Welfare measurement in labour supply models with nonlinear budget constraints

This paper is concerned with the measurement of individual welfare in labour supply models which allow for the impact of income taxation and income support schemes on labour supply decisions. The paper is motivated by the concern over the need to have measures which can be interpreted easily, which can be compared with net income, and which can be meaningfully aggregated. To illustrate the issues we use estimates of a discrete choice model of labour supply for United Kingdom lone mothers to compute alternative welfare measures which might be considered as having intuitive appeal to policy-makers. We compute welfare change based on these measures arising from a recent reform of the child support payments system. Received: 25 February 1997/Accepted: 12 March 1998     

Effect of mortality change on stable population parameters

The stable population model is used to establish formulas expressing the effects of mortality change on population growth rates, birth rates, and age composition. The change in the intrinsic growth rate is shown to be quite accurately approximated by the average decline in age-specific death rates between age zero and the mean age at childbearing in the stable population. This change is essentially independent of the initial level of fertility in the population. Changes in birth rates and age composition are shown to be simple functions of the age pattern of cumulative changes in mortality rates relative to an appropriately defined “neutral” standard.     

THE NONPROFIT FIRM: A POTENTIAL SOLUTION TO INHERENT MARKET FAILURES

This article analyzes the differences in products offered by nonprofit and for-profit firms in a monopolistically competitive industry where goods are differentiated both by product attributes and by the degree to which benefits are public. Because nonprofit firms receive donations, they provide a Pareto improvement of the equilibrium product set: nonprofit firms will be less biased against goods with a high social good component than will their for-profit counterparts, hi addition, the optimal donations function which equates the nonprofit equilibrium product set to the set which maximizes societal welfare is derived.     

Transnationalism and American Exports in an English‐Speaking World1

Investigating the relationship between immigration, middleman minority status, transnationalism, and U.S. foreign trade, the authors assembled a census‐based data file that contains aggregate‐level variables for 88 foreign‐born groups by national origin between 1980 and 1990. They regressed immigrant characteristics and immigration volume upon time‐lagged import/export statistics from the same 88 nations between 1985 and 1995. Results show the independent influence on exports of immigrant entrepreneurship, transnationalism, and middleman minority status. But these variables, exhaustively derived from the existing literature, had no effect on U.S. imports; they only affected exports. The authors propose that the discrepancy between imports and exports arises because of the dominance of English as a world business language. In this situation, foreigners need no help from immigrants when they export to the United States; but native‐born, monolingual Americans need the help of bicultural immigrants when they export. The empirical results suggest that immigrant entrepreneurs enhance the United States' exports and thus reduce the United States' balance of payments deficit.     

Estimating African-American mortality from inaccurate data

This paper evaluates the quality of vital statistics and census data for estimating African-American mortality over a period of six decades. The authors employ intercensal cohort comparisons and extinct generation estimates to demonstrate that conventionally constructed African-American death rates may be seriously flawed as early as age 50. Using the crude death rate at ages 50+ for 1978-1982 in conjunction with estimated growth rates and two model life table systems, the authors estimate black age-specific death rates in 1978–1982. These results suggest that if a racial crossover in death rates occurs, the age pattern of mortality among African-Americans must be far outside the range observed in populations with more accurate data.     

Age,period, and cohort effects in demography: a review

This paper considers only the vital events of demographic measurement, the factors influencing the rate at which those events occur and then investigates the consequences of patterns of these events. It reviews the state of the art of age, period and cohort analysis for demographic dependent variables. Major examples of such analyses are given in both mortality and fertility studies. In the area of mortality the conventional approach to such analysis apears to be well suited to a wide range of applications yielding useful results. The reasons for this suitability are: early childhood experience is important in many major disease and death processes, so that cohorts are legitimately viewed as acquiring early on a certain fixed susceptibility; data sometimes stretch back far enough that stationary standards of age patterns can be developed empirically, and applied to later experience; and, logarithmic or logistic transformations linearize comparisons of age schedules or mortality so that standard statistical procedures are suitable. Applications of age, period, and cohort analysis are not always routine; external constraints are required, in the form of theoretically based and mathematically expressed age patterns of mortality, in order to distinguish effectively between period and cohort effects. A set of models of age patterns of mortality that are based on cohort as well as period experience could be constructed with useful applications. With fertility analysis the conventional approach is much less suitable. Once goal directed behavior is introduced, empirical examinations must be based on theories or assumptions about how such goals are formulated and pursued. Conventional analysis might suffice only if one is prepared to accept the assumption that all pertinent goals and strategies are formulated before the initiation of childbearing and remain unaffected by subsequent events. This assumption is untenable for modern developed populations and the forms of analysis appropriate to age period cohort investigations of fertility will have to develop along with theories of reproductive behavior.