Glass ceilings or sticky floors? A model of high-income law graduates

Minorities and females are underrepresented in the top-income quintile of law school graduates. Employing a binary logistic regression model, I examine whether this is due to a“glass ceiling” (an invisible barrier erected by third parties) or a“sticky floor” (self-imposed limitations regarding employment). My major finding is that being female, a minority, or disabled did not significantly reduce one's probability of making the top-income quintile once hours of work, experience, and other factors are taken into account. My findings directly contradict the large body of glass-ceiling literature and support the sticky-floor model. I thank the Law School Admission Council for funding this research. Helpful comments and suggestions were received from Robert Nelson of Northwestern University and the American Bar Foundation, Steven Conroy of the University of West Florida, and R. Kim Craft and Douglas Bonzo of Southern Utah University. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the institutions or persons listed above.     

Formalization of grievance procedures: A multi-firm and industry study

This study examines how two aspects of formalization of grievance procedures affect grievance procedure effectiveness: written versus oral presentation of grievance and the level of union and management authorized to resolve grievances at the first step. Several demographic variables were controlled for: size of bargaining unit, percentage of organization represented, number of grievances filed, and industry. A sample of 46 firms, representing a broad cross-section of unionized companies in the private sector, was obtained with the help of the American Arbitration Association. Results indicate that more formal grievance procedures (e.g., written presentation) are positively related to resolution rates at the first step. The number of grievances field and the size of the bargaining unit were positively related to total resolution rates prior to arbitration. We thank the American Arbitration Association for making this study possible.     

CORPORATE TAX INCIDENCE AND INEFFICIENCY WHEN CORPORATE AND NONCORPORATE GOODS ARE CLOSE SUBSTITUTES

An important deficiency in Harberger's [1962] model of corporate income taxation is its inability to consider both corporate and noncorporate production of the same good. Within-industry substitution has potentially major implications for both the excess burden and incidence of the corporate tax.
We analyze this within-industry substitution using a model in which each industry/sector contains corporate and noncorporate firms (with identical production functions) which produce goods that are close substitutes. The scope for considerable within-industry substitution of noncorporate for corporate capital leads to a very much larger excess burden than that in the Harberger model.     

Detecting parameter shift in garch models

This paper applies recent theories of testing for parameter constancy to the conditional variance in a GARCH model. The supremum Lagrange multiplier test for conditional Gaussian GARCH models and its robustified variants are discussed. The asymptotic null distribution of the test statistics are derived from the weak convergence of the scores, and the critical values from the hitting probability of squared Bessel process.

Monte Carlo studies on the finite sample size and power performance of the supremum LM tests are conducted. Applications of these tests to S&P 500 indicate that the hypothesis of stable conditional variance parameters can be rejected.     

Adoptive parents to children with severe developmental disabilities: A profile

A sample of 16 women and men who accompanied their adopted children with severe developmental disabilities to a medical appointment at Henry Ford Hospital's Multidisciplinary Care Clinic during the one-year period beginning July 1, 1988 are described in the context of their parental role vis-a-vis these children. Results of the study are presented through use of a six-part organizational scheme: demographic and social traits of the parents and their adopted children, the adopted children in family context, life satisfactions of the parents, adoption motives, adoption satisfactions, and humanization of the children.     

log-logistic survival estimation based on failure-censored data

Approximations of the Bayesian estimators of the survival function based on the censored data of the log-logistic distribution are obtained under squared-error and log-odds squared-error loss functions. A numerical example is presented. Through a Monte Carlo simulation study, the behavior of the approximations found by Tierney & Kadane and Lindley are compared with a method suggested by Weiss & Howlader.