Labor eJournal最新文献

{"title":"Desegregation and Black Dropout Rates","authors":"Jonathan Guryan","doi":"10.1257/0002828042002679","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1257/0002828042002679","url":null,"abstract":"In 1954 the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that separate schools for black and white children were 'inherently unequal.' This paper studies whether the desegregation plans of the next 30 years in fact benefited the black students for whom the plans were designed. Analysis of data from the 1970 and 1980 censuses suggests that desegregation plans of the 1970's reduced the high school dropout rates of blacks by one to three percentage points during this decade. Desegregation plans can account for about half of the decline in dropout rates of blacks between 1970 and 1980. A similar analysis suggests that desegregation plans had no effect on the dropout rates of whites. The results are robust to controls for time-varying region and family income effects, as well as to tests for selective migration, though mean reversion may account for some portion of the larger estimated effects. Further investigation of conditions in segregated schools in 1970 suggests that peer effects explain at least some of the decline in the dropout rates of blacks due to desegregation plans.","PeriodicalId":114523,"journal":{"name":"Labor eJournal","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130179457","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Life Course Risks, Mobility Regimes, and Mobility Consequences: A Comparison of Sweden, Germany, and the U.S.","authors":"T. DiPrete","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.296199","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.296199","url":null,"abstract":"Intragenerational mobility has been a central concern in sociology, especially in the latter half of the 20th century. Most of this analysis has proceeded using measures of social position that are functions of an individual's occupation. This approach has been based on two primary justifications. First, occupational mobility is a key attribute of labor market structure, and the labor market, along with the educational system, is the principal institution responsible for a country's structure of inequality. Second, occupation is an income producing asset that provides an approximate measure of \"permanent income\" and standard of living. Occupation-based models of social mobility, however, have limitations that arguably have grown during the recent past. Meta-analysis of available evidence for Sweden, western Germany, and the United States concerning occupational mobility, household income mobility, job displacement, union dissolution, and poverty dynamics shows the limitations of the individual-level occupation-based careertrajectory approach to life course mobility. An alternative formulation at the household rather than the individual level is developed that focuses on cross-national variation in the extent to which institutions influence the rate of class-altering events, and the extent to which they mitigate the consequences of these events. The combination of these two institutional processes produces the distinctive characteristics of the mobility regimes of these three countries.","PeriodicalId":114523,"journal":{"name":"Labor eJournal","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117102178","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Does Participating in a 401(K) Raise Your Lifetime Taxes?","authors":"Jagadeesh Gokhale, L. Kotlikoff, Todd C. Neumann","doi":"10.3386/w8341","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3386/w8341","url":null,"abstract":"Contributing to 401(k)s and similar tax-deferred retirement accounts certainly lowers current taxes. But does it lower your lifetime taxes? If average and marginal tax rates were independent of income and didn't change through time, the answer would be an unambiguous yes. The reduction in current taxes would exceed the increase in future taxes when measured in present value. But tax rates may be higher when retirement account withdrawals occur, either because one moves into higher marginal federal and state tax brackets or because the government raises tax rates. In addition, reducing tax brackets when young, at the price of higher tax brackets when old, may reduce the value of mortgage deductions. Finally, and very importantly, shifting taxable income from youth to old age can substantially increase the share of Social Security benefits subject to federal income taxation. This paper uses ESPlanner, a detailed life-cycle personal financial planning model to study the lifetime tax advantage to stylized young couples of participating in a 401(k) plan. Assuming a percent real return on assets, we find that low- and moderate-income households actually raise their lifetime taxes and lower their lifetime expenditures by saving in a 401(k) plan. In the case of a couple with $50,000 in annual earnings, partaking fully in the typical 401(k) plan raises lifetime tax payments by 1.1 percent and lowers lifetime expenditures by 0.4 percent. The lifetime tax hike is 6.4 percent and the lifetime spending reduction is 1.7 percent for such households if they receive an 8 percent real rate of return. These figures rise to 7.3 percent and 2.3 percent, respectively, if taxes are increased by 20 percent when the couple retires. These findings are driven, in large part, by the additional Social Security benefit taxation induced by 401(k) withdrawals. The picture is quite different for high-income young couples with so much income that 401(k) participation cannot a) lower and then raise their marginal income tax rates or b) raise the