Knowledge that Transforms

Using three major U.K. pension reforms as natural experiments we investigate the relationship between pension saving and discretionary private savings. Unlike most differences-in-differences approaches which rely on average differences between control and treatment group, we use economic theory to model the response of each individual household. The empirical analysis, based on the Family Expenditure Survey, uses both time-series and cross-sectional variation to identify the behavioral response. The earnings-related tier of the pension scheme is found to have a negative impact on private savings with relatively high substitution elasticities; the impact of the flat-rate tier is not significantly different from zero.

Economics departments face increasing pressure to improve the quality of undergraduate instruction (William E. Becker, 2000). A teachertraining program (TTP) is one strategy departments can use to improve the quality of teaching. A TTP typically targets graduatestudent teaching assistants (TA’s) but can also provide valuable education to new junior faculty. The task set for this paper is to describe the ideal TTP. What is ideal is a matter of opinion. Mine is based on long experience with the TTP at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, on familiarity with TTP’s at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Indiana University, and Purdue University, and on my experience as director of teaching workshops sponsored by the AEA Committee on Economic Education (Salemi et al., 1996). I begin with principles that should guide creation of a TTP, describe a TTP’s essential elements, and conclude with a consideration of resource issues.

Productivity reflects not only how efficiently inputs are transformed into outputs, but also how well information is applied to resource allocation decisions. This paper examines how information technology has affected capacity utilization in the trucking industry. Estimates for 1997 indicate that advanced on-board computers (OBCs) have increased capacity utilization among adopting trucks by 13 percent. These increases are higher than for 1992, suggesting lags in the returns to adoption, and are highly skewed across hauls. The 1997 estimates imply that OBCs have enabled 3-percent higher capacity utilization in the industry, which translates to billions of dollars of annual benefits.

Mortgage overage pricing is little understood by consumers and has received little academic scrutiny. We consider the impact of the market power of individual loan officers on overages paid by borrowers, particularly minorities. We include numerous borrower and lender characteristics unavailable previously. We find that minorities who purchase homes pay larger overages than whites, but our evidence suggests that this traces to differences in the pools of borrowers rather than to racial discrimination. We conclude that a more effective way to eliminate racial differences in overages is to increase minorities’ ability to bargain rather than to enact additional anti-discrimination laws.

This paper introduces a new technique for testing the Heckscher-Ohlin model that allows for the possibility that countries with sufficiently disparate endowments specialize in unique subsets of goods. Results based upon industry-level data reject one-size-fits-all homogeneity in favor of Heckscher-Ohlin specialization. Results also reveal that industry-level data hide substantial intra-industry heterogeneity, violating the assumptions of the model and complicating the interpretation of results from earlier research. A methodology for adjusting industry output to reflect underlying product variation is introduced. Reestimation of the model using adjusted aggregates in place of standard industry classifications provides strong support for Heckscher-Ohlin specialization.

A new and easily implementable framework for the empirical analysis of the relationship between aggregate and individual wages is developed. Aggregate real wages are shown to contain three important bias terms: one associated with the dispersion of individual wages, a second deriving from compositional changes in the (selected) sample of workers, and a third reflecting the distribution of working hours. Their importance for interpreting the path of aggregate wages and of the returns to education for recent experience in Britain is highlighted. A close correspondence between the estimated biases and the patterns of differences shown by aggregate wages is established.

We study nearly 7,000 retirement accounts during the April 1994–August 1998 period. Several interesting patterns emerge. Most asset allocations are extreme (either 100 percent or zero percent in equities) and there is inertia in asset allocations. Equity allocations are higher for males, married investors, and for investors with higher earnings and more seniority on the job; equity allocations are lower for older investors. There is very limited portfolio reshuffling, in sharp contrast to discount brokerage accounts. Daily changes in equity allocations correlate only weakly with same-day equity returns and do not correlate with future equity returns.

Strong and widely accepted evidence shows that the natural rate of unemployment varies over time with substantial amplitude. The frictions in the labor market that account for positive normal levels of unemployment are not simple and mechanical. Instead, as a rich modern body of theory demonstrates, the natural rate of unemployment is an equilibrium in which the volumes of job-seeking by workers and worker-seeking by employers reach a balance controlled by fundamental determinants of the relative prices of the two activities. In recessions, unemployment rises, and job vacancies fall. The natural explanation is an economywide fall in labor demand. But a compelling model that generates a fall in labor demand without a counterfactual fall in productivity has eluded theorists to date. Nonetheless, policymakers have appropriately adopted the view that the natural rate varies over time and is not a simple benchmark for setting monetary instruments.