In-school labour supply,parental transfers,and wages

In many industrialised countries, teenagers have a significant spending power, and they are important customers for specialised industries. The income of teenagers still in full time education comes from two major sources: parental pocket money and earnings from part-time jobs. Little is known about the way these sources interact, and how they depend on parental, school and family characteristics. In this paper, we analyse labour supply of 16 year old British teenagers together with the cash transfers made to them by their parents. We first develop a theoretical model, where labour supply and transfers are jointly determined. We then estimate labour supply and transfers jointly, using unique data on labour supply of teenagers, the wages they receive, and the transfers from their parents. We show how these two processes depend on each other, and how transfers and labour supply react to changes in wages. We are grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for financial support for this research, which has also benefited from support to the IFS as a Designated Research Centre of the ESRC. We thank Murali Agastya, Richard Blundell, Ian Preston, Frank Windmeijer, and two anonymous referees and the editor Bernd Fitzenberger for useful comments.     

The determinants of female labour supply in Hungary

The aim of this paper is to closely examine the effect on a married woman's labour supply decision of non-labour income and of her own wage rate in a transition economy. The paper first shows that labour force participation rates for Hungarian females, though decreasing, were still extremely high and comparable to male economic activity in western countries. It then estimates labour supply parameters using a model that controls for sample selection issues associated with the labour supply of married women. Wage elasticity is estimated to be high and positive (1.81) while the income effect is consistent with leisure being a normal good. No sample selection bias is found.     

Self-insurance in a life-cycle model of labour supply and savings

This paper analyses the incentives to work and to save over the life cycle in the presence of incomplete markets. In a calibrated, partial equilibrium model, flexibility in hours worked changes asset age-profiles: borrowing when young is greater and saving when middle-aged is greater than when labour supply is fixed. Uncertainty causes individuals to work longer hours and to consume less when young. With flexibility over hours, accumulating precautionary assets incurs less of a utility cost and so the level of saving is greater. Further, allowing for flexibility and uncertainty means simulated hours of work and consumption more closely match the age profiles in the data.     

Sector specific foreign investment,labour inflow,economies of scale and welfare

This paper argues that the impact of foreign investment on welfare depends on the sector that attracts the investment and certain characteristics of the economy. It is shown that, as long as the intermediate good is non-traded, foreign investment in a sector that is subject to economies of scale increases welfare by increasing the size of the intermediate good sector. On the other hand, foreign investment in a sector that is subject to constant returns to scale decreases welfare by decreasing the size of the intermediate good sector. The impact of foreign investment (in either sector) on welfare depends on relative factor intensities when the intermediate good is traded.     

Multi-family households in a labour supply model: a calibration method with application to Poland

Models of cooperative and noncooperative behaviour opened the household ‘black box’ and allowed for individual treatment of partners in couples. However, labour supply literature has so far largely ignored a broader issue – the distinction of single versus multi-family (‘complex’) households. We propose a method to account for multi-family household structure by borrowing from recent applications of the collective model to identify the degree of sharing. We assume that each household is characterized by a between-family sharing parameter, which is calibrated on estimated preferences, observed labour market status and other characteristics. We apply the method to Polish labour market data.     

And the winner is... An empirical evaluation of unitary and collective labour supply models

An empirical evaluation is presented of two competing flexible labour supply models. The first is a standard unitary model, while the second is based on the collective approach to household behaviour. The evaluation focuses on the testing of the model’s? theoretical implications and on their ability to identify structural information, like preferences and the intrahousehold allocation process. Models are applied to Dutch microdata from the DNB Household Survey. The unitary model cannot be rejected for male and female singles, while it is rejected for a sample of couples. The alternative collective model cannot be rejected for the same sample, allowing identification of individual preferences and an intrahousehold sharing rule that can be used as a basis for welfare economic policy evaluations.     

