Marriage rates in Korea have been declining at an unprecedented pace in the recent two decades. Drawing on the classical economic theory of marriage as a rational choice, we compute local aggregate economic values of prime-age working men and women to examine the relationship between the relative values of men and marriage rates. The relative values of men fell dramatically by 40% during this period, undermining the economic justification of marriage under unequal allocation of housework. The two-way fixed effects estimation using region-year transitory variations shows that a 1% decrease in the relative values of men was associated with a 0.088% decrease in marriage rates. To explain the precipitous convergence of economic values between the two genders, we decompose the changes in the relative values into four components – (gender-neutral) structural changes, (gender-specific) industrial segregation, (gender-neutral) wage growth, and (gender-specific) wage gaps within industries – to measure their contributions to secular marriage decline. In the 2000s, both the alleviated industrial segregation and the structural changes toward industries with higher female proportions played a major role. On the other hand, the impact of reduced gender wage gaps within industries also became prominent in the 2010s.

Based on recent evidence from Europe, the paper shows that polarisation and upgrading are not mutually exclusive trends, but rather, simultaneously defined recent structural changes in employment. The results show that (a) the occupational structure shows a general shift towards high-skill jobs, (b) the prevailing upgrading patterns are often accompanied by job polarisation, as the share of middle-skill jobs declines in most cases, and (c) while low-skill employment often outperforms middle-skill jobs, it has tended to decline. In addition to analysing trends for EU-27 countries with different levels of development for the latest available time periods, the article also shows that occupational upgrading patterns are rather intertwined with job polarisation and are compatible with both the Skill-Biased Technical Change (SBTC) and Routine-Biased Technical Change (RBTC) hypotheses. The employment dynamics of low-skill workers are uncertain, as they are not fully compatible with any theoretical model, thus pointing to the need for a finer understanding of changes in occupational structure, and the extent to which both polarisation and upgrading are shaping the evolution of the labour force structure under the impact of (ongoing) technological change.

Economic agents often have to make decisions in environments affected by regime switches but expectation formation has hardly been explored in this context. We report about a laboratory experiment whose participants judgmentally forecast three time series subject to regime switches. The participants make forecasts without context knowledge and without support from statistical software. Their forecasts are only based on the previous realizations of the time series. Our interest is the explanation of the average forecasts with a simple model, the bounds & likelihood heuristic. In previous studies it was shown that this model can explain average forecasting behavior very well given stable and stationary time series. We find that the forecasts after a structural break are characterized by a higher variance and less accuracy over several periods. Considering this transition phase in the model, the heuristic performs even slightly better than the Rational Expectations Hypothesis.

Official Ecuadorian gross domestic product (GDP) data begin in 1950. Prior, only preliminary estimates were available, based on very scattered evidence and broad assumptions. In this paper, we estimate new GDP figures for Ecuador for 1900–50. These are based on the quantitative and qualitative information available for the period, using extensive primary and secondary sources. The new data series allows analysing Ecuador’s economic growth and structural change and comparing them to industrialised core countries and other countries in the region. Unlike previous estimates, our series shows a sustained divergence of Ecuador from the core countries during the first half of the 20th century.

Policy is often seen as the synthesis of economic and political interests of the most influential players operating in material economic structures such as industrial sectors and markets. However, this is not always the case as the formation of policies often depends only partially on the inputs from economic structures, while greater influence is exercised by the internal logics of policy processes and by shared beliefs among policymakers and the society. This paper explores this issue through a comparison of the UK and US liberalisation policies of the natural gas sector.

