Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Social Interactions In The Labor Market, Andrew Grodner, Thomas J. Kniesner, John A. Bishop

Center for Policy Research

We examine theoretically and empirically social interactions in labor markets and how policy prescriptions can change dramatically when there are social interactions present.

Spillover effects increase labor supply and conformity effects make labor supply perfectly inelastic at a reference group average. The demand for a good may also be influenced by either a spillover effect or a conformity effect. Positive spillover increases the demand for the good with interactions, and a conformity effect makes the demand curve pivot to become less price sensitive. Similar social interactions effects appear in the associated derived demands for labor.

Individual and community factors may …

County Characteristics And Poverty Spell Length, Andrew Grodner, John A. Bishop, Thomas J. Kniesner

Center for Policy Research

*In this paper we ask, how do individual and community factors influence the average length of poverty spells? We measure local economic conditions by the county unemployment rate and neighborhood spillover effects by the racial makeup and poverty rate of the county. We find that moving an individual from one standard deviation below the mean poverty rate to one standard deviation above the mean poverty rate (from the inner city to the suburbs) lowers the average poverty spell by 20 to 25 percent. This effect is equal in magnitude to the effect of changing the household head from female to …

Ranking Inequality: Applications Of Multivariate Subset Selection, William C. Horrace, Joseph T. Marchand, Timothy M. Smeeding

Center for Policy Research

Inequality measures are often presented in the form of a rank ordering to highlight their relative magnitudes. However, a rank ordering may produce misleading inference, because the inequality measures themselves are statistical estimators with different standard errors, and because a rank ordering necessarily implies multiple comparisons across all measures. Within this setting, if differences between several inequality measures are simultaneously and statistically insignificant, the interpretation of the ranking is changed. This study uses a multivariate subset selection procedure to make simultaneous distinctions across inequality measures at a pre-specified confidence level. Three applications of this procedure are explored using country-level data …

Ranking Inequality: Applications Of Multivariate Subset Selection, William C. Horrace, Joseph T. Marchand, Timothy M. Smeeding

Center for Policy Research

Inequality measures are often presented in the form of a rank ordering to highlight their relative magnitudes. However, a rank ordering may produce misleading inference, because the inequality measures themselves are statistical estimators with different standard errors, and because a rank ordering necessarily implies multiple comparisons across all measures. Within this setting, if differences between several inequality measures are *simultaneously* and statistically insignificant, the interpretation of the ranking is changed. This study uses a multivariate subset selection procedure to make simultaneous distinctions across inequality measures at a pre-specified confidence level. Three applications of this procedure are explored using country-level data …

American Income Inequality In A Cross-National Perspective: Why Are We So Different?, Timothy M. Smeeding

Center for Policy Research

Increasingly the rich nations of the world face a common set of social and economic issues: the cost of population aging, a growing number of single parent families, the growing majority of two-earner families, increasing numbers of immigrants from poorer nations, and in particular, rising economic inequality generated by skill-based technological change, international trade and other factors. All of these nations have also designed systems of social protection to shield their citizen against the risk of a fall in economic status due to unemployment, divorce, disability, retirement, and death of a spouse. The interaction of these economic and demographic forces …