ALTERNATIVE MEASURES OF THE AVERAGE DURATION OF UNEMPLOYMENT

Four alternative measures of the average duration of unemployment are examined with the intention of illustrating: (1) the biases inherent in the average incomplete duration of unemployment, a statistic that is often the only one reported by many statistical agencies; and (2) the robustness of the average complete duration of unemployment to a host of assumptions underlying its derivation by non-parametric methods. Canadian data are employed, but the results offer a guide to the construction of the average complete duration of unemployment that may have broader applications.     

THE ELASTICITY OF SUBSTITUTION BETWEEN TIME AND MARKET GOODS: EVIDENCE FROM THE GREAT RECESSION

We document a change in household shopping behavior during the Great Recession. Households purchased more on sale, larger sizes, and generic products and increased coupon usage and shopping at discount stores. We estimate a decline in returns to shopping during the recession. Therefore, the increase in shopping behavior implies a significant decrease in households' opportunity cost of time. Using the estimated cost of time and time use data, we estimate a high elasticity of substitution between market expenditure and time spent on nonmarket work. We find that households smooth a sizable fraction of consumption by varying their time allocation during recessions.     

A COMPARISON OF ALTERNATIVE MEASURES OF ECONOMIC WELL-BEING FOR GERMANY AND THE UNITED STATES

This paper, using six waves of data (1984-89) from the United States Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP), compares economic well-being using single year income, multi-year income, and wealth as measures. We find inequality to be greater in the United States than in Germany regardless of the measure used. However, the relative degree of inequality varies across measures. When we disaggregate our data by age and gender categories, in general we find greater inequality in the United States, but wealth inequality among older Germans is greater than it is among older Americans.     

THE MORISHIMA ELASTICITY OF SUBSTITUTION FOR THE VARIABLE PROFIT FUNCTION AND THE DEMAND FOR IMPORTS IN THE UNITED STATES*

In this article, I derive expressions for the Morishima elasticities of substitution (MES) for the variable profit function and estimate these elasticities to shed some light on the substitutability between imports, capital services, and labor services. The results reveal that capital services and imports are Morishima substitutes, irrespective of whether the price of capital services or imports changes, and imports and labor services are also Morishima substitutes, irrespective of whether the price of imports or the wage rate changes. Thus, an increase in the price of U.S. imports (through tariffs or duties) will result in substitution (in the Morishima sense) into labor and capital services.     

COMPARISON OF ALTERNATIVE TAX AND TRANSFER TREATMENT OF CHILDREN USING ADULT EQUIVALENCE SCALES

This paper estimates adult equivalence scales in the context of a nonlinear demand system using cross-section individual household data. It then evaluates the treatment of children under the tax allowance and child benefit systems on the basis of the estimated equivalence scales. The results suggest that a child benefit system allowing for economies of scale in the family is consistent with the cost of children implied by the notion of adult equivalence scale.     

EVIDENCE ON RELATIONSHIPS AMONG ALTERNATIVE MEASURES OF CONCENTRATION: A TOOL FOR ANALYSIS OF LDC INEQUALITY

The evidence on economic inequality in nearly all developing countries is both seriously incomplete and of moderate to poor quality. In addition, information often corresponds to distributions which appear to be less revealing and useful than other ones; thus it can be argued that the frequently available distribution of income among households ranked by household income is less helpful than the seldom found distribution of consumption among persons ranked by per capita household consumption. Whether one's objective is to assess inequality in some absolute sense or (especially) to make comparisons across countries or evaluate trends over time, it is useful to know whether systematic relationships exist among various measures of inequality, in particular between those most commonly available and those conceptually most interesting. Illustrative comparisons of a variety of inequality indicators are presented. They suggest that in developing countries the concentration of income among persons (assuming equal distribution within the family) does not differ much from the concentration among households. They also suggest that the concentration of consumption is somewhat less unequal than that of income, the ratio of the respective Gini coefficients tending to cluster around 0.85 to 0.90.     

RELATIVE INEQUALITY AND POVERTY IN GERMANY AND THE UNITED STATES USING ALTERNATIVE EQUIVALENCE SCALES

We use data from the Luxembourg Income Study to show the sensitivity of measures of relative economic well-being of persons in the U.S. and Germany using official equivalence scales and consumption-based country-specific equivalence scales developed for the two countries. Overall inequality and poverty levels are found not to be sensitive to the equivalence scale used. However, the official German equivalence scale yields quite different results from the others with respect to the relative income and poverty levels of vulnerable groups within the population, especially older single people.     

THE NON-CONSTANCY OF EQUIVALENCE SCALES

Comparisons of households of differing composition are usually achieved through the use of equivalence scales. It is well known that the choice of scales can have considerable impact on the conclusions drawn from studies of welfare and poverty. There is a considerable literature on the theoretical issues relating to equivalence scales, but applied work on income distribution and related areas almost invariably takes scales to be constant irrespective of income. This paper focuses on the relation of scale to income, by applying theoretical analysis to some simple household types. The conclusion is that scales are not constant and that current practice should be changed.     

