Do Sectoral Employment Programs Work? New Evidence from New York City's Sector‐Focused Career Centers

While sectoral employment is growing as an approach to providing job opportunities to disadvantaged jobseekers, there is little evidence on the effectiveness of these programs. This study estimates impacts on employment and earnings of three large sectoral employment programs in New York City using a quasi‐experimental design and administrative data on earnings. Participants realized increased employment levels and earnings gains. In addition, participants who received industry‐specific training had greater earnings gains than those who did not.     

Bargaining or Backlash? Evidence on Intimate Partner Violence from the Dominican Republic

This essay explores the role of economic, political, and social factors in the incidence of intimate partner violence (IPV). It considers the extent to which two prominent theses on the determinants of IPV – (1) the household bargaining model (HBM), and (2) the male backlash model (MBM) – best explain this phenomenon in the case of the Dominican Republic. Drawing on the 2007 Demographic and Health Survey (DHS), which differentiates between physical and sexual IPV, results from logistic regressions reveal that the HBM better explains physical IPV, while the MBM better predicts sexual IPV. Further, the HBM does better accounting for IPV among wealthier women, while the MBM best explains IPV among poorer women. The findings suggest the need to reconsider broad programs and policies intended to prevent and ameliorate IPV in the Dominican Republic, and to implement targeted initiatives focusing on the economic factors motivating them.     

How migration restrictions limit agglomeration and productivity in China

China strongly restricts rural–urban migration, resulting in a well acknowledged surplus of labor in agriculture. But migration is also restricted within sectors. This paper argues that these intra-sector restrictions lead to insufficient agglomeration of economic activity in both the rural industrial and urban sectors, with resulting first order losses in GDP. For urban areas the paper estimates a city productivity relationship, based on city GDP numbers. The effects of access, educational attainment, FDI, and public infrastructure on productivity are estimated. Given these, worker productivity is shown to be an inverted U-shape function of city employment, with the peak point shifting out as industrial composition moves from manufacturing to services, as predicted by urban theory. As far as we know this is the first paper to actually estimate the relationship between output per worker and city scale for any country. The majority of Chinese cities are shown to be potentially undersized—below the lower bound on the 95% confidence interval about the size where their output per worker peaks. The paper calculates the large gains from increased agglomeration in both the rural industrial and urban sectors.     

Consequences of Price Discrimination in Health Care

Atlantic Economic Journal -     

Industrial Centralization in Indonesia

In certain situations, economic liberalization policies canincrease the degree of spatial centralization of resources andspatial concentration of manufacturing in large metropolitanareas. In addition, historical patterns of location make itdifficult to alter the degree of centralization. This articleexplores these issues by specifying and estimating a nestedlogit model of industrial location of manufacturing activityin Java, focusing on the unincorporated sector. The resultsindicate that plants strongly prefer locations with mature plantsin related industries, which offer a built-up stock of localknowledge. In addition, the 1983 liberalization in Indonesiawas associated with increased centralization of the unincorporatedsector. Although the liberalization gave unincorporated firmsbetter access to government and other centralized services,firms needed to centralize to take advantage of these opportunitiesbecause the bureaucratic process is centralized and communicationsare poor. The relative increased growth of the corporate sectorfollowing liberalization may also have helped to further drawunincorporated plants into centralized locations.     

Researching Leisure and Physical Activity with Women of Color: Issues and Emerging Questions

The roles of women in the United States are changing, along with the idea that being female is mitigated by a number of constructions such as race, class, age, income, (dis)ability, culture, and sexual orientation. Interest in understanding physical activity as leisure embodied in movement, exercise, fitness, recreation, and sports has increased because moderate to vigorous physical activity is associated with a lower risk for premature death, some chronic diseases, and being overweight. Research from the Centers for Disease Control, however, has shown that fewer than 30% of minority women in the United States obtain sufficient amounts of moderate activity to derive physical and mental health benefits. The Cross Cultural Activity Participation Study was designed to measure physical activity habits in African American and American Indian women and to develop and validate a set of surveys to measure moderate physical activity. A qualitative component was included as part of the larger study to obtain additional information about the psychosocial context and sociocultural meanings of physical activity and perceptions of leisure. The process of data collection, analyses, and reporting the qualitative findings, as well as developing and validating quantitative measurement instruments, resulted in raising methodological issues about studying race and culture and theoretical concerns for future research. The purpose of this article is to retrospectively describe our research process and what we learned in undertaking it. If behavior changes, health improvement, and an enhanced quality of life are to be achieved, then researchers must continue to determine the best ways to examine the meanings that individuals attach to activities.     

Public and Private Capital Productivity Puzzle: A Nonparametric Approach

Is public expenditure productive? Is there a shortfall or excess in public capital investment? We address these old issues in the light of new econometric tools. It is argued that the Cobb-Douglas specification that ignores nonlinearity inherent in the functional relationship of the production technology causes incorrect estimates of input elasticities. To avoid possible model misspecification, we use Li-Racine generalized kernel estimation. This procedure is used to estimate the returns to private capital, employment, and public capital in gross state product from a panel of 48 states for 17 years. In contrast to previous studies, we find that the return to public capital is positive and significantly different from zero.     

The stock market, fundamentals, cash flow, and private investment: evidence from Japan

Using Japanese postwar annual aggregate data, we examine the responsiveness of investment to three variables — asset Q (stock market), fundamentals Q (discounted future “profits”), and cash flow. We find considerable support for cash flow, but only moderate and very weak support for fundamentals Q and asset Q, respectively.Earlier work that has estimated investment equations on Japanese data spanning the entire period from the 1960s to the 1990s may therefore be plagued with specification error. When estimating the investment equations, we are careful to split the Japanese post-war period into two samples.