[spa] ? Que papel juegan la rama, el nivel de instruccion, el diploma obtenido y en fin la region en el proceso de insercion de aquellos jovenes que han optado por una formacion profesional? Un estudio basado en los datos de la encuesta Jovenes y carreras mide la eficacia relativa de dos ramas de formacion inicial: el contrato de aprendizaje y el instituto de formacion profesional. De ello resulta que los aprendices tienen mas probabilidad de ser contratados que aquellos jovenes que han optado por el instituto de formacion profesional y menos probabilidad de ser contratados a tiempo parcial. Los salarios que cobran no son muy distintos de los de aquellos que salen del instituto de formacion profesional y su primer sueldo y los futuros aumentos tampoco son inferiores.. El analisis basado en cuatro criterios estadisticos distintos (la tasa de empleo en 1997, la tasa de empleo a tiempo completo, el salario de ese ano y el primer sueldo en el primer empleo de mas de seis meses de duracion), confirman la idea de que el aprendizaje permite una buena insercion profesional de los jovenes. Las condiciones de insercion dependen ademas del nivel de instruccion. Asi, el emprender una formacion suplementaria favorece el acceso al empleo, aunque no desemboque esta formacion en la obtencion de un diploma ni en un aumento del sueldo. En fin, no es de mesestimar el protagonismo de las regiones en la opcion por el contrato de aprendizaje y en el hecho de ser contratado a tiempo parcial. La formacion profesional y la insercion en el mercado laboral: . la eficacia del contrato de aprendizaje [ger] Welche Rolle spielen der Ausbildungsgang, das Ausbildungsniveau, das Abschluszeugnis und schlieslich die Region bei der beruflichen Eingliederung der Jugendlichen, die sich fur eine Berufsausbildung entschieden haben? In einer Studie anhand der Daten der Erhebung Jugendliche und karriere wird die relative Effizienz der beiden Erstausbildungsgange - der Lehre und des Berufsgymnasiums - geschatzt. Im Vergleich zu den Absolventen des Berufsgymnasiums ist demnach fur die Lehrlinge die Wahrscheinlichkeit, eine Anstellung zu finden, groser, und die Wahrscheinlichkeit, einer Teilzeitbeschaftigung nachzugehen, kleiner. Ihr Lohn weicht kaum von dem der Absolventen des Berufsgymnasiums ab; auch ihr Anfangslohn und die Lohnerhohungen sind nicht geringer. Eine Analyse auf der Grundlage vier verschiedener statistischer Kriterien (Beschaftigungsquote 1997, Quote der Vollzeitbeschaftigung, Lohn in diesem Jahr und Anfangslohn bei der ersten Beschaftigung von langer als sechs Monaten) bestatigt die Annahme, das eine Lehre die berufliche Eingliederung der Jugendlichen begunstigt. Ferner hangen die Bedingungen der Eingliederung vom Ausbildungsniveau ab: eine Zusatzausbildung erleichtert den Zugang zur Beschaftigung, auch wenn im Rahmen dieser Ausbildung kein Diplom erworben wurde und deshalb kein hoherer Lohn gezahlt wird. Bei der Entscheidung zugunsten einer Lehre und bei der Anstellung als Teilzeitbeschaftigte spielen die Regionen eine herausragende Rolle. [eng] What role is played by the type of training, level of education, qualifications attained and region in the process of young people’s integration into the world of work when they have taken vocational training? A study based on data from the Young People and careers survey looks at the relative effectiveness of two types of initial training: the apprenticeship contract and the vocational secondary school. It finds that apprentices are more likely to be employed and less likely to be employed part time than young people who choose a vocational secondary school. They do not receive significantly different wages from those who graduate from vocational secondary schools and have neither lower starting wages nor smaller wage increases. The analysis is based on four statistically different criteria: the employment rate in 1997, the full-time employment rate, wages in 1997 and the starting wage in the first job lasting over six months. This analysis confirms the idea that apprenticeship provides young people with a fairly good entry into the world of work. Moreover, employability conditions depend on the level of studies attained: taking additional training helps make it easier to find a job, even when this training provides no paper qualifications and wages are consequently no better. Lastly, the regions play an essential role in whether young people are steered towards an apprenticeship contract and employed part time. [fre] Quel est le role de la filiere, du niveau d’education, du diplome obtenu et enfin de la region dans le processus d’insertion des jeunes ayant choisi une formation professionnelle? Une etude a partir des donnees de l’enquete Jeunes et carrieres estime l’efficacite relative de deux filieres de formation initiale: le contrat d’apprentissage et le lycee professionnel. Il en ressort que les apprentis sont plus probablement employes que les jeunes ayant choisi le lycee professionnel et moins probablement employes a temps partiel. Ils n’obtiennent pas de salaires significativement differents des sortants du lycee professionnel et ne connaissent pas de salaires d’embauche ni de croissances de salaire plus faibles. L’analyse basee sur quatre criteres statistiques differents (le taux d’emploi en 1997, le taux d’emploi a plein temps, le salaire cette meme annee et le salaire d’embauche dans le premier emploi de plus de six mois), conforte l’idee selon laquelle l’apprentissage permet une assez bonne insertion professionnelle des jeunes. Les conditions d’insertion dependent, de plus, du niveau d’etudes atteint: le fait d’avoir entrepris une formation supplementaire contribue a faciliter l’acces a l’emploi, meme si cette formation n’est pas validee par un diplome et si, dans ce cas, le salaire ne s’en trouve pas ameliore. Enfin, les regions jouent un role primordial dans l’orientation vers le contrat d’apprentissage et dans le fait d’etre employe a temps partiel.

