Paul J. Wolfson

The Pipeline to the Top: Women and Men in the Top Executive Ranks of U.S. Corporations

Executive Overview People often ask about the pipeline of women in line for the top position in major U.S. corporations. Despite persistent interest in this issue, we do not yet have good answers to the question of how long it will take until more than a token number of women hold the CEO position. This study provides numerical estimates that help to answer this question, and also provides new information regarding the job responsibilities and positions in the executive hierarchy of women and men below the rank of CEO. This article presents the results of an extensive data collection effort that has yielded a comprehensive census of top executives in U.S. Fortune 1000 firms as of the year 2000. With regard to the pipeline to the CEO position, our data suggest that we should expect to see a slow increase in the percentage of CEOs that are women in the next five to ten years. Nevertheless, the percentage of CEOs that are women is likely to remain relatively low. As a result, our estimates suggest that if current trends continue, perhaps 6 percent of CEOs in the Fortune 1000 will be women by 2016. We also document the little known fact that almost 50 percent of the firms in the Fortune 1000 had no women as top executives as recently as the year 2000. Moreover, even firms with women executives generally had only 1 or 2 per firm.

What Does the Minimum Wage Do

The authors perform a meta-analysis of more than 200 published studies on the effects of raising the minimum wage to determine impacts on employment, wages, and more.

The Minimum Wage

Do moderate increases in the minimum wage reduce employment? If not, do they nevertheless raise wages? To examine these questions, we apply techniques of time series analysis and systems estimation that are commonly used in macroeconomics and finance to five panels of data that contain between 11 and 34 low-wage industries. Our answers are “No” and “Yes,” respectively. We find that increases in the federal minimum wage between 1947 and 1997 have raised average wages in many of these industries, especially the lowest wage ones. The effect on employment, however, is mixed and typically nonsignificant, even when average wages have risen.

The Effect of Legislated Minimum Wage Increases on Employment and Hours: A Dynamic Analysis

We present a dynamic policy simulation analysing what would have happened to wages, employment, and total hours had the federal minimum wage increased in September 1998, a year after the last actual increase in our data. Prior work suggests that employment responses take 6 years to play out. Using a time-series model for 23 low-wage industries, we find a positive response of average wages over 54 months following an increase in the minimum wage, but neither employment nor hours can be distinguished from random noise. Ignoring confidence intervals, the adjustment of hours is complete after 1 year, the adjustment of employment after no more than two and one half years.

Phantom Results from Panel Regressions

This paper examines current practice with respect to serial correlation in studies that rely on regression analysis of panel datasets. It first examines how frequently various techniques for dealing with serial correlation are used. Next, it runs a horse race using Monte Carlo simulation to establish how well each works in this context. Test sizes based on clustered standard errors are considerably more accurate than those of any of the common alternatives. Finally, it applies the results of the simulation to about one-quarter of the articles from the survey that can be grouped into four research programs. This leads to severe pruning in each line and to a dramatically changed assessment of the overall findings in two of the four.

A simple keynesian model with flexible wages: A succinct synthesis

Abstract Drawing on both the General Theory and the large Post-Keynesian secondary, literature, this states a model of Keynes that is free of the faults often attributed to the mainstream version. Those dissatisfied with the familiar orthodoxy must determine, largely in the dark, whether to take the time and effort required to master this alternative on their own. It is the authors hope that this piece can serve as an introduction to work in this vein, and that brevity, completeness, and accessibility to those familiar with more conventional analysis characterize this paper.

Separating Dynamic Consumer, Competitor and Company Response to Marketing Actions: Exclusion Restrictions on VAR-based Impulse Response Functions

Long-term marketing effectiveness is a high priority research topic for managers (Marketing Science Institute 2002), and recent research applied flexible models of dynamic market interactions to measure the net long-term performance impact of marketing actions. Unfortunately, this net long-term impact is challenging to interpret, as it emerges from the complex interplay among dynamic reactions of several market players. This paper introduces and formally compares restricted policy simulations based on structural VAR-models in order to distinguish three dynamic forces: consumer response, competitor response and company response.