This paper reevaluates the concept of unemployment in the context of differing labor market and nonmarket opportunities for men and women, discussing common fallacies in female to male unemployment rate comparisons and their use as an indicator of labor market equality. Suggestive empirical evidence is presented for an alternative unemployment rate concept for women, for interpreting the procyclical variation in female to male unemployment rate differentials, and for decomposing unemployment differences into differences in labor market characteristics and in behavioral coefficients for the two sexes. The paper concludes that a large part of the observed unemployment rate differential may be attributed to the definition and methodology used in deriving unemployment statistics rather than to discrimination in productive opportunities.

This paper reevaluates the concept of unemployment in the context of differing labor market and nonmarket opportunities for men and women, discussing common fallacies in female to male unemployment rate comparisons and their use as an indicator of labor market equality. Suggestive empirical evidence is presented for an alternative unemployment rate concept for women, for interpreting the procyclical variation in female to male unemployment rate differentials, and for decomposing unemployment differences into differences in labor market characteristics and in behavioral coefficients for the two sexes. The paper concludes that a large part of the observed unemployment rate differential may be attributed to the definition and methodology used in deriving unemployment statistics rather than to discrimination in productive opportunities.

It is often argued that separation of public spending and taxing decisions engenders in the voter overoptimistic hopes that someone else will bear the cost of public services, thereby inducing an increase in the size of government. But are perceived tax prices systematically and persistently reduced by separation? Although in stock markets all agents' expectations may be unbiased, they may or may not be unbiased in political markets. This paper analyzes the separation created in federal states when the central government finances local expenditures. Evidence from a dynamic decisive-voter model is presented that indicates that the separation introduced by federal grants to Canadian provinces did in fact reduce the perceived tax price of provincial public services and raise provincial expenditures. The results suggest also that the effect of separation diminished over time.

During the last two decades the issue of equality according to sex and race has become one of increasing importance to economists. An extant literature on the economics of discrimination began with the pioneering work of Becker (1957). This paper is an attempt to shed further light on the extent of employer discrimination by sex and race by comparing the earnings of self-employed workers to their wage and salary counterparts. In short, if employer discrimination is a principal source of discrimination against blacks and women, then we would expect the black/white and female/male earnings ratios to be higher for the self-employed compared to their wage and salary counterparts. No discrimination of this type is applicable to self-employed workers. In addition, blacks and women should be relatively overrepresented among the self-employed compared to wage and salary workers in the economy. Section II of this paper further elaborates on this indirect method to estimate the extent of employer discrimination in the labor market for blacks and women. In section III, the results of this method are presented using the 1978 Current Population Survey as the data source. Results indicate the black/white and female/ male earnings ratios are no larger for the self-employed compared to their wage and salary counterparts, even after making various attempts to adjust for differences in other variables that affect earnings, and to limit the influence of consumer discrimination on the results.

[It is shown that wquilibria with dispersed prices exist in environments with identical and rational agents on both sides of the market. In particular, the original Stigler model of nonsequential search often has many equilibria, some with price dispersion. Also, price dispersion holds in equilibrium in general if search is "noisy," i.e., there is some chance of learning two or more prices when an agent is looking for one price.]