Worker-generated claims reporting moral hazard is said to occur when, in order to collect workers' compensation benefits, workers report on-the-job injuries that never occurred or that occurred off-the-job. Using newly available injury micro data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, this paper assesses the hypothesis that claims reporting moral hazard is more likely to occur for hard to diagnose injuries, such as back sprains and carpal tunnel syndrome, than for easy to diagnose cuts and fractures. Multinomial logits are estimated to control for a wide variety of worker, job, and establishment characteristics that are correlated with the distribution of injuries. When the only workers' compensation variable included in the analysis is the wage replacement rate, general support for the hypothesis is found. However, results are less strong, though not contradictory, when controls for the waiting period and for who get to choose the doctor are introduced into the analysis.

Worker peer-effects and managerial selection have received limited attention in the stochastic frontier analysis literature. We develop a parametric production function model that allows for worker peer-effects in output and worker-level inefficiency that is correlated with a manager’s selection of worker teams. The model is the usual “composed error” specification of the stochastic frontier model, but we allow for managerial selectivity (endogeneity) that works through the worker-level inefficiency term. The new specification captures both worker-level inefficiency and the manager’s ability to efficiently select teams to produce output. As the correlation between the manager’s selection equation and worker inefficiency goes to zero, our parametric model reduces to the normal-exponential stochastic frontier model of Aigner et al. (1977) with peer-effects. A comprehensive application to the NBA is provided.

With a view towards lessening the analytic and computational burden faced by practitioners seeking to correct the standard errors of two-stage estimators, we offer a heretofore unexploited simplification of the conventional formulation for the most commonly encountered cases in empirical application – two-stage estimators that, in either stage, involving maximum likelihood estimation or the nonlinear least squares method. Also with the applied researcher in mind, we cast the discussion in the context of nonlinear regression models involving endogeneity – a sampling problem whose solution often requires two-stage estimation. We detail our simplified standard error formulations for three very useful estimators in applied contexts involving endogeneity in a nonlinear setting (endogenous regressors, endogenous sample selection, and causal effects). The analytics and Stata/Mata code for implementing our simplified formulae are demonstrated with illustrative real-world examples and simulated data.

Why are the east sides of formerly industrial cities more deprived? To answer this question, we use individual-level census data and create historical pollution patterns derived from the locations of 5,000 industrial chimneys and an atmospheric model. We show that this observation results from path-dependent neighborhood sorting that began during the Industrial Revolution, as prevailing winds blew pollution eastward. Past pollution explains up to 20% of observed neighborhood segregation in 2011, even though coal pollution stopped in the 1970s. We develop a quantitative model to identify the role of neighborhood effects and relocation rigidities underlying this persistence.

When markets are incomplete, individuals may choose to marry to diversify their labor income risk. Love, however, can complicate the picture. If love is fleeting or the resolution of agents’ income uncertainty occurs predominantly later in life, then marriages with good economic matches last longer. In contrast, if love is persistent and the resolution of uncertainty to agents’ income occurs early, then marriages with good economic matches are more likely to be caught short with too little love to save a marriage. Consequently, once married, the partners will be more likely to divorce. Evidence is provided to distinguish between these alternative scenarios.

