Comparing earnings profiles in urban areas of an LDC: rural-to-urban migrants vs. native workers

"We use Tanzanian data to test a recently proposed hypothesis that rural-to-urban migrants have an incentive to supply greater work effort than native urban workers, because of the migrants' positive probability of returning to the low-wage rural areas. We treat the choice between public- and private-sector employment as endogenous and, for theoretical and empirical reasons, distinguish migrants with access to rural land from those without access. Our results show that migrants in both sectors face lower initial wage offers than native urban workers. But, the wage gap is eliminated within a decade or less, and thereafter, migrants surpass the wage offers of native workers."     

Accounting practices,earnings volatility,and earnings forecast: The case of the oil and gas producing companies

International Advances in Economic Research -     

The earnings experience of rural-urban migrants in Korea

"Migration models in the Harris-Todaro tradition imply that urban informal sector earnings are less than rural sector earnings. Examining the situation for [South] Korea, we find that both urban formal and informal sector earnings exceed earnings opportunities in rural areas, making rural-urban migration the best decision for the individual and for the Korean economy in terms of maximizing output.... The implication for policy makers is that government efforts may be better directed toward mitigating the externalities caused by over-crowding, rather than attempting to influence population movements."     

Determinants of R&D in an LDC: The Indian engineering industry

R&D behaviour of LDC industrial firms is an unexplored subject. Data on the largest engineering firms in India are analysed to test the hypothesis that technological effort in LDCs is primarily directed at assimilating and adapting foreign technologies.     

Schooling,fertility and the labour market experience of married women

This paper discusses the role of formal schooling and child rearing in the determination of career path choice of women in the US. Data were collected from the adult educational component of the 1991 US National Household Education Survey. Data are available for about 12,568 respondents, of whom 6860 are female. It is established that, amongst others, expected earnings significantly affect the career path and the hours of work chosen by American women. Based on the results of the study, a number of conclusions have been drawn: 1) expectations of earnings affect women's choice of career path, including decisions such as labor market participation, the part-time work versus full-time work decision, and occupational choice; 2) the indirect and indirect effects of schooling and other variables on regime choice has been studied; the impact of schooling and fertility on women's labor supply follows an intuitively plausible pattern; 3) evidence provided here on the private rate of return to education confirms the findings of Bland that part-time workers do not receive a lower return than others; and 4) the importance of correcting for endogeneity and sample selection biases in the problem of earnings determination and career choice has been established.     

Work experience,earnings and participation: evidence from the women and employment survey

This paper presents a probit model of labour force participation and a set of earnings equations estimated using data from the 1980 Women and Employment Survey. The results of the participation model compare with previous findings and the earnings models give typical results of human capital and job characteristics variables. Exclusion of the sample selection effect appears to be of importance and a linear piecewise experience variable outperforms the quadratic specification.     

Changing American earnings distributions: One-half century of experience

Empirical Economics - Recent increases in earnings inequality have been described as “enormous.” Is it that we are experiencing a unique shift toward greater inequality or are we...     

Work-limiting health,earnings, and employment: an analysis with SIPP data

ABSTRACT

This study examines the role of work-limiting health conditions on employed people’s earnings, employment status, and working hours, and distinguishes between the different degree and severity of predictable shocks. Using data from the 2004 Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), we evaluate the impact of any work-limiting health condition as well as a subset of health conditions that appear to arrive largely exogenously on post-onset earnings, employment, and working hours. We find that people who report being employed and later experience the onset of any work-limiting health condition tend to have lower subsequent earnings, a reduced probability of being employed, and fewer working hours per month compared to those who remain healthy. The adverse impact is even greater for people with health conditions that arrive less predictably. We use a difference-in-differences regression model with person and year fixed effects as the primary estimation method.     

