Knowledge that Transforms

Abstract-The lifecycle theory of saving and consumption predicts that changes in an economy's rate of economic growth will affect its aggregate saving rate by changing the lifetime resources of younger people relative to older people. However, studies that track the saving behavior of cohorts of household heads over time as they age have yielded estimates of age-saving profiles that are too flat for growth to have much effect on the aggregate saving rate. One problem with the cohort approach is that multigenerational households are common in many counties, and the age-saving profiles of households may be quite different from the age-saving profiles of individuals that make up households. In this paper, we propose a method for estimating individual age-saving profiles using household data. This method is applied to data from Taiwan and Thailand. We find that the individual method yields results that are more favorable to the lifecycle model. These results imply that changes in the rate of economic growth may in some circumstances have large effects on the aggregate saving rate. However, the size and sign of these effects depends on the rate of economic growth and the rate of population growth, and in many cases the effect of growth on saving is small. I.

We test for a unit root in postwar unemployment rates for sixteen OECD countries. When a one-time structural break is incorporated, the unit root hypothesis can be rejected for most of the countries and the measured persistence of unemployment falls dramatically. We then test for multiple structural changes and find evidence of one or two breaks for those countries for which the unit root hypothesis could be rejected. Almost all of the breaks are positive, reflecting the sustained rise in European unemployment. The major exception is the United States, where long-term unemployment rose in the 1970s and fell in the 1980s.

This paper uses a VAR approach to investigate the effects of public investment on private-sector performance in the United States. This approach is consistent with the argument that the analysis of these effects requires the consideration of dynamic feedbacks among the different variables. Estimation results suggest that all types of public investment have a positive effect on private output. Core infrastructure investment in electric and gas facilities, transit systems, and airfields, as well as in sewage and water supply systems display the highest rates of return, 16.1% and 9.7%, respectively, closely followed by investment in educational, hospital, and other public buildings with 8.9%.

This paper studies the effect of corruption on foreign direct investment. The sample covers bilateral investment from twelve source countries to 45 host countries. There are two central findings. First, a rise in either the tax rate on multinational firms or the corruption level in a host country reduces inward foreign direct investment (FDI). In a benchmark estimation, an increase in the corruption level from that of Singapore to that of Mexico would have the same negative effect on inward FDI as raising the tax rate by fifty percentage points. Second, American investors are averse to corruption in host countries, but not necessarily more so than average OECD investors, in spite of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977.

We introduce a simple allocation-of-time model to explain the high school athletic participation choice and the implications of this choice for educational and labor market outcomes. Four different factors that could explain athletic participation are identified in the context of this model. A variety of tests of the model are provided using two data sets: the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and the National Longitudinal Study of the High School Class of 1972. We find some evidence that athletic participation directly affects wages and educational attainment. However, much of the effect of athletic participation on wages and educational attainment appears to reflect differences across individuals in ability or value of leisure.

This study proposes using correlations between neighboring children in their later socioeconomic status to bound the proportion of inequality in socioeconomic outcomes that can be attributed to disparities in neighborhood background. We apply this approach to educational attainment data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, which has sampled neighboring children and followed them into adulthood. We find that, once the effects of a few readily observed family background characteristics are accounted for, the correlation between neighboring children in their eventual educational attainment is only about 0.1. Given that even this figure is inflated by neighbors' similarity in unmeasured aspects of family background, the results suggest a limited role for neighborhood factors in accounting for inequality in educational attainment.

We examine the structure of preferences for mitigating impacts of global climate change that will not occur during the lifetimes of most who are alive today. Because no market data exist for such distant markets, a statedpreference approach is used. The analysis is based on the random-parameters logit model, and the results indicate substantial heterogeneity in respondent preferences, that mean willingness to pay is a significant and increasing function of the scope of the impact, and, provocatively, that respondents have the same preferences over the two very different time horizons that we consider.

We study the impact of profit uncertainty on investment and whether or not this response is different in industries that are dominated by small firms versus those that are dominated by relatively larger firms. Our key findings are that the sign of the investment-uncertainty relationship is negative, and that the quantitative negative impact is substantially greater in industries dominated by small firms. These results are robust to accounting for potential endogeneity of the uncertainty measure, alternate procedures for measuring uncertainty, and alternate ways of segmenting industries into small- and large-firm groups.

This paper incorporates a Bayesian learning model into a hedonic framework to estimate the value that residents place on avoiding cancer risks from hazardous-waste sites. We show that residents are willing to pay to avoid cancer risks from Superfund sites before the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) releases its assessment (known as the Remedial Investigation) of the site. Residents' willingness to pay to avoid risks actually decreases after the release of the Remedial Investigation, suggesting that the information lowers the perceived levels of risk. This estimated willingness to pay implies a statistical value of cancer similar to the value-of-life estimates in labor market studies.

Researchers using cross-sectional data have failed to produce systematic evidence that teacher salaries affect student outcomes. These studies generally do not account for non-pecuniary job attributes and alternative wage opportunities, which affect the opportunity cost of choosing to teach. When we employ the methodology used in previous studies, we replicate their results. However, once we adjust for labor market factors, we estimate that raising teacher wages by 10% reduces high school dropout rates by 3% to 4%. Our findings suggest that previous studies have failed to produce robust estimates because they lack adequate controls for non-wage aspects of teaching and market differences in alternative occupational opportunities.