OCCUPATIONAL EARNINGS BEHAVIOR AND THE INEQUALITY OF EARNINGS BY SEX AND RACE IN THE UNITED STATES*

This paper examines differences in earnings by occupations, and within occupations by sex and by race, on the basis of the 1/100 Public Use Samples of the 1960 and 1970 U.S. Population Censuses. It employs interval analysis to establish 32 categories of occupations with similar characteristics. Little relation was found between mean earnings of occupational groups and the degree of earnings inequality within them. When the figures are examined by sex, it was found that men, on average, earned over twice as much as women in both years, but women's earnings were more unequally distributed (as measured by the Gini coefficient). Women are concentrated in the traditional “female” occupations, which tend to be those at the bottom of the earnings scale, and men have a monopoly of the higher paid occupations. But mean earnings for men exceeded those for women in all occupational groups except one, even in the primarily female occupations. Standardizing first for occupational distribution and then for earnings by occupation, it was found that earnings differences between males and females within occupation had a greater impact on the overall male-female earnings ratio than did differences in occupational distribution by sex. In contrast, when the figures are examined by race, the change in occupational distribution (primarily the movement of blacks out of farming and of blacks and Spanish speakers out of personal services) was the major factor. There was also a considerable degree of earnings inequality within demographic groups. The degree of inequality was in the main reduced when the demographic groups were subdivided into occupations, but it was still substantial. Additional factors like time worked, schooling, and experience must be taken into consideration in understanding this phenomenon.     

Una nuova caratterizzatione dell'ammissibilità nella teoria delle decisioni

In questo lavoro viene fornita una nuova caratterizzazione dell'ammissibilità attraverso un adeguato uso della nozione di ammissibilità parziale. Questa caratterizzazione consente di affrontare le questioni riguardanti la completezza della classe delle decisioni ammissibiliti sotto condizioni «maneggevoli». Fornisce inoltre un approccio unificante al problema della completezza che consente di derivare, come casi particolari, alcuni risultati già noti nella letteratura sull'argomento.

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In this paper a new characterization of admissibility is given for general decision problems. It is based on an adequate use of the notion of partial admissibility.A general decision problem is usually synthetized by a triplet (, , ) where is the states (or parameters) space, the set of available decisions and is a family of real valued functions defined on and expressing numerically the consequences of choosing when the state is . The set is regarded as a subset of the space of all real valued functions on endowed with the topology of pointwise convergence.As for as admissibility is concerned all the pertinent information about decisions are contained in the corresponding functionsW .This allows to introduce a notion of partial admissibility through the neigh-bourhoods of this topology. Admissibile decisions are then shown to be limits of monotone non increasing sequences of partially admissible decisions.Moreover this topological characterization allows to prove the completeness of classes of admissible decisions under acceptable systems of conditions which contain as special cases, known results in literature.

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Lavoro svolto nell'ambito del Gruppo Nazionale per l'Analisi Funzionale e le sue Applicazioni del C.N.R.     

Listen and learn

After making a solicitation, a lot can be gained by listening to a donor's questions. Do not simply answer the question. Consider why they asked it in the first place.     

A model of public sector wage determination

The paper presents an empirical model of wage determination in the public sector that leads to the specification of a system of interrelated wage equations for municipal employees, which allows for occupational and geographic interdependence of wages. The model also considers the influence of public employee unions, municipal government form, and monopsony power of local governments on the wages of municipal employees. Several variants of the derived system of equations are estimated based upon 1967 cross-section data for 478 cities, and the policy implications of the results are discussed.     

Estimation of a non-invertible moving average process: The case of overdifferencing

The effect of differencing all of the variables in a properly specified regression equation is examined. Excessive use of the difference transformation induces a non-invertible moving average (MA) process in the disturbances of the transformed regression. Monte Carlo techniques are used to examine the effects of overdifferencing on the efficiency of regression parameter estimates, inferences based on these estimates, and tests for overdifferenccing based on the estimator of the MA parameter for the disturbances of the differences regression. Overall, the problem of overdifferencing is not serious if careful attention is paid to the properties of the disturbances of regression equations.     

Effect of outliers on the estimation of parameters

Summary The estimation of parameter in the type of distributionf(x)=b x ^{–1 /b} exp (–x ^b (/b),x>0, is considered, when several outliers of the type , ,r=1,2, ...,k, are present in the data. The estimates of as well as of 's are put in the closed form. Special cases, Weibull, Gamma and Exponential are considered for the case of single outlier. Actual estimates are calculated from the generated samples of size 2 and 3 for the Weibull and Exponential.