Schooling and household welfare: The case of Sri Lanka from 1990 to 2006

This paper looks at the effect schooling has had on household welfare in Sri Lanka during the 1990–2006 period, on average and across the welfare distribution. We account for the endogeneity of schooling using quantile instrumental variable estimation as developed in Chernozhukov, Fernández‐Val, and Kowalski ( 2015 ). We use pooled data from four cross‐sectional Household Income Expenditure Surveys. The results show that an extra year of schooling on the part of the most educated adult member in the household can increase welfare (proxied by real per capita consumption expenditure) by 3.8 percent on average. However, the effect varies considerably across the welfare distribution: At the lower end, around the 20th and 25th quantiles, an extra year of education increases welfare by 6 and 5 percent, respectively, while at the median it is around 3.5 percent. At the higher, 90th quantile it is much less, at 1 percent. Thus the marginal effect of schooling on welfare is significant and positive at all levels of the welfare distribution, but highest at the lower and middle quartiles. This result is different from findings in the literature that tend to show larger effects at higher quantiles, when endogeneity is uncorrected.     

Career length: Effects of curvature of earnings profiles,earnings shocks,taxes, and social security

The same high labor supply elasticity that characterizes a representative family model with indivisible labor and employment lotteries also emerges without lotteries when self-insuring individuals choose interior solutions for their career lengths. Off corners, the more elastic is an earnings profile to accumulated working time, the longer is a workerʼs career. Negative (positive) unanticipated earnings shocks reduce (increase) the career length of a worker holding positive assets, while the effects are the opposite for a worker with negative assets. By inducing a worker to retire at an official retirement age, government provided social security can attenuate responses of career lengths to earnings profile slopes, earnings shocks, and taxes.     

Errors in self-reported earnings: The role of previous earnings volatility and individual characteristics

I report the measurement error in self-reported earnings for a developing country using a novel data set. The data set consists of two cross-sections of the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM) wage and salary sectors; additionally, a subset of the two cross-sections may be linked to create a panel. Administrative data from FSM Social Security office are matched to the FSM Census data for the wage and salary sectors. I find that the error in annual self-reported earnings is centered on zero. Additionally, I find strong evidence for mean reversion in the data suggesting non-classical measurement error. I identify the impact of prior years' earnings variability on the current reporting of earnings using administrative data on earnings histories. Prior earnings volatility strongly affects measurement error in current period. However, the effect of prior shocks diminish significantly over time—suggesting that first-differencing and fixed-effects techniques will not improve accuracy.     

The labour market and the distribution of earnings: an empirical analysis for Italy

Using four waves of data from the Participation Labour Unemployment Survey, a database of information on the Italian labour market supply, we address the question of earnings dispersion by applying a ‘nested’ decomposition procedure of the Theil inequality measure, which combines into a unified framework the standard decompositions by population subgroups and income sources. The empirical evidence obtained points to the key role played by the self-employees in shaping labour income inequality, especially at the upper extreme of the earnings distribution, and the emergence of non-standard forms of employment as an important feature of the contemporary workplace.     

Measuring the extent of earnings discrimination: an update

Ordinary least squares (OLS) regression and data from the March 1990 Current Population Survey are used to estimate yearly earnings averages for white males, white females, black males and black females. In order to test for the possible existence or gender and/or race discrimination, earnings estimates are decomposed, using the tradional Oaxaca (1973) and Blinder (1973) methodology. In comparing these results with those from Carlson and Swartz (1988, using 1979 data), we find that overall and unexplained residual differences have declined quite substantially, but that they still favour white males. We then incorporate an extension of the traditional methodology (Jackson and Lindley, 1989) which allows for testing for the significance of enexplained residuals, and for jointly testing for the significance of residual effect components, the constant and coefficient effects. These results call into question the unambiguous conclusion that earnings differentials uniformly favour white males. Strong support is found for the Jackson–Lindley contention that significant and positive residuals may have have offsetting signs. More specifically, where males appear to receive an entry level premium, as measured by constant effect differentials, but other groups appear to receive favourable treatment as measured by response rates to changes in independent variables (the coefficient effect). This result suggests that efforts may be underway to ‘make up’ for the entry level white male premium.     

Assimilation,labour market experience and earnings profiles of temporary and permanent immigrant workers in Germany

We test the assimilation hypothesis, as initially proposed by Chiswick (1978), by making use of a rich panel-data set for Germany, which permits us to allow for unobserved population heterogeneity and potential selectivity bias arising from an individual's remigration decision and employment behaviour. To take into account the institutional aspects of the German guest-worker system we use information on an immigrant's expected duration of stay in Germany to distinguish between temporary and permanent migrants and to test for differences in earnings/experience profiles with respect to a foreigner's expected duration of stay. We find that years of schooling in Germany have a strong positive effect on earnings, that earnings/experience profiles of guest-workers differ by expected duration of stay, and that the renumeration of labour market experience in Germany is higher for natives than for most foreigners. The assimilation hypothesis is therefore not supported by the evidence for Germany.     