share of their Social Security benefits that is taxable. For such couples 401(k) participation means major lifetime tax savings. At a 6 percent real return, a couple earning at the rate of $300,000 per year would enjoy a 6.8 percent lifetime tax break, which translates into a 3.9 percent increase in lifetime spending. These couples' continue to enjoy a large lifetime subsidy even if tax rates are raised by as much as a fifth when they retire. In addition to demonstrating the regressivity of the fe","PeriodicalId":114523,"journal":{"name":"Labor eJournal","volume":"274 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116257296","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Honesty in Managerial Reporting","authors":"J. Evans, R. Hannan, Ranjani Krishnan, Donald V. Moser","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.269448","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.269448","url":null,"abstract":"This study reports the results of three experiments that examine how preferences for wealth and honesty affect managerial reporting. We find that subjects often sacrifice wealth to make honest or partially honest reports, and they generally do not lie more as the payoff to lying increases. We also find less honesty under a contract that provides a smaller share of the total surplus to the manager than under one that provides a larger share, suggesting that the extent of honesty may depend on how the surplus is divided between the manager and the firm. The optimal agency contract yields more firm profit than a contract that relies exclusively on honest reporting. However, a modified version of the optimal agency contract, which makes use of subjects' preferences for honest reporting, yields the highest firm profit. These results suggest that firms may be able to design more profitable employment contracts than those identified by conventional economic analysis.","PeriodicalId":114523,"journal":{"name":"Labor eJournal","volume":"68 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-05-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128583147","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Foreign Direct Investment and Wages in Indonesian Manufacturing","authors":"R. Lipsey, Fredrik Sjoholm","doi":"10.3386/W8299","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3386/W8299","url":null,"abstract":"This paper asks two types of questions. One is about the behavior of foreign-owned firms in Indonesian labor markets and the other is about the effect of the presence of foreign-owned firms on Indonesian wages. We ask first whether foreign-owned plants pay a higher price for labor, that is, more than locally-owned plants for workers of a given quality, as we can measure it. We then ask whether foreign-owned plants pay a higher price for labor given the characteristics of the plants such as their size, industry, and location. The answer is that foreign firms do pay a higher price, and even a higher price given their plant characteristics. The second set of questions is whether a larger presence of foreign-owned plants results in higher wages in locally-owned plants and overall. Higher foreign presence leads to higher wages in locally-owned plants. Since the foreign plants also pay higher wages than locally-owned ones, the two factors together mean that higher foreign presence raises the general wage level in a province and industry.","PeriodicalId":114523,"journal":{"name":"Labor eJournal","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121390892","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Declining Quality of Teachers","authors":"D. Lakdawalla","doi":"10.3386/W8263","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3386/W8263","url":null,"abstract":"Concern is often voiced about the declining quality of American schoolteachers. This paper shows that, while the relative quality of teachers is declining, this decline is a result of technical change, which improves the specialized knowledge of skilled workers outside teaching, but not the general knowledge of schoolteachers. This raises the price of skilled teachers, but not their productivity. Schools respond by lowering the relative skill of teachers and raising teacher quantity. On the other hand, college professors, who teach specialized knowledge, are predicted to experience increases in skill relative to schoolteachers. Finally, the lagging productivity of primary schools is predicted to raise the unit cost of primary education. These predictions appear consistent with the data. Analysis of US Census microdata suggests that, from the 1900 birth cohort to the 1950 birth cohort, the relative schooling of teachers has declined by about three years, and the human capital of teachers may have declined in value relative to that of college graduates by as much as thirty percent, but the teacher-student ratio has more than doubled over the last half century in a wide array of developed countries. Moreover, the per student cost of primary school education in the US has also risen dramatically over the past 50 years. Finally, the human capital of college professors has risen by nearly thirty percent relative to schoolteachers.","PeriodicalId":114523,"journal":{"name":"Labor eJournal","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132554079","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Housing Programs for Low-Income Households","authors":"E. Olsen","doi":"10.7208/9780226533575-008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7208/9780226533575-008","url":null,"abstract":"The primary purposes of this paper are to (1) consider the justifications that have been offered for housing subsidies to low-income households and the implications of