Women,Ecology and Economics,edited by Ellie Perkins

This paper finds that black women earn 7 percent less than similarly skilled white women because of their race. Even within the same occupational category, black women earn 3 percent less than similarly qualified white women. Black women receive lower pay primarily due to occupational segregation and because they are rewarded with lower earnings than white women for equivalent levels of education and other human capital characteristics.     

Statistical Independence and Fractional Age Assumptions

Abstract

This paper considers in some detail the issue of statistical independence of the curtate future lifetime and the fractional part of the future lifetime of a general status.

Statistical independence is often employed in actuarial contexts, primarily because it leads to simple relationships between quantities of interest and statistical information that is of a discrete nature, such as a life table. The uniform distribution of deaths (UDD) assumption is the most commonly used because of its simplicity and intuitive appeal, but it can be somewhat restrictive. For example, all deaths or withdrawals may be assumed to be at a particular point in the year such as the middle; assumptions of this type are often made in a multiple decrement context. This paper attempts to unify these assumptions and extend their applicability in an actuarial context.

The conditions for independence need to be stated carefully, and the last-survivor status is cited as an example in which failure to do so can lead to erroneous conclusions.

The fractional independence (Fl) assumption is defined, and it is demonstrated that many of the formulas for life table functions that hold under the more restrictive UDD assumption are extended easily to the general Fl case. The simple relationship under UDD between insurances payable on other than an annual mode and those payable at the end of the year of death is extended to the Fl case as well. These results are then used to obtain results for annuities and reserves, again generalizing UDD relationships. It is then demonstrated that many contingent probabilities in the multiple life context are exactly the same under the Fl assumption as under the more restrictive UDD assumption. Finally, a very general result that holds in the multiple decrement context is shown to hold under the Fl assumption.     

Ruin Problems for Phase-Type(2) Risk Processes

In this paper we consider a risk process in which claim inter-arrival times have a phase-type(2) distribution, a distribution with a density satisfying a second order linear differential equation. We consider some ruin related problems. In particular, we consider the compound geometric representation of the infinite time survival probability, as well as the (defective) distributions of the surplus immediately prior to ruin and of the deficit at ruin. We also consider explicit solutions for the infinite time ruin probability in the case where the individual claim amount distribution is phase-type.     

The gift of advice: communication in a bilateral gift exchange game

We augment a standard bilateral gift exchange game so employees can send messages at the same time as choosing an effort level. Employee effort (controlling for wages) is unaffected by allowing messages, but wages dramatically increase. Messages affect wages because employees give managers advice to set higher wages, usually explaining that this will result in higher effort. This advice prompts managers to try higher wages, helping them learn that raising wages increases their payoffs. In a follow-up experiment, we directly provide managers with additional information about the relationship between wages and effort. This too causes wages to increase, but to a lesser extent than allowing messages. Our results highlight the critical role of learning in generating gains from positive gift exchange.     

Managing health authorities: One member's view

The Government have devoted a lot of energy to improving the quality of management in the Civil Service. Most of this effort has gone on internal management, leaving relatively untouched the management of Departmental and broader government programmes and of outside organisations such as the national health service ‐ with all its regions, districts, family practitioner committees, and medical practitioners. One reason for this imbalance may be that, as successive National Audit Office reports have shown, management in the broader sense is actually rather difficult.