The employment effects of the Working Families Tax Credit

In October 1999 WFTC replaced Family Credit as the main package of in-work financial support for families with children. This note compares the results of three IFS projects assessing the effectiveness of the WFTC in getting people back to work

Interpreting aggregate wage growth

This paper analyzes the relationship between aggregate wages and individual wages when there is time series variation in employment and in the dispersion of wages. A new and easily implementable framework for the empirical analysis of aggregation biases is developed. Aggregate real wages are shown to contain three important bias terms: one associated with the dispersion of individual wages, a second reflecting the distribution of working hours, and a third deriving from compositional changes in the (selected) sample of workers. Noting the importance of these issues for recent experience in Britain, data on real wages and participation for British male workers over the period 1978-1996 are studied. A close correspondence between the estimated biases and the patterns of differences shown by aggregate wages is established. This is shown to have important implications for the interpretation of real wage growth over this period

Torsional suspension system for testing space structures

A low frequency torsional suspension system for testing a space structure uses a plurality of suspension stations attached to the space structure along the length thereof in order to suspend the space structure from an overhead support. Each suspension station includes a disk pivotally mounted to the overhead support, and two cables which have upper ends connected to the disk and lower ends connected to the space structure. The two cables define a parallelogram with the center of gravity of the space structure being vertically beneath the pivot axis of the disk. The vertical distance between the points of attachment of the cables to the disk and the pivot axis of the disk is adjusted to lower the frequency of the suspension system to a level which does not interfere with frequency levels of the space structure, thereby enabling accurate measurement

MEASURING THE DEGREE OF MARKET POWER AMONG BEEF EXPORTERS TO JAPAN

A residual-demand model for beef exporters to Japan is specified to estimate market power. The analysis is disaggregated by beef cut and form. The results indicate U.S. frozen-ribs category enjoys the highest markup of price over marginal cost, while Australia and New Zealand have some market power, which includes five chilled-beef categories.International Relations/Trade,

Integrating Marginal Cost into Pricing-to-market Models for U.S. Agricultural Products

This article investigates the markup pricing behaviour of U.S. exporters of agricultural products. Agricultural products studied are feed, flour, frozen potatoes, frozen orange juice, five categories of beef, five categories of pork, and two categories of chicken. The popular pricing-to-market (PTM) approach of Krugman (1987) is used to examine market power and imperfect competition for the markets under study. The PTM model can directly investigate whether there is any evidence of market power in international trade.The sensitivity of U.S. export prices to exchange rate fluctuations may indicate price discrimination and imperfect competition in the international markets. The PTM approach is popular because of its relatively simple specification and empirical testing.Demand and Price Analysis, International Relations/Trade,

Demand for quality-differentiated beef in Japan

In this article, we apply a model of vertical product differentiation to the Japanese beef market. We theoretically derive a system of consumer demand functions for quality-differentiated beef in Japan. We choose a particular utility function which is nonlinear in the consumption of the quality-differentiated product and linear in the consumption of all other goods. We employ a seemingly unrelated econometric model to estimate Japanese consumer demand functions for four beef types from the four origins. The empirical results show Japanese consumers prefer domestically produced beef to imported US and Australian. We also find seventeen substitution and two complementary effects among the various origins.vertical quality differentiation, consumer demand, beef, Japan, Consumer/Household Economics, Demand and Price Analysis,

Wing/store flutter with nonlinear pylon stiffness

Recent wind tunnel tests and analytical studies show that a store mounted on a pylon with soft pitch stiffness provides substantial increase in flutter speed of fighter aircraft and reduces dependency of flutter on mass and inertia of the store. This concept, termed the decoupler pylon, utilizes a low frequency control system to maintain pitch alignment of the store during maneuvers and changing flight conditions. Under rapidly changing transient loads, however, the alignment control system may allow the store to momentarily bottom against a relatively stiff backup structure in which case the pylon stiffness acts as a hardening nonlinear spring. Such structural nonlinearities are known to affect not only the flutter speed but also the basic behavior of the instability. The influence of pylon stiffness nonlinearities or the flutter characteristics of wing mounted external stores is examined

Surface tension induced convection in encapsulated liquid metals in microgravity: Apollo-Soyuz test project experiment no. MA-041

This experiment was designed to determine the extent of surface tension induced convection caused by a steplike compositional variation in a liquid metal. Preliminary results are presented

Export Market Pricing Decisions and Market Power in World Grain Markets: A Duopoly Model for Soybeans

Replaced with revised version of paper 02/13/07.Marketing,