Knowledge that Transforms

A basic relationship of the standard general equilibrium trade model relating product-price changes to factor-price changes is used—together with other economic relationships based on this model—to investigate empirically the importance of changes in trade, technology, and factor endowments in accounting for the shifts in relative wages of less-educated workers compared to more-educated workers from 1967 to 1996. In the early part of the period when wage inequality decreased, the dominant explanatory factor seems to have been a relative increase in the supply of highly educated labor. However, since the late 1970s, none of the three economic forces considered can alone account for the observed changes in relative wages, prices, outputs, net exports, and factor-use ratios. In particular, both education-biased technical progress that was greater in industries that intensively used more-educated labor and increased import competition in industries that intensively used less-educated labor seem to have played important roles in bringing about the increase in wage inequality during the 1980s and 1990s.

Current sales of most consumer durable goods are accounted for by replacements. However, only in recent years has the economic literature provided a more rigorous analysis of replacement purchases by incorporating elements of dynamic programming and of the theory of stochastic processes. This paper is an empirical study of household replacement decisions modeled as an optimal stopping rule. Using data from the Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS) of the U.S. Department of Energy, we conclude that demographic variables, operation and replacement costs, and equipment characteristics may affect ownership spells of appliances such as electric heaters and central air conditioners.

The paper investigates the effect of the time-to-build technology on investment dynamics. It explains the positive autocorrelation of investment by showing that investment is serially correlated once the time-to-build technology is taken into account. The paper also shows that the time-to-build technology can explain a substantial portion of the variation in aggregate investment data. Using estimated marginal Q, the paper illustrates that investment responds asymmetrically to different levels of Q (a fact in favor of the irreversibility argument).

The prediction that consumption-income ratios should decline as income rises in cross-sectional data is a feature of Friedman's (1957) permanent income hypothesis and other consumption-smoothing models. The theory thus provides a link between longitudinal income data and cross-sectional expenditure data: given measured income variability and a functional relationship between consumption and permanent income, we predict cross-sectional expenditure patterns and compare those predictions to actual values. Our approach cannot explain the actual skewness in consumption-income ratios under even the strictest consumption-smoothing model, which implies that income measurement error or other anomalies are affecting the data.

Many credit card issuers charge “fixed rates” that remain the same for three to five years, while the rest charge “variable rates” that are indexed to market rates. The presence of these two distinct rate types forces prices at firms selling an otherwise identical product to move asynchronously; variable rates move one-for-one with the index, while fixed rates stay constant. Empirical and theoretical analysis shows that this pricing structure provides an explanation for the simultaneous (yet seemingly contradictory) existence of high rate-cost margins and aggressive non-price competition for new customers, a phenomenon that existed in the credit card market in the early 1990s.

This paper investigates the role of managerial preferences in shaping corporate income tax evasion. Using noncompliance with the personal income tax as a measure of taste for evasion, the empirical results from a sample of corporate income tax returns show that managerial preferences play an important role in determining noncompliance with the corporate income tax. Basic sample tabulations show that, when compared to compliant firms, noncompliant firms are three times more likely to be managed by executives who have understated personal taxes. In addition, results from multivariate analyses suggest that the amount of underreported income is significantly higher in the presence of such executives.

While fiscal adjustment is commonly viewed as the cornerstone of macroeconomic stabilization, the effectiveness of alternative fiscal instruments in raising national saving is still poorly understood. This paper enters the debate by estimating a private consumption function that allows for two types of agents—finite horizons and liquidity constraints—and nests three different consumption hypotheses. Using a large-panel data set that includes both industrial and developing countries, we reject full Ricardian equivalence. We also find substantial differences between industrial and developing countries, regarding both the extent of Ricardian offsetting and the degree to which the government budget constraint is internalized.

The decline in the unskilled share of French employment is chiefly due to the slackness of domestic demand for those industries with the highest proportion of unskilled workers. The spread of computers has not been particularly conducive to substitution between skilled and unskilled labor. We test and accept the hypothesis of technical-progress neutrality within French industries. The mechanisms that generate inequality do not appear to be the same in France and in the United States. The source of inequality isn't so much technical progress per se as its interaction with the institutions that regulate the labor market.

We develop a procedure to rank-order objects using censored panel data sets. We illustrate this by ranking countries and commodities using disaggregated American import data and find evidence that countries and commodities can be ranked. Countries habitually begin to export goods to the United States according to an ordering; goods are also exported in order. We estimate these orderings using a methodology, that takes account of the fact that most goods are not exported by most countries in our sample. Our orderings seem sensible, robust, and intuitive, and they are correlated with macroeconomic phenomena such as productivity and growth rates.

Using quarterly data to estimate state-level matching functions, we obtain point estimates that are slightly higher than are found with national gross flows data, likely because of inherent differences in the data sources. We also estimate matching functions separately by the source of the new hire, and show that the results are consistent with the assumptions of endogenous job search by the employed and a preference for employed applicants by firms. Thus, care must be taken in interpreting empirical matching functions, which are likely a reduced-form combination of a structural matching function and a job competition model.