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Katherine Terrell Svejnar
Journal of Comparative Economics 38 (2010) 107–109
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Journal of Comparative Economics journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jce
In Memoriam
Katherine Terrell Svejnar q An influential scholar in the field of comparative and development economics, Professor Katherine Terrell has contributed in many areas of economic development by examining the effect of public policies and structural change on labor market outcomes, income inequality, and firm efficiency. Katherine Terrell spent much of her childhood living in Latin America and maintained a life-long interest in the work, pay and living conditions of low-income Latin Americans. Her Ph.D. dissertation at Cornell University examined labor mobility and earnings in Guatemala (1989). While she was an Assistant and Associate Professor at the University of Pittsburgh (1987– 1996) and Associate and Full Professor at the University of Michigan (1996–2009), she broadened her research interests and examined the behavior of workers and families, as well as performance of firms. Katherine’s early research examined the status of women and public–private pay differences (1992a, 1993a). She gradually became one of the world’s leading academic experts on the impact of legal minimum wages on employment, earnings and poverty in Latin America; publishing and presenting research on the impact of minimum wages in Brazil, Costa Rica, Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador (1995, 2005a, forthcoming-b). Even before the fall of communism, Katherine made important contributions to the understanding of the functioning of the centrally planned economies, providing a path breaking analysis of the (in)efficiency of the transfer of foreign technology to these economies (1992b, 1993b). After the breakdown of communism, much of Katherine’s research focused on the postSoviet labor markets. She brought her Latin American experience to emerging markets of Central and Eastern Europe and examined the effect of market reforms on unemployment duration, worker and job reallocation, the value of human capital, and the relative position of females. She visited and studied several transition economies, including Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Romania, Russia, Slovak Republic, and Ukraine. In the early 1990s, Katherine and her co-authors began collecting unemployment insurance data from local employment offices in Czech and Slovak Republics. They used these data and a nonlinear decomposition method they developed to analyze the large differences in unemployment durations between Czech and Slovak men (1998) and Czech and Slovak women (1999), as well as investigating the impact of unemployment insurance system on the length of unemployment spells for all four groups. In the mid of the 1990s, Katherine brought the idea of organizing a large retrospective survey of labor market histories in the Czech Republic. After burdensome but fascinating data collection work with a group of PhD students, the resulting research provided new evidence on changes in private returns to human capital and labor reallocation between old state and new private sectors (2005b,c). Among many other findings, her research based on individual workers’ histories showed that while returns to experience remained almost unchanged, markets pay women and man equally more for their education than did the planners; that all of the adjustments in returns to human capital are being driven by market forces rather than privatization; and that individual unobservable effects from communism persisted into transition. In her work on job reallocation (2003, 2008a), she combined the experience from different transition regimes (rapid and gradual) with macroeconomic theory to provide an interpretation for the observed job creation and destruction patterns. Her papers linked the observed reallocation patterns to the increase in the market value of education during transition across different types of individuals, firms, and regions. Katherine’s work (2002) has also highlighted the importance of institutions for observed cross-country differences in labor market outcomes. In particular, she was able to contrast the experience of Central European countries, which provided their citizens with a relatively generous social safety net, with that of former Soviet economies, where wages were allowed to fall much faster. Katherine Terrell was also instrumental in designing the Ukrainian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (ULMS), one of the most comprehensive databases on labor market development in former Soviet Union countries. Before the creation of ULMS, knowledge of labor market adjustment to the transition in Ukraine was very limited. Katherine’s profound experience with q Prepared by Klara Sabirianova Peter, with the help of Tim Gindling, Yuriy Gorodnichenko, John Ham, Stepan Jurajda, Hartmut Lehmann, Daniel Munich, Shwetlena Sabarwal, and Jan Svejnar.
