Winners and losers after 25 years of transition: Decreasing wage inequality in Slovenia

Over the past twenty-five years, wage inequality has fallen in Slovenia, even as it has risen in most developed economies. The rates of return to education and work experience rose and remained high on average. However, rapid increases in the number of college graduates have outpaced the rising relative demand for skill among the youngest labor market entrants. As a result, the youngest cohorts of college graduates have experienced declining returns to education and a downward shift in their occupational distribution, which has not been experienced by older college graduates. These changes coincide with the implementation of the Bologna Reform, which reduced the length of time necessary to complete a bachelor’s degree and contributed to the incentives to attend college. Falling returns to tertiary education contributed to declining within-cohort wage inequality among the young, which was large enough to reduce overall wage inequality.     

Rehabilitation decisions in rental housing: An empirical analysis

Housing policy-makers show increased interest in encouraging rehabilitation of the existing housing stock. But little is known about what factors influence the decision to invest, particularly in rental housing, making policy design difficult. This paper presents an empirical analysis of individual landlords' housing rehabilitation decisions in one housing market. The analysis tests hypotheses about the impacts of detailed neighborhood, structure, and site characteristics on each owner's investment activity. Findings support the general hypothesis that economic returns to investment have a major effect on rehabilitation decisions, identify some other important circumstances, and suggest which among many specific policy levers should be effective.     

The effect of match quality and specific experience on career decisions and wage growth

This paper constructs and estimates a career decision model where individuals search for both careers and firms that are a good match for their idiosyncratic skills using the NLSY79. It departs from previous papers in that career mobility decisions and participation decisions are explicitly modeled. I find substantial returns to career-specific experience. However, college graduates' wage grows little through career-match upgrading, which results in a lower incidence of career changes than high school graduates. The finding suggests that college graduates learn about their suitable careers before they enter a labor market.     

The long-term labor market consequences of graduating from college in a bad economy

This paper studies the labor market experiences of white-male college graduates as a function of economic conditions at time of college graduation. I use the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth whose respondents graduated from college between 1979 and 1989. I estimate the effects of both national and state economic conditions at time of college graduation on labor market outcomes for the first two decades of a career. Because timing and location of college graduation could potentially be affected by economic conditions, I also instrument for the college unemployment rate using year of birth (state of residence at an early age for the state analysis). I find large, negative wage effects of graduating in a worse economy which persist for the entire period studied. I also find that cohorts who graduate in worse national economies are in lower-level occupations, have slightly higher tenure and higher educational attainment, while labor supply is unaffected. Taken as a whole, the results suggest that the labor market consequences of graduating from college in a bad economy are large, negative and persistent.     

Institutional barriers in labor markets: Examples, impacts, and policies

This paper examines the institutional biases that impede the competitive functioning of labor markets. Two contexts are considered. The first relates to Moroccan labor migrants in The Netherlands, where institutional bias distorts the competitive functioning of the labor market by downgrading the educational returns to migrant workers and acting as a disincentive for further investment in human capital. The second relates to labor markets in Indonesia and Pakistan. Institutional bias in these two countries leads to an exaggeration of labor returns to certified education, and to over-investment in university education. We argue that such biases are fed by misinformed beliefs and group interests, and stand in the way of achieving higher growth and equity.     

Does neighborhood income mix affect earnings of adults? New evidence from Sweden

This paper contributes to the literature on obtaining unbiased estimates of neighborhood effects, explored in the context of a centralized social welfare state. We employ a longitudinal database comprised of all working age adults in metropolitan Sweden 1991–1999 to investigate the degree to which neighborhood income mix relates to subsequent labor incomes of adults and how this relationship varies by gender and employment status. We control for unobserved, time-invariant individual characteristics by estimating a first-difference equation of changes in average incomes between the 1991–1995 and 1996–1999 periods. We further control for unobserved time varying characteristics through an analysis of non-movers. These methods substantially reduce the magnitude of the apparent effect of neighborhood shares of low-, middle- and high-income males. Nevertheless, statistically and substantively significant neighborhood effects persist, though relationships are nonlinear and vary by gender and employment status. Males who are not fully employed appear most sensitive to neighborhood economic mix in all contexts.     

A search interpretation of the family gap

This paper proposes a general equilibrium search model to investigate what is known as the family gap: wage differentials between mothers and non-mothers. In the human capital literature a substantial amount of the family gap is left unexplained after controlling for schooling and experience. This paper suggests that differences in labor market behavior between mothers and non-mothers are an important factor in explaining the family gap. For college graduates, estimation results show that employed mothers search 70% less than non-mothers and more than 50% of the family gap can be explained by the labor market behavior differences between mothers and non-mothers. Such differences, however, can not explain the family gap for high school graduates.     