What are the drivers of retailer pricing tactics over time? Based on multivariate time-series analysis of two rich data sets, we quantify the relative importance of competitive retailer prices, pricing history, brand demand, wholesale prices, and retailer category-management considerations as drivers of retail prices. Interestingly, competitive retailer prices account for less than 10% of the over-time variation in retail prices. Instead, pricing history, wholesale price, and brand demand are the main drivers of retail-price variation over time. Moreover, the influence of these price drivers on retailer pricing tactics is linked to retailer category margin. We find that demand-based pricing and category-management considerations are associated with higher retailer margins. In contrast, dependence on pricing history and pricing based on store traffic considerations imply lower retailer margins.

We use predictions of aggregate stock return variances from daily data to estimate time varying monthly variances for size-ranked portfolios. We propose and estimate a single factor model of heteroskedasticity for portfolio returns. This model implies time-varying betas. Implications of heteroskedasticity and time-varying betas for tests of the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) are then documented. Accounting for heteroskedasticity increases the evidence that risk-adjusted returns are related to firm size. We also estimate a constant correlation model. Portfolio volatilities predicted by this model are similar to those predicted by more complex multivariate generalized-autoregressive- conditional- heteroskedasticity (GARCH) procedures.

We use extreme value theory methods to infer conventionally unobservable connections between financial institutions from joint extreme movements in credit default swap spreads and equity returns. Estimated pairwise co-crash probabilities identify significant connections among up to 186 financial institutions prior to the crisis of 2007/2008. Financial institutions that were very central prior to the crisis were more likely to be bailed out during the crisis or receive the status of systemically important institutions. This result remains intact also after controlling for indicators of too-big-to-fail concerns, systemic, systematic, and idiosyncratic risks. Both credit default swap (CDS)-based and equity-based connections are significant predictors of bailouts. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.

We use a public referendum on a new aviation concept in Berlin, Germany, as a natural experiment to analyze how the interaction of tenure and capitalization effects influences the outcome of direct democracy processes. We distinguish between homevoters, i.e., voters who are homeowners, and leasevoters, i.e., voters who lease their homes. We expect that homevoters would be more likely to support initiatives that positively affect the amenity value of a neighborhood because some of the related benefits of leasevoters are neutralized by adjustments in market rents. Likewise, homevoters would be more likely to oppose initiatives that negatively affect the amenity value of a neighborhood. Our empirical results are consistent with these expectations, implying that public votes on local public goods do not necessarily reflect the spatial distribution of welfare effects in mixed-tenure environments.

We tackle the problem of multiscale regression for predictors that are spatially or temporally indexed, or with a pre-specified multiscale structure, with a Bayesian modular approach. The regression function at the finest scale is expressed as an additive expansion of coarse to fine step functions. Our Modular and Multiscale (M&M) methodology provides multiscale decomposition of high-dimensional data arising from very fine measurements. Unlike more complex methods for functional predictors, our approach provides easy interpretation of the results. Additionally, it provides a quantification of uncertainty on the data resolution, solving a common problem researchers encounter with simple models on down-sampled data. We show that our modular and multiscale posterior has an empirical Bayes interpretation, with a simple limiting distribution in large samples. An efficient sampling algorithm is developed for posterior computation, and the methods are illustrated through simulation studies and an application to brain image classification. Source code is available as an R package at this https URL.

We study the competitive forces that shaped ideological diversity in the US press in the early twentieth century. We find that households preferred like-minded news and that newspapers used their political orientation to differentiate from competitors. We formulate a model of newspaper demand, entry, and political affiliation choice in which newspapers compete for both readers and advertisers. We use a combination of estimation and calibration to identify the model's parameters from novel data on newspaper circulation, costs, and revenues. The estimated model implies that competition enhances ideological diversity, that the market undersupplies diversity, and that optimal competition policy requires accounting for the two-sidedness of the news market.

We study the asymptotic distribution of three-step estimators of a finite-dimensional parameter vector where the second step consists of one or more nonparametric regressions on a regressor that is estimated in the first step. The first-step estimator is either parametric or nonparametric. Using Newey's (1994) path-derivative method, we derive the contribution of the first-step estimator to the influence function. In this derivation, it is important to account for the dual role that the first-step estimator plays in the second-step nonparametric regression, that is, that of conditioning variable and that of argument.