Domestic financial market frictions,unrestricted international capital flows,and crises in small open economies

Summary. We present an example of a small open economy where small increases in the world interest rate may induce a sharp decline in output and a precipitous depreciation of the exchange rate. Due to a costly state verification problem in domestic credit markets, combined with unrestricted international capital flows, our economy generates two long-run equilibria, one with low GDP and a relatively depreciated real exchange rate (RER), and one with high GDP and a relatively appreciated RER. The first is always a saddle, while the second may be a sink or a source, depending on the level of the world interest rate. A crisis is identified with the economy switching from an equilibrium path approaching the high-output steady state to the saddlepath approaching the low-output steady state. In Mexicos recent history, periods of growth associated with appreciation of the RER have alternated with periods of sharp contraction and depreciation of the RER. Our economy displays such behavior in response to changes in the world interest rate.Received: 9 April 2002, Revised: 20 March 2003JEL Classification Numbers: E5, F4.G. Antinolfi, E. Huybens: We thank Steve Fazzari, Tim Kehoe, Todd Keister, Manuel Santos, Karl Shell and especially Bruce Smith for very helpful discussions. Jaime Calleja Alderete, Eduardo Camero Godínez, and Juan Vargas Hernández provided excellent research assistance. All remaining errors are ours. Huybens was an assistant professor in the Centro de Investigación Económica, ITAM, at the time this article was written, and part of this work was completed while Antinolfi was a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The views expressed herein are those of the authors, and do not reflect those of the World Bank or the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Correspondence to: G. Antinolfi     

Unemployment insurance: The role of electoral systems and regional labour markets

Levels of insurance against unemployment vary considerably across countries. Replacement rates, the ratio relating income from unemployment to what people earned when they were employed, are higher in countries with proportional electoral systems than in countries with majoritarian systems. Also, replacement rates are positively correlated with per capita income and negatively correlated with the countries' unemployment rates. I develop an electoral competition model that replicates these stylized facts.     

Endogenous capital market imperfections, human capital, and intergenerational mobility

In this paper, capital market imperfections are endogenized considering an adverse selection problem between banks and borrowers. We develop a growth model with linear OLG wealth dynamics, where agents are heterogeneous in terms of observable wealth and ability, which is private information. We show that banks react to this informational asymmetry by granting higher loans to talented borrowers. This, in turn, helps poor and talented agents to become educated and catch up with the rich agents. Furthermore, the credit market friction leads to greater human capital accumulation.     

Trade liberalization, heterogeneous firms and the soft budget constraint

We analyze the interaction between the soft budget constraint (SBC) and international trade by placing Segal’s (1998) SBC model within Melitz’s (2003) framework of international trade with heterogeneous monopolistically competitive firms. As in Segal’s model, SBC may result in moral hazard. The opening to international trade adds another sort of inefficiency. Some firms that would have become exporters in the absence of SBC choose to apply low effort and not export in order to extract a subsidy from the government. This effect takes place when the trade costs are sufficiently low. Overall, however, trade liberalization reduces inefficiencies generated by SBC. The number of firms subject to moral hazard SBC decreases, aggregate effort level increases and aggregate profits lost due to SBC-induced sub-optimal effort decline as trade costs decrease.     

Rural labour market policies in Croatia,FYR of Macedonia and Turkey

Considerable differences are found among countries regarding the importance of the agricultural labour force, between rural and urban labour, and in poverty and living conditions in rural areas. Declines in the agricultural labour force and rural population are foreseen for each of the countries, but with significant variations between them. Showing different patterns over time, labour market developments in the sector and in rural areas have been shaped by the overall labour market institutions, conditions and factors in each country, such as the legal basis, educational attainment and migration flows, and the presence of non-agricultural activities in rural areas.     

Inflationary finance, capital mobility, and monetary coordination

This paper compares the inflation rate before and after monetary coordination between two benevolent governments. Many authors have previously argued that monetary coordination will reduce inflation [e.g., Aizenman, 1992; Beetsma & Bovenberg, 1998; Jensen, 1997; Kimbrough, 1993; Sibert, 1992; Tori, 1997]. Unlike these studies, the present paper introduces a mobile factor, which is capital. While capital may move freely between countries, it is subject to the inflation tax of the country in which it is located. This is because of a cash-in-advance type constraint governing investment expenditures. Since capital is perfectly mobile, inflation tax competition between governments leads to suboptimally low inflation. When countries coordinate their monetary policies, they can raise the inflation tax simultaneously without fear of capital flight. Hence, inflation tends to increase rather than decrease after monetary coordination.     

