Time to work or time to play: The effect of student employment on homework,sleep, and screen time

We use detailed time-diary information on high school students’ daily activities from the 2003–2008 American Time Use Surveys (ATUS) to investigate the effects of employment on the time a student spends on homework and other major activities. Time-diary data are more detailed and accurate than data derived from responses to “usual activity” survey questions underlying other analyses and capture the immediate effects of working that may well accumulate over time to affect future outcomes. Our results suggest that employment decreases the time that high school students spend on homework, which is human-capital building, on all days, but also decreases screen time on non-school days, which may be considered unproductive time. Employed teens get more than the recommended amount of sleep on school days, and only slightly less on non-school days.     

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The efficient market hypothesis implies that (risk-adjusted) asset prices cannot be cointegrated. On the other hand, arbitrage processes prevent prices of fundamentally related assets from drifting too far away. An attractive model that reconciles these two conflicting facts is the non-linear error correction mechanism (ECM). Such a process tolerates small deviations from the long-run relationship. For more substantial deviations, an effective adjustment process pushes the diverging prices towards their fundamental relationship. In this paper parametric and non-parametric techniques are employed to investigate the ECM between prices of voting and non-voting stocks. Despite its intuitive appeal, we find little evidence for a non-linear relationship between German dual-class shares. Only in four out of 12 cases does the threshold ECM yield a substantial improvement of fit. In other cases, the evidence for non-linearity is rather weak and the threshold ECM fails to outperform the linear model.     

Cost-based pricing: Behavioral aspects of price decisions for capital goods

Some empirical research is reported upon the question, whether the type of cost calculation has a significant influence on suppliers' price decisions in capital goods markets. Experimental findings indicate that highly aggregated cost information (full cost accounting) effects ceteris paribus higher offering prices than disaggregated cost information (complete transparency of cost structure). A complex causal model of price decisions in this field is developed which is capable of giving further insights into the empirical effects of psychological variables in the price decision process.     

Which workers gain upon adopting a computer?

Abstract.  Using the Canadian Workplace and Employee Survey and controlling for individual and establishment fixed-effects, we find that within a year of adopting a computer, the average worker earns a 3.6% higher wage than a worker who did not use a computer. Returns are even larger for managers and professionals, highly educated workers, and those with significant prior computer experience. Employees who adopt computers for use with applications that require high cognitive skills earn the highest returns.     

Dispersion in Dispersion: Measuring Establishment-Level Differences in Productivity

We describe new experimental productivity dispersion statistics, Dispersion Statistics on Productivity (DiSP), jointly produced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and the Census Bureau, that complement the official BLS industry-level productivity statistics. The BLS has a long history of producing industry-level productivity statistics, which represent the average establishment-level productivity within industries when appropriately weighted. These statistics cannot, however, tell us about the variation in productivity levels across establishments within those industries. Dispersion in productivity across businesses can provide information about the nature of competition and frictions within sectors and the sources of rising wage inequality across businesses. DiSP data show enormous differences in productivity across establishments within industries in the manufacturing sector. We find substantial variation in dispersion across industries, increasing dispersion from 1997 to 2016, and countercyclical total factor productivity dispersion. We hope DiSP will enable further research into understanding productivity differences across industries and establishments and over time.