Occupational choice and liquidity constraints

Using U.S. data, Evans and Jovanovic find a strong effect of the level of assets on the probability of being self-employed. They interpret this result as evidence of liquidity constraints. In this paper, we follow up this line of research: first, by replicating Evans and Jovanovic's methodology on French data to show that the empirical evidence is similar. Second, we embed their static model into a dynamic framework with uncertainty. The main theoretical prediction that can be drawn is that if the liquidity constraint is strong enough a future increase in the “entrepreneurial ability” of an agent, although raising expected future incomes, may induce her to lower her current consumption and raise her savings.     

Occupational choice, incentives and wealth distribution

We consider a model of occupational choice in large economies where individuals differ in their wealth endowment. Individuals can remain self-employed or engage in productive matches with another individual, i.e., form firms. Matches are subject to a moral hazard problem with limited liability. The division of the gains from such matches is determined by competitive forces. When the incentive problem is asymmetric, matches are typically wealth-heterogeneous, with richer individuals choosing the occupation for which incentives are more important. The utilities attained within a match depend on the wealth distribution and changes in the latter give rise to ‘trickle down’ effects.     

Fertility choice and financial development

We study the consequences of broader access to credit and capital markets on household decisions over the number of children. A model of the net reproduction rate is estimated on data from 78 countries over the period 1995–2010. Liquidity constraints are approximated by private credit and household credit, while opportunities for financial investment are measured by domestic public debt. We use the Index of Financial Liberalisation (Abiad et al., 2009) as one of the instruments for financial variables. We find that improved access to credit increases fertility with an elasticity of around 30%, while the effect of the development of capital markets is negative (–10%). The regression model takes the role of social security into account. Quantile regression shows that our results are robust to outliers and parameter heterogeneity.     

Educational choice, endogenous inequality and economic development

This paper investigates the mechanics through which wealth may, in the long run, trickle down from the rich to the poor. In the presence of indivisibilities in investment of human capital and impossibility of borrowing money, investment in education is financed through an intergenerational transfer. In an OLG model where aggregate production requires capital and both skilled and unskilled labor, it is shown that the long run equilibrium outcome depends on the values of few key parameters. A complete characterization of the steady state is provided. Under some configurations of the parameter values a unique invariant equilibrium exists where inequality vanishes asymptotically. Under others, multiple equilibria exist and the equilibrium outcome crucially depends on the initial conditions of the system. These equilibria are characterized by a negative relationship between inequality and economic development.     

区域发展模式的成本、风险及选择

今年发生在南方的雪灾凸显中国产业布局成本高、风险大，区域经济发展不平衡。破解难题需要调整经济布局，减少经济发展的显性成本，特别是选择集群发展战略，作为实施主体功能区规划的微观组织基础。     

The choice of technology in economic development

The impact of capital accumulation on job creation is an important and interesting issue in economic development. This model provides a general-equilibrium framework for studying technology choice with unemployment in a developing economy based on micro-foundations. Unemployment in the urban sector results from the existence of efficiency wages. Manufacturing firms engage in oligopolistic competition and choose technologies to maximise profits. A more advanced technology uses more capital and less labour. In the steady state, an increase in the amount of capital induces firms to choose more advanced technologies and the wage rate increases. While a higher capital stock always induces firms to choose more advanced technologies, urban unemployment rate may decrease and agricultural sector employment may increase.     

Symbolic values, occupational choice, and economic development

Channeling human resources into occupations with high social productivity has historically been a key to economic prosperity. Occupational choices are not only driven by the material rewards associated with the various occupations, but also driven by the esteem that they confer. We propose a model of endogenous growth in which occupations carry a symbolic value that makes them more or less attractive; the evolution of symbolic values is endogenously determined by purposive transmission of value systems within families. The model sheds light on the interaction between cultural and economic development and identifies circumstances under which value systems matter for long-run growth. It shows the possibility of culturally determined poverty traps and offers a framework for thinking about the transition from traditional to modern values.     

