illness and disease have been on a dramatic upward trend that is projected to continue. The most recent estimates of national health expenditures indicate a 400 percent increase since 1965 (Freeland and Schendler, 1981). As a proportion of the Gross National Product (GNP), the costs associated with illness and disease are projected to reach nearly 11 percent by the year 1990 (Freeland and Schendler, 1981) compared to 9.4 percent in 1980 and 6 percent in 1965 (Gibson and Waldo, 1981). It should not be surprising that the analytic literature on these costs has also grown rapidly. Medical journals, in particular, contributed to this growth as the medical profession has become increasingly involved with economists, sociologists, public health specialists, and others in scrutinizing the cost of modern health care (Warner and Hutton, 1980). Estimates of the costs of illness and disease are produced and used in cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness analyses and in other modes to set priorities and make government policy decisions, to prepare and deliver congressional testimony, and to support agency budgets. The application of the techniques of cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness analysis to health care, in particular, has been the subject of several

Cost-of-illness methodology: a guide to current practices and procedures

Publisher Summary The chapter presents a survey on the economics of labor market discrimination, motivated by two fundamental problems associated with income and wage differences among groups classified by sex, race, ethnicity, and other characteristics. The first is the inequity of long-lasting differences in economic well-being among the groups; in particular, differences in household or family income. The second is the inequity of long-lasting differences in the average wage rates among groups of workers classified by these demographic traits, when the groups may be presumed to be either equally productive or to have equal productive capacity. The second problem also raises the question of whether a labor market that pays unequal wages to equally productive workers is inefficient. Economic discrimination is defined in terms of income differences among families and wage differences among workers. The chapter discusses these definitions and presents data from the United States on the income and earnings differences of blacks, Hispanics, whites, women, and men. The chapter surveys theories of economic discrimination in the labor market. The theories are classified into competitive and monopolistic neoclassical models with (essentially) complete information, competitive neoclassical models with imperfect information-leading to “statistical discrimination,” and institutional theories. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the policy implications of the economic research on discrimination.

Chapter 13 The economic analysis of labor market discrimination: A survey

Using the first six waves of the European Community Household Panel (ECHP), a largescale comparative survey collected annually since 1994, we establish some stylised facts about the extent and determinants of work-related training in European Union (EU) countries. We investigate gender differences within and across EU countries in training participation, using decomposition analysis. We focus on: access to “lifelong learning”, fixed-term contracts, part-time versus full-time work, public/private sector affiliation, educational attainment, and the individual’s position in the wage distribution prior to training. We find that, overall, women are no less likely than men to undertake training and considerably more likely to train in four countries. The differing effects of characteristics and ‘returns’ can explain the gaps. There is no significant training-age profile for women and a strong negative profile for men. In several countries there is a negative association between fixed-term contacts and training, particularly for men. In most countries and, for both sexes, training is positively associated with public sector employment, high educational attainment and a high position in the wage distribution.

Training in Europe

This article examines past evaluations of government training programs for the economically disadvantaged and offers an agenda for future research. It is found that government training programs are producing modest increases in earnings for adult men and women, but are probably not producing positive effects for youth. Future research must better document links between program-provided training and acquisition of valuable skills and must explore potential returns from increased scale. The recent adoption of random assignment has improved the accuracy of field evaluations but would benefit from an economic theory of evaluation to guide research into increasing training effectiveness.

Evaluating Government Training Programs for the Economically Disadvantaged

Publisher Summary This chapter presents the empirical studies of the union/nonunion relative wage differential, or wage gap as Mincer has termed it, in the United States for the period 1967–79. In recent years, the wage gap usually has been estimated by fitting wage equations to cross-section (CS), individual-worker data on wages (micro), union status (union or nonunion), and other variables supposedly controlling for differences among workers in working conditions and worker quality. The chapter describes the distinction between wage gaps and wage gains. The likelihood that micro, ordinary least squares (OLS), and CS wage gap estimates are selectivity biased has not escaped the notice of econometricians and recently a substantial number of papers have appeared that use techniques designed to reduce this bias. These papers fall into two groups according to the technique used—(1) simultaneous equations (SE) studies and (2) panel studies.

Chapter 20 Union relative wage effects

Five hypotheses explaining differences in pay between men and women were examined: wage discrimination, occupational wage levels, job choice and working conditions, fringe benefits, and qualifications and productivity of women. Data were from a 1969 survey of working conditions of American workers. A difference of /$5,000 was found in mean pay between women and men working full time in 1969. The difference was only $2,500 among nonprofessional workers, aged 22-64, with a steady job and working the same number of hours. About 42 percent of the men, compared to 27 percent of the women, reported their jobs exposed them to physical dangers or unhealthy conditions. The most important reason for the difference in the average pay of men and women is the clustering of women in lower paying jobs.

Sex Differences in Compensation.

An estimate of the direct effects of federal manpower programs on the unemployment rate is made quarterly for the years 1965 through 1967. Four manpower programs are included in the estimates: Neighborhood Youth Corps, On-the-Job Training under the Manpower Development and Training Act, Community Action (paid nonprofessionals), and College Work Study. These programs accounted for an average of nearly half a million jobs in 1967. The study indicated that the programs led to a reduction of 0.15 percent in the over-all unemployment rate in 1965, 0.3 percent in 1966, and 0.4 percent in 1967 (from 4.2 to 3.8 percent). The Neighborhood Youth Corps accounted for two-thirds of the total reduction in 1967. The four programs had a far greater impact on the unemployment rate of youth aged 16-21, resulting in a reduction of 2.5 percent (from 13.5 to 11.0 percent). Because the study considers only the effects of four manpower programs, it underestimates the total effect of federal manpower programs in reducing underemployment. Since the study considers only direct effects, it also excludes the reduction in unemployment caused by increasing the skill of the labor force and the multiplier effects of government spending. A rough estimate is also made of the effect of four new manpower programs on employment in the third and fourth quarters in 1967. Because the new programs were just getting under way, the effect was negligible.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/145170.pdf

Malcolm S. Cohen

Papers

Sex Differences in Compensation.

The Direct Effects of Federal Manpower Programs in Reducing Unemployment.