The political economy of capital market integration and tax competition

This paper investigates the effect of capital market integration (CMI) on capital taxes in a political economy framework in which policy is influenced by lobbying of interest groups. CMI increases the efficiency cost of the capital tax, which introduces incentives to reduce the tax rate, but also reduces lobbying by owners of capitalists, which introduces countering incentives to increase the tax rate. CMI can therefore result in a higher capital tax rate. When the market share of each country is small, CMI may increase government supply of public goods and enhance efficiency, which implies that, in the presence of policy endogeneity through lobbying, decentralized policymaking can be more efficient than centralized policymaking.     

Managerial compensation and R&D investments: the role of the external managerial labour market

This paper investigates the importance of the external managerial labour market in the determination of managerial compensation and in the influence of the compensation incentives on a firm’s R&D investments. I design an empirical model including the compensation adjustment regression, of which the focus is the role of the external labour market, and the R&D regression that examines how the compensation incentives derived from the external labour market affect a firm’s R&D intensity. Empirical results suggest that the R&D intensity is positively related to the premium of the actual pay adjustments over the expected pay adjustments based on the external labour market comparisons. The effect of the compensation incentives on the R&D investments is strongest when managers expect pay to decrease but actually experience an increase in pay.     

Real wages,inflation and labour productivity in Australia

This article presents an analysis of real wages, inflation and labour productivity interrelationships using cointegration, Granger causality and, most importantly, structural change tests. Applications of tests to Australian data over the 1965 to 2007 period corroborate the presence of a structural break in 1985 and show that a 1% increase in manufacturing sector real wages led to an increase in manufacturing sector productivity of between 0.5% and 0.8%. Comparable estimates for the effect of inflation on manufacturing sector productivity have limited statistical significance. Granger causality test results suggest that real wages and inflation both Granger cause productivity in the long run.     

Start-ups, venture capitalists, and the capital gains tax

A model of start-up finance with double moral hazard is proposed. Entrepreneurs have ideas and technical competence, but lack own resources as well as commercial experience. Venture capitalists (VCs) provide start-up finance and managerial support. Both types of agents thus jointly contribute to the firm's success, but neither type's effort is verifiable. We find that the market equilibrium is biased towards inefficiently low entrepreneurial effort and venture capital support. In this situation, the capital gains tax is particularly harmful. The introduction of a small tax impairs effort and advice and leads to a first-order welfare loss. Several other policies towards venture capital and start-up entrepreneurship are also investigated.     

经济一体化、产业分工与失业

本文建立了产业分工架构,分析工业国家非技术劳工工资与失业问题。产业分工程度内生决定于经济一体化(即市场扩大)型态:在一体化市场内,若技术劳动成长率大于非技术劳动增幅,制造业产业分工程度将加深;反之,产业分工程度降低。产业分工程度加深促使非技术劳工工资上升、失业率下降,并未如预期会威胁工业国家非技术劳工。值得注意的是,既使产业分工程度加深、非技术劳工失业率下降,亦可能出现非技术劳工失业量上升现象。     

Economies of density, scale and scope in the water supply and sewerage sector: a study of four developing and transition economies

Using panel data, we estimate measures of density, scale and scope economies in four countries that differ substantially in their levels of economic development and in their piped water and sewerage coverage: Brazil, Moldova, Romania and Vietnam. We find evidence of economies of scale in Moldova, Romania and Vietnam. In Brazil, we cannot reject the null hypothesis of constant returns to scale. The results of this study show that the cost structure of water and sewerage utilities varies significantly within and between countries and over time.      

Elasticity of substitution and productivity, capital and skill intensity differences across firms

This paper, instrumented with six theorems, shows that differences between firms in labor productivity, capital intensity and relative demand for skilled labor can be explained by differences in the substitution parameters between capital, skilled and unskilled labor in the presence of skill biased technical change.