Knowledge that Transforms

Using data from two longitudinal surveys of American high school seniors, we show that basic cognitive skills had a larger impact on wages for 24-year-old men and women in 1986 than in 1978. For women, the increase in the return to cognitive skills between 1978 and 1986 accounts for all of the increase in the wage premium associated with post-secondary education. We also show that high school seniors' mastery of basic cognitive skills had a much smaller impact on wages two years after graduation than on wages six years after graduation.

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In 1991, the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers undertook an initiative to increase the quality of economic statistics. One specific objective was to reduce the size of revisions in GNP estimates. The authors present evidence that one straightforward and inexpensive way of forwarding this objective is for the Department of Commerce to utilize better publicly available information released by other governmental agencies. An important caveat, however, applies: the relationship appears to be nonlinear. Specifically, the inefficient use of information is concentrated in those quarters where the change in the preliminary GNP estimate is large in absolute value. Copyright 1995 by MIT Press.

Recently developed methods in the analysis and measurement of latent factor models for time series are utilised to study international business cycles and their relationship to international stockmarket price behaviour. An advantage of these methods is that the duality properties between time domain and frequency domain approaches for investigating the properties of time series can be exploited to identify and model business cycles. The empirical results show that the six countries studied, which include the United States, Australia, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany and Japan, exhibit coherent national business cycles, although these cycles are not all alike. It is also found that international coherence in economic activity has increased in the flexible exchange rate period, although it is not as strong as it is for the national business cycles. The coherence between stockmarket prices and business cycles is not strong, both nationally and internationally, but international stockmarkets appear to show greater mutual coherence than do the corresponding economies.

Market disruption or the threat thereof constitutes grounds for restraining countries under the U.S. Multifibre Arrangement (MFA). Since 1980, however, countries accounting for very small shares of U.S. imports have been restrained. This study estimates the determinants of U.S. voluntary export restraints under MFA I and MFA II-III using a bivariate probit model with sample selection. Results show a shift from targeting large developing country exporters to targeting those that are small but have rapidly growing sales. This raises the cost of the MFA to the United States. It also suggests that expansion of exports by developing countries will be met by restrictions on market access. Copyright 1995 by MIT Press.

Empirical implications for the variability of firm value in various models of industry evolution are discussed. Under certain conditions, learning models imply that industries with higher sunk costs should exhibit greater difference in firm value between entering and exiting firms whereas external shocks models imply that industries with higher sunk costs should exhibit greater variability of firm value over time relative to a numeraire industry. The theoretical results from external shocks models are consistent with agricultural data from California and Florida. Copyright 1995 by MIT Press.

The extreme bounds analysis in Leamer (1982) is extended to the Tobit model with censoring. The extension involves the simple modification of replacing the censored values of the dependent variable by their expectation conditional on the MLEs and using the negative of the Hessian evaluated at the MLEs in place of the inverse of the covariance matrix. The application of this method to a data set that pools U.S. nontariff barriers across industries and countries arrives at the surprisingly robust (to changes in the prior) conclusion that U.S. nontariff barriers against its largest trading partners are already significantly retaliatory. Copyright 1995 by MIT Press.

Economists commonly estimate the value of characteristics not traded in explicit markets by hedonic pricing. Unfortunately, these nonexplicitly traded characteristics often display a lack of independent variation or multicollinearity. Often some prior information on the value of these characteristics is available from submarkets. This paper utilizes this type of prior information to circumvent multicollinearity problems in hedonic pricing models using an inequality restricted Bayesian estimator. The authors perform a Monte Carlo experiment and cross-validation analysis to demonstrate the superiority of inequality restricted Bayesian over ordinary least squares at many margins in a variety of situations typically faced in hedonic estimation. Copyright 1995 by MIT Press.

Earlier studies have presented mixed evidence on the rationality of the Federal Reserve's preliminary money stock estimates. The authors investigate the rationality of M1A, M1, M2, and M3 for both seasonally and not seasonally adjusted data. They find preliminary growth rates of these aggregates to be rational for not seasonally adjusted data but irrational when data are seasonally adjusted. Using Monte Carlo studies, the authors conclude that irrationality in seasonally adjusted data arises from the specific seasonal adjustment procedure used by the Federal Reserve. As a result, researchers conducting similar tests may want to focus exclusively on not seasonally adjusted data. Copyright 1995 by MIT Press.

In many advertising-intensive industries one observes market share persistence, i.e., firms maintaining lead market shares over long periods of time. I hypothesize that firms that have the largest stock of well-established brands, a stock that I term brand capital, are most likely to introduce new products in response to new market information about consumer preferences. Firms with less brand capital delay their introductions until the uncertainty concerning the market size is reduced. I present empirical support in a study of new product introductions in the U.S. beverage industry.