סמינרים משנים קודמות

We study life-cycle decisions of five cohorts of American men and women born from the 1930s to the 1970s in a unified econometric framework applied to CPS data. The men and women in our model make individual decisions when single, joint decisions when married, and interact in a marriage market. Our model succeeds in explaining differences in education, work, marriage/divorce and fertility across the five cohorts using shifts in five exogenous factors: parental education, the distribution of potential partners, divorce laws, the wage/job offer distribution, and birth control technology. For example, one major change between the 1935 and 1975 cohorts was an increase in the employment rate of married women aged 25 to 34 from 29% to 60%. Our model attributes almost 2/3 of this increase to improved wage/job offer distributions for women, while 1/3 is accounted for by improved birth control technology. Another major change was the increase in women’s college graduation rate from 6% to 37%. Our model attributes roughly 40% of this change to higher mother’s education, 33% to lower divorce costs, 20% to improved wage/job offers and 7% to changes in the marriage offer distribution. Availability of oral contraception explains the entire drop in children of single mothers. It explains most of the drop in completed fertility for married women, but economic factors explain most of the delay in fertility.

We consider the lifr-cycle problem of a household that in each period decides how much to -We consider the lifeconsume and how to allocate spouses' time to work, leisure, and childcare. In an ays the environment with uncertainty, the allocation of goods and time over the life cycle plfurther role of providing insurance against shocks. We use longitudinal data on consumption, and husband and wife separate information on hourly wages, hours of work, itivity of and time spent with children to estimate structural parameters measuring the sensconsumption and time allocation choices to transitory and permanent wage shocks. These structural parameters provide a full picture regarding the ability of household to smooth hours of work and hours marginal utility in response to shocks. In addition, information on spent on childcare allows to decompose overall Frisch response into two components, one reflecting the degree of complementarity between husband's and wife's leisure ubstitutability of their ("companionship" or "love") and another reflecting the degree of s.childcare time in the production of childcare services

We analyze the e¤ect of a shared brand name, such as geographical names, on incentives of otherwise autonomous …rms to establish a reputation for product quality. On the one hand, brand membership provides consumers with more information about past quality and therefore can motivate investment when the scale of production is too small to motivate stand alone …rms to invest. On the other hand, a shared brand name may motivate free riding on the groups reputation, reducing incentives to invest. We identify conditions under which collective branding may deliver higher quality than stand alone …rms can achieve.

Beginning with Waldman (1984a), it is well understood that in a world characterized by asymmetric learning promotions can serve as a signal of worker ability which can, in turn, lead to an inefficiently small number of promotions. In this paper we explore two related issues. First, how robust is the finding of a promotion signaling distortion to different ways of modeling the promotion process? Second, what are the various forms that the promotion signaling distortion can take? Our first conclusion is that a promotion signaling distortion exists across a wide range of settings, including some for which earlier work suggests no distortion. Our second conclusion is that, even if there is no inefficiency concerning the number of promotions, there can still be a promotion distortion that takes the form of inefficiencies concerning who is promoted.

In the centuries leading up to the Industrial Revolution, Western Europe gradually pulled ahead of other world regions in terms of technological creativity, population growth, and income per capita. We argue that superior institutions for the creation and dissemination of productive knowledge help explain the European advantage. We build a model of technological progress in a pre-industrial economy that emphasizes the person-to-person transmission of tacit knowledge. The young learn as apprentices from the old. Institutions such as the family, the clan, the guild, and the market organize who learns from whom. We argue that medieval European institutions such as guilds, and specific features such as journeymanship, can explain the rise of Europe relative to regions that relied on the transmission of knowledge within extended families or clans.

We study response behavior of New York City parking-ticket recipients by analyzing administrative data on 6.6m tickets, issued to 2m individuals over two years. Exploiting variation in letters sent from the city to recipients, we report evidence that forgetting plays a role in delay—letters seem to act merely as reminders, with little evidence that their content matters. In addition, studying an individual’s behavior across multiple tickets, the data show clear indication of significant unobserved heterogeneity in underlying types, with di↵erent types reacting di↵erently to deadlines and reminders. Failing to control for the resulting selection could lead to misleading conclusions.

We study a dynamic principal-agent environment in which short-lived investment and compensation opportunities arrive stochastically over time. The agent privately observes whether an action (investment or reward) is currently available, which he can implement if he has the principal's consent to do so.

Analyzing panel data of 32,650 checking-account holders facing a menu of three-part tariff contracts, we document several findings that indicate that subscribers use simple heuristics to learn about the desirability of the contracts they have chosen. Our main findings are: subscribers change contracts in a direction that diminishes the probability of re-experiencing the trigger for switching; subscribers exhibit recency effects in switching, and after switching the majority of switchers systematically pay higher fees than they did before. We argue that directional learning theory could explain why consumers behave in a manner that yields suboptimal economic outcomes.

This study explores the consequences of the French Revolution in the short and long , we trace the impact of the emigres' exodus during the Revolution Specificallyduree on economic performance at the local level. Instrumenting emigres' intensity with temperature shocks on the eve of the "Second Revolution" in the summer of local1792, a period marked by major political events like the abolition of the Constitutional monotonic effect -Monarchy and bouts of violence, we find that emigres have a noneive development unfolding over thon comparat subsequent 200 years. During the 19th century there is a significant negative effect which turns positive during the 20th century. The reversal can be partially attributed nd to the decline of the local elite and a change in the composition in agricultural laemigration areas have few large landowners and more small ones.

The aim of this study is to develop an eclectic but robust model that allows for a better measure of expected inflation and allows testing for all sorts of biases. Improving the measure of expected inflation is of critical importance for conducting monetary policy. In many circumstances, indicators of expected inflation move in opposite directions, and this divergence may be critical for the setting of the interest rate. The model is estimated for a special set of Israeli data via the Kalman filter methodology. We test for systematic biases, for a better normalization of the model, for liquidity problems and for inflation risk—all possibly present in current measures of expected inflation. JEL: