Knowledge that Transforms

The results show that demand decreases with prices.They indicate that if we take a household with particular characteristics and vary only the marginal price a negative relationship holds between quantity and price.While this approach is less informative than that of section 1I, table 4 supports the downward sloping demand curve results rather than those produced in the Rosen framework and does not make any assumptions regarding the household's utility function. IV. ConclusionThis paper develops estimates of the demand for electricity in Medellin, Colombia using a method which exploits the information implicit in constrained maximization subject to a convex, but segmented linear, budget set.The estimates seem adequate statistically, fall within the accepted range of parameter estimates, and show a consistent pattern whereby richer consumers have absolutely larger price and income elasticities than do the poor.Their veracity is enhanced by similar results developed using a generalised Heckman method due to Vella (1990).This contrasts sharply with the results obtained when the standard Rosen method is applied to the same data.The formation of instruments which linearise the budget constraint was incapable with these data of identifying the downward sloping demand curve from the upward sloping supply curve.

A labor-market model of search and transitions is analyzed where certain jobs carry layoff prospects and others do not. The dynamic value functions are solved for reservation wages for searchers with a choice between these jobs. For the laid-off worker, the wage at the prior job emerges as an important determinant of the optimal search strategy. Similarly, prospect of layoff is an important consideration for permanently separated workers during search. Conditioning on the nonparametric estimates of the reservation wages, the model is estimated using data from the Employment Opportunities Pilot Project survey.

In a recent paper, Yoram C. Peles and Meir I. Schneller (1989) ignore the sampling autocorrelation bias. A replication of their work that removes the bias changes their results. With the bias removed, there is no evidence that their three long-term ratios follow an adjustment process.

Donald H. Dutkowsky, William G. Foote, Intertemporal Substitution in Macroeconomics: Consumption, Labor Supply, and Money Demand, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 74, No. 2 (May, 1992), pp. 333-338

Susan Feigenbaum, Gerard Anderson, Judith R. Lave, Medicare's Prospective Payment System: The Victim of Aggregation Bias?, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 74, No. 1 (Feb., 1992), pp. 185-191

The information value of central bank announcements of projected future money growth is shown to depend both on the accuracy of the announcements and the extent to which the announcements themselves are anticipated by the public. The authors construct a new data set on internal Federal Reserve money projections. These projections, which are kept secret while they are in force, are comparable in many important respects to publicly announced Bank of Japan money projections. Using a derivative of the law of iterated projections, the authors estimate the information value of disclosure on the part of the Bank of Japan and the cost of secrecy on the part of the Federal Reserve. They find that the value of the information provided by the Bank of Japan has been small in terms of reducing money surprises, but that disclosure by the Federal Reserve would have significantly reduced money surprises in the United States.

This paper examines evidence about whether workers' compensation adjudicators "split the difference" between the parties' positions. It uses data from a workers' compensation system that provide information about the parties' final offers in both settled and adjudicated cases. Estimates of an "equitable settlement" offer fit the data quite well (R squared = 0.87). They are consistent with the hypothesis that only the parties' positions affected the adjudicator's decision and that the parties' position had equal weight. Adjudicator's did not rely less on more disparate positions. Still, other factors had a strong impact on the parties' positions, which in turn affected the final ratings.

Econometric analysis of duration data raises difficult issues of statistical inference. Building on the work of Prentice (1974) and Farewell and Prentice (1977), Addison and Portugal (1987; henceforth, AP) use the extended generalized gamma (EGG) distribution to test the sensitivity of regression estimates to more restrictive distributional assumptions which frequently have been imposed by other studies. AP find that these restrictions are rejected by data from the 1984 Displaced Worker Survey (DWS) and that imposing them creates large and variable biases in the estimated effects of the independent variables. AP also find that very different distributional forms provide the best fit for two subsamples of displaced workers. Both results suggest that many findings from earlier studies using simple parametric hazard models of unemployment duration are not robust. In this comment, we show that the sensitivity of AP's estimation results to distributional assumptions is a consequence of using an endogenous criteria to stratify the estimation sample, namely, whether or not workers collect Ul. This is an especially serious problem for a sample of displaced workers, because (a) many workers report jobless spells of zero or very few weeks; and (b) most displaced workers are Ul eligible. We also identify several other limitations of the DWS data for estimating unemployment durations and perform sensitivity analysis.