Neighborhood quality and labor market outcomes: Evidence from quasi-random neighborhood assignment of immigrants

Settlement in a socially deprived neighborhood may hamper individual labor market outcomes because of lack of employed or highly skilled contacts. I investigate this hypothesis by exploiting a unique natural experiment that occurred between 1986 and 1998 when refugee immigrants to Denmark were assigned to municipalities quasi-randomly, which successfully addresses the methodological problem of endogenous neighborhood selection. I show that individuals sort into neighborhoods. Taking account of location sorting, living in a socially deprived neighborhood does not affect labor market outcomes of refugee men. Their labor market outcomes are also not affected by the overall employment rate and the overall average skill level in the neighborhood. However, an increase in the average skill level of non-Western immigrant men living in the neighborhood raises their employment probability, while an increase in the employment rate of co-national men living in the neighborhood raises their real annual earnings. This provides quasi-experimental evidence that residence-based job information networks are ethnically stratified.     

Over-education for the rich,under-education for the poor: A search-theoretic microfoundation

This paper studies the efficiency of educational choices in a two sector/two schooling level matching model of the labor market where a continuum of heterogenous workers allocates itself between sectors depending on their decision to invest in education. Individuals differ in working ability and schooling cost, the search market is segmented by education, and there is free entry of new firms in each sector. Self-selection in education causes composition effects in the distribution of skills across sectors. This in turn modifies the intensity of job creation, implying the private and social returns to schooling always differ. Provided that ability and schooling cost are not too positively correlated, agents with large schooling costs — the ‘poor’ — underinvest in education, while there is overinvestment among the low schooling cost individuals — the ‘rich’. We also show that education should be more taxed than subsidized when the Hosios condition holds.     

Heterogeneous economic returns to higher education: evidence from Italy

This paper uses official Italian micro data and different methods to estimate, in the framework of potential outcomes, the marginal return to college education allowing for heterogeneous returns and for self-selection into higher education. Specifically, the paper is focused on the estimation of heterogeneity of average treatment effect (ATE) on a cohort of college and high school graduates using the 2008 survey on household, income and wealth of the Bank of Italy. Methodologically, this study was carried out by using both propensity-score-based (PS-based) methods and a new approach based on marginal treatment effects (MTE), recently proposed by Heckman and his associates as a useful strategy when the ignorability assumption may be violated. In the PS-based approach, heterogeneous treatment effects are estimated in three different manners: the traditional stratification approach (propensity score strata), the regression adjustment within propensity score strata and, finally, a non-parametric smoothing approach. In the MTE approach, the treatment effect heterogeneity across individuals is estimated in a parametric as well as a semi-parametric strategy. Our empirical analysis shows that the estimated heterogeneity is substantial: following MTE based results (quite representative of other methods) the return to college graduation for a randomly selected individual varies from as high as 20 % (for persons who would add one fifth of wage from graduating college) to as low as ?22 % (for persons who would lose from college graduation), suggesting that returns are higher for individuals more likely to attend college. Furthermore, the results of different methods show very low (point) estimates of ATE: average college returns vary from 3.5 % by the PS-smoothing method to 1.8 % by the parametric MTE method, which also leads a greater treatment effect on treated (5.5 %), a moderate, but significant sorting gain and a negligible selection bias.     

The external returns to education: Evidence from Chinese cities

Following Rauch's seminal study, there has been a growing interest among economists in estimating human capital externalities at the individual level [J. Rauch, Productivity gains from geographic concentration of human capital: Evidence from the cities, Journal of Urban Economics 34 (1993) 380–400]. In this paper, we provide a first set of estimates of the external returns to education in Chinese cities. We find that the external returns are at least as high as the private returns to education. OLS estimates of the external returns range from a low of 4.9% to a high of 6.7%. Two-stage least squares estimates indicate that a one-year increase in city average education could increase individual earnings by between 11 and 13%. We also examine the impact of economic reforms on the external returns to education and find suggestive evidence that economic reforms have raised the external returns to education in Chinese cities.     

The effects of families and ability on men's education and earnings in Britain

The paper estimates the returns to education for a cohort of men born in Britain in March 1958 who have been followed since birth until the age of 33. The data used has a wealth of information on family background including parental education, social class and interest shown in the child's education as well as measures of ability. These variables are typically missing in studies looking at the returns to schooling. In the paper, we find that the average return to an additional year of full-time education for the UK men is somewhere around 5 1/2% to 6% even after correcting for the effects of measurement error. The paper also presents evidence that the returns to an additional year of schooling in the UK are heterogeneous. In particular, the paper finds some evidence that men with lower tastes for education, have significantly higher marginal returns to education. The results of the paper suggest that recent IV estimates of the returns to schooling in the UK, which exceed typical OLS estimates, may overestimate the average marginal return for the population of men as a whole.     

