Political Repression and Child Labour: Theory and Empirical Evidence

Most normative studies on child labour arrive at the conclusion that child labour is detrimental to social welfare. Child labour is, however, still prevalent in many developing countries even though in many of these countries it is forbidden by law. In this paper we develop a political‐economic model that explains lenient enforcement of existing child labour legislation. The most important implication of our model is that in countries with repressive political regimes enforcement is more lenient and child labour thus more prevalent than in countries enjoying political freedom. We test this implication and find that it is confirmed by the data.     

Who Benefits from the Reform of Pension Taxation in Germany?*

The present paper quantifies the revenue, distributional and efficiency effects of the recent reform of pension taxation in Germany. The starting point is the new legislation, which has introduced a switch to the deferred taxation of retirement benefits starting in 2005. We compare this reform with an alternative transition proposed by the Federation of German Pension Insurance Institutes (VDR), where double taxation is avoided at the cost of higher revenue losses. Our simulations indicate significant growth and efficiency gains from the new tax legislation. Winners from the reform are mainly younger workers, while older workers, civil servants and the self‐employed will lose. The VDR proposal would have resulted in higher efficiency gains, but also in stronger distributional consequences.     

Rezensionen

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Temporary Help Work: Earnings,Wages, and Multiple Job Holding*

Temporary help services (THS) employment has been growing in size, particularly among disadvantaged workers. An extended policy debate focuses on the low earnings, limited benefits, and insecurity that such jobs appear to provide. We investigate the earnings and wage differentials observed between THS and other jobs in a sample of disadvantaged workers. We find lower quarterly earnings at THS jobs but a $1 per hour wage premium. We reconcile these findings in terms of the shorter duration and lower hours worked at THS jobs. We interpret the premium as a compensating wage differential.     

The Rate of Change in Evolutionary Systems and Evolutionary Economic Modeling

Evolutionary economics seeks to model socio-economic reality as an evolutionary system. This powerful approach entails the implication of the continuous loss of information through the evolutionary process. The implication corresponds to evolutionary biology, although the systems in evolutionary economics are different from those in evolutionary biology. The issue of the loss of information has not been extensively studied in economics. Many open questions remain: Which knowledge is lost under what circumstances? Can loss of information be harmful to the socio-economic system as a whole in the presence of runaway dynamics caused by, for example, network externalities? How can the development of knowledge in economic systems be studied? The present article examines these questions and more.     

Suboptimal segmentation: Assessing the use of demographics in financial services advertising

Marketers routinely make use of demographic-based segmentation as a means of targeting customers of financial services. This article builds on growing evidence that a demographic-based approach is ill-founded. Using a large sample we investigate whether demographic information is of use in segmenting customers and find little support for existing practice. Implications for researchers and managers are discussed.     

Technical Efficiency and Producers’ Individual Technology: Accounting for Within and Between Regional Farm Heterogeneity

Differences in resource endowment between regions influence the technologies applied in agriculture and cause location‐specific effects on production and technical change. Access to technologies may also differ within regions because producers may apply different technologies in production due to different characteristics. Within this setting, we extend the existing literature by considering that producers face region‐ and farm‐specific production frontiers. The treatment of essentially heterogeneous technical efficiency (TE) is performed following a two‐step procedure. First, a random coefficient specification of the production technology is used to measure the interactions of technology adoption with time, input factors, and output. Second, linear programming techniques are employed to envelop the optimal level of technology. This procedure is applied to household‐level data from eastern, central, and western provinces in China. Our results provide evidence that TE is significantly affected by farm heterogeneity. This factor influences TE directly as a producer‐specific input, and indirectly through interaction with observable inputs such as land, labor, capital, and intermediate inputs. Our results also prove the assumption that farming technology exhibits region‐specific characteristics. Furthermore, there is a disparity of TE across provinces that narrows over the study period and is driven by the shifts of production to the metafrontier. Les différences observées dans la répartition des ressources entre les régions influencent les technologies utilisées en agriculture et entraînent des effets spécifiquement liés au lieu géographique sur la production et le changement technique. L’accès aux technologies peut également varier suivant les régions puisque les producteurs peuvent choisir des technologies de production en fonction de caractéristiques variées. Dans ce contexte, nous accroissons la littérature existante en tenant compte du fait que les producteurs sont confrontés à des frontières de production spécifiques à une région et à une ferme. Nous avons mesuré l’efficacité technique essentiellement hétérogène à l’aide d’une méthode en deux étapes. Premièrement, nous avons utilisé la spécification à coefficients aléatoires de la technologie de production afin de mesurer les interactions de l’adoption de la technologie avec le temps, les facteurs d’intrant et les extrants. Deuxièmement, nous avons utilisé des techniques de programmation linéaire pour déterminer le niveau de technologie optimal. Nous avons appliqué cette méthode à des données recueillies auprès de ménages de provinces situées dans l’est, le centre et l’ouest de la Chine. Les résultats de notre étude montrent que l’efficacité technique est considérablement influencée par l’hétérogénéité des fermes. Ce facteur influence directement l’efficacité technique comme un intrant spécifique à un producteur et indirectement par l’interaction avec des intrants observables tels que les terres, la main‐d’?uvre, le capital et les intrants intermédiaires. Les résultats de notre étude appuient également l’hypothèse selon laquelle la technologie agricole reflète les caractéristiques spécifiques d’une région. De plus, l’efficacité technique montre une disparité entre les provinces, une disparité qui s’est réduite au cours de la période d’étude et qui a été alimentée par les changements de production à la méta‐frontière.