跨国公司直接投资对高技术产业溢出效应的横向比较研究

跨国公司对高技术产业的直接投资对当地企业产生溢出效应,通过与同是在亚洲的印度和印尼的发展状况的横向比较,给我国的高新技术产业发展带来了启示,即加强国内高技术产业的R&D能力和发展MNC在东道国的前向联系。     

Immigrant earnings differentials in Canada: A more general specification of age and experience effects

This paper investigates empirically the role of age and arrival cohort effects on immigrant earnings differentials. The dataset used consists of a sample of 5,069 adult Canadian male employees from the 1973 Job Mobility Survey, a non-census dataset that provides information on actual work experience, language attributes, and numerous parental family background characteristics. It thus allows a more general specification of foreign-born/native-born earnings differentials, particularly the effects of age, work experience and years since immigration. The results confirm the importance of cross-sectional age cohort effects and refine previous findings on arrival cohort effects. Sample selectivity bias is investigated and found to be significant only when respondent's occupation is not controlled for. Adjustment for sample selection bias leaves essentially unchanged the main findings.For their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper presented at a Labour Economics Conference at The University of Western Ontario, the authors would like to thank Martin Dooley, John Vanderkamp, Hank Farber, David Card and John Abowd. The authors also gratefully acknowledge the useful comments offered by members of the Labor Economics/Institute for Research on Poverty Workshop at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an anonymous referee. The authors, of course, retain full responsibility for all remaining errors and shortcomings. The first version of this paper was written while the second author was visiting the Industrial Relations Section at Princeton University and the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.     

Optimal Harvesting of an Age-Structured Schooling Fishery

Biologists have criticized traditional biomass models in fishery economics for being oversimplified. Biological stock assessment models are more sophisticated with regard to biological content, but rarely account for economic objectives. This study includes a full age-structured population model for studying schooling fisheries and extends the delayed difference approach used in earlier studies. We take the total harvest as the choice variable, resulting in a simple analytical structure. The model produces optimal steady states that may be higher or lower compared to the delayed-difference formulation. The model is applied to the Baltic sprat fishery. Both ecological and harvesting cost data support specifying Baltic sprat as a schooling fishery. Given nonlinear harvesting costs, the optimal solution is a path toward a steady state with smooth annual harvest and population age structure. Sensitivity analysis shows that the optimal solution is highly dependent on the population level of the sprat’s main predator Baltic cod. A linear cost function and an interest rate below 9 % imply pulse fishing instead of smooth continuous harvesting. Given nonlinear harvesting cost, the optimal steady state yield is rather insensitive to changes in the interest rate. However, under a high cod scenario, interest rates of 10 % or higher implies that no optimal steady state exists.     

退休年龄、教育年限与社会保障

在本文中，我们用养老金的缴纳费率和养老金替代率代表社会保障制度，采用有限生命预期的连续时间状态代际交叠模型作为基本框架，分析了社会保障制度对消费者接受教育的年限、退休年龄、工作年限的选择、GDP增长率和利率的影响。同时，我们还分析了消费者的预期寿命对个体消费者接受教育的年限、退休年龄、工作年限的选择以及对社会保障制度的影响。     

Schooling,health knowledge and obesity

The connection between schooling and health is well documented. An important empirical issue that needs to be examined, however, is whether schooling's effects are due to individual health knowledge differences. This empirical study examines this issue with an increasingly important health indicator, obesity. Since provision of health knowledge is a major tool of public agencies promoting health, this empirical study uses a new direct measure of health knowledge to test this hypothesis. The results show that knowledge is inversely related to the probability that an individual is obese. Schooling's effects on relative weight and the probability of being obese are explained by differences in knowledge. This result may imply that schooling's effect on the allocative efficiency of the household production of health is the main reason schooling is linked to health behaviour. The result also may imply that the most effective method of health education is to highlight the disease element of poor dietary habits and health. More importantly, the simulations conducted suggest positive returns to knowledge based on improvements in the probability estimates.