Knowledge that Transforms

No significant convergence between Canadian and American income per capita occurred during the first ninety years of the twentieth century. This lack of convergence does not appear to have been due to technological dependence, input price distortions, or diseconomies of scale within the Canadian manufacturing sector. The evidence presented in this paper is based on total factor productivity measurement, statistical testing, and counterfactual experimentation using data from national statistical agencies and firm-level sources.

This paper examines the construction of a price index based on an estimated-demand system. In principle the method examined can produce a price index that takes account of the introduction of new products and quality changes in existing products. However, I isolate two key assumptions that have to be made in order to interpret the demand estimates into welfare measures. Using estimates of a brand-level demand system for ready-to-eat cereal, I demonstrate the empirical importance of the assumptions. For the data I use, depending on the interpretation of the demand estimates, a price index can range between a 35% increase over the five years examined to a 2.4% decrease.

Minimum-variance hedging of a contingent claim in discrete time is suboptimal when the contingent claim is hedged for multiple periods and the objective is to maximize the expected utility of cumulative hedging errors. This is because the hedging errors are not independent. The difference between a minimum-variance hedge and the optimal multiperiod hedge is called the hedging demand and depends on the hedger's preferences, the characteristics of the contingent claim, the trading frequency and horizon, and most importantly the joint distribution of the contingent claim and the underlying security prices. Since modeling this joint distribution is empirically controversial, I examine nonparametrically the economic importance of hedging demands in the case of hedging Standard & Poor's 500 index options.

This paper empirically tests for a multidimensional separating equilibrium in contract negotiations and tests for evidence of the moral hazard inherent in many contracts. Using contract and performance data on players drafted into the National Football League from 1986 through 1991, we find evidence that players use delay to agreement and incentive clauses to reveal their private information during contract negotiations. In addition, our empirical tests of the moral hazard issue indicate that a player's effort level is influenced by the structure of his contract.

We derive a structural index for labor market density based on the Ellison-Glaeser index for industry concentration. The labor market density index serves as a proxy for the number of workers that are potentially available for jobs in a particular area. The index is based on observed home-work location patterns. It is particularly useful for testing theories where the scale of the market matters. We apply this index to a standard wage equation and find that it explains almost half of the cross-region wage variance.

This article uses unobserved-components time series models to capture the underlying trends in the quarterly deciles of U.S. hourly wages. Tests of stability and divergence are developed as a means of assessing changes in inequality. The decrease in the wage gender gap is examined, and the impact of changes in the minimum wage is assessed.

This paper investigates the hypothesis that individuals are less willing to marry when there are more potential partners to search amongst, and thus when others are also less prone to marry. To do this, it develops a reduced-form method [a variation on Manski's (1993) model] that allows identification of such spillovers in two-sided matching markets. Estimates from this method are internally consistent, unbiased, robust to different definitions of the marriage market, and large enough to warrant attention. Additional evidence suggests that the effect works via the proposed search mechanism.

This study provides empirical evidence concerning the economic feasibility of competition in the local market for video-delivery services. Using responses from the FCC's 1995 cost survey, we jointly estimate a translog cost function with factor share equations. To evaluate subadditivity, the fitted total cost of each firm is compared with the cost of two firms providing the same total output in eleven different market scenarios. Although costs were mildly superadditive, in the vast majority of cases they were lower when one firm provided the output. Average cost savings with respect to a monopoly were fairly small, ranging from 1.37% with a 10% market overlap to 5.05% with a complete overbuild. We also calculated marginal cost from the fitted total cost equation, and a price for cable services derived from the FCC survey data. Using these results and Rubinovitz's price elasticity of −1.46, we estimated that reregulation had a regulatory effectiveness of 0.3251 and held prices to 40.5% of the monopoly level.

An incomplete demand system is developed for recreation and donation choices, subject to both money and time constraints. The model results in a three-good system, with an endogenous marginal value of time for estimation. The model is implemented by adapting Deaton and Muellbauer's locally flexible almost ideal demand system to a two-constraint recreation model of trips and donations of California whale watchers. Exact welfare measures are calculated for changes in costs, as well as for whale population changes. Results indicate a use and a nonuse component of overall willingness to pay for increases in environmental quality.

Using U.S. input-output data for the period 1947–1996 and Dictionary of Occupational Titles skill scores, I find that U.S. exports have a high content in cognitive and interactive skills relative to imports, and a low content in motor skills. Moreover, the skill gap between exports and imports has widened over time. Imports are more capital- and equipment-intensive than exports, but the difference has fallen over time. By 1987 exports were more computer-intensive than imports. In contrast, though exports were more R&D-intensive than imports in 1958, they were slightly lower in 1996. Labor productivity also rose faster in export than in import industries, and the unit labor cost of exports declined relative to imports.