Contrary to widespread assumptions, there is substantial variation, both across states and across time, in the salaries of politicians. In this paper, we examine the empirical determinants of Chief Political Officer (CPO) pay guided by the literature on executive compensation. Using data for 1950-94 for the US, and controlling for fixed effects, we find that gubernatorial wages respond to incre...

This study explores the extent to which inequality affects the impact of income growth on the rates of poverty changes in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) comparatively with nonSSA, based on a global sample of 1977–2004 unbalanced panel data. For both regions and all three measures of poverty—headcount, gap, and squared gap—the paper finds the impact of GDP growth on poverty reduction as a decreasing f...

Estimating the Wage Elasticity of Labour Supply to a Firm: What Evidence Is There for Monopsony? In this paper we estimate the elasticity of the labour supply to a firm, using data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey. Estimation of this elasticity is of particular interest not only in its own right but also because of its relevance to the debate about the ...

In this study, a housing wealth effect on personal consumption is assumed and tested on 16 selected European countries using an estimator developed for dynamic heterogeneous panel data analysis. Empirical estimates have shown that there is a long-run and a short-run housing wealth effect in analysed countries. The elasticity of real private consumption to changes in real disposable income has s...

We incorporate a wage-bargaining structure in a dynamic general equilibrium model and show how this feature changes shortand long-run properties of equilibria compared with a perfectly competitive setting. We discuss how employment, capital and income shares respond to wage-setting shocks and show that adjustment dynamics depend decisively on the magnitude of the elasticity of substitution betw...

This empirical paper adopts panel data methodologies to investigate the impact of trade liberalisation on export growth and import growth across 28 Sub-Saharan African countries from 1981 to 2010. The results show that trade liberalisation increases the growth of exports; however, imports grow faster by approximately two percentage points which gives a prima facie evidence that the trade balanc...

The objective of this paper is to analyse to what extent the use of cross-section data will distort the estimated elasticities for car ownership demand when the observed variables do not correspond to a state equilibrium for some individuals in the sample. Our proposal consists of approximating the equilibrium values of the observed variables by constructing a pseudo-panel data set which entail...

We examine the impact of the coal boom of the 1970's and the coal bust of the 1980's on disability program participation. These shocks provide clear evidence that as the value of labor-market participation increases, disability program participation falls. For the Disability Insurance program, the elasticity of payments with respect to local earnings is between -0.3 and -0.4 and for Supplementa...

This study estimates household demand for finfish in the United States using a limited dependent variable model that accounts for both participation and consumption decisions and also accommodates nonnormal and heteroskedastic errors. Results suggest that own-price elasticity is near unitary and income elasticity is small. Price of finfish, shopping frequency, Northeast, Black and other non-Whi...

We develop a model for determining the optimal high income linear tax rate when there exist imperfectly substitutable types of labor. If one type is disproportionately prevalent among higher income taxpayers, then wages adjust in response to more progressive taxation and part of the statutory tax burden is shifted to lower income taxpayers. Our derivation is expressed in terms of readily interp...