these justifications for the evaluation and design of housing programs, (2) describe the most important features of the largest rental housing programs for low-income households in the United States, (3) summarize the empirical evidence on the major effects of these programs, and (4) analyze the major options for reform of the system of housing subsidies. The largest rental programs are HUD's Public Housing, Section 236, Section 8 New Construction/Substantial Rehab, Section 8 Existing, USDA's Section 515, and the IRS's Low Income Housing Tax Credit. The effects of these programs that will be considered include effects on the housing occupied by recipients of the subsidy and their consumption of other goods, effects on labor supply of assisted households, the distribution of benefits among recipients, participation rates among different types of households, effects on the types of neighborhoods in which subsidized households live and the effect of subsidized housing and households on their neighbors, the effect on prices of unsubsidized housing, and the cost-effectiveness of alternative methods for delivering housing assistance.","PeriodicalId":114523,"journal":{"name":"Labor eJournal","volume":"115 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115480174","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Influence of Non-Executive Director Control and Rewards on CEO Remuneration: Australian Evidence","authors":"R. Evans, John P. Evans","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.263050","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.263050","url":null,"abstract":"The study examined whether non-executive director (NED) control and remuneration impact on the CEO pay decision. NED control was represented by three measures. The first, the existence of a majority of non-executive directors on the board of directors; second, the instalment of a nomination committee to facilitate the employment of properly qualified, independent directors to the board; and third, participation of NEDs in the company?s operation as evidenced by attendance at regularly scheduled board meetings. This study finds no evidence that these variables have a significant impact upon the determination of CEO pay levels. The second aspect of the study explored the impact of NED remuneration (including an equity component) on the setting of CEO pay levels. It finds evidence that these variables have a significant influence upon the determination of CEO pay levels, with NED equity holdings apparently acting as restraint on CEO cash pay, and alternatively, NED pay (retainer) increasing in line with CEO cash pay.","PeriodicalId":114523,"journal":{"name":"Labor eJournal","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114289433","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Does Inequality in Skills Explain Inequality in Earnings Across Advanced Countries?","authors":"Dan Devroye, Richard B. Freeman","doi":"10.3386/w8140","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3386/w8140","url":null,"abstract":"The distribution of earnings and the distribution of skills vary widely among advanced countries, with the major English-speaking countries, the US, UK, and Canada, having much greater inequality in both earnings and skills than continental European Union countries. This raises the possibility that cross-country differences in the distribution of skills determine cross-country differences in earnings inequality. Using the International Adult Literacy Survey, we find that skill inequality explains only about 7% of the cross-country difference in inequality. Most striking, the dispersion of earnings in the US is larger in narrowly defined skill groups than is the dispersion of earnings for European workers overall. The bulk of cross-country differences in earnings inequality occur within skill groups, not between them.","PeriodicalId":114523,"journal":{"name":"Labor eJournal","volume":"934 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2001-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116197290","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"What Determines 401(K) Participation and Contributions?","authors":"A. Munnell, Annika E. Sundén, Catherine Taylor","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.253037","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.253037","url":null,"abstract":"This paper uses the 1998 Survey of Consumer Finances to identify the factors that determine whether an eligible employee elects to participate in a 401(k) plan and the magnitude of the employee's contribution. The conclusion is that the most important factor affecting employees' participation and contribution decisions is their planning horizon. Those with planning periods of less than two years are much less likely to provide for retirement than those who have a more long-term perspective. These results are consistent with other studies suggesting that employee education can have a major impact on retirement saving. On the plan side, the most important determinants are the availability of an employer match and the ability of employees to gain access to their funds before retirement through withdrawal or borrowing. In short, good information about the need for retirement saving and good plan design can significantly increase participation and contributions. The question is whether employers have the incentive to make this effort under the new safe harbor nondiscrimination provisions.","PeriodicalId":114523,"journal":{"name":"Labor eJournal","volume":"48 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2000-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122543307","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}