Building upon recent developments in production function identification and decomposition methods, this paper investigates the sources of output and productivity growth among China’s listed manufacturing companies from 2000 to 2022. While previous studies on China’s manufacturing have predominantly focused on the period preceding 2007, our study extends the analysis to a broader timeframe and divide it into four sub-periods to accommodate diverse economic conditions and varying growth rates. We provide new insights into the Chinese economy during a period marked by gradual economic transformation. Specifically, we first decompose industry output growth into factor deepening and firm productivity progress within each sub-period. To account for heterogeneity across firms in terms of production technology and sources of growth, we employ a nonparametric production function and decompose firm output growth at both the mean and different quantiles of the output distribution. We find that increased materials usage and productivity growth are primary growth drivers. However, the contribution of productivity experiences a significant decline, particularly in recent years and among median-sized and large firms. Furthermore, we examine China’s industry aggregate productivity growth and its origins among state-invested, foreign-invested, and domestic private firms. Our findings suggest that reforms among state firms are the largest contributor to industry productivity growth before the 2008 financial crisis, whereas productivity progress of domestic private firms emerges as the sole significant driver in recent years. Additionally, there is no evidence of improvements in output reallocation efficiency within China’s manufacturing sector throughout our sample period.

A variety of statistical methods have been suggested for detecting differential item functioning (DIF) in the Rasch model. Most of these methods are designed for the comparison of pre-specified focal and reference groups, such as males and females. Latent class approaches, on the other hand, allow the detection of previously unknown groups exhibiting DIF. However, this approach provides no straightforward interpretation of the groups with respect to person characteristics. Here, we propose a new method for DIF detection based on model-based recursive partitioning that can be considered as a compromise between those two extremes. With this approach it is possible to detect groups of subjects exhibiting DIF, which are not pre-specified, but result from combinations of observed covariates. These groups are directly interpretable and can thus help generate hypotheses about the psychological sources of DIF. The statistical background and construction of the new method are introduced by means of an instructive example, and extensive simulation studies are presented to support and illustrate the statistical properties of the method, which is then applied to empirical data from a general knowledge quiz. A software implementation of the method is freely available in the R system for statistical computing.

We examine the effects of mining booms in Indonesia on labor market outcomes using exogenous price changes and 452 mines. We do this using labor force surveys between the years 1998 and 2011, and four waves of individual panel data between 1997 and 2014. Surprisingly, female incomes grow during mining booms, not because women work more, but because their work moves from the agricultural to the service sector where paid work is more common. Men experience mixed labor market changes. High average mining incomes attract male labor to mining districts, allowing for some adjustment of labor supply to demand. Suggestive evidence also shows that informal work increases marginally for men, potentially in auxiliary mining jobs. A male dominated industry that supports economic opportunities for women can unexpectedly benefit women as well.

Structure-switching aptamers have become ubiquitous in several applications, notably in analytical devices such as biosensors, due to their ease of supporting strong signaling. Aside from their ability to bind specifically with their respective target, this class of aptamers also undergoes a conformational rearrangement upon target recognition. While several well-studied and early-developed aptamers (e.g., cocaine, ATP, and thrombin) have been found to have this structure-switching property, the vast majority do not. As a result, it is common to try to engineer aptamers into switches. This proves challenging in part because of the difficulty in obtaining structural and functional information about aptamers. In response, we review various readily available biophysical characterization tools that are capable of assessing structure switching of aptamers. In doing so, we delve into the fundamentals of these different techniques and detail how they have been utilized in characterizing structure-switching aptamers. While each of these biophysical techniques alone has utility, their real power to demonstrate the occurrence of structural change with ligand binding is when multiple techniques are used. We hope that through a deeper understanding of these techniques, researchers will be better able to acquire biophysical information about their aptamer–ligand systems and accelerate the translation of aptamers into biosensors.

This study investigates the relationship between occupational skills and wages in Thailand using the Labour Force Survey from 1985 to 2020. We quantify the contribution of changes in the skill requirement and highlight the increase in the return on the ‘brain’ and the decrease in the penalty on ‘brawn’, which helps explain the wage distribution changes across periods. We further explore the polarisation in the labour market and analyse the changes in the wage distribution by applying the decomposition method proposed by Firpo et al (2009). Our results suggest that wage dispersion increases in the top end over the first two time periods but decreases in the third time period, while it continues to decrease in the lower end of the distribution.