Time Schedule and Program Profile: TV News in Norway and Denmark

Two TV channels compete on programming with respect to both time schedule (continuous choice) and program profile (discrete choice), with a directional constraint concerning time schedule (viewers cannot watch TV before they get home). We show how the relative importance of program profile and time schedule, as perceived by the viewers, determines the equilibrium outcome. Furthermore, we find that there is a first-mover disadvantage in a sequential game where one channel sets its two choice variables before its rival does, and a first-mover advantage in a semise-quential game where the channels set time schedules sequentially and thereafter set program profiles simultaneously. The results are applied to the Norwegian and Danish markets for TV news, where number-two channels have challenged the incumbents.     

Relative Home‐Court Advantage: The Impact of Travel on Team Production When One Team is Closer than its Opponent to a Neutral Game Site

Using data from the National Collegiate Athletic Association Men's Basketball Tournament, I examine the impact of travel on team production in a setting where one team is geographically closer than its opponent to a neutral site. I hypothesize and find that the closer team, or relative home team, has a relative home‐court advantage that helps it to out‐produce its opponent. When the relative home team travels a much shorter distance than its opponent to a neutral site, binary logistic and ordinary least squares regressions indicate a positive relationship between relative home‐court advantage and, respectfully, winning and margin of victory. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Does Stress Shorten Your Life? Evidence from Parental Bereavement

I study the impact of stress resulting from the unexpected death of a child on parents' mortality risk. Using a flexible approach and allowing for time-varying treatment effects, I find no impact on the short-run mortality risk. However, I estimate a substantial increase in the long-run, particularly among men. I provide evidence that this group likely resorts to risky health behaviours such as heavy smoking and drinking as coping mechanisms. Assessing the possible protective effects of mental health support, I find evidence that it lowers the mortality risk for women. Mental health support has a smaller impact for men. I show that this is likely due to underutilization by those who would benefit the most. Finally, I present robustness of my results to specific departure from my identifying assumptions.     

The effect of subsidizing continuous training investments — Evidence from German establishment data

This paper evaluates the impact of a training voucher program on establishments' investments in further training. The voucher program that was implemented in the German federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia increased training incentives for employees in small and medium-sized establishments by reducing training costs by 50%. The estimation is based on a quasi-experimental research design exploiting variation across time, regions and establishment size. Using establishment data, I find that the share of establishments that invest in training increased by 4–6 percentage points. Training intensity and the educational structure of participants remained unaffected among those establishments investing in training.     

Family planning,gender differences and infant mortality: evidence from Uttar Pradesh,India

This paper modeled the proximate determinants of infant survival using the National Family Health Survey data on 11,500 women from the most populous Indian state Uttar Pradesh in the period 1982–1992. A methodological framework was developed for analyzing the inter-relationships between high fertility and infant mortality, gender differences in mortality, and for modeling the effects of health care and family planning variables. Probit models were estimated by maximum likelihood taking into account simultaneity of regressors and unobserved household differences. The proximate determinants of infant survival included maternal education and age at first birth, birth interval, the number of children before family planning was first used, maternal tetanus vaccination, and child's vaccinations. Indicator variables for a boy (girl) born at a birth order higher than the “ideal” number showed that unwanted births exacerbated female mortality.     

The role of neighborhood characteristics in mortgage default risk: Evidence from New York City

Using a rich database of non-prime mortgages from New York City, we find that census tract level neighborhood characteristics are important predictors of default behavior, even after controlling for an extensive set of controls for loan and borrower characteristics. First, default rates increase with the rate of foreclosure notices and the number of lender-owned properties (REOs) in the tract. Second, default rates on home purchase mortgages are higher in census tracts with larger shares of black residents, regardless of the borrower’s own race. We explore possible explanations for this second finding and conclude that it likely reflects differential treatment of black neighborhoods by the mortgage industry in ways that are unobserved in our data.     

Adapting to survive: The case of Danish employers' organisations

Scholars often characterise Danish employers' organisations (EOs) as relatively stable, with a continuing role in the coordination of industrial relations and corporatist policymaking. This article shows that, beneath surface stability, Danish EOs have significantly adapted structurally and functionally to survive environmental pressures. However, rather than converging onto a liberal market trajectory, we find that Danish EOs have layered new functions onto traditional collective functions. We also find significant variations in functional adaptation depending on the employer constituencies' exposure to international competition and position in value chains. We argue that these adaptations imply that the provision of collective goods, especially in collective bargaining, is no longer sufficient for the survival of EOs.     

A journey home: What drives how long people are homeless?

This paper uses survival analysis to model exits from two alternative forms of homelessness: sleeping on the streets (‘literal homelessness’) and not having a home of one's own (‘housing insecurity’). We are unique in being able to account for time-invariant, unobserved heterogeneity. Like previous researchers, we find results consistent with negative duration dependence in models which ignore unobserved heterogeneity. However, controlling for unobserved heterogeneity, we find that duration dependence has an inverted U-shape with exit rates initially increasing (indicating positive duration dependence) and then falling. Exit rates out of both literal homelessness and housing insecurity fall with age. Women are more likely than men to exit housing insecurity for a home of their own, but are less likely to exit literal homelessness. Persons with dependent children have higher exit rates. Finally, education seems to protect people from longer periods of housing insecurity.     