doi:10.1016/j.jce.2010.02.002
108
In Memoriam / Journal of Comparative Economics 38 (2010) 107–109
the analysis of micro data in developing, emerging and transition countries helped to shape large sections of the core of the survey instrument, especially the reference week and the retrospective sections of the individual questionnaire. This core of the survey instrument has been and will be the basis for the collection of the data in the already undertaken surveys and in future surveys to come. In 2006, she co-edited a symposium on the Ukrainian labor market in the Journal of Comparative Economics (2006a) and has written one of the first studies on gender wage inequality in Ukraine (2006b). Another important strand of Katherine Terrell’s research focused on the role of globalization on firm performance, employment, and innovation. Her research established that domestically owned firms in two alternative models of emerging market economies, the Czech Republic and Russia, have not been converging to the technological frontier set by foreignowned firms. Her findings suggest that firms (and more generally economies) need to be more technologically advanced and open to competition in order to be able to gain from foreign presence. Importantly, Katherine and her co-authors also find that foreign ownership markedly improves the efficiency of firms and the gap between domestic and foreign-owned firms survives even after accounting for a variety of confounding factors such age, selection and others (2005d, 2007b). To explore why performance gaps between domestic and foreign-owned firms are so persistent, she examined the dynamics of productivity gains for a variety of firms and, more specifically, the role of globalization on innovation via competition and technology transfer (2007a, forthcoming-a). Using data on firms in 27 emerging market economies, Katherine and her co-authors showed the positive effect of foreign competition, vertical linkages with foreign firms, and international trade on several types of innovation by domestic firms. All these findings are central for designing policy to lift millions of people from poverty and to catch up to the living standards of the developed countries. In more recent years, Katherine Terrell had been working on the ambitious project comparing the relative behavior and performance of female and male entrepreneurs within three developing regions, namely, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Latin America, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Using data from the World Bank enterprise surveys, she had undertaken one of the most rigorous and comprehensive examinations of the nature of female entrepreneurship in the developing world and the policy implications thereof (2008b). Aside from measuring gender-based gaps in firm scale and performance, Katherine was particularly interested in evaluating gender-based differences in entrepreneurial credit-seeking behavior and propensity towards risk taking and innovation. This research has been presented at numerous conferences, engendering much debate and discussion on this contentious but relatively less-researched issue. Originally commissioned by the Gender and Development group at World Bank, Katherine’s papers have been used as important background material for some of the group’s work on promoting women’s economic empowerment. Kathy was continuing her work in this area and was excited by the large demand from both academic and non-academic audiences for research on this topic. Until her unexpected passing on December 29, 2009, Katherine continued to be actively involved with research and advising policy makers on various aspects of public policies. She was always full of new ideas and was able to work simultaneously on dozens of projects with co-authors from many different countries. Many of us will also remember Kathy’s great personality, warm heart, great mind, and incredible work ethic. I was privileged to have worked with Kathy for almost 10 