Studies in Fuzziness and Soft Computing

One of the stylized facts from the past 30 years has been the declining rate of first births before age 30 for all women and the increase rate of first births after age 30 among women with four-year college degrees (Steven P. Martin, Demography, 37(4), 523–533, 2000). What are some of the factors behind women’s decision to postpone their childbearing? We hypothesize that the wage difference often observed between like-educated mothers and non-mothers (Jane Waldfogel, Journal of Labor Economics, 16, 505–545, 1998a; Journal of Economic Perspectives 12(1) 137–156, 1998b) may be affected by the postponement of childbearing until after careers are fully established. Hence, we focus on college-educated women because they are typically more career-oriented than their non-college educated counterparts and also the group most often observed postponing maternity. We use individual-level data on women from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) in order to control for individual-level unobserved heterogeneity as well as human capital characteristics, such as actual work experience, in our empirical analysis. We estimate wage equations, first producing base-line results to compare to the existing literature. Then, we expand the basic wage equation model to address fundamental econometric issues and the education/fertility issue at hand. Our empirical findings are two-fold. First, we find that college-educated mothers do not experience a motherhood wage penalty at all. In fact, they enjoy a wage boost when compared to college-educated childless women. Second, fertility delay enhances this wage boost even further. Our results provide an explanation for the observed postponement of maternity for educated women. We argue that the wage boost experienced by college-educated mothers may be the result of their search for family–friendly work environments, which, in turn, yields job matches with more female-friendly firms offering greater opportunities for advancement.

http://homepages.wmich.edu/~jkimmel/motherhood wage gap for women.pdf

“The Motherhood Wage Gap for Women in the United States: The Importance of College and Fertility Delay”

This paper surveys the literature on strategy-proofness from a historical perspective. While I discuss the connections with other works on incentives in mechanism design, the main emphasis is on social choice models. This article has been prepared for the Handbook of Social Choice and Welfare, Volume 2, Edited by K. Arrow, A. Sen and K. Suzumura

/pdf/strategy-proof-social-choice-8yatxf0684.pdf

Strategy-proof Social Choice

This paper deals with measuring total factor productivity (TFP) growth of financial institutions incorporating different types of deregulatory measures. TFP growth is decomposed into external, scale, and markup components. The external component is further dissected into deregulation and technical change components. The TFP growth relationship is included as an additional equation in estimating the cost system. The empirical model uses panel data on Spanish banks (savings and commercial banks). We find that deregulations contributed positively to TFP growth for both savings and commercial banks. Furthermore, domestic (European) deregulations had a greater effect on TFP growth of savings (commercial) banks.

http://www.biblioteca.uma.es/bbldoc/tesisuma/16615001.pdf

Deregulation and Productivity: The Case of Spanish Banks ∗

This paper argues and provides evidence that the stock of immigrants in a country have a positive effect on the share of its bilateral intra-industry trade (IIT). The paper links the literatures about immigration and trade and about IIT determinants. The key is that immigration contributes to trade transaction costs reduction and this would benefit more intra than inter-industry trade. We test this hypothesis using Spanish data and departing from the models developed by Helpman (1987). Immigration helps more IIT in manufactures and IIT between Spain and less developed countries. Results are robust both to different estimation methods and specifications.

Does Immigration Help to Explain Intra-Industry Trade? Evidence for Spain

This paper studies industry evolution driven by non strategic learning by doing and spillovers. We characterize a dynamic process of cost and output changes and its effect on welfare and industry profits. The paper gives conditions for shakeouts to occur and analyzes the key factors affecting these conditions. Since shakeouts could lead to a long-run social loss due to higher market concentration, there is a role for a government to play in limiting unnecessary shakeouts. The most effective way to do so is to enhance spillovers.

Learning by doing, spillovers and shakeouts

Strategy-proof fuzzy aggregation rules

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, we propose a coherent model of implementation of ethical norms that we believe is both compatible with the rigorous decision analysis of game theory and with the well-established tradition of ethics in moral philosophy and argue that this kind of models must be considered and complement the existing implementation theory. Furthermore, we explore the model from a normative and axiomatic viewpoint and prove that a complete and ''coherent'' ethical system under our assumptions cannot be founded in any of these two simple moral maxima: the first entails the “moral punishment of induction” (inducing somebody to desire to do something wrong) and the second, called ''respecting reciprocity'' is an operative version of the “golden rule”: do not do others what you would not like to be done.

Ethical Implementation and the Creation of Moral Values

In this paper we introduce a new concept of solidarity in terms of reciprocity and characterize the set of social choice functions that are reciprocate (in both a strong and a weak sense), anonymous and efficient in a standard public good provision model when the agents have single-peaked preferences on the amount of the good provided. The resulting procedures are the well-known Generalized Condorcet Winner Solutions, and therefore, we provide an alternative characterization of that class of social choice functions based in new ethical properties regarding solidarity.

Solidarity in Terms of Reciprocity

In this paper we propose to analyze the economic problem of allocating tasks on time in order to finish a complex project when information about tasks' duration and predating sequences of tasks is privately owned by the agents that undertake each task. In order to achieve the efficient allocation of tasks -using the well-known Critical path method in the Operations Research literature-, the planner must design the appropriate incentives and compensations to the agents based on the reported information. We show the existence of mechanisms that implement in dominant strategies the efficient allocation of tasks on time. When we further add new desirable properties like individual rationality, an impossibility result emerges.

Juan Perote-Peña

Papers

Learning by doing, spillovers and shakeouts

Strategy-proof fuzzy aggregation rules

Ethical Implementation and the Creation of Moral Values

Solidarity in Terms of Reciprocity

Dominant Strategies Implementation of the Critical Path Allocation in the Project Planning Problem