We study the agenda-setting political behavior of a large sample of U.S. newspapers during the last decade, and the behavior of smaller samples for longer time periods. Our purpose is to examine the intensity of coverage of economic issues as a function of the underlying economic conditions and the political affiliation of the incumbent president, focusing on unemployment, inflation, the federal budget and the trade deficit. We investigate whether there is any significant correlation between the endorsement policy of newspapers, and the differential coverage of bad/good economic news as a function of the president's political affiliation. We find evidence that newspapers with pro- Democratic endorsement pattern systematically give more coverage to high unemployment when the incumbent president is a Republican than when the president is Democratic, compared to newspapers with pro-Republican endorsement pattern. This result is not driven by the partisanship of readers. There is on the contrary no evidence of a partisan bias - or at least of a bias that is correlated with the endorsement policy - for stories on inflation, budget deficit or trade deficit.

We study a general class of semiparametric estimators when the infinite-dimensional nuisance parameters include a conditional expectation function that has been estimated nonparametrically using generated covariates. Such estimators are used frequently to e.g., estimate nonlinear models with endogenous covariates when identification is achieved using control variable techniques. We study the asymptotic properties of estimators in this class, which is a nonstandard problem due to the presence of generated covariates. We give conditions under which estimators are root-n consistent and asymptotically normal, derive a general formula for the asymptotic variance, and show how to establish validity of the bootstrap.

We study a collective decision-making process in which people interested in an issue may participate, at a cost, in a meeting, and the resulting decision is a compromise among the participants' preferences. We show that the equilibrium number of participants is small and their positions are extreme, and when the compromise is the median, the outcome is likely to be random. The model and its equilibria are consistent with evidence on the procedures and outcomes of U.S. regulatory hearings.

We study IPO pricing in Germany to determine whether when-issued trading provides information that is useful for setting IPO offer prices, and whether such trading supplants bookbuilding as a source of information. We find that when-issued trading reveals relevant information for pricing IPOs, and that, once when-issued trading has begun, bookbuilding is not a source of costly information for pricing. But bookbuilding does not appear to be fully supplanted as a source of pricing information. We find evidence consistent with bookbuilding being used to gather information prior to the onset of when-issued trading.

We show how stated preference information obtained from a choice experiment, and revealed preference information based on housing market transactions, can be combined via generalized method of moments (GMM) estimation. Specifically, we use a moment condition matching the predicted marginal willingness to pay (WTP) from a first-stage hedonic model to the marginal WTP formula implied by the choice experiment utility function. This is coupled with other moments from the choice experiment to produce GMM-based estimates of parameters that reflect the strengths of each data source. Our application values remediation of a contaminated site in Buffalo, New York, and we find evidence in support of estimates arising from our approach. (JEL Q51, Q53)

We report that initial public offering (IPO) underpricing is positively related to analyst coverage by the lead underwriter and to the presence of an all-star analyst on the research staff of the lead underwriter. These findings are robust to controls for other determinants of underpricing and to controls for the endogeneity of underpricing and analyst coverage. In addition, we find that the probability of switching underwriters between IPO and seasoned equity offering is negatively related to the unexpected amount of post-IPO analyst coverage. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that underpricing is, in part, compensation for expected post-IPO analyst coverage from highly ranked analysts. INVESTMENT BANKERS PROVIDE a wide range of services to firms issuing new shares through an initial public offering (IPO). These services include pre-IPO activities, related to the pricing, marketing, and distribution of the offering, as well as post-IPO activities such as price stabilization, market making, and analyst research coverage. Despite the variety of services provided to issuers and the variation in issuer characteristics, there is surprisingly little variation in the direct costs of completing an IPO. Chen and Ritter (2000) and Hansen (2001) show that underwriter spreads in IPOs are clustered at 7% for all but the very smallest and very largest offerings. Moreover, a 15% overallotment option is a standard feature of IPO contracts. Both anecdotal and academic evidence indicate that research coverage has become an essential element of the security issuance process in recent years. Press reports indicate that star analysts play an important role in securing

We reexamine a recent controversy in the inventory literature regarding the impact of estimator choice on estimated speeds of adjustment in partial adjustment models. We compare the properties of two asymptotically equivalent estimators, the residual-adjusted Aitken (RAA) and nonlinear least squares (NLS) estimators. Our results indicate that (a) the RAA estimator is very sensitive to the quality of the instrument used in first-round estimation, and (b) model mis-specification may cause substantial differences in the finite-sample distributions of the two estimators. An empirical analysis of inventory equations suggests that adjustment speeds are more sensitive to model specification than to choice of estimator.