years. She was an exceptional professor, compassionate advisor, rigorous researcher, entrepreneur, and organizer. But what I cherish most is to have had Kathy as my friend. References Boeri, Tito, Terrell, Katherine, 2002. Institutional determinants of labor reallocation in transition. Journal of Economic Perspectives 16 (1), 51–76. Ganguli, Ina, Terrell, Katherine, 2006b. Institutions, markets and men’s and women’s wage inequality: evidence from Ukraine. Journal of Comparative Economics 34 (2), 200–227. Gindling, Tim, Terrell, Katherine, 1995. The nature of minimum wages in Costa Rica: are they an effective wage floor? World Development 23 (8), 1439– 1458. Gindling, Tim, Terrell, Katherine, 2005a. The effect of minimum wages on actual wages in the formal and informal sectors in Costa Rica. World Development 33 (11), 1905–1921. Gindling, Tim, Terrell, Katherine, forthcoming-b. Minimum wages, wages and employment in various sectors in Honduras. Labour Economics. Gorodnichenko, Yuriy, Svejnar, Jan, Terrell, Katherine, 2007a. When does FDI have positive spillovers? Evidence from 17 transition economies, IZA Discussion Paper, No. 3079. Gorodnichenko, Yuriy, Svejnar, Jan, Terrell, Katherine, forthcoming-a. Globalization and innovation in emerging markets. American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics. Ham, John, Svejnar, Jan, Terrell, Katherine, 1998. Unemployment and the social safety net during the transition to a market economy: evidence from Czech and Slovak men. American Economic Review 88 (5), 1117–1142. Ham, John, Svejnar, Jan, Katherine, Terrell, 1999. Women’s unemployment during the transition: evidence from Czech and Slovak micro data. Economics of Transition 7 (1), 47–79. Jurajda, Stepan, Katherine, Terrell, 2003. New sector growth in transition: comparing two paths. Economics of Transition 11 (2), 291–321. Jurajda, Stepan, Terrell, Katherine, 2008a. Job reallocation in two cases of massive adjustments in Eastern Europe. World Development 36 (11), 2144–2169. Klara, Sabirianova, Jan, Svejnar, Terrell, Katherine, 2005d. Distance to the efficiency frontier and FDI spillovers. Journal of the European Economic Association. Papers and Proceedings 3 (2–3), 576–586. Sabirianova, Klara, Svejnar, Jan, Terrell, Katherine, 2007b. Foreign investment, corporate ownership and development: are firms in emerging markets catching up to the world standard? IZA Discussion Paper, No. 1457. Available at SSRN:. Lehmann, Hartmut, Terrell, Katherine, 2006a. The Ukrainian labor market in transition: evidence from a new panel data set. Journal of Comparative Economics 34, 195–199. Munich, Daniel, Svejnar, Jan, Terrell, Katherine, 2005b. Is women’s human capital valued more by markets than by planners? Journal of Comparative Economics 33 (2), 278–299. Munich, Daniel, Svejnar, Jan, Terrell, Katherine, 2005c. Returns to human capital under the communism wage grid and during the transition to a market economy. Review of Economics and Statistics 87 (1), 100–123. Sabarwal, Shwetlena, Terrell, Katherine, 2008b. Does gender matter for firm performance? Evidence from the East Europe and Central Asia, International Policy Working Paper Series, No. 73, University of Michigan.
In Memoriam / Journal of Comparative Economics 38 (2010) 107–109 Terrell, Terrell, Terrell, Terrell, Terrell,
Katherine, Katherine, Katherine, Katherine, Katherine,
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1989. An analysis of the wage structure in Guatemala City. Journal of Developing Areas 23, 405–424. 1992a. Female–male earnings differentials and occupational structure. International Labour Review 131 (4), 387–404. 1992b. Productivity of western and domestic capital in Polish industry. Journal of Comparative Economics 16 (3), 494–514. 1993a. Public–private wage differentials in Haiti: do public servants earn a rent? Journal of Development Economics 42 (2), 293–314. 1993b. Technical change and factor bias in Polish industry, 1962–1983. Review of Economics and Statistics 75 (3), 741–747.
