Half the power,half the income and half the glory,the use of microeconomic theory in women's emancipation research

Summary Major fields of economic research to understand the development of women's integration into the economy and women's economic independence can be categorized into three main groups. First, theories that attempt to explain wage and earnings differences according to gender; second, theories that attempt to explain the division of work within the family, and third, theories that attempt to explain the determination of fertility and the combination of work and motherhood. This paper offers a review of these three areas of neo-classical theory as well as an evaluation as to what extent the theories are adequate to answer the questions of women's emancipation research.This article is a revised version of my inaugural speech held on May 30th, 1990, at the official assumption of the chair of Labour market issues with special attention to women's emancipation, at the University of Amsterdam. Comments on earlier drafts have been received by Marga Bruyn-Hundt, Joop Hartog, Jan Hoem, Henriëtte Maassen van den Brink, Notburga Ott, Hettie Pott-Buter, Jolande Sap, Kea Tijdens, the participants of the demographic colloquium at Stockholm University, and the editor ofDe Economist.     

Banks and the stability of the international financial system

Summary Does today's banking scene pose a potential threat to the stability of the international financial system? The article discusses three possible sources of vulnerability of the international banking system: a major bank failure causing a general banking crisis via the extensive interbank linkages; the systemic risks allegedly inherent in certain new (as well as traditional) financial products; and the impact of external events such as debt crises, violent swings in exchange or interest rates, deregulation and recession. The author's conclusion is twofold: systemic risks clearly exist, but the probability of a major banking crisis tends to be greatly exaggerated. Banks not only survived the various crises of the seventies and eighties; they also learned in the process. Capital and reserves have been strengthened, provisions for country risk and for general contingencies have increased, supervision has been tightened and it is exercised on a comprehensive as well as a world-wide consolidated basis (i.e. including all contingent and off-balance liabilities, and all offshore activities). Assuming reasonably intelligent policies on the part of the monetary authorities and adequate international coordination, a general banking crisis can be avoided. Official rescue operations do, however, raise difficult questions of an ethical, political and economic nature.     

Fertility projection based on birth order data--a Swedish approach

"The decreasing fertility rates in Sweden during the 1970s can be explained as postponement of childbearing. An increasingly larger part of each generation has chosen to bear children at a late age, after education and some years of occupational work. As a consequence, the yearly age-specific rates will, in years to come, change systematically towards relatively high rates for women in the second half of the fertile period; changes which are important in population projections. To predict the future rates a model based on birth order data and assumptions about the final family size is used. The model and its application in the 1989 projection of the Swedish population is discussed in the paper. Alternative projections and the assumptions behind the alternatives are specified."     

Reduced Form Auctions Revisited

This note uses the Theorem of the Alternative to prove new results on the implementability of general, asymmetric auctions, and to provide simpler proofs of known results for symmetric auctions. The tradeoff is that type spaces are taken to be finite.