Knowledge that Transforms

Workers choose a job and receive in return a bundle consisting of income and a probability of job injury. The authors view this income- job-risk bundle chosen by the worker as being exchanged in an implici t market. By jointly estimating the market income-job-risk locus and the optimum conditions for utility maximization, they are able to identif y the market locus and parameters of the workers' utility function. In contrast to previous work, the authors are able to derive valuations of discrete changes in job risk for each individual in the sample. They present evidence that an increase in nonlabor income leads workers to select safer jobs. Copyright 1988 by MIT Press.

Income and price elasticities for non-oil exports of non-OPEC developing countries play an imp ortant role in the development of policy responses to the debt crisis. These elasticities are estimated for the major Standard Internation al Trade Classification commodity groups. Based on two-stage least sq uares and quarterly data for 1973 to 1984, the income elasticity for non-oil exports ranges between 1.4 and 1.9. The analysis also tests t he properties of the error term, the dynamic specification, and para- metric stability. The sensitivity of the results is assessed using Sh iller's lags and band spectrum estimation. Copyright 1988 by MIT Press.

In order to determine the importance of parental time inputs in the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic status, previous work relies on proxies such as family size, birth order, maternal employment, and retrospective reports of child care time. This paper is unique in finding a connection between more direct measures of mother's child-care time and children's outcomes as adults. It shows that (1) higher home productivity increases, but higher opportunity costs reduce, maternal child-care time and (2) greater child-care time of highly-educated, but not of less well-educated, mothers significantly raises children's years of schooling. Copyright 1988 by MIT Press.

This paper uses a survey of private establishments to examine the determinants of the firm's relative demand for partand full-time workers. The elasticity of substitution of part-time for full-time workers is about 1.5, considerably lower than previous estimates with aggregate data. The results indicate that the quasi-fixed labor costs have a negative impact on the proportion of part-timers in a firm's work force.

Data are used for thirteen industrialized countries to investigate convergence of labor productivity levels in individual manufacturing industries over the 1963-82 period. The authors find convergence in virtually every manufacturing industry. Among these countries, the co efficient of variation of industry labor productivity declined in all but one of twenty-eight industries. However, productivity convergenc e is stronger for all manufacturing than within individual industries, especially heavy and high-technology industries. Also, variation in employment mix among countries plays little role in explaining cross-country differences i n aggregate manufacturing productivity, nor have changes in employment mixes been an important source of convergence. Copyright 1988 by MIT Press.

A specialized survey of Maine households' responses to information about the risks associate d with radon concentrations in their homes and water supplies was use d to evaluate how they form risk perceptions. The findings support a modified form of a Bayesian learning model to describe how individual s used the information to revise their risk perceptions. Moreover, in dividuals who took some mitigating actions reported lower risk percep tions after that action. The overall results are potentially importan t to the use of information programs as policy instruments for risk r eduction because they indicate that new information can affect risk p erceptions in a systematic way. Copyright 1988 by MIT Press.