论选择性旅游的可持续发展意义

本文针对大众旅游对旅游环境不可避免的破坏,基于经济利益而产生的盲目开发和对景区的无度扩容,及大量旅游流造成的地域间文化差势等方面消极影响的分析,提出了选择性旅游的全新概念。论述了择性旅游的内涵特征,并对其两大类主体构项进行了剖析。以上述为基础,从改变传统旅游模式、推进可持续发展思想理念及操作的可行性等方面,深入探讨了选择性旅游对旅游可持续发展的主要贡献。     

THE BEHAVIOR OF CASINO GAMING REVENUE OVER THE BUSINESS CYCLE CONSIDERING ALTERNATIVE MEASURES OF “INCOME”

Reasons exist for believing that casino gaming revenue does not respond equally to all sources of income over the business cycle. We examine the growth and variability of casino revenue resulting from the growth and variability in different sources of income. We find that casino revenue behaves quite differently in response to short‐run and long‐run variation in each income source, thus revealing that the common use of personal income masks underlying drivers of each state's business cycle. Our results have implications for revenue forecasting models, research on the growth and variability of tax bases in general, and public policy. (JEL H72, H79, L83)     

ON NON‐MONETARY MEASURES IN THE FACE OF RISKS AND THE SIGNS OF THE DERIVATIVES

Vulnerability of both prudence and temperance towards a sure loss and towards a zero‐mean background risk seems to be a very realistic assumption on individual preference. This paper shows that when the concepts of prudence and temperance are defined in non‐monetary terms, the above assumption is equivalent to the usual signs of the successive derivatives of the utility function.     

ON THE EQUIVALENCE OF WEIGHTED COUNTRY-PRODUCT-DUMMY (CPD) METHOD AND THE RAO-SYSTEM FOR MULTILATERAL PRICE COMPARISONS

The country-product-dummy (CPD) method, originally proposed in Summers (1973), has recently been revisited in its weighted formulation to handle a variety of data related situations (Rao and Timmer, 2000, 2003; Heravi et al. , 2001; Rao, 2001; Aten and Menezes, 2002; Heston and Aten, 2002; Deaton et al. , 2004). The CPD method is also increasingly being used in the context of hedonic modelling instead of its original purpose of filling holes in Summers (1973). However, the CPD method is seen, among practitioners, as a black box due to its regression formulation. The main objective of the paper is to establish equivalence of purchasing power parities and international prices derived from the application of the weighted-CPD method with those arising out of the Rao-system for multilateral comparisons. A major implication of this result is that the weighted-CPD method would then be a natural method of aggregation at all levels of aggregation within the context of international comparisons.     

THE DYNAMIC PROPERTIES OF ALTERNATIVE ASSUMPTIONS ON PRICE ADJUSTMENT IN NEW KEYNESIAN MODELS

This paper presents a classification of the different new Phillips curves existing in the literature as a set of choices based on three assumptions: the choice of the structure of price adjustments (Calvo or Taylor), the presence of backward indexation and the type of price contracts (fixed prices or predetermined prices). The paper suggests study of the dynamic properties of each specification, following different monetary shocks on the growth rate of the money stock. We develop the analytical form of the price dynamics, and we display graphics for the responses of prices, output and inflation. We show that the choice made for each of the three assumptions has a strong influence on the dynamic properties. Notably, the choice of the price structure, while often considered as unimportant, is indeed the most influential choice concerning the dynamic responses of output and inflation.     

EQUIVALENCE SCALES AND THE WELFARE OF CHILDREN: A COMMENT ON “IS THERE BIAS IN THE ECONOMIC LITERATURE ON EQUIVALENCE SCALES?”

In a recent issue of this journal, M. Luisa Ferriera, Reuben C. Buse, and Jan-Paul Chavas argue that the equivalence scales implicit in the official U.S. poverty line and in public welfare programs overcompensate parents for their children, with resulting negative distributional and incentive effects. We show that their analysis is based on a very particular, and ethically unappealing, assumption about the importance of children's well-being.     

THE SUBSTITUTION OF SELF-SERVICE ACTIVITIES FOR MARKETED SERVICES

This paper is divided into two parts. In the first part the consequences of permanent differences in the rates of productivity growth between economic activities are dealt with. Special attention is given to the substitution of self-service activities for marketed services. The former are tentatively defined as activities carried out outside the market having the following principal inputs: consumer's time, industrial products (mainly durables), and energy. The emergence of self-service activities challenges the conventional division of man's time into work for market and leisure, which should be replaced by a more detailed breakdown. Consumers’preference for self-service results mainly from high taxation, high real wages and equality in the distribution of personal income. Because of the growth of self-service activities in industrialized countries a non-negligible part of the population's productive effort will be difficult to record, since it will neither appear on the market nor have market value. The need to record self-service activities would be most strongly felt in statistics on private consumption, but would also have consequences in the measurement of the nation's welfare. One should make a distinction between consumption of marketed services and their self-service substitutes in order to provide information on the complementarity of the energy, time and material inputs into various self-service activities and on the substitutability between them and marketed services. This could perhaps be done with the help of extended commodity-private expenditure matrices. The recording as well as the valuation of non-market working time would probably cause great difficulties. Self-service activities are also becoming sufficiently important to warrant their inclusion in the debate on the measurement of the nation's productive effort and of the nation's welfare. But any recording of self-service activities would be a controversial measure since it would require recourse to imputations on a large scale.