11 Many authors have discussed an apparent shift to a new employment contract characterized 12 by less commitment between employer and employee, and closer ties between wages within the 13 enterprise and those in the external labor market. We study the issue of when people in the US 14 and Canada feel pay cuts are fair. In contrast to much previous discussion, we find no evidence 15 of increasi...

Child Labor Variation by Type of Respondent: Evidence from a Large-Scale Study This study uses a nationally representative survey to analyze a key survey design decision in child labor measurement: self-reporting versus proxy interviewing. The child/proxy disagreement affects 20 percent of the sample, which translates into a 17.1 percentage point difference in the national rate of child labor b...

We construct an intertemporal model of rent-maximizing behaviour on the part of a timber harvester under potentially multi-dimensional risk as well as geographical heterogeneity. Subsequently, we use recursive methods (in particular, the method of dynamic programming) to characterize the optimal policy function, the rent-maximizing timber-harvesting profile. One noteworthy feature of our applic...

Using the Helmert-Transformation to Reduce Dimensionality in a Mixed Model: Application to a Wage Equation with Worker and Firm Heterogeneity A model for matched data with two types of unobserved heterogeneity is considered – one related to the observation unit, the other to units to which the observation units are matched. One or both of the unobserved components are assumed to be random. This...

We study the effect of interview modes on estimates of economic inequality which are based on survey data. We exploit variation in interview modes in the Austrian EU-SILC panel, where between 2007 and 2008 the interview mode was switched from personal interviews to telephone interviews for some but not all participants. We combine methods from the program evaluation literature with methods from...

How Sensitive Are Retirement Decisions to Financial Incentives: A Stated Preference Analysis We study effects of financial incentives on the retirement age using stated preference data. Dutch survey respondents were given hypothetical retirement scenarios describing age(s) of (partial and full) retirement and replacement rate(s). A structural model is estimated in which utility is the discounte...

We examine the Cournot oligopoly model in the context of social and individual learning. In both models of learning, firms update their decisions about how much to produce via variants of the genetic algorithm updating procedure. Arifovic (1994) found that both models of social and individual learning converged to the Walrasian, competitive equilibrium. Vriend (2000) reports that the model of s...

Downloading Wisdom from Online Crowds The internet and other large textual databases contain billions of documents: is there useful information in the number of documents written about different topics? We propose, based on the premise that the occurrence of a phenomenon increases the likelihood that people write about it, that the relative frequency of documents discussing a phenomenon can be ...

This paper proposes that bank runs are unique equilibrium outcomes instead of self-fulfilling prophecies. By assuming that depositors make their withdrawal decisions sequentially, the model provides an equilibrium-selection mechanism in the economy. A bank run would occur if and only if depositors perceive a low return on bank assets. Furthermore, a panic situation arises only when the market i...

We examine the roles of idiosyncratic and systemic funding liquidity risks in bank failures. We estimate a discrete-time hazard model of bank failure using data of U.S. commercial banks between 1985 and 2004, and examine its out-of-sample forecasting performance between 2005 and 2011. The out-of-sample performance comparison shows this model outperforms typical bank failure prediction models. W...