Workplace heterogeneity and wage inequality in Denmark

Wage inequality is on the rise in most developed economies, and this phenomenon has fostered a growing body of research on its potential drivers. Using German data over the period 1985–2009, Card et al. (The Quarterly Journal of Economics 2013, 128(3), 967-1015) argue that rising workplace heterogeneity has contributed substantially to the rise in wage inequality. I revisit their findings in two ways. First, because the generalization of their findings remains an open question, I apply their methodological approach to Danish register data and test whether rising workplace heterogeneity explains a significant share of the rise in wage inequality in Denmark. I find that, contrary to Germany, workplace heterogeneity remained practically stable over time, and this pattern contributed slightly negatively to the rise in wage inequality. Second, I complement Card et al.'s (2013) methods with the variance decomposition exercise proposed by Song et al. (2019) to identify more precisely the sources of the rise in wage inequality in Denmark. Although the rise in wage inequality is partly a between-establishment phenomenon, I show that the strengthening of assortative matching patterns and the rising heterogeneity of workers within establishments are the main drivers of growing inequality.     

'Out' in The Valley

Building on previous work by Castells, and Adler and Brenner, I explore the public character of a lesbian concentration in the Connecticut River Valley region of Massachusetts. From the late 1980s this area has gained national media attention for its lesbian population. Using a number of data sources I examine how lesbian residences and services are distributed in the Valley. I find a strong service core in the small city of Northampton, but residences, while showing some clustering around Northampton, reach well into a rural hinterland. In these rural towns lesbians live at low physical densities while forming relatively high proportions of the towns’ populations. Unlike previous studies of gay male and lesbian space that have tended to focus on center cities, this paper starts to chart this space on the low-density, semirural edge of a metropolitan area. Previous studies of residential concentrations of gay and lesbian persons have also found highly visible gay male territories - sometimes with a lesbian minority - but showed lesbians forming social networks or somewhat underground concentrations. Several parts of the Valley area are different; comprising a visibly lesbian space. This paper contributes to analyses of diverse populations in contemporary metropolitan and exurban regions and to discussions of methods in research on lesbian and gay populations.     

Gender Differences in Entrepreneurial Propensity*

Using data from representative population surveys in 17 countries, we find that the lower rate of female business ownership is primarily due to women's lower propensity to start businesses rather than to differences in survival rates across genders. We show that women are less confident in their entrepreneurial skills, have different social networks and exhibit higher fear of failure than men. After controlling for endogeneity, we find that these variables explain a substantial part of the gender gap in entrepreneurial activity. Although, of course, their relative importance varies significantly across countries, these factors appear to have a universal effect.     

Local public goods and the demand for high-income municipalities

Affluent towns often deliver high-quality public services to their residents. I estimate the willingness to pay to live in a high-income suburb, above and beyond the demand of wealthy neighbors, by measuring changes in housing prices across city–suburban borders as the income disparity between the two municipalities changes over time. I find that a $10,000 increase in town-level median income is associated with a seven percent increase in housing values at the border. The estimated demand for high-income municipalities is primarily driven by school quality and lower property tax rates.     

Housing market dynamics

The purpose of this paper is to consider the dynamic behavior of housing markets. I first set out a model in which interest rates affect the implicit rental value of housing and indicate how the latter is related to the stock demand for housing and new construction. Using this model and the actual values of U.S. mortgage interest rates in the late 60's and 70's I then find those values of the model's parameters most consistent with fluctuations in new construction in that period. Finally, I simulate the effects of various shocks to the model.     

Effects of social and cultural processes on health1

Future advances in the planning and evaluation of health service systems are highly dependent upon the development of a methodology that permits the empirical validation of hypotheses concerning the effects of social and cultural processes on health. In this paper such a methodology has been proposed. A structural model has been developed and analyzed, using the causal modeling technique of path analysis, in which social, economic, and demographic characteristics of New Mexico counties have been related to the infant mortality rate as an index of health. Path coefficients have been estimated from census data and vital statistics. Dynamic programming has been utilized to predict the combined direct and indirect effects on the health of New Mexico's population that would result from changes in the composition of the population.Analysis of the model suggests that these structural characteristics are causally interrelated, with economic factors a major determinant of infant mortality. While urbanization and migration also significantly affect infant mortality rates, education surprisingly is not important causally when compared to other variables, nor is proportion nonwhite when other social and economic factors are taken into account. In contrast, the proportion of Spanish-Americans residing in a county has a rather unexpected effect in that infant mortality rates decline as the proportion of this ethnic group rises. This finding suggests that it is important in health planning to consider cultural factors that may be unique to particular ethnic groups.In general the model building techniques and the algorithms presented here provide a valuable means of generating and testing hypotheses regarding the effects of social and cultural processes on health.     

