Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch ge... more Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your personal and scholarly purposes. You are not to copy documents for public or commercial purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence.
In this paper, we focus on a novel and potentially important aspect of the workfare policy in the... more In this paper, we focus on a novel and potentially important aspect of the workfare policy in the Danish labor market, namely its effect on crime. We do this by exploiting two policy changes. First, we examine the effect of a series of national welfare reforms introduced during the 1990s. Those reforms strengthened the work requirement for the young welfare recipients and were introduced gradually, starting with younger welfare participants first. We exploit the differential introduction of workfare reform across different age groups as the exogenous variation. Second, we use a unique policy experiment that began in 1987 by an innovative mayor of the Danish city of Farum, where he imposed a 100 % work or training requirement for all welfare recipients immediately from the date of enrollment. By comparing the changes in crime rates among the welfare recipients in Farum before and after 1987 with that of the rest of Denmark, we identify the effect of workfare on the crime rate. Our re...
We model pre-birth twins' competition for maternal resources inside the womb. When the innate... more We model pre-birth twins' competition for maternal resources inside the womb. When the innate endowment affects both birth weight and the post-birth outcome directly, pre-natal social interaction leads to bias in thestandard twin fixed-effects estimator. We propose a test of social interaction that is based on data on triplets, and find some evidence for social interaction. We then use an instrumental-variable estimation strategy that recovers consistently the returns to birth weight. Our estimation results indicate that the returns to birth weight are closer to the sibling-based estimates than the twin fixed-effects estimates reported in the previous literature.
We examine the ability of male immigrants to transfer their occupational human capital using info... more We examine the ability of male immigrants to transfer their occupational human capital using information from the O*NET and a unique dataset that includes both the last source country occupation and the first four years of occupations in Canada. We first augment a model of occupational choice and skill accumulation to derive predictions about the cross-border transferability of occupational human capital. We then test the empirical implications using the skill requirements of pre- and post-immigration occupations. We find that male immigrants to Canada were employed in source country occupations that required high levels of cognitive skills, but relied less intently on manual skills. Following immigration, they find initial employment in occupations that require the opposite. Regression analysis uncovers large returns to the quantitative skill requirements of Canadian occupations, but no returns to source country skill requirements. Finally, our empirical findings suggests that occu...
In this paper, we estimate the effect of workfare policy on crime by exploiting two exogenous wel... more In this paper, we estimate the effect of workfare policy on crime by exploiting two exogenous welfare policy changes in Denmark. Our results show a strong decline in the crime rate among treated unemployment uninsured men relative to untreated uninsured and unemployment insured men, and part of this decline can be identified as a direct effect of workfare participation. Moreover, we find that criminal activity was also reduced during weekends, when the workfare programs were closed, allowing us to distinguishing the pure program effect from the incapacitation effect. These results imply a strong and potentially lasting crime reducing effect of workfare policy.
Canadian Journal of Economics/Revue canadienne d'économique, 2019
We examine the ability of immigrants to transfer the occupational human capital they acquired pri... more We examine the ability of immigrants to transfer the occupational human capital they acquired prior to immigration. We first augment a model of occupational choice to study the implications of language proficiency on the cross‐border transferability of occupational human capital. We then explore the empirical predictions using information about the skill requirements from O*NET and a unique dataset that includes both the last source country occupation and the first four years of occupations in Canada. We supplement the analysis using Census estimates for the same cohort with source country occupational skill requirements predicted using detailed human capital related information such as field of study. We find that male immigrants to Canada were employed in source country occupations that typically require high levels of cognitive skills, but rely less intently on manual skills. Following immigration, they find initial employment in occupations that require the opposite. Consistent ...
In this paper, we estimate the effect of workfare policy on crime by exploiting two exogenous wel... more In this paper, we estimate the effect of workfare policy on crime by exploiting two exogenous welfare policy changes in Denmark. Our results show a strong decline in the crime rate among treated unemployment uninsured men relative to untreated uninsured and unemployment insured men, and part of this decline can be identified as a direct effect of workfare participation. Moreover, we find that criminal activity was also reduced during weekends, when the workfare programs were closed, allowing us to distinguishing the pure program effect from the incapacitation effect. These results imply a strong and potentially lasting crime reducing effect of workfare policy.
Previous studies find significant negative effects of cancer on employment, with stronger effects... more Previous studies find significant negative effects of cancer on employment, with stronger effects for less-educated workers. We investigate whether the effect of cancer varies by skill requirement in the pre-cancer occupation, whether such heterogeneity can explain educational gradients, and whether cancer is associated with changes in job characteristics for cancer survivors who remain employed four years after the diagnosis. We combine Danish administrative registers with detailed skill requirement data and use individuals without cancer as a control group. Our main findings are the following: the negative effect of cancer on employment is stronger if the pre-cancer occupation requires high levels of manual skills or low levels of cognitive skills; the educational gradient diminishes substantially if we allow the effects of cancer to also depend on pre-cancer skill requirements; and cancer is not associated with occupational mobility, indicating potential for policies that reduce ...