Occupational choice and entrepreneurship: effects of R&D subsidies on economic growth

Most R&D-based growth models fail to explicitly account for the role of entrepreneurs in economic growth. By contrast, this study accounts for this factor and constructs an overlapping-generations model that includes entrepreneurial innovation and the occupational choice of becoming an entrepreneur or a worker. For the role of entrepreneurs, even a policy intended to encourage innovation can negatively affect economic growth. For the effect of such policies, I focus on the role of R&D subsidies. I show that while R&D subsidies promote entrepreneurs’ R&D activities, they increase workers’ wages by boosting labor demand. Thus, it is more attractive to be a worker, which reduces the number of entrepreneurs. Subsidies can have both a negative and positive effect on growth, which results in an inverted U-shaped relationship between R&D subsidies and growth. In addition, a growth-maximizing R&D subsidy rate exists, although this rate is too high to maximize the welfare level of any one generation. When individuals are heterogeneous in their abilities, R&D subsidies reduce intra-generational inequalities.     

职业经理与职业经理人的素质

通过对职业经理的阐述和层级的理解,浅析职业经理的素质及其需要具备的能力,中国经济市场化发展的迅猛态势以及对职业经理人需求迅速增长的现实。要求必须尽快加强职业经理人的培养、提高职业经理人的素质,健全职业经理人制度。     

中国发展服务外包的路径选择

服务外包包括信息技术外包和商务流程外包两种业务模式.信息技术外包模式下的服务外包业务由于过于集中在软件外包上,造成业务结构单一、增长空间受限,而商务流程外包的业务特点则与中国发展服务外包的资源优势具有较强的合意性.因此,中国发展服务外包应该选择商务流程外包模式.     

Public choice and the development of modern laboratory experimental methods in economics and political science

The paper is an account of the development of laboratory experimental methods in the early 1970s as influenced by the fields of Public Choice and Social Choice. Just a few key experiments conducted during a period when no experimental markets research was taking place, provide a bridge with the subsequent, rapid, growth of experimental economics. A new focus on public goods and externalities, as opposed to private goods traditionally used in economics experiments, required new representations of the commodity space and preference inducement methods. The importance of voting and collective decision making processes dictated the testing of equilibrium concepts from political science and cooperative game theory as opposed to the competitive equilibrium and Nash equilibria found in economics. The existence of many theories from multiple disciplines required new experimental designs and experimental tests. The Public Choice and Social Choice emphasis on comparing the performance of different types of collective decision processes induced early experiments related to institutional design and testing.     

System analysis and path choice for modem agricultural development： a case study of Suzhou

From the view of system theory, modern agriculture in a region embodies elements conformity, structure optimization, multi-functionality and sustainable development. This paper first expounds on the relationship among agricultural elements, structure, function and development theoretically, compartmentalizes agriculture types based on human-land elements matching, and depicts the development path of agricultural multi-functionality. it shows that the matching of human-land elements is a key to agricultural types, and the multi-functionality is an indication of agricultural development stages. At last, as a case study of Suzhou in eastern coastal area, the paper analyzes the evolvement situation and developing mechanism and some typical models of modern agriculture which suit to agriculture system evolvement. The results .show that in Suzhou the agriculture productivity, has improved greatly; And along with the agriculture structure optimizing, agriculture function has translated from ＂production ＂ to ＂non- production and production ＂. With simulation of agricultural trend in Suzhou, it is .found that Suzhou has a LP- dependence （labor productivity） on agricultural element, so Suzhou will has much more potential in land productivity. Based on the above analysis on agricultural system, some typical patterns on modern agriculture in Suzhou are brought up, such as export-oriented agriculture, enterprises-leading agriculture, science and technology, parks agriculture, stereoseopic agriculture, and tourism and sightseeing agriculture.     

Changes in Occupational Tasks and Their Association with Individual Wages and Occupational Mobility

This study provides novel evidence on the relevance of task content changes between and within occupations to wage dynamics of occupational changers and stayers. I use individual‐level, cross‐sectional data featuring tasks performed on the job to compute a measure of proximity of job contents. Then, I merge this measure to a large‐scale panel survey to show that occupational changers experience a wage growth that is declining when the accompanying alterations in task contents are big. For occupational stayers, alterations in task contents generate a positive wage component, beyond tenure effect. However, the results are not robust with respect to the choice of proximity measure and over time.     

Set-rationalizable choice and self-stability

Rationalizability and similar notions of consistency have proved to be highly problematic in the context of social choice, as witnessed by a range of impossibility results, among which Arrow?s is the most prominent. We propose to rationalize choice functions by preference relations over sets of alternatives (set-rationalizability) and introduce two consistency conditions, and , which are defined in analogy to Sen?s α and γ. We find that a choice function satisfies if and only if it is set-rationalizable and that it satisfies and if and only if it is self-stable, a new concept based on earlier work by Dutta. The class of self-stable social choice functions contains a number of appealing Condorcet extensions.     

