Knowledge that Transforms

A model for testing all types of relative price inefficiency expands the Averch-Johnson effect and makes it possible to test for absolute price efficiency, which exists if the value of the marginal product for each factor is equated to factor price and implies both cost minimization and production of the optimal quantity of output. Duality theory is used to derive the empirical model using 1973 data for electric utilities. The results indicate that relative and absolute price efficiency were generally not achieved by electric utilities in that year. 36 references, 1 table.

T HE stereotypical view of female employees is that they have relatively weak job attachment and that, in particular, they are especially prone to voluntary job separations. Although this notion is borne out by overall sex differences in aggregative quit rates, this evidence is at best only suggestive since it does not distinguish sex-specific differences in quit behavior from other factors, such as differences in job characteristics and wage rates.' The principal study to date of sex differences in worker quitting is that of Barnes and Jones (1974), who analyzed differences in aggregative quit rates by sex. Although their findings were consistent with the view that females are more prone to quitting, the analysis was restricted to observations for only 19 two-digit industries for each sex so that there was not sufficient information in the sample to analyze many important patterns of interest.2 Quit rate studies that do not focus specifically on female quit behavior typically have included a variable reflecting the percentage of workers of a particular sex in the industry. While industries with larger percentages of female employees generally have been associated with higher levels of quitting,3 these findings for samples of 47-52 two-digit industries are somewhat different from those found in other samples. Indeed, analysis of 95 3-digit industries by Viscusi (1979) reveals no significant sex effect on aggregative quit behavior. In this paper, I will utilize data for a large sample of individuals in an attempt to resolve the ambiguities in these earlier findings. The most familiar economic motivation underlying potential male-female quit differences is that women often leave the labor market to bear and raise children. Moreover, since wives typically earn lower wage rates than do their spouses, they may serve as secondary earners, entering the labor force during periods of temporary economic needs and exiting thereafter. In addition, family migration decisions, such as those analyzed by Mincer (1978), may lead to quits by wives whose husbands have been transferred to new locales. There also may be important differences in the lifetime employment choice pattern related to the role of quitting as part of an adaptive choice process.4 To the extent that women have less precise notions of their prospects for advancement and their working conditions, such as the presence of co-worker discrimination, they will be more likely to use the initial period of employment as a period of experimentation and then quit if their experiences are sufficiently unfavorable. An offsetting influence is the fact that males have a greater expected future period of work so that learninginduced quit behavior may offer greater potential gains even though the informational content of the on-the-job experiences may be less.5 Finally, in situations in which workers are unable to voice their complaints effectively and have them settled through grievance procedures, they will adopt an alternative economic response of exiting from the undesirable job context.6 CoReceived for publication October 23, 1978. Revision accepted for publication July 25, 1979. * Northwestern University and Council on Wage and Price Stability. Helpful comments were provided by Gregory M. Duncan, an anonymous referee, and members of the Northwestern Labor Seminar. John Link performed his usual excellent job as programmer for this research. I The importance of quit behavior to analyses of sex differences in employment and the inconclusive nature of existing studies is discussed by Reynolds (1978), especially on page 167, and by Pigors and Myers (1973). 2 Their principal regressions included only two age variables and an industry wage variable. Inclusion of a worker education variable knocked out the wage effect for males. See footnote 16 on page 447 of Barnes and Jones (1974). 3 See, for example, Burton (1969), Burton and Parker (1969), Parsons (1972), Pencavel (1970), and Stoikov and Raimon (1968) for aggregative results of this type. The signs for the worker sex variable are sometimes mixed or statistically insignificant.

O NE of the issues in the monetarist-fiscalist debate is whether it is more appropriate to obtain estimates of monetary and fiscal multipliers from structural models or reduced form equations. In recent years, Keynesians have challenged the results from reduced form equations on econometric grounds. They have argued that reduced form estimates are subject to bias if any of the following conditions exist:

Robert Archibald, Robert Gillingham, An Analysis of the Short-Run Consumer Demand for Gasoline Using Household Survey Data, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 62, No. 4 (Nov., 1980), pp. 622-628

An attempt has been made to improve upon existing specifications and estimations of freight demand by treating transportation as an input in the production process and estimating the derived input demand equations for rail and trucking associated with a general translog cost function. This estimation method also recognizes that rates and shipment characteristics are jointly dependent and takes this inter dependence into account in estimating the demand functions. Two tentative conclusions emerge from the findings of this paper. First, at least with respect to less-than-truckload (LTL), rail and truck transportation are largely independent. Therefore, relatively little modal misallocation of resources between rail and LTL trucking should result from ICC policies that attempt to maintain the value of service pricing structure. Second, the estimated own price elasticities of demand for rail services were sufficiently high to indicate that the railroads might not benefit from blanket rate increases but could benefit instead from selective rate cutting. It is noted that the unique methodology employed and the empirical findings described in this paper need to be verified using different data and different time periods.