In the recent past, many economies, attempting to become more open, have adopted policies fosteri... more In the recent past, many economies, attempting to become more open, have adopted policies fostering a less restrictive trade regime. In their attempts to become more open, policy makers can, with the best of intentions, adopt policies that have unforeseen and often undesirable side effects. In the 1980s, Australia was in the process of converting quotas to tariffs. In the process they auctioned off import quota licenses in order to use the submitted bids to calculate equivalent tariff rates. A security deposit was charged to prevent frivolous bidding. The collection of security deposits may be seen as a harmless policy with the only discernable cost being the opportunity cost of the funds while they are on deposit. We argue that, at least in the Australian context, this is not so. Using data from a middleman in the secondary market for these licenses, we show that the policy may have led to welfare losses in the secondary market.
There is little work on the inner workings of journals. What factors seem to affect the ability t... more There is little work on the inner workings of journals. What factors seem to affect the ability to publish in a journal? Could simple rules (which are already used by some journals) like the desk rejection of a significant minority of papers, help to streamline the process? At what cost? How well do journals seem to do in choosing papers? What can we say about the extent of type 1 and type 2 errors? Do editors seem to have uniform standards or are some harsher than others? We use data on submissions to the Journal of International Economics to help answer these questions.
This paper proposes a new test of the Protection for Sale (PFS) model by Grossman and Helpman (19... more This paper proposes a new test of the Protection for Sale (PFS) model by Grossman and Helpman (1994). Unlike existing methods in the literature, our approach does not require any data on political organizations. We formally show that the PFS model provides the following prediction: in the quanitle regression of the protection measure on the inverse import penetration ratio divided by the import demand elasticity, its coefficient should be positive at the 1 quantile close to one. We examine this prediction using the data from Gawande and Bandyopadhyay (2000). The results do not provide any evidence favoring the PFS model.
International Review of Economics & Finance, 2009
The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of... more The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.
We solve and estimate a dynamic model that allows agents to optimally choose their labor hours an... more We solve and estimate a dynamic model that allows agents to optimally choose their labor hours and consumption and that allows for both human capital accumulation and savings. Estimation results and simulation exercises indicate that the intertemporal elasticity of substitution is much higher than the conventional estimates and the downward bias comes from the omission of the human capital accumulation effect. The human capital accumulation effect renders the life-cycle path of the shadow wage relatively flat, even though wages increase with age. Hence, a rather flat life-cycle labor supply path can be reconciled with a high intertemporal elasticity of substitution.
1 We are grateful to Abdullah Yavas and Bee Roberts for comments on an earlier draft, to Anshul K... more 1 We are grateful to Abdullah Yavas and Bee Roberts for comments on an earlier draft, to Anshul Kumar, Su(Jen Roberts and Supriya Mishra for able research assistance, and to Sergey Lychagin for help with the PERL code for citation extraction. This is a very preliminary draft. Please ...
This special issue brings together several novel contributions that bridge marketing and industri... more This special issue brings together several novel contributions that bridge marketing and industrial organization literature. In economics, traditional consumer theory assumes a consumer makes optimal consumption choice given the budget constraint without frictions. The consumption or demand is a continuous function of income and the price of the products. Such textbook consumer theory abstracts away from details that are the main focuses of marketing research. For example, in marketing literature,
We propose a new methodology for estimating the demand and cost functions of differentiated produ... more We propose a new methodology for estimating the demand and cost functions of differentiated products models when demand and cost data are available. The method deals with the endogeneity of prices to demand shocks and the endogeneity of outputs to cost shocks, but does not require instruments for identification. We establish non-parametric identification, consistency and asymptotic normality of our estimator. Using Monte-Carlo experiments, we show our method works well in contexts where instruments are correlated with demand and cost shocks, and where commonly-used instrumental variables estimators are biased and numerically unstable.
We develop a model of household demand for frequently purchased consumer goods that are branded, ... more We develop a model of household demand for frequently purchased consumer goods that are branded, storable and subject to stochastic price fluctuations. Our framework accounts for how inventories and expectations of future prices affect current period purchase decisions. We estimate our model using scanner data for the ketchup category. Our results indicate that price expectations and the nature of the price process have important effects on demand elasticities. Long-run cross price elasticities of demand are more than twice as great as short-run cross price elasticities. Temporary price cuts (or deals) primarily generate purchase acceleration and category expansion, rather than brand switching.
Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch ge... more Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your personal and scholarly purposes. You are not to copy documents for public or commercial purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence.
In this paper, we focus on a novel and potentially important aspect of the workfare policy in the... more In this paper, we focus on a novel and potentially important aspect of the workfare policy in the Danish labor market, namely its effect on crime. We do this by exploiting two policy changes. First, we examine the effect of a series of national welfare reforms introduced during the 1990s. Those reforms strengthened the work requirement for the young welfare recipients and were introduced gradually, starting with younger welfare participants first. We exploit the differential introduction of workfare reform across different age groups as the exogenous variation. Second, we use a unique policy experiment that began in 1987 by an innovative mayor of the Danish city of Farum, where he imposed a 100 % work or training requirement for all welfare recipients immediately from the date of enrollment. By comparing the changes in crime rates among the welfare recipients in Farum before and after 1987 with that of the rest of Denmark, we identify the effect of workfare on the crime rate. Our re...
We model pre-birth twins' competition for maternal resources inside the womb. When the innate... more We model pre-birth twins' competition for maternal resources inside the womb. When the innate endowment affects both birth weight and the post-birth outcome directly, pre-natal social interaction leads to bias in thestandard twin fixed-effects estimator. We propose a test of social interaction that is based on data on triplets, and find some evidence for social interaction. We then use an instrumental-variable estimation strategy that recovers consistently the returns to birth weight. Our estimation results indicate that the returns to birth weight are closer to the sibling-based estimates than the twin fixed-effects estimates reported in the previous literature.
We examine the ability of male immigrants to transfer their occupational human capital using info... more We examine the ability of male immigrants to transfer their occupational human capital using information from the O*NET and a unique dataset that includes both the last source country occupation and the first four years of occupations in Canada. We first augment a model of occupational choice and skill accumulation to derive predictions about the cross-border transferability of occupational human capital. We then test the empirical implications using the skill requirements of pre- and post-immigration occupations. We find that male immigrants to Canada were employed in source country occupations that required high levels of cognitive skills, but relied less intently on manual skills. Following immigration, they find initial employment in occupations that require the opposite. Regression analysis uncovers large returns to the quantitative skill requirements of Canadian occupations, but no returns to source country skill requirements. Finally, our empirical findings suggests that occu...
In this paper, we estimate the effect of workfare policy on crime by exploiting two exogenous wel... more In this paper, we estimate the effect of workfare policy on crime by exploiting two exogenous welfare policy changes in Denmark. Our results show a strong decline in the crime rate among treated unemployment uninsured men relative to untreated uninsured and unemployment insured men, and part of this decline can be identified as a direct effect of workfare participation. Moreover, we find that criminal activity was also reduced during weekends, when the workfare programs were closed, allowing us to distinguishing the pure program effect from the incapacitation effect. These results imply a strong and potentially lasting crime reducing effect of workfare policy.
Canadian Journal of Economics/Revue canadienne d'économique, 2019
We examine the ability of immigrants to transfer the occupational human capital they acquired pri... more We examine the ability of immigrants to transfer the occupational human capital they acquired prior to immigration. We first augment a model of occupational choice to study the implications of language proficiency on the cross‐border transferability of occupational human capital. We then explore the empirical predictions using information about the skill requirements from O*NET and a unique dataset that includes both the last source country occupation and the first four years of occupations in Canada. We supplement the analysis using Census estimates for the same cohort with source country occupational skill requirements predicted using detailed human capital related information such as field of study. We find that male immigrants to Canada were employed in source country occupations that typically require high levels of cognitive skills, but rely less intently on manual skills. Following immigration, they find initial employment in occupations that require the opposite. Consistent ...
In this paper, we estimate the effect of workfare policy on crime by exploiting two exogenous wel... more In this paper, we estimate the effect of workfare policy on crime by exploiting two exogenous welfare policy changes in Denmark. Our results show a strong decline in the crime rate among treated unemployment uninsured men relative to untreated uninsured and unemployment insured men, and part of this decline can be identified as a direct effect of workfare participation. Moreover, we find that criminal activity was also reduced during weekends, when the workfare programs were closed, allowing us to distinguishing the pure program effect from the incapacitation effect. These results imply a strong and potentially lasting crime reducing effect of workfare policy.
Previous studies find significant negative effects of cancer on employment, with stronger effects... more Previous studies find significant negative effects of cancer on employment, with stronger effects for less-educated workers. We investigate whether the effect of cancer varies by skill requirement in the pre-cancer occupation, whether such heterogeneity can explain educational gradients, and whether cancer is associated with changes in job characteristics for cancer survivors who remain employed four years after the diagnosis. We combine Danish administrative registers with detailed skill requirement data and use individuals without cancer as a control group. Our main findings are the following: the negative effect of cancer on employment is stronger if the pre-cancer occupation requires high levels of manual skills or low levels of cognitive skills; the educational gradient diminishes substantially if we allow the effects of cancer to also depend on pre-cancer skill requirements; and cancer is not associated with occupational mobility, indicating potential for policies that reduce ...
