Knowledge that Transforms

Volunteer activity is work performed without monetary recompense. This article shows that volunteering is a sizeable economic activity in the United States, that volunteers have high skills and opportunity costs of time, that standard labor supply explanations of volunteering account for only a minor part of volunteer behavior, and that many volunteer only when requested to do so. This suggests that volunteering is a "conscience good or activity"-something that people feel morally obligated to do when asked, but which they would just as soon let someone else do.

This article examines the long-term wage and earnings losses of displaced workers using longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Consistent with previous research, the author finds that the effects of displacement are quite persistent, with earnings and wages remaining approximately 9 percent below their expected levels six or more years after displacement. She then shows that much of this persistence can be explained by additional job losses in the years following an initial displacement. Workers who avoid additional displacements have earnings and wage losses of 1 percent and 4 percent six or more years after job loss. Copyright 1997 by University of Chicago Press.

Using Michigan Panel Study of Income Dynamics data for 1979 and 1988, the authors analyze how a falling gender wage gap occurred despite changes in wage structure unfavorable to low-wage workers. The decrease is traced to 'gender-specific' factors which more than counterbalanced changes in measured and unmeasured prices working against women. Supply shifts net of demand were unfavorable for women generally and hurt high-skilled more than middle- and low-skilled women. By analyzing wages, the authors find support for the notion of a gender twist in supply and demand having its largest negative effect on high-skilled women. Copyright 1997 by University of Chicago Press.

This article assesses the possible future directions and roles of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. It first reviews their initially envisaged roles at Bretton Woods, and their evolution, concluding that both institutions played valuable roles earlier on. But for both institutions, the world has changed, and the questions as to their future are important. For the IMF, those questions center on its role in providing finance for poor developing countries in balance of payments difficulties and on its role for middle income countries in managing financial crises. For the World Bank, the question is whether it can and should gradually phase out lending for most middle income countries except in times of drastic policy reforms and focus on low-income countries, or whether it should address the soft issues of development.

Early economic models assumed that the maximizing behavior of individual actors was the primary determinant of political as well as market outcomes. This approach revolved several long-standing puzzles in political science, but created new anomalies in place of the old: why do citizens vote in large elections? Why are democratic legislatures as stable as they are? Partly in response to these anomalies, the emphasis has shifted from the study of self-interested choice, to the study of constraints on self-interested choice. This has opened new doors for the study of bureaucracies, parties, and other fundamental political institutions.

Friedrich A. Hayek was a life-long opponent of socialism. Three of his contributions are surveyed and placed within historical context: his debates in the 1930s with the market socialists, his political critique of socialism in The Road to Serfdom, and his evolutionary arguments against "rationalist constructivists." Recent discussions that use the economics of information to analyze the prospects for socialism are also reviewed. It is argued that theorists working in the economics of information have not recognized just how far Hayek's conceptualization of the appropriate theoretical constructs for economics deviates from those of mainstream economists. As such they have misunderstood what may constitute an independent set of arguments against socialism.