Economic Inquiry articles from April 1999

Economic Inquiry archives from April 1999

Measurement error in job evaluation and the gender wage gap.
April 1, 1999... I. INTRODUCTION Wage equations are widely used to estimate the size of the pay gap between male- and female-dominated jobs. When jobs are the unit of observation, job wage rates are regressed on job attributes (such as skill, effort,...

Women's rising market opportunities and increased labor force participation.
April 1, 1999... I. INTRODUCTION This paper examines the secular increase in the labor market activity of married women in the United States from 1975 to 1991. Overall, the female employment rate increased from 49% in 1975 to 67% in 1991. Not surprisingly,...

Lifespan and output.(analyzing the link between lifespan and labor productivity)
April 1, 1999... I. INTRODUCTION This paper presents a finite-life model of human capital acquisition. Time is continuous and individuals have lifespan T. Technological progress has two components, an ease-of-learning parameter and a knowledge frontier....

The U.S. productivity slowdown: a peak through the structural break window.
April 1, 1999... I. INTRODUCTION Productivity (total and labor) plays a prominent role in theories of economic growth, business cycles and labor demand. It is also widely accepted that productivity growth, whatever its cause, is a key determinant of the...

Economic growth regressions for the American states: a sensitivity analysis.
April 1, 1999... I. INTRODUCTION Researchers motivated by a variety of questions turn to data on the economic performance of the American states to analyze their ideas empirically. The appeal of cross-state empirical analysis derives from the fact that...

Information sharing and tacit collusion in laboratory duopoly markets.
April 1, 1999... I. INTRODUCTION Economists have long believed that enhanced information about demand conditions or rival actions can play an important role in facilitating collusion, for example because it simplifies detection of chiselers (Stigler...

The physician labor market in a managed care-dominated environment.
April 1, 1999... I. INTRODUCTION Health maintenance organizations (HMOs) and other managed care arrangements are rapidly growing alternatives to fee-for-service (FFS) insurance in the United States. HMO enrollment has grown from under 3 million in 1970...

Valuing petroleum reserves using current net price.
April 1, 1999... I. INTRODUCTION The Hotelling Valuation Principle (HVP) states that, when valuing any depleting mineral reserve, one can simply multiply the current net price (price less unit extraction cost) associated with those reserves by the quantity...

Alternative P* models of inflations forecasts.
April 1, 1999... I. INTRODUCTION Inflation forecasts play a key role in monetary and macroeconomics. During the past three decades, dramatic changes in the inflationary environment have stimulated a wealth of studies on the relative accuracy of alternative...

Has discrimination lessened over time? A test using baseball's star vote.
April 1, 1999... I. INTRODUCTION The objective of this analysis is to examine changes in racial discrimination over time. The labor market literature indicates that black-white wage differentials have declined substantially in the last 45 years, and most...

Rule changes and competitive balance in Japanese professional baseball.
April 1, 1999... I. INTRODUCTION Since Rottenberg's [1956] classic analysis of baseball's reserve clause, economists have been interested in whether the rules for initially allocating players among major league baseball (MLB) teams affect their final...

What's wrong with scully-estimates of a player's marginal revenue product.
April 1, 1999... One needs to be cautious about the results, since the estimates of player marginal products are crude (Scully [1989, 168]). Our MRP estimates do not have a particularly impressive correlation with player salaries (Zimbalist [1992, 190])....

Specification error, prediction bias and rational expectations.(response to Gertrud H. Flemming and John R. Lott Jr., p.276, April 1996)
April 1, 1999... I. INTRODUCTION In a recent issue of this journal Fremling and Lott [1996] present a novel explanation of why aggregate forecasts can be biased, casting considerable doubt on the applicability of rational expectations. Their argument is...

The bias toward zero in identifying relationships: reply to Kennedy. (response to Peter Kennedy in this issue, p.382)n.
April 1, 1999... We will argue that rational expectations has considered only the "misestimation" type of error, which can "cancel out" in the aggregate, but that with errors in identifying relationships, there is no similar cancelling out effect (Fremling and...