Search results

Over the past 15 years or so, a very large proportion of the forensic economics literature has been devoted to research concerning better ways of estimating damages in cases involving personal injury and wrongful death (PI/WD). This is probably not surprising since the largest fraction of consulting income for forensic economists (at least those in the National Association of Forensic Economics, NAFE) comes from such cases.

Cross-section data suggest that the relationship between age and hourly earnings is an inverted U shape. Evidence from panel data does not necessarily confirm this finding suggesting that older workers may not experience a reduction in earnings at the end of their working life. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

In this paper the authors use panel data on males for Great Britain in order to examine why the two types of data provide conflicting conclusions. Concentrating on the over 50s, several hypotheses are examined: overlapping cohorts, job tenure, job-changing, labour supply behaviour, and selectivity bias.

Cohort and individual fixed effects partly explain the divergent conclusions. However, for fully, year-on-year employed individuals, there is no evidence of earnings decline at the end of working life. The authors find no role for selectivity due to retirement, although shorter working hours or partial retirement along with job-changing late in life does provide an explanation for why hourly earnings decline for certain older workers.

The authors find no evidence that the process of ageing itself leads to lower earnings as suggested by the cross-section profile.

It has long been recognised that cohort and cross‐sectional age‐earnings profiles differ. A standard procedure, which is quite reasonable in the absence of more information, is to obtain a cohort profile by simply adding the general rate of growth of real earnings to the growth of earnings associated with age, as shown by cross‐sectional data. Indeed, this would seem to be supported by the observation that cross‐sectional earnings profiles for a number of different years show a great deal of stability in their general shape. The main question considered here is whether cohort profiles can in fact be estimated in this simple way. A basic statistical model of age‐earnings profiles is described in the next section. The model is then applied to several groups of professional scientists, chemists and physicists in Britain and Australia, in the third section. The data were obtained from special surveys of career histories and are described briefly in the Appendix. A feature of the surveys is that sufficient data were collected to enable separate analyses of male and female scientists to be carried out.

The costs of job displacement are examined on a sample of Japanese workers successfully provided job placement services from 2000 to 2003, a period of economic stagnation and structural change in Japan. We find that displaced workers suffer a loss of approximately $1,100 for each additional year of age. Workers also incur a large penalty when they change industries after being displaced. The age–earnings loss relationship is consistent with the operation of a delayed compensation scheme in large firms.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the rates of return and the risks of different types of educational paths – all leading to a tertiary educational degree. The paper seeks to distinguish a purely academic educational path from a purely vocational path and a mixed path with loops through both systems.

The paper studies the labor market outcome to compare earnings and calculate net return rates as well as risk measures to investigate whether different educational paths are characterized by different risk‐return trade‐offs. Entrepreneurs are separated from employees in order to examine whether for the same combination of education the labour market outcomes differ between the two groups.

The empirical results are based on the Swiss Labor Force Survey (SLFS) and demonstrate that mixed educational paths are well rewarded in the labor market. However, for entrepreneurs a high return is also associated with a high income variance.

The findings provide evidence for the existence of complementarities between vocational and academic education. Further research on mixed educational paths might provide more insight into this presumed relationship.

Since the results indicate that mixed educational paths are a worthwhile strategy, the permeability of a national education system is a very important educational policy issue.

The study is innovative in three ways: first, it focuses on complete educational paths and not just the highest educational degree. Second, an alternative measure, the Baldwin rate of return, is used to assess the profitability attached to different educational paths. Third, the income risk associated with each educational path is calculated.

A striking feature of Jaques' work is his “no nonsense” attitude to the “manager‐subordinate” relationship. His blunt account of the origins of this relationship seems at first sight to place him in the legalistic “principles of management” camp rather than in the ranks of the subtler “people centred” schools. We shall see before long how misleading such first impressions can be, for Jaques is not making simplistic assumptions about the human psyche. But he certainly sees no point in agonising over the mechanism of association which brings organisations and work‐groups into being when the facts of life are perfectly straightforward and there is no need to be squeamish about them.

Economic conditions such as convexity, homogeneity, homotheticity, and monotonicity are all important assumptions or consequences of assumptions of economic functionals to be estimated. Recent research has seen a renewed interest in imposing constraints in nonparametric regression. We survey the available methods in the literature, discuss the challenges that present themselves when empirically implementing these methods, and extend an existing method to handle general nonlinear constraints. A heuristic discussion on the empirical implementation for methods that use sequential quadratic programming is provided for the reader, and simulated and empirical evidence on the distinction between constrained and unconstrained nonparametric regression surfaces is covered.

The purpose of this paper is to estimate the union-nonunion pay gap impact separately for wages and bonuses as well as total compensation to include both wages and bonuses in China. The way in which the impact varies as control variables are added is illustrated as is how the impact varies by the type of firm ownership. The overall pay gap is also decomposed into a component due to differences in their pay determining characteristics as well as a component due to differences in their returns to those characteristics. These separate components are also calculated throughout the pay distribution.

Using the 2010 China Family Panel Studies Survey, a nationally representative survey in China, the methodology involves different estimation procedures as appropriate for the nature of the data and the dependent variables. First the authors estimate a single equation to determine the union-nonunion pay gap. Then the authors estimate the union impact on the various components of compensation (wages and bonuses). Next the authors decompose the relative contribution of each factor in explaining the wage gap. Finally, quantile regressions are used to examine the union impact across various levels of the pay distribution.

The authors find a gross union-nonunion pay gap (wages + bonuses) of 42 percent, dropping to 12 percent after controlling for the effect of other pay determining factors. The union impact on wages is only 8 percent, but bonuses are about twice as high for union workers. The union impact is essentially zero for (state-owned firms) SOEs and for foreign-owned firms but it is large at 16 percent for private firms and even larger at 22 percent for government agencies. Of the overall pay gap of 42 percent, about three-quarters is attributable to differences in their endowments of pay determining characteristics and about one-quarter to differences in the returns for the same endowments of characteristics. Quantile regressions reveal that the pure or adjusted union wage premium exhibits a u-shaped pattern being highest in the bottom and to a lesser extent the top of the pay distribution.

There are a dearth of studies examining the union-nonunion pay gap in China. Of the studies that examine this issue, all of them are at the enterprise level with no studies at the individual level. Taking a nationally representative dataset at the individual level, the authors are able to estimate the union-nonunion pay gap in China. The authors identify the portion of the gap that reflects differences in endowments of pay determining characteristics and the portion that reflects different returns to those characteristics, and the relative contribution of the different variables to those components; and how these components change over the pay distribution. The authors also offer explanations for many of these patterns.

The paper is devoted to the question of how to allocate a given educational budget. Alternative avenues of expenditure on post‐secondary education are treated as investment projects and their benefit‐cost ratios are compared. The analysis is essentially static and is based on two investigations carried out by the author, one in Canada, the other in the United Kingdom. The paper is organised into three sections. The first discusses the methodology underlying the two detailed studies. The second presents conclusions on particular aspects of the general problem of allocating resources within formal education, and is divided into four parts: the balance between private and social costs and benefits, between academic levels of education, between types of education and between male and female education. The final section of the paper contains four more general points and emphasises our ignorance in much of this area.