Measuring true sales and underreporting with matched firm-level survey and tax-office data

This paper uses firm-level survey data matched with official tax records to estimate the unobserved true sales of formal firms in Mongolia. Taking into account firm-level incentives to comply with taxes and a production function technology linking unobserved true sales with observable firm-level production characteristics, the authors derive a multiple-indicators, multiple-causes model predicting unobserved true sales. Comparing predicted true sales with sales reported to the tax office, the analysis finds that 38.6 percent of firm-level sales are underreported. It also finds evidence that firm-level survey data suffer from significant underreporting. Finally, the paper compares this approach with two alternative approaches to measuring underreporting by firms.Taxation&Subsidies,Microfinance,Emerging Markets,Economic Theory&Research,Debt Markets

Wages Around the World: Pay Across Occupations and Countries

This study transforms the October Inquiry' Survey of wages conducted by the International Labour Organization into a consistent data file on pay in 161 occupations in over 150 countries from 1983 to 1998 to examine the pattern of pay across occupations and countries. The new file tells us that: 1. Skill differentials vary inversely with gross domestic product per capita. During the 1980s-1990s, they fell modestly in advanced countries; fell more sharply in upper middle income countries while rising markedly in countries moving from communism to free markets and in lower middle income countries. 2. Wages in the same occupation vary greatly across countries measured by common currency exchange rates and measured by purchasing power parity. Cross-country differences in pay for comparable work increased, despite increased world trade. 3. The principal forces that affect the occupational wage structure around the world are the level of gross domestic product per capita and unionisation/wage-setting institutions.

Giving Voice: Studies in honour of Christine Anthonissen

No Abstrac

Expressing Inflection Tonally

In Limburg Dutch, the difference between neuter and feminine agreement on adjectives is expressed by a difference in lexical tone. This paper argues that this distinction is due to a difference in underlying representations and not to a paradigmatic antifaithfulness effect. In particular, it argues for a specific version of REALIZE-MORPHEME, the constraint demanding every underlying morpheme to be present in phonological surface representations. The key argument is that a schwa suffix turns up whenever the tonal change from neuter to feminine is not possible

Developments in the Safety Science Domain and in Safety Management From the 1970s Till the 1979 Near Disaster at Three Mile Island

Objective: What has been the influence of general management schools and safety research into causes of accidents and disasters on managing safety from 1970 till 1979? Method: The study was limited to original articles and documents, written in English or Dutch from the period under concern. For the Netherlands, the professional journal De Veiligheid (Safety) has been consulted. Results and conclusions: Dominant management approaches started with 1) the classical management starting from the 19th century, with scientific management from the start of the 20st century as a main component. During the interwar period 2) behavioural management started, based on behaviourism, followed by 3) quantitative management from the Second World War onwards. After the war 4) modern management became important. A company was seen as an open system, interacting with an external environment with external stakeholders. These schools management were not exclusive, but have existed in the period together. Early 20th century, the U.S. 'Safety First' movement was the starting point of this knowledge development on managing safety, with cost reduction and production efficiency as key drivers. Psychological models and metaphors explained accidents from ‘unsafe acts’. And safety was managed with training and selection of reckless workers, all in line with scientific management. Supported by behavioural management, this approach remained dominant for many years, even long after World War II. Influenced by quantitative management, potential and actual disasters after the war led to two approaches; loss prevention (up-scaling process industry) and reliability engineering (inherently dangerous processes in the aerospace and nuclear industries). The distinction between process safety and occupational safety became clear after the war, and the two developed into relatively independent domains. In occupational safety in the 1970s human errors thought to be symptoms of mismanagement. The term ‘safety management’ was introduced in scientific safety literature as well as concepts as loose, and tightly coupled processes, organizational culture, incubation of a disaster and mechanisms blinding organizations for portents of disaster scenarios. Loss prevention remained technically oriented. Till 1979 there was no clear relation with safety management. Reliability engineering, based on systems theory did have that relation with the MORT technique as a management audit. The Netherlands mainly followed Anglo-Saxon developments. Late 1970s, following international safety symposia in The Hague and Delft, independent research started in The Netherland

Colored Saturation Parameters for Bipartite Graphs

Let F and H be fixed graphs and let G be a spanning subgraph of H. G is an F-free subgraph of H if F is not a subgraph of G. We say that G is an F-saturated subgraph of H if G is F-free and for any edge e in E(H)-E(G), F is a subgraph of G+e. The saturation number of F in K_{n,n}, denoted sat(K_{n,n}, F), is the minimum size of an F-saturated subgraph of K_{n,n}. A t-edge-coloring of a graph G is a labeling f: E(G) to [t], where [t] denotes the set { 1, 2, ..., t }. The labels assigned to the edges are called colors. A rainbow coloring is a coloring in which all edges have distinct colors. Given a family F of edge-colored graphs, a t-edge-colored graph H is (F, t)-saturated if H contains no member of F but the addition of any edge in any color completes a member of F. In this thesis we study the minimum size of ( F,t)-saturated subgraphs of edge-colored complete bipartite graphs. Specifically we provide bounds on the minimum size of these subgraphs for a variety of families of edge-colored bipartite graphs, including monochromatic matchings, rainbow matchings, and rainbow stars