Knowledge that Transforms

This paper explores the determinants of pension funding in the public sector. We formulate and test several hypotheses about the determinants of public employer pension funding practices, using a new data set describing financial and other characteristics of state, local, and teacher plans. The data show that, on average, public sector pension plans were relatively well-funded during the late 1980s. There were, however, wide variations in funding practices in our sample. Our analysis of these variations suggests that past funding practice tends to be perpetuated, that unionized employers are less likely to fully fund future pension obligations, and that funding is sensitive to fiscal pressure.

In this paper, the authors divide actual years of schooling into effective years, repeated years, skipped years, inefficient routing years, and dropout years. Estimation of earnings functions reveals that this topology is statistically superior to the usual concepts of either actual or effective years of schooling. Based on the authors' distinction, they formulate tests that discriminate between the human capital theory and the screening hypothesis. The results give strong support to the human capital theory and refute the screening hypothesis.

Increases in import competition led to large increases in labor productivity growth in highly concentrated industries during the period from 1975 through 1987. The finding is based on a panel of ninety-four manufacturing industries observed over four periods, each of three years duration. Imports had no observable effects on productivity growth in less concentrated industries; the strong effects in concentrated industries did not occur contemporaneously but appeared with a one-period lag. The effects are weakened but still statistically significant when Bureau of Labor Statistics productivity data are replaced by National Bureau of Economic Research data and in a larger panel with less precise trade data.

The authors show that, contrary to the beliefs of some previous analysts of international economic growth, the hypotheses of convergence and of mean-reversion are not equivalent. Under some assumptions, the rate of convergence is independent of the degree of mean-reversion; under other assumptions, mean-reversion is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for convergence. The authors show the relationship between the convergence test and the mean-reversion test and provide an empirical example in which the null hypothesis of no mean-reversion is rejected but the null hypothesis of no convergence is not rejected.

The response of most stock variables (e.g., capital, housing, consumer durables, and prices) to exogenous impulses involves a dynamic-or 'short-run' - reaction, and a target - or 'long-run' - reaction. The difference between these two is typically attributed to some form of adjustment cost. In this paper I argue that the small sample problems of cointegrating procedures used to estimate the ' long'-run component are particularly severe when adjustment costs are important. More precisely, elasticity estimates will tend to be biased downward. I illustrate the empirical relevance of this by showing that the target elasticity of capital with respect to its cost is - severely downward biased when estimated with conventional OLS cointegration procedures. Once this is corrected, the elasticity of the U.S. capital-output ratio to the cost of capital is found to be large and close to (minus) one.

This paper investigates the finite sample properties of likelihood ratio tests for 'stochastic cointegration' that have recently been proposed by S. Johansen and P. Perron and J. Y. Campbell. The author transforms the model into a canonical form and conducts a comprehensive simulation study. He finds that the test performance is very sensitive to the value of the stationary root(s) of the process and to the correlation between the innovations that drive the stationary and nonstationary components of the process. Unfortunately, the simulation results suggest that these asymptotic test procedures are not very powerful for sample sizes that are typical for economic time series.

This study employs a stochastic model developed by G. Udny Yule and Herbert A. Simon as the probability mechanism underlying the consumer's choice of artistic products and predicts that artistic outputs will be concentrated among a few lucky individuals. We find that the probability distribution implied by the stochastic model provides an excellent description of the empirical data in the popular music industry, suggesting that the stochastic model may represent the process generating the superstar phenomenon. Because the stochastic model does not require differential talents among individuals, our empirical results support the notion that the superstar phenomenon could exist among individuals with equal talent.

The authors extend Daniel McFadden's (1989) method of simulated moments to approximating efficient estimators in general estimation problems. The general approach applies a simulated bias correction to an approximation of the efficient score. They discuss a general trade-off in estimator inefficiency between bias correction and moment approximation.

Julian M. Alston, Kenneth A. Foster, Richard D. Gree, Estimating Elasticities with the Linear Approximate Almost Ideal Demand System: Some Monte Carlo Results, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 76, No. 2 (May, 1994), pp. 351-356

Andrew D. Foster, Mark R. Rosenzweig, A Test for Moral Hazard in the Labor Market: Contractual Arrangements, Effort, and Health, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 76, No. 2 (May, 1994), pp. 213-227