四川农民工务工流与沿海地区“民工荒”问题的研究──基于2009年四川地震灾后农民工务工的实证分析

处于转型期的中国劳动力市场农民工的就业取向符合人力资本论和新移动经济学理论。四川地震促使农民工大量回川导致沿海地区"民工荒"问题的加剧,与农民工的经济行为,就业意识,就业决策的变化以及农民工打工渠道,外出打工成本,家庭收益,打工环境等个人的就业取向相关。当前,在全球金融危机和国内经济发展的影响下,四川劳动力市场的变化和农民工务工流的去向选择,正在改变中国劳动力市场,使之形成新的格局。     

Accounting for heterogeneous returns in sequential schooling decisions

This paper presents a method for estimating returns to multiple schooling levels taking into account that returns may be heterogeneous among agents and that educational decisions are made sequentially. A sequential decision model explicitly considers that the level of education is the result of previous schooling choices and so, the variation of supply-side instruments over time will emerge as a source of identification of the desired parameters. A test for heterogeneity in returns from sequential schooling decisions is developed and expressions for Marginal Treatment Effects are obtained in this context. Returns are estimated and tested from cross-sectional data from a Spanish household survey that contains rich family background information and useful instruments. This methodology is used to analyze possible effects of the 1970 reform of the Spanish education system.     

Empirical labor search: A survey

This paper surveys the existing empirical research that uses search theory to empirically analyze labor supply questions in a structural framework, using data on individual labor market transitions and durations, wages, and individual characteristics. The starting points of the literature are the Mincerian earnings function, Heckman's classic selection model, and dynamic optimization theory. We develop a general framework for the labor market where the search for a job involves dynamic decision making under uncertainty. It can be specialized to be in agreement with most published research using labor search models. We discuss estimation, policy evaluation with the estimated model, equilibrium model versions, and the decomposition of wage variation into factors due to heterogeneity of various model determinants as well as search frictions themselves. We summarize the main empirical conclusions.     

The Prophecy of Place: A Labor Market Study of Young Women and Education

This study demonstrates that place—defined in this article as labor market area (LMA)— provides a useful context for examining how youth manage gendered situations. Places vary by conditions in which gender is more, less or differently salient, and a particular mix of factors accommodates different individual outcomes. This study utilizes multi–level modeling to examine influence of LMA characteristics on over–time educational measures for young women (Center for Human Resource Research 1994). Hierarchical models determine place–level effects on both average outcomes (within and between LMAs) and attainment processes. A major finding of this study is that aggregate place effects channel personal decisions and outcomes of young women. Young women's educational aspirations are dependent on gender– specific variables such as the number of women in college or the number of young women married in a local area. Attainment depends on the percentage of women in higher education and a local labor market's average age at first marriage. Further, what are assumed to be positive environmental effects (e.g., manufacturing dominance) are based on structural advantages for men and actually depress outcomes for women. Notably, the influence of place is independent of strong individual–level determinants, including social class.     

The dynamic investment and exit decisions of venture capitals

This study develops a continuous time model to examine a complete two-stage decision process for venture capitals (VCs), including investment in the private market at Stage 1 and exit through IPO in the public market at Stage 2. Optimal timings, investment terms, and exit decisions are investigated using the real options game theory under two cases: the same required returns in the public and private markets and a higher required return in the private market than in the public market. Our results indicate that the same required returns in the public and private markets generate an optimal investment decision at Stage 1 without relation to the exit decision in Stage 2. However, when the required return in the private market is higher than that in the public market, the exit decision will influence the investment decision. The size of the initial capital, ownership structure, growth rate and risk of industry, required returns in public and private capital markets, extent of lock-up period price pressure, and transaction costs of financing are important factors influencing the equilibrium results.     

信息化中女性就业问题的思考

信息化使女性劳动者劳动生产率、经济地位以及福利水平均得到了极大的提高,同时也使女性面临着应对技术与劳动力市场竞争变动的巨大挑战。文章论述了信息化与女性就业的关系,并针对其问题深入分析,力图为政府、企业亦或个人认识女性在信息化时代的作用和意义提供研究的参考。     

The Economic Effects (Neutrality) of Taxes on Land

A bstract A recent review of the economic effects of land taxation by Steven Bourassa created the misleading impression that a tax on land will have pro-development or non-neutral effects where there are non pecuniary returns from land or where there are capital market imperfections preventing developers from obtaining all the land that they want for development This note argues that a tax on land value is generally neutral, and that this will be the case whether or not there are non pecuniary returns and capital market imperfections, provided that the existence and extent of the imperfections are independent of the tax     

Firm Characteristics and Chinese Stocks

This paper presents a comprehensive study on predicting the cross section of Chinese stock market returns with a large panel of 75 individual firm characteristics. We use not only the traditional Fama-MacBeth regression, but also the “big-data” econometric methods: principal component analysis (PCA), partial least squares (PLS), and forecast combination to extract information from all the 75 firm characteristics. These characteristics are important return predictors, with statistical and economic significance. Furthermore, firm characteristics that are related to trading frictions, momentum, and profitability are the most effective predictors of future stock returns in the Chinese stock market.