Knowledge that Transforms

The growth of employee benefits in academe has closely paralleled their economy-wide growth. This study estimates a complete system describing the demand for benefits and wages using panel data on 1477 institutions of higher learning. the demand for benefits is very responsive to changes in real income and the tax price of benefits. These conclusions are robust with respect to varying definitions of the tax price, treating it as endogenous, and accounting for unmeasured individual effects on demand. Simulations suggest that the Tax Reform Act of 1986 sharply reduced the demand for benefits. Extrapolating the impact to the entire economy, the annual flow of compensation shifted away from benefits by at least $15 billion.

Justin Yifu Lin, Hybrid Rice Innovation in China: A Study of Market-Demand Induced Technological Innovation in a Centrally-Planned Economy, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 74, No. 1 (Feb., 1992), pp. 14-20

This study derives and estimates a dynamic model of factor demand that includes both fixed and quadratic variable costs of adjustment. Using quarterly data on the employment of mechanics at seven airlines, it finds that both types of adjustment costs characterize the dynamic constraints facing employers. Using monthly data covering production-worker employment in seven manufacturing plants, it shows that only fixed costs are important. The apparent diversity of the underlying costs of adjustment means it is difficult to draw useful inferences from macroeconometric estimates. It suggests the importance of examining broader arrays of microeconomic time series describing labor demand.

This paper looks at the empirical consequences of inappropriately using a representative firm to mimic the aggregate investment decisions of a group of heterogeneous firms faced with costs of adjusting capital inputs. Improper aggregation generates a bias with two important consequences: (1) an apparent insensitivity of the aggregate capital stock to the user cost of capital and (2) predicted responses of the capital stock to shocks that are considerably slower than observed. Both of these consequences are features of available investment equations.

The effects of expenditure on R&D and purchase of technology on costs in Indian manufacturing is investigated using firm-level data. Expenditures for R&D, royalties, and technical fees are treated as potentially inducing both Hicks-neutral efficiency shifts and substitution between capital and labor in an indirect cos t function framework. The effects of technology expenditure are found to vary by industry, by type of expenditure, and by domestic or foreign origin of seller. Technology expenditures associated with higher levels of Hicks-neutral efficiency are generally also associated wit h higher capital-labor ratios.

A nonparametric analysis of agricultural production behavior was conducted for each of the contiguous forty-eight states for the period 1956-82 under the joint hypothesis of profit maximization, convex technology, and nonregressive technical change. Tests were conducted in each state for profit maximization and for constant returns to scale. Although considerable variability was observed among states, measurement errors of magnitudes common in secondary data yielded test results fully consistent with the profit-maximization hypothesis in all states with complete output and input data.

The conventional model of the housing market does not take into account the search process for a suitable housing unit. Based on a dynamic search theory, this paper develops and estimates a truncated regression model of the rental housing market with stochastic and unobserved truncation points. The author's model provides a joint estimation of the hedonic rice and the reservation rent equations. The results turn out to be superior to the ordinary least squares estimates of either the traditional housing demand function or the hedonic price equation.

Two hypotheses are tested in this paper. The first is whether the appropriate geographic market for certain banking services is national, instead of local. The second is whether the definition of banking "product" as all banking services is too broad.

This paper compares the industry characteristics that determine U.S. export competitiveness with those that affect the export competitiveness of U.S. multinationals. Higher R&D and human capital intensities are associated with high U.S. shares in exports and, more strongly with high U.S. multinationals' shares, and higher labor content with low shares. Within the multinationals, high R&D intensity leads to a larger share of the firms' exports being supplied from the U.S. parent. The higher the labor intensity and the level of advertising expenditures in an industry, the larger the proportion of the firms' exports supplied by the foreign affiliates.

This paper introduces survey-based measures of expectations and uncertainties about income and real interest rates into an otherwise conventional consumption function. The survey dat a contribute more than conventional variables to the explanation of changes in consumption. The hypothesis that consumption follows a random walk is rejected in favor of a model in which consumption responds with a lag to changes in expected income growth. The significance of inflation in earlier estimates of the U.S. consumpti on function is shown to be spurious and due to a strong negative correlation between expected inflation and expected income growth.