Klara Sabirianova Peter Member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Comparative Economics, Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, Georgia State University, United States
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Journal of Comparative Economics journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jce
In Memoriam
Katherine Terrell Svejnar q An influential scholar in the field of comparative and development economics, Professor Katherine Terrell has contributed in many areas of economic development by examining the effect of public policies and structural change on labor market outcomes, income inequality, and firm efficiency. Katherine Terrell spent much of her childhood living in Latin America and maintained a life-long interest in the work, pay and living conditions of low-income Latin Americans. Her Ph.D. dissertation at Cornell University examined labor mobility and earnings in Guatemala (1989). While she was an Assistant and Associate Professor at the University of Pittsburgh (1987– 1996) and Associate and Full Professor at the University of Michigan (1996–2009), she broadened her research interests and examined the behavior of workers and families, as well as performance of firms. Katherine’s early research examined the status of women and public–private pay differences (1992a, 1993a). She gradually became one of the world’s leading academic experts on the impact of legal minimum wages on employment, earnings and poverty in Latin America; publishing and presenting research on the impact of minimum wages in Brazil, Costa Rica, Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador (1995, 2005a, forthcoming-b). Even before the fall of communism, Katherine made important contributions to the understanding of the functioning of the centrally planned economies, providing a path breaking analysis of the (in)efficiency of the transfer of foreign technology to these economies (1992b, 1993b). After the breakdown of communism, much of Katherine’s research focused on the postSoviet labor markets. She brought her Latin American experience to emerging markets of Central and Eastern Europe and examined the effect of market reforms on unemployment duration, worker and job reallocation, the value of human capital, and the relative position of females. She visited and studied several transition economies, including Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Romania, Russia, Slovak Republic, and Ukraine. In the early 1990s, Katherine and her co-authors began collecting unemployment insurance data from local employment offices in Czech and Slovak Republics. They used these data and a nonlinear decomposition method they developed to analyze the large differences in unemployment durations between Czech and Slovak men (1998) and Czech and Slovak women (1999), as well as investigating the impact of unemployment insurance system on the length of unemployment spells for all four groups. In the mid of the 1990s, Katherine brought the idea of organizing a large retrospective survey of labor market histories in the Czech Republic. After burdensome but fascinating data collection work with a group of PhD students, the resulting research provided new evidence on changes in private returns to human capital and labor reallocation between old state and new private sectors (2005b,c). Among many other findings, her research based on individual workers’ histories showed that while returns to experience remained almost unchanged, markets pay women and man equally more for their education than did the planners; that all of the adjustments in returns to human capital are being driven by market forces rather than privatization; and that individual unobservable effects from communism persisted into transition. In her work on job reallocation (2003, 2008a), she combined the experience from different transition regimes (rapid and gradual) with macroeconomic theory to provide an interpretation for the observed job creation and destruction patterns. Her papers linked the observed reallocation patterns to the increase in the market value of education during transition across different types of individuals, firms, and regions. Katherine’s work (2002) has also highlighted the importance of institutions for observed cross-country differences in labor market outcomes. In particular, she was able to contrast the experience of Central European countries, which provided their citizens with a relatively generous social safety net, with that of former Soviet economies, where wages were allowed to fall much faster. Katherine Terrell was also instrumental in designing the Ukrainian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (ULMS), one of the most comprehensive databases on labor market development in former Soviet Union countries. Before the creation of ULMS, knowledge of labor market adjustment to the transition in Ukraine was very limited. Katherine’s profound experience with q Prepared by Klara Sabirianova Peter, with the help of Tim Gindling, Yuriy Gorodnichenko, John Ham, Stepan Jurajda, Hartmut Lehmann, Daniel Munich, Shwetlena Sabarwal, and Jan Svejnar.
doi:10.1016/j.jce.2010.02.002
108
In Memoriam / Journal of Comparative Economics 38 (2010) 107–109
