Satisfaction with current commuting expense as related to the relative fuel efficiency of a desired car purchase

Although projecting the demand for cars in North America has been the subject of research for almost half a century,^1–6 increases in the price of petroleum and petroleum products during the 1970s prompted an interest in projecting the demand for fuel-efficient cars. The purpose of this paper is to assess factors affecting the relative fuel efficiency of a desired car purchase among households with at least one individual employed outside the home. In addition to socio-economic and demographic characteristics of the household, sex of the worker, distance to work and satisfaction with the expense involved in the journey to work are used to predict relative efficiency of a potential car purchase. The analysis is not intended to follow the lines of a traditional economic analysis. Rather, its purpose is to add other dimensions to such analyses.     

The managerial behaviour of families with preschool children

The purpose of this study is to examine the managerial behaviour of families with preschool children. Dummy variable regression analysis is used as an analysis of covariance procedure in order to ascertain how reported managerial behaviour scores of families with only younger children vary with regard to other family types. This study has resulted in two major findings. The first is that there is indication that managerial behaviour is more a function of family composition than socio-economic/demographic characteristics. The second finding is that families with only preschool children are more similar to families with only older children than to families with both younger and older children or families without children. The conclusion is that it is not just the presence of preschool children that makes a difference in managerial behaviour, but whether or not there are only preschool children in the family.     

Rhetoric in Economic Research: The Case of Gender Wage Differentials

Scientific rhetoric can have a profound impact on the perception of research; it can also drive and direct further research efforts. What determines whether results are discussed in a neutral or a judgmental way? How precise and convincing do results have to be so that authors call for significant policy changes? These questions are in general difficult to answer, because rhetoric on the one hand, and content and methodology of the paper on the other, cannot be separated easily. We therefore used a unique example to examine this question empirically: the analysis of gender wage differentials. Here, the Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition represents a standard research method that compares male and female earnings, holding observable factors constant. We analyzed close to 200 papers to investigate what drives authors to talk about discrimination, whether and when they call for policy activism, or when they are more hesitant to do so. Our results show that American authors are more reluctant to refer to discrimination. So are women, but only with respect to the titles of their papers. Furthermore, we find that the better the data and method used in a paper, the more likely an author is to assign his/her estimate of unequal wages to discrimination. The contrary is true the higher the prestige of the author or the research outlet.     

On the Rate Structure of the American Life Insurance Market

This article re-examines the conclusion of previous studies that price dispersion is extreme in the American whole life insurance market. We take an axiomatic approach to the problem of measuring “price” dispersion in the market for the multiparameter whole life contracts, studying the distribution across contract offers of a price index which is uniquely determined by two conditions. In contrast to the accepted wisdom, we find that the derived measure of price dispersion is only 3.6% and that much of this dispersion can be accounted for by measurement error.