This article, in good economic tradition, starts with consideration of recent microlevel patent behaviour in telecommunications before new macroeconomic procedures to measure technical change are outlined. The new challenges to patent statistics comprise the assignment of countries to patent documents of multinational firms, the appropriate use of economic `filters' in comparing patent statistics from various patent offices, the fitting of the new international patent procedures offered by the amended Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) to national statistics, the assignment of patent applications in case of withdrawn country destinations and the estimation of time series if most recent data sets are incomplete. We propose consistent, workable adjustments to patent statistics that overcome the above-mentioned biases, which we denote the `triad patent model', for measuring technical progress in the proper economic sense. First applications deal with the assessment of the pace of technical change in major countries up until 1995. In conclusion we discuss problems for future research. The main policy implication is that macroeconomic patent statistics can correct for the effects of global knowledge production, indeed, as these are not disruptive but rather limited and well accountable.
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