From infant to mother: Early disease environment and future maternal health

This paper investigates the connections between a woman's early life disease environment and her future health, socioeconomic status, and the health of her children. We exploit U.S. birth records, which can be linked to the post-neonatal mortality rates in the mother's state of birth and provide information on the outcomes of the mother and her infant. We find that exposure to disease in early childhood significantly increases the incidence of diabetes and is associated with worse socioeconomic status and maternal behaviors. We also find evidence of intergenerational transmission of maternal health shocks: among whites, higher exposure increases the probability of low birth weight infants. However, among blacks, higher maternal exposure reduces the incidence of low birth weight, possibly reflecting selection effects.     

Labor supply and the optimality of Social Security

Traditional economic theory predicts that an unfunded public pension system can be justified on the basis of its ability to provide intergenerational transfers, and also for its ability to provide partial insurance against mortality and labor income risks. In this paper, I demonstrate that the quantitative importance of these traditional roles depends on how the pension system distorts households' labor supply decisions. Using a general-equilibrium life-cycle consumption model calibrated to the U.S. economy, I show that these distortions can be large enough to erase much of the traditional welfare gains from Social Security. I also find that this fact is robust within the range of labor supply elasticities usually encountered in the macroeconomic literature.     

The effect of household appliances on female labor force participation: Evidence from microdata

We estimate the effect of household appliance ownership on the labor force participation rate of married women using micro-level data from the 1960 and 1970 U.S. Censuses. In order to identify the causal effect of home appliance ownership on married women's labor force participation rates, our empirical strategy exploits both time-series and cross-sectional variation in these two variables. To control for endogeneity, we instrument a married woman's ownership of an appliance by the average ownership rate for that appliance among single women living in the same U.S. state. Single women's labor force participation rates did not increase between 1960 and 1970. We find evidence in support of the hypothesis that the diffusion of household appliances contributed to the increase in married women's labor force participation rates during the 1960's.     

Using managers' expectations for ex-ante policy evaluation: Evidence from the COVID-19 crisis

Evaluation of the impacts of government policies during an economic crisis is often delayed until the outcomes are realized. Policies can be better guided if they can be evaluated amid a crisis, before the realization of outcomes. This study examines whether survey data on the expectations of small business managers can help evaluate two high-stake subsidies for firms amid the COVID-19 crisis in Japan, namely, Subsidy Program for Sustaining Businesses (SPSB) and Employment Adjustment Subsidy (EAS). We evaluate the accuracy of managers' expectations, estimate the impact of subsidies on the expected firm survival, and compare it with the estimated impact on realized survival. We find that the managers' expectations on their future sales, survival rate, and the possibility of receiving these subsidies predict the realized outcomes, although they were highly pessimistic about their survival rates. We find that the estimated impacts of the SPSB on the expected survival rates have the same sign as the estimated impact on the realized survival rates, but the size is more than twice because of the pessimism on survival. The estimated impacts of the EAS are both insignificant. Therefore, although its impact may be overestimated, managers' expectations are useful for selecting an effective policy.     

Property taxes and home prices: A tale of two cities

We explore the influence of property taxes on home prices, taking advantage of a policy experiment of property taxation in Shanghai and in Chongqing starting from January 2011. Using the approach suggested by Hsiao, Ching and Wan (2012) we estimate hypothetical home prices in the absence of property taxation for Shanghai and Chongqing using home prices in other cities and provinces. We show that the OLS generates consistent estimators when the price series are non-stationary I(1) processes. We apply the model to a panel of average home prices of 31 cities and provinces in China, and find the property-tax experiment lowered the Shanghai average home price by 11%–15% but raised the Chongqing average home prices by 10%–12%. An examination of the policy details and data on prices by home types suggests the post-treatment price increase in Chongqing can be driven by a spillover effect from high-end to low-end properties.     

The growth of information workers in the US economy, 1950–2000: the role of technological change,computerization, and structural change

Using data from the decennial US Censuses of 1950, 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990, and 2000, I construct matrices of employment by 267 occupations and 64 industries and then aggregate the occupations into four categories: (i) knowledge producers; (ii) data processors; (iii) service workers; and (iv) goods-processing workers. I find that information workers (the sum of the first two categories) increased from 37% of the workforce in 1950 to 59% in 2000. Then, using an input–output decomposition analysis, I find that the growth in information workers was driven not by a shift in tastes toward information-intensive goods and services (as measured by the composition of final demand) but rather by a roughly equal combination of the substitution of information workers for goods and service workers within the structure of production of industries and the unbalanced growth effect (from differential rates of industry productivity growth). Finally, on the basis of regression analysis, I find that R&D expenditures and computer investment are positively associated with the growth in knowledge workers but negatively associated with the growth of data workers.