This paper hypothesizes that value of time, and consequently labor force participation, can vary with circumstances specific to a marriage or a marriage market. Wives' traits valued in the marriage market are expected to be associated with lower labor force participation, whereas husbands' traits valued in the marriage market are expected to be associated with lower participation, rates on the part of wives. Evidence for these hypotheses is found on the basis of regressions of labor force participation for a sample of Israeli married women. Inclusion of traits valued in the marriage market and marital sorting patterns increases the explanatory power of the regressions.
A supply-determined model of housing investment is estimated from quarterly data over the 1963-83 period. The model is built on dynamic marginal cost pricing considerations and allows short- and long-run supply elasticities to differ. These are estimated as 1.0 and 3.0, respectively, but most of the long-run response occurs within 1 year. Rapid adjustment speed and the sizable long-run elasticity of supply are important factors in understanding the volatility of housing investment. The data also suggest some anomalies in the expected present value theory of asset pricing for housing capital.
Congressional voting on proposed floor amendments concerned solely with setting the level of the election campaign expenditure ceiling provision of the House Administration Committee's broad campaign finance reform bill of 1974 is analyzed for consistency with either the public-interest or economic theories of regulation. The benefit or cost to the individual congressman of a given ceiling is defined as the implied increase or decrease in his probability of reelection under the ceiling. Logit regression analysis provides the preponderant support for the economic theory of regulation by indicating that the likelihood of voting for a given ceiling varies directly with the implied change in reelection probability under the ceiling and is quite sensitive to the implied change.
In the presence of aggregate demand spillovers, an imperfectly competitive form's profit is positively related to aggregate income, which in turn rises with profits of all firms in the economy. This pecuniary externality makes a dollar of a firm's profit raise aggregate income by more than a dollar since other firms' profits also rise, and in this way gives rise to a "multiplier." Since such multipliers are ignored by firms making investment decisions, privately optimal investment decisions under uncertainty will not in general be socially optimal. Under reasonable conditions, investment is too low.
A dynamic general equilibrium model is developed in which goods are valued according to the characteristics they contain, the set of goods produced in any period is endogenously determined, and learning by doing is the force behind sustained growth. It is shown that the set of produced goods changes in a systematic way over time, with goods of higher quality entering each period and those of lower quality dropping out. The model is then used to study the effect of introducing a "traditional" sector in which there is no learning.
It is feared that low fertility and older age distributions in the developed countries might cause lower life cycle consumption because of the increased pension and health cost burden. The theoretical literature on intergenerational transfers has addressed this question but has considered only the consumption of market goods and has made no serious empirical attempt to measure the theoretical concepts necessary to assess the problem. This paper develops a theoretical model of intergenerational transfers incorporating time use. With the aid of time budget and consumer expenditure surveys, empirical estimates of the age profiles of various types of time and goods consumption are presented, and we conclude that (1) the net direction of intergenerational transfers is from younger to older ages; (2) under the golden-rule assumption, these transfers largely constitute an externality to childbearing; and (3) they are not large enough to offset the capital dilution effect that would result from higher fertility and more rapid population growth.
An examination of data on output and labor input reveals that some U.S. industries have marginal cost well below price. The conclusion rests on the finding that cyclical variations in labor input are small compared with variations in output. In booms, firms produce substantially more output and sell it for a price that exceeds the costs of the added inputs. The paper documents the disparity between price and marginal cost, where marginal cost is estimated from annual variations in cost. It considers a variety of explanations of the findings that are consistent with competition, but none is found to be completely plausible.
Tournament contracts are characterized that simultaneously elicit first-best efficient effort levels and self-selection of risk-neutral heterogeneous workers into ability-specific contracts. Comparisons across self-selected ability types are shown to be sometimes necessary to attain efficiency. Rationales are explored for not commonly observing such contracts in hierarchical organizations.
This paper presents a measure of the persistence of fluctuations in GNP based on the variance of its long differences. That measure finds little long-term persistence in GNP. Previous research on this question found a great deal of persistence in GNP, suggesting models such as a random walk. A reconciliation of this paper's results with previous research shows that conventional criteria for time-series model building can produce misleading estimates of persistence.