In the recent past, many economies, attempting to become more open, have adopted policies fosteri... more In the recent past, many economies, attempting to become more open, have adopted policies fostering a less restrictive trade regime. In their attempts to become more open, policy makers can, with the best of intentions, adopt policies that have unforeseen and often undesirable side effects. In the 1980s, Australia was in the process of converting quotas to tariffs. In the process they auctioned off import quota licenses in order to use the submitted bids to calculate equivalent tariff rates. A security deposit was charged to prevent frivolous bidding. The collection of security deposits may be seen as a harmless policy with the only discernable cost being the opportunity cost of the funds while they are on deposit. We argue that, at least in the Australian context, this is not so. Using data from a middleman in the secondary market for these licenses, we show that the policy may have led to welfare losses in the secondary market.
There is little work on the inner workings of journals. What factors seem to affect the ability t... more There is little work on the inner workings of journals. What factors seem to affect the ability to publish in a journal? Could simple rules (which are already used by some journals) like the desk rejection of a significant minority of papers, help to streamline the process? At what cost? How well do journals seem to do in choosing papers? What can we say about the extent of type 1 and type 2 errors? Do editors seem to have uniform standards or are some harsher than others? We use data on submissions to the Journal of International Economics to help answer these questions.
This paper proposes a new test of the Protection for Sale (PFS) model by Grossman and Helpman (19... more This paper proposes a new test of the Protection for Sale (PFS) model by Grossman and Helpman (1994). Unlike existing methods in the literature, our approach does not require any data on political organizations. We formally show that the PFS model provides the following prediction: in the quanitle regression of the protection measure on the inverse import penetration ratio divided by the import demand elasticity, its coefficient should be positive at the 1 quantile close to one. We examine this prediction using the data from Gawande and Bandyopadhyay (2000). The results do not provide any evidence favoring the PFS model.
International Review of Economics & Finance, 2009
The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of... more The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.
We solve and estimate a dynamic model that allows agents to optimally choose their labor hours an... more We solve and estimate a dynamic model that allows agents to optimally choose their labor hours and consumption and that allows for both human capital accumulation and savings. Estimation results and simulation exercises indicate that the intertemporal elasticity of substitution is much higher than the conventional estimates and the downward bias comes from the omission of the human capital accumulation effect. The human capital accumulation effect renders the life-cycle path of the shadow wage relatively flat, even though wages increase with age. Hence, a rather flat life-cycle labor supply path can be reconciled with a high intertemporal elasticity of substitution.
1 We are grateful to Abdullah Yavas and Bee Roberts for comments on an earlier draft, to Anshul K... more 1 We are grateful to Abdullah Yavas and Bee Roberts for comments on an earlier draft, to Anshul Kumar, Su(Jen Roberts and Supriya Mishra for able research assistance, and to Sergey Lychagin for help with the PERL code for citation extraction. This is a very preliminary draft. Please ...
This special issue brings together several novel contributions that bridge marketing and industri... more This special issue brings together several novel contributions that bridge marketing and industrial organization literature. In economics, traditional consumer theory assumes a consumer makes optimal consumption choice given the budget constraint without frictions. The consumption or demand is a continuous function of income and the price of the products. Such textbook consumer theory abstracts away from details that are the main focuses of marketing research. For example, in marketing literature,
We propose a new methodology for estimating the demand and cost functions of differentiated produ... more We propose a new methodology for estimating the demand and cost functions of differentiated products models when demand and cost data are available. The method deals with the endogeneity of prices to demand shocks and the endogeneity of outputs to cost shocks, but does not require instruments for identification. We establish non-parametric identification, consistency and asymptotic normality of our estimator. Using Monte-Carlo experiments, we show our method works well in contexts where instruments are correlated with demand and cost shocks, and where commonly-used instrumental variables estimators are biased and numerically unstable.
We develop a model of household demand for frequently purchased consumer goods that are branded, ... more We develop a model of household demand for frequently purchased consumer goods that are branded, storable and subject to stochastic price fluctuations. Our framework accounts for how inventories and expectations of future prices affect current period purchase decisions. We estimate our model using scanner data for the ketchup category. Our results indicate that price expectations and the nature of the price process have important effects on demand elasticities. Long-run cross price elasticities of demand are more than twice as great as short-run cross price elasticities. Temporary price cuts (or deals) primarily generate purchase acceleration and category expansion, rather than brand switching.
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