Teacher Mobility Responses to Wage Changes: Evidence from a Quasi-natural Experiment

By Torberg Falch

American Economic Review, May 2011

This paper utilizes a Norwegian experiment with exogenous wage changes to study teachers' turnover decisions. Within a completely centralized wage setting system, teachers in schools with a high degree of teacher vacancies in the past got a wage premium o...

Negative Returns to Seniority and Job Mobility across the Program Quality Distribution: Are Top Public PhD-Granting Programs Different?

By Michael J. Hilmer and Christiana E. Hilmer

American Economic Review, May 2011

We analyze a unique data set containing annual salary and detailed job and publication histories for a sample of 1,009 faculty members drawn from 53 public Ph.D.-granting economics departments. Empirical results suggest that all else equal: (1) statistica...

Are Micro and Macro Labor Supply Elasticities Consistent? A Review of Evidence on the Intensive and Extensive Margins

By Raj Chetty, Adam Guren, Day Manoli, and Andrea Weber

American Economic Review, May 2011

We evaluate whether state-of-the-art macro models featuring indivisible labor are consistent with modern quasi-experimental micro evidence by synthesizing evidence on both the intensive and extensive margins. We find that micro estimates are consistent wi...

Interpreting Labor Supply Regressions in a Model of Full- and Part-Time Work

By Yongsung Chang, Sun-Bin Kim, Kyooho Kwon, and Richard Rogerson

American Economic Review, May 2011

We construct a family model of labor supply that features adjustment along both the intensive and extensive margin. Intensive margin adjsutment is restricted to two values: full-time work and part-time work. Using simulated data from the steady state of t...

Labor Supply and the Extensive Margin

By Richard Blundell, Antoine Bozio, and Guy Laroque

American Economic Review, May 2011

In this paper we propose a systematic way of examining the importance of the extensive and the intensive margins of labor supply in order to explain the overall movements in total hours of work over time. We show how informative bounds can be developed on...

A Labor Supply Elasticity Accord?

By Lars Ljungqvist and Thomas J. Sargent

American Economic Review, May 2011

A dispute about the size of the aggregate labor supply elasticity has been fortified by a contentious aggregation theory used by real business cycle theorists. The replacement of that aggregation theory with one more congenial to microeconomic observation...

Which Dimensions of Culture Matter for Long-Run Growth?

By Yuriy Gorodnichenko and Gerard Roland

American Economic Review, May 2011

We present empirical evidence that, among a variety of cultural dimensions, the individualism-collectivism dimension, based on Hofstede's (2001) data, is the most important and robustly significant effect of culture on long run growth. Other dimensions th...

Fertility and the Plough

By Alberto Alesina, Paola Giuliano, and Nathan Nunn

American Economic Review, May 2011

This paper provides evidence that the form of agriculture traditionally practiced—intensive plough agriculture versus shifting hoe agriculture—affected historic norms and preferences about fertility, and that these norms persist, affecting obs...

The Weight of History on European Cultural Integration: A Gravity Approach

By Pauline Grosjean

American Economic Review, May 2011

The cultural gravity model proposed in this paper uses micro-level survey data of 21,000 households to estimate the contribution to cultural heterogeneity of a long history of division between the Ottoman, Habsburg, Russian or Prussian Empires since the y...

Social Preferences and Fairness Norms as Informal Institutions: Experimental Evidence

By Pamela Jakiela

American Economic Review, May 2011

We conduct a series of dictator games in which the status of the dictator relative to other players varies across treatments. Experiments are conducted in a conventional university lab and in villages in rural Kenya. We find that status is an important de...

Gender Gap in Performance under Competitive Pressure: Admissions to Czech Universities

By Štěpán Jurajda and Daniel Münich

American Economic Review, May 2011

Do women perform worse than equally able men in stressful competitive settings? We ask this question for competitions with a high payoff—admissions to tuition-free selective universities. With data on an entire cohort of Czech students graduating fr...

The Roma/Non-Roma Test Score Gap in Hungary

By Gábor Kertesi and Gábor Kézdi

American Economic Review, May 2011

This paper documents and decomposes the test score gap between Roma and non-Roma 8th graders in Hungary in 2006. Our data connect national standardized test scores to an individual panel survey with detailed data on ethnicity and family background. The te...

Learn English, Not the Local Language! Ethnic Russians in the Baltic States

By Ott Toomet

American Economic Review, May 2011

This paper analyzes the return to dominant language fluency for ethnic Russians in the Baltic States. We look at male workers using Estonian Labor Force Survey for years 2000-2010 and the 1998 wave of a panel of high-school graduates of 1982. The results ...

Oaxaca-Blinder as a Reweighting Estimator

By Patrick Kline

American Economic Review, May 2011

The classic regression based estimator of counterfactual means studied by Ronald Oaxaca (1973) and Alan Blinder (1973) is shown to constitute a propensity score reweighting estimator based upon a linear model for the conditional odds of being treated.

Robustness to Parametric Assumptions in Missing Data Models

By Bryan S. Graham and Keisuke Hirano

American Economic Review, May 2011

We consider estimation of population averages when data are missing at random. If some cells contain few observations, there can be substantial gains from imposing parametric restrictions on the cell means, but there is also a danger of misspecification. ...

Flexible Estimation of Treatment Effect Parameters

By Thomas MaCurdy, Xiaohong Chen, and Han Hong

American Economic Review, May 2011

A variety of identification strategies have a common cell structure, in which the observed heterogeneity of the regression defines a partition of the sample into cells. Typically in the presence of exogenous covariates that define the cell structure, iden...

Origins of the Unemployment Rate: The Lasting Legacy of Measurement without Theory

By David Card

American Economic Review, May 2011

The modern definition of unemployment emerged in the late 1930s from research conducted at the Works Progress Administration and the Census Bureau. According to this definition, people who are not working but actively searching for work are counted as une...

The Lerner Index of Monopoly Power: Origins and Uses

By Kenneth G. Elzinga and David E. Mills

American Economic Review, May 2011

Abba Lerner's paper in the Review of Economic Studies (1934) is the source of what is now referred to as the Lerner Index of monopoly power. The Lerner Index has become the standard measure of monopoly power and one of the most widely cited index...

Real Wage Index Numbers

By John Pencavel

American Economic Review, May 2011

Real wage index numbers have been used to measure movements in the standard of living of the typical worker. This paper describes some of these indicators for the United States and England. A new real wage index is proposed that resembles the sliding scal...

The Impact of the Transatlantic Slave Trade on Ethnic Stratification in Africa

By Warren Whatley and Rob Gillezeau

American Economic Review, May 2011

In the last 15 years, economists and economic historians have argued that Africa has undergone a "reversal of fortune" and that ethnic fragmentation is a significant cause of Africa's underdevelopment. In this article, we join these narratives by arguing ...