Author(s): Botero, Juan; Djankov, Simeon; La Porta, Rafael; Lopez-de-Silanes, Florencio; Shleifer, Andrei | Abstract: We investigate the regulation of labor markets through employment, collective relations, and social security laws in 85 countries. We find that the political power of the left is associated with more stringent labor regulations and more generous social security systems, and that socialist, French and Scandinavian legal origin countries have sharply higher levels of labor regulation than do common law countries. However, the effects of legal origins are larger, and explain more of the variation in regulations, than those of politics. Heavier regulation of labor is associated with lower labor force participation and higher unemployment, especially of the young. These results are most naturally consistent with legal theories, according to which countries have pervasive regulaory styles inherited from the transplantation of legal systems.

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The Regulation of Labor

The authors present an overview of the academic literature on charitable giving based on a literature review of more than 500 articles. They structure their review around the central question of why people donate money to charitable organizations. They identify eight mechanisms as the most important forces that drive charitable giving: (a) awareness of need; (b) solicitation; (c) costs and benefits; (d) altruism; (e) reputation; (f) psychological benefits; (g) values; (h) efficacy. These mechanisms can provide a basic theoretical framework for future research explaining charitable giving.

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A Literature Review of Empirical Studies of Philanthropy: Eight Mechanisms That Drive Charitable Giving

Acknowledgments vii Preface xiii Chapter 1. Educational Attainment: Overall Trends, Disparities, and the Public Universities We Study 1 Chapter 2. Bachelor's Degree Attainment on a National Level 20 Chapter 3. Finishing College at Public Universities 32 Chapter 4. Fields of Study, Time-to-Degree, and College Grades 57 Chapter 5. High Schools and "Undermatching" 87 Chapter 6. Test Scores and High School Grades as Predictors 112 Chapter 7. Transfer Students and the Path from Two-Year to Four-Year Colleges 134 Chapter 8. Financial Aid and Pricing on a National Level 149 Chapter 9. Financial Aid at Public Universities 166 Chapter 10. Institutional Selectivity and Institutional Effects 192 Chapter 11. Target Populations 207 Chapter 12. Looking Ahead 223 Appendix A. The Modern Evolution of America's Flagship Universities by Eugene M. Tobin 239 Notes 265 List of Figures 337 List of Tables 347 List of Appendix Tables 349 References 357 Index 377

Crossing the Finish Line:: Completing College at America’s Public Universities (Association for Institutional Research, May 30, 2010)

Recent developments in long-established democratic systems have reignited the old debate about the proper degree of governmental accountability. We build a simple model that captures the major virtues and drawbacks of accountability: having the ability to screen and discipline public o¢cials on the one hand while inducing them to pander to public opinion on the other. We study the optimal allocation of power between accountable and nonaccountable branches of government. Our main …ndings are that (a) technical decisions are ill-suited to the political process, (b) accountability is less desirable when there is a substantial risk of oppression by the majority, or conversely when “pork-barrel pandering” leads to a tyranny of minorities, and (c) nonaccountable o¢cials should be given less discretion than their elected counterparts, but should be held more individually responsible in committee decision-making.

/pdf/the-politician-and-the-judge-accountability-in-government-5gbzbcz1xs.pdf

The Politician and the Judge: Accountability in Government

Self-selected migration presents one potential explanation for why observed returns to a college education in local labor markets vary widely even though U.S. workers are highly mobile. To assess the impact of self-selection on estimated returns, this paper first develops a Roy model of mobility and earnings where workers choose in which of the 50 states (plus the District of Columbia) to live and work. Available estimation methods are either infeasible for a selection model with so many alternatives or place potentially severe restrictions on earnings and the selection process. This paper develops an alternative econometric methodology that combines Lee's (1983) parametric maximum order statistic approach to reduce the dimensionality of the error terms with more recent work on semiparametric estimation of selection models (e.g., Ahn and Powell (1993)). The resulting semiparametric correction is easy to implement and can be adapted to a variety of other polychotomous choice problems. The empirical work, which uses 1990 U.S. Census data, confirms the role of comparative advantage in mobility decisions. The results suggest that self-selection of higher educated individuals to states with higher returns to education generally leads to upward biases in OLS estimates of the returns to education in state-specific labor markets. While the estimated returns to a college education are significantly biased, correcting for the bias does not narrow the range of returns across states. Consistent with the finding that the corrected return to a college education differs across the U.S., the relative state-to-state migration flows of college- versus high school-educated individuals respond strongly to differences in the return to education and amenities across states.

/pdf/mobility-and-the-return-to-education-testing-a-roy-model-4g1wpw5chp.pdf

Mobility and the return to education: testing a roy model with multiple markets

Economists have long observed that crowding out of government grants to private charities is incomplete. The accepted belief is that givers treat the grants as imperfect substitutes for private giving. We theoretically and empirically investigate a second reason: the strategic response of a charity will be to reduce fund-raising efforts after receiving a grant. Employing panel data from arts and social service organizations, we find that government grants cause significant reductions in fund-raising. This adds a new dimension to the policy discussions - analysts should account for the behavioral responses of the charity, as well as the donors, to government grants.

https://econweb.ucsd.edu/~jandreon/Publications/AER03-A&P.pdf

Do Government Grants to Private Charities Crowd Out Giving or Fund-raising?

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w6766/w6766.pdf

School finance reform, the distribution of school spending, and the distribution of student test scores

https://www.socsci.uci.edu/~jkbrueck/course%20readings/Econ%20272B%20readings/payne.pdf

Does the government crowd-out private donations? New evidence from a sample of non-profit firms

https://econweb.ucsd.edu/~jandreon/Publications/JPubE2011AndreoniPayne.pdf

Is crowding out due entirely to fundraising? Evidence from a panel of charities

This paper estimates the effects of federal research funding on research outcomes at 68 research universities We provide a new interpretation of the instrumental variable estimate of the coefficient in a regression of the output of an institution on an input Absent parameter heterogeneity, it captures the total change in output when an institution obtains an additional unit of the input that may be correlated with the other inputs that affect the output measure Our instrument for research funding is alumni representation on US Congressional appropriations committees Our results suggest an increase of $1 million in federal research funding (1996$) to a university results in 10 more articles and 02 more patents The change in citations per article is negative but very small and imprecisely measured As a first approximation, increasing federal research funding on the margin results in more, but not necessarily higher quality, research output

A. Abigail Payne

Papers

Do Government Grants to Private Charities Crowd Out Giving or Fund-raising?

School finance reform, the distribution of school spending, and the distribution of student test scores

Does the government crowd-out private donations? New evidence from a sample of non-profit firms

Is crowding out due entirely to fundraising? Evidence from a panel of charities

Does Federal Research Funding Increase University Research Output