Knowledge that Transforms

Estimates of the effect of education on GDP (the social return) have been hard to reconcile with micro evidence on the private return to schooling. We present a simple explanation combining two ideas: imperfect substitution and endogenous skill-biased technological progress and use cross-country panel data on inequality and GDP to test these ideas. A one-year increase in the level of education reduces the private return by 2 percentage points, consistent with Katz-Murphy's (1992) elasticity of substitution. We find no evidence for reversal of this initial effect as in Acemoglu (2002). In the short run, the social return equals the private return.

This paper establishes the existence of a previously overlooked relationship between agglomeration and hours worked. Among nonprofessionals, hours worked decrease with the density of workers in the same occupation. Among professionals, the relationship is positive. This relationship is stronger for the young than for the middle-aged. Moreover, young professional hours worked are especially sensitive to the presence of rivals. The paper shows that these patterns are consistent with the selection of hard workers into cities and with the high productivity of agglomerated labor. The behavior of young professionals is also consistent with the presence of keen rivalry in larger markets, a kind of urban rat race.

A long-standing assumption among economists is that nursing home quality is common across Medicaid and private-pay patients within a shared facility. However, there has been only limited empirical work addressing this issue. Using a unique individual level panel of residents of nursing homes from seven states, we exploit both within-facility and within-person variation in payer source and quality to examine this issue. We also test the robustness of these results across states with different Medicaid and private-pay rate differentials. Across various identification strategies, our results are consistent with the assumption of common quality across Medicaid and private-paying patients within facilities.

This note revisits the proof of the steady-state growth theorem, first given by Uzawa in 1961.We provide a clear statement of the theorem, discuss intuition for why it holds, and present a new, elegant proof due to Schlicht (2006).

Identification of potential wage distributions by education is important to the study of the causal links between education, inequality, and uncertainty. Potential wage inequality within an educational group (that is, the variance in wages if all workers had the same education) exceeds the observed statistics because self-selected education truncates wage distributions. Decomposing potential wage inequality into heterogeneity (known to the agent making the educational choice) and uncertainty (unknown to the agent) suggests that wage uncertainty does not necessarily rise with education. It is unobserved heterogeneity, not uncertainty, that explains the observed relationship between college graduation and higher wage inequality.

Methods are described for the appropriate use of data obtained and analysed in real time to represent the output gap. The methods employ cointegrating VAR techniques to model real-time measures and realizations of output series jointly. The model is used to mitigate the impact of data revisions; to generate appropriate forecasts that can deliver economically meaningful output trends and that can take into account the end-of-sample problems encountered in measuring these trends; and to calculate probability forecasts that convey in a clear way the uncertainties associated with the gap measures. The methods are applied to data for the United States 1965q4–2004q4, and the improvements over standard methods are illustrated.

Standard estimates of the NAIRU or natural rate of unemployment are subject to considerable uncertainty. We show in this paper that using multiple indicators to extract an estimated NAIRU cuts in half uncertainty as measured by variance and gives a 33% reduction in the confidence band. The inclusion of an Okun's Law relation is particularly valuable. The essential notion is the existence of a common cyclical force driving the macroeconomic variables. Model comparisons based on the use of Bayes factors favor the idea of a common cyclical component.

We employ a comprehensive linked employer-employee data set for Brazil to analyze wage determinants and compare results to Abowd, Kramarz, Margolis and Troske (2001) for French and U.S. manufacturing. While returns to human capital variables in Brazilian manufacturing exceed those of the other countries, occupation and gender differentials are similar. The worker characteristics component of individual compensation accounts for much of the greater wage inequality in Brazil, but the establishment-fixed component has scant explanatory power. Thus, firm- or industry-level factors have little scope for explaining the differences in wage inequality. Brazil's wage structure closely resembles that of France, a country with some similarity in labor-market institutions.

This paper evaluates the impact of international reserves, terms-of-trade shocks, and capital flows on the real exchange rate (REER). We observe that international reserves cushion the impact of terms-of-trade shocks on REER, and that this effect is important for developing but not for industrial countries. This buffer effect is especially significant for Asian countries, and for countries exporting natural resources. Financial depth reduces the buffer role of international reserves in developing countries. Developing countries' REERs seem to be more sensitive to changes in reserve assets; whereas industrial countries display a significant relationship between hot money and REER.

The secular rise in female labor force participation, highlighted in the recent macroe-conomics literature on growth and structural change, has been associated with the de-clining price and wider availability of home appliances. This paper uses a new and unique country dataset on the price of home appliances to test its impact on female labor supply. We assess the role of the price of appliances in raising participation by comparing it to the impact of fertility and other macroeconomic factors. A decrease in the relative price of appliances- the ratio of the price of appliances to the consumer price index- leads to a substantial and statistically significant increase in female labor force participation. The impact of the price of appliances is quantitatively of the same order of magnitude as that of fertility. This result is robust to the inclusion of additional controls, such as income per capita, government spending, and male and female unemployment rates. To assess causality, we test for exogeneity and use the lagged relative price of appliances and the food price index as instrumental variables, confirming that lower appliance prices lead to increased female participation.