Part-Time Work in the EEC Countries: Evolution during the 1980s

Whereas part-time working remains the exponent par excellence of the flexibility of female employment, its relative growth seems to have come to a standstill in both Denmark and the United Kingdom as far as women are concerned, and for men it is now becoming more a matter of young people offsetting studies and work. In France, the Netherlands, Belgium, the UK, Ireland and Germany, the increase in female employment between 1983 and 1989 is largely attributable to the growth of part-time employment. The difference with respect to the countries of the South of Europe is striking since the proportion of part-time working there is low, and has not increased significantly since 1983. Its concentration in already very close sectors, its non-optional nature, insecurity and awkward working hours make part-time employment of very little personal value for employees.     

Deterministic Approximation of Stochastic Evolution in Games

This paper provides deterministic approximation results for stochastic processes that arise when finite populations recurrently play finite games. The processes are Markov chains, and the approximation is defined in continuous time as a system of ordinary differential equations of the type studied in evolutionary game theory. We establish precise connections between the long‐run behavior of the discrete stochastic process, for large populations, and its deterministic flow approximation. In particular, we provide probabilistic bounds on exit times from and visitation rates to neighborhoods of attractors to the deterministic flow. We sharpen these results in the special case of ergodic processes.     

The Dynamics of Inequality

The past forty years have seen a rapid rise in top income inequality in the United States. While there is a large number of existing theories of the Pareto tail of the long‐run income distributions, almost none of these address the fast rise in top inequality observed in the data. We show that standard theories, which build on a random growth mechanism, generate transition dynamics that are too slow relative to those observed in the data. We then suggest two parsimonious deviations from the canonical model that can explain such changes: “scale dependence” that may arise from changes in skill prices, and “type dependence,” that is, the presence of some “high‐growth types.” These deviations are consistent with theories in which the increase in top income inequality is driven by the rise of “superstar” entrepreneurs or managers.