Knowledge that Transforms

Many previous studies have found a strong positive effect of job seniority (tenure) on wages. This paper re-examines the evidence using a simple instrumental variables scheme to deal with the fact that tenure is likely to be related to unobserved individual and job characteristics that affect the wage. We use the variation of tenure over a given job match as the principal instrumental variable for tenure. The variation in tenure over the job is uncorrelated by construction with the fixed individual and job match specific components of the error term of the wage equation. Our main finding is that the partial effect of tenure on wages is small, and that general labour market experience and job shopping account for most wage growth over a career. The strong cross section relationship between tenure and wages is due primarily to heterogeneity bias.

Journal Article Prices vs. Quantities vs. Laissez-faire Get access Martin Browning Martin Browning McMaster University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of Economic Studies, Volume 54, Issue 4, October 1987, Pages 691–694, https://doi.org/10.2307/2297490 Published: 01 October 1987 Article history Received: 01 December 1986 Accepted: 01 March 1987 Published: 01 October 1987

We derive the information matrix test, suggested by White, for the normal fixed regressor linear model, and show that the statistic decomposes asymptotically into the sum of three independent quadratic forms. One of these is White's general test for heteroscedasticity and the remaining two components are quadratic forms in the third and fourth powers of the residuals respectively. Our results show that the test will fail to detect serial correlation and never be asymptotically optimal against heteroscedasticity, skewness and non-normal kurtosis.

A risk neutral principal wishes to exact a payment from a risk neutral agent whose wealth he does not know, but may verify through a costly auditing procedure. We characterize efficient schemes for the principal when he is allowed to choose schedules for preaudit and postaudit payments and audit probabilities, subject to the constraint that only monetary incentives can be used and that the principal may never make a net payment to the agent. The main results are that efficient schemes involve preaudit payments which are increasing in the agent's wealth, audit probabilities are decreasing in the agent's wealth and also satisfy certain constraints as equalities. In general, such schemes involve stochastic auditing and rebates after an audit.

The paper presents two models of races in which there is both technological uncertainty and strategic interaction between competitors as the race unfolds. Most of the existing literature examines one or other of these features, but not the two combined. Our aim is to see how the efforts of competitors in a race vary with the intensity of rivalry between them. In our principal model, whch is of a one-dimensional race, it is shown that the leader in the race makes greater efforts than the follower, and efforts increase as the gap between competitors decreases. Under certain conditions the same results hold in our second, related model, which is of a two-dimensional race.

We investigate the ability of the price system to aggregate private information in a market of uncertain size and where set-up costs are incurred by entrants. It is shown that the equilibrium is random even when the totality of private information is so large that aggregate uncertainty is virtually non-existent. In particular, the limiting equilibrium does not approach the full-information, Walrasian outcome. Hence, the model identifies a technological factor (increasing returns) which gives rise to informational losses.

Previous authors who have considered the issue of noncooperative entry deterrence have not found the free rider problem to be a significant factor. These authors, however, have only considered models in which the exact investment needed to deter entry is known with certainty. In this paper I add uncertainty to the models investigated by these previous authors, and demonstrate that the free rider problem can be significant, but is not so in all cases. That is, for certain types of entry deterring investments the introduction of uncertainty causes the oligopoly to underinvest in entry deterrence; however, for other types no underinvestment result arises.

The effect of short-term contracting on resource extraction is studied, in a two-country model of international trade in oil. Countries' planners are assumed to be fully rational, with perfect information and perfect foresight. Contracts are assumed perfectly enforceable and complete, except that short-term contracts do not allow commitments to actions taken beyond the contract period. We show that short-term contracting limits countries' opportunities for intertemporal consumption-smoothing, reducing their collective tolerance for temporal variation in consumption. This tends to make them extract more slowly than in the efficient plan that results from long-term contracting.

This paper identifies several social choice correspondences which are or are not fully implementable in economic environments when agents are incompletely informed about the environment. We show that in contrast to results in the case of complete information, neither efficient allocations nor core allocations define implementable social choice correspondences. We also identify conditions under which the Rational Expectations Equilibrium correspondence is implementable. We extend the concepts of fair allocations and Lindahl allocations to economies with incomplete information, and show that envy-free allocations and Lindahl allocations are implementable under some conditions while fair allocations are not.

A symmetric allocation in a continuum is "multilaterally incentive compatible" if no finite coalition of privately informed agents can manipulate it by combining deception with hidden trades of exchangeable goods. Sufficient conditions for mutilateral compatibility are that all agents face the same linear prices for exchangeable goods and that indistinguishable agents face identical budget sets. The same conditions are necessary under assumptions that extend those under which the second efficiency theorem of welfare economics holds in a continuum economy. Markets for exchangeable goods emerge as binding constraints on the set of Pareto efficient allocations with private information.