Knowledge that Transforms

Although recent research suggests that intergenerational transfers play an important role in aggregate capital accumulation, our understanding of bequest motives remains incomplete. We develop a simple model of strategic bequests in which a testator influences the decisions of his beneficiaries by holding wealth in bequeathable forms and by conditioning the division of bequests on the beneficiaries' actions. The model generates falsifiable empirical predictions that are inconsistent with other theories of intergenerational transfers. We present econometric and other evidence that strongly suggests that bequests are often used as compensation for services rendered by beneficiaries.

Jouke van Dijk, Hendrik Folmer, The Consequences of Interregional Labor Migration for the Regional Labor Market: Theory, Methodology and Dutch Experience, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 68, No. 1 (Feb., 1986), pp. 74-83

Alan L. Gustman, Thomas L. Steinmeier, A Disaggregated, Structural Analysis of Retirement by Race, Difficulty of Work and Health, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 68, No. 3 (Aug., 1986), pp. 509-513

This paper develops an empirical strategy for testing competing hypotheses of expectation regimes when direct measures of expectations are unavailable. The procedure takes as given an assumed structural relationship between expected values of exogenous variables and a given decision variable. By imposing different expectation regimes on this model, we obtain an artificial nesting of the hypothesized regimes which allows us to test whether any specification dominates. This methodology is extended to multiple equation applications with any number of hypothesized expectation regimes. The tests are illustrated using a model of the response of county-level farm acreage allocation to expected commodity prices.

Failure time models correcting for heterogeneity are used to explain the length of participation in a risky career. Using data from the National Football League, first we employ a class of techniques which ignore unobserved heterogeneity; hence these methods impose severe restrictions on the estimate hazard. We then examine a second class of techniques which correct for unobservables and thereby allow greater flexibility in the estimated hazard. Within this second class, we find that the estimated hazard using the Burr-12 density is much more accurate than densities in the first class, which include the exponential and Weibull. We expect that this density could be employed to successfully explain career duration in other high-risk, high-stress careers as well.

The question of how the funds required for the capital accumulation associated with industrialization are to be raised has a long history. Since the industrial sector is relatively small in the early stages of industrialization, there has been a presumption that funds must primarily come from the agricultural sector. A simple model of a closed socialist economy in which the instruments at the disposal of the government are the terms of trade and the industrial wage, sheds some light on these questions, particularly in the context of the Soviet industrialization debate. In an economy facing binding constraints in external trade, a lowering of the price of the rural good, which reduces the supply of rural surplus available to the urban sector, must be accompanied by a lowering of the urban wage to reduce the demand for the rural good, and hence to balance the supply and demand of the rural good. A virtue of developing a general theoretical framework is that it enables one to isolate those features of the economy which are critical for the issues at hand.

The authors consider how the organization of rural markets will affect capital accumul ation and long-run aggregate income in the development process. They show that in a simple, dual economy, overlapping-generations model, c apital accumulation and aggregate income will be lowest when both fac tor markets in the agricultural sector are fully competitive. Both ca pital and aggregate income will be higher when land is not traded but the labor market is competitive, and highest in the absence of compe titive markets in both factors in the agricultural sector, when incom e distribution favors rural workers over landlords.

Cost of living escalators are an important feature of North American labor contracts. This paper presents a measure of the response of indexlinked wage increases to concurrent price increases for a sample of Canadian contracts, and then analyses this response in terms of a simple model of indexation to the aggregate price level. The model highlights the importance of aggregate price movements in conveying information about industryspecific prices. The empirical analysis confirms that industry-specific correlations between input and output prices and the Consumer Price Index are important determinants of the response of wage to prices across index contracts.

Recent work by David Lilien has argued that the positive correlation between the dispersion of employment growth rates across sectors (σ) and the unemployment rate implies that sectoral shifts in labor demand are responsible for a substantial fraction of cyclical variation in unemployment. This paper demonstrates that, under empirically satisfied conditions, traditional single-factor business-cycle models will produce a positive correlation between σ and the unemployment rate. Information on the job vacancy rate permits one to distinguish between a pure sectoral shift and a pure aggregate demand interpretation of this positive correlation. The finding that σ and the volume of help wanted advertising (a job vacancy proxy) are negatively related supports an aggregate demand interpretation.

The paper describes an artificial economy in which firms in different sectors make inventions at different times but innovate simultaneously to take advantage of high aggregate demand. In turn, high demand results from simultaneous innovation in many sectors. The economy exhibits multiple cyclical equilibria, with entrepreneurs' expectations determining which equilibrium obtains. These equilibria are Pareto ranked, and the most profitable equilibrium need not be the most efficient. While an informed stabilization policy can sometimes raise welfare, if large booms are necessary to cover fixed costs of innovation, stabilization policy can stop all technological progress.