Rationality and intertemporal choice

The alleged problems associated with self-control, hyperbolic discounting and other examples of seemingly irrational intertemporal choice are examined in the context of an evolution-based neurobiological model that emphasizes the role of the biological evolution of big brains and language and the cultural evolution of institutions. There is no utility function in the brain; it has no central-planner, in fact, the brain is a self-organized complex system, a decentralized spontaneous order. This spontaneous order is coordinated, much like an economy, by a distributed network that maintains and makes available the discounted net value of various options to decentralized and specialized areas in the brain when making decisions. Further, that decision making is embodied and embedded in the decision making environment. For humans, an important part of that environment is the social environment consisting of institutions and other components of culture. It was, in part, the evolution of this environment that made long-range planning possible. Additionally, it is very often the lack of embedded experience with the environment that leads to what seems to be irrational intertemporal choices. In fact, under close examination the evidence for consistent irrational intertemporal choice is weak.     

Consumer choice and television

A consumer choice model which described 48 television programmes in terms of 48 specially constructed orthogonal characteristics was employed to predict how frequently adult US males would watch each of eight shows chosen for testing purposes. The first half of the random sample of 789 was used to construct estimates of the relevant structures and parameters including parameters of viewer utility functions. The second half was used for testing purposes. The predictive error was significantly less - 28 per cent less- than a naive alternative. This 28 per cent was apparently a significantly greater reduction than a comparable percentage found by BOWMAN and FARLEY (1972) using other techniques and the same data.     

Salience and social choice

The axioms of expected utility and discounted utility theory have been tested extensively. In contrast, the axioms of social welfare functions have only been tested in a few questionnaire studies involving choices between hypothetical income distributions. In a controlled experiment with 100 subjects placed in the role of social planners, we test five fundamental properties of social welfare functions to determine the efficacy of traditional social choice models in predicting social planner allocations when presented with choice sets designed to test the axioms of the theory. We find that three properties of the standard social welfare functions tested are systematically violated, producing an Allais paradox, a common ratio effect, and a framing effect in social choice. We find support for scale invariance and a preference for tail-increasing transfers. Our experiment also enables us to test a model of salience-based social choice which predicts the systematic deviations and highlights the close relationship between these anomalies and the classical paradoxes for risk and time.

     

Return Migration and Occupational Change

Return migrants exhibit a high tendency for self-employment over waged employment. Using cross- sectional data from Pakistan, the paper explores the determinants of this choice. Retirement from the domestic labor market is not a reason for opting for self-employment. The preference for non-farm self-employment is a two-period process of self-selection. Migrants who expect to switch occupation to non-farm self-employment upon return save more from high transitory overseas income than do their counterparts. Upon return, savings become a significant factor in the choice of self-employment over waged employment. International migration and return have little influence on the choice of farm self-employment.     

Occupational Mobility and Wage Inequality

In this article we argue that wage inequality and occupational mobility are intimately related. We are motivated by our empirical findings that human capital is occupation specific and that the fraction of workers switching occupations in the U.S. was as high as 16% a year in the early 1970's and had increased to 21% by the mid-1990's. We develop a general equilibrium model with occupation-specific human capital and heterogeneous experience levels within occupations. We find that the model, calibrated to match the level of occupational mobility in the 1970's, accounts quite well for the level of (within-group) wage inequality in that period. Next, we find that the model, calibrated to match the increase in occupational mobility, accounts for over 90% of the increase in wage inequality between the 1970's and the 1990's. The theory is also quantitatively consistent with the level and increase in the short-term variability of earnings.     

Occupational Choice and Dynamic Incentives

We study an overlapping generations version of the principal-agent problem, where incentive contracts are determined in general equilibrium. All individuals are workers when young, but have a choice between becoming entrepreneurs or remaining workers when old. Imperfections in the credit market give rise to rents in entrepreneurial activities involving capital. These rents motivate poor young agents to work hard and save to overcome the borrowing constraints. With a labour market that is subject to moral hazard, the increased effort raises social welfare. Policies that reduce credit market imperfections, or redistribute income, may reduce welfare by dampening this effect.