the analysis of micro data in developing, emerging and transition countries helped to shape large sections of the core of the survey instrument, especially the reference week and the retrospective sections of the individual questionnaire. This core of the survey instrument has been and will be the basis for the collection of the data in the already undertaken surveys and in future surveys to come. In 2006, she co-edited a symposium on the Ukrainian labor market in the Journal of Comparative Economics (2006a) and has written one of the first studies on gender wage inequality in Ukraine (2006b). Another important strand of Katherine Terrell’s research focused on the role of globalization on firm performance, employment, and innovation. Her research established that domestically owned firms in two alternative models of emerging market economies, the Czech Republic and Russia, have not been converging to the technological frontier set by foreignowned firms. Her findings suggest that firms (and more generally economies) need to be more technologically advanced and open to competition in order to be able to gain from foreign presence. Importantly, Katherine and her co-authors also find that foreign ownership markedly improves the efficiency of firms and the gap between domestic and foreign-owned firms survives even after accounting for a variety of confounding factors such age, selection and others (2005d, 2007b). To explore why performance gaps between domestic and foreign-owned firms are so persistent, she examined the dynamics of productivity gains for a variety of firms and, more specifically, the role of globalization on innovation via competition and technology transfer (2007a, forthcoming-a). Using data on firms in 27 emerging market economies, Katherine and her co-authors showed the positive effect of foreign competition, vertical linkages with foreign firms, and international trade on several types of innovation by domestic firms. All these findings are central for designing policy to lift millions of people from poverty and to catch up to the living standards of the developed countries. In more recent years, Katherine Terrell had been working on the ambitious project comparing the relative behavior and performance of female and male entrepreneurs within three developing regions, namely, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Latin America, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Using data from the World Bank enterprise surveys, she had undertaken one of the most rigorous and comprehensive examinations of the nature of female entrepreneurship in the developing world and the policy implications thereof (2008b). Aside from measuring gender-based gaps in firm scale and performance, Katherine was particularly interested in evaluating gender-based differences in entrepreneurial credit-seeking behavior and propensity towards risk taking and innovation. This research has been presented at numerous conferences, engendering much debate and discussion on this contentious but relatively less-researched issue. Originally commissioned by the Gender and Development group at World Bank, Katherine’s papers have been used as important background material for some of the group’s work on promoting women’s economic empowerment. Kathy was continuing her work in this area and was excited by the large demand from both academic and non-academic audiences for research on this topic. Until her unexpected passing on December 29, 2009, Katherine continued to be actively involved with research and advising policy makers on various aspects of public policies. She was always full of new ideas and was able to work simultaneously on dozens of projects with co-authors from many different countries. Many of us will also remember Kathy’s great personality, warm heart, great mind, and incredible work ethic. I was privileged to have worked with Kathy for almost 10 years. She was an exceptional professor, compassionate advisor, rigorous researcher, entrepreneur, and organizer. But what I cherish most is to have had Kathy as my friend. References Boeri, Tito, Terrell, Katherine, 2002. Institutional determinants of labor reallocation in transition. Journal of Economic Perspectives 16 (1), 51–76. Ganguli, Ina, Terrell, Katherine, 2006b. Institutions, markets and men’s and women’s wage inequality: evidence from Ukraine. Journal of Comparative Economics 34 (2), 200–227. Gindling, Tim, Terrell, Katherine, 1995. The nature of minimum wages in Costa Rica: are they an effective wage floor? World Development 23 (8), 1439– 1458. Gindling, Tim, Terrell, Katherine, 2005a. The effect of minimum wages on actual wages in the formal and informal sectors in Costa Rica. World Development 33 (11), 1905–1921. Gindling, Tim, Terrell, Katherine, forthcoming-b. Minimum wages, wages and employment in various sectors in Honduras. Labour Economics. Gorodnichenko, Yuriy, Svejnar, Jan, Terrell, Katherine, 2007a. When does FDI have positive spillovers? Evidence from 17 transition economies, IZA Discussion Paper, No. 3079. Gorodnichenko, Yuriy, Svejnar, Jan, Terrell, Katherine, forthcoming-a. Globalization and innovation in emerging markets. American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics. Ham, John, Svejnar, Jan, Terrell, Katherine, 1998. Unemployment and the social safety net during the transition to a market economy: evidence from Czech and Slovak men. American Economic Review 88 (5), 1117–1142. Ham, John, Svejnar, Jan, Katherine, Terrell, 1999. Women’s unemployment during the transition: evidence from Czech and Slovak micro data. Economics of Transition 7 (1), 47–79. Jurajda, Stepan, Katherine, Terrell, 2003. New sector growth in transition: comparing two paths. Economics of Transition 11 (2), 291–321. Jurajda, Stepan, Terrell, Katherine, 2008a. Job reallocation in two cases of massive adjustments in Eastern Europe. World Development 36 (11), 2144–2169. Klara, Sabirianova, Jan, Svejnar, Terrell, Katherine, 2005d. Distance to the efficiency frontier and FDI spillovers. Journal of the European Economic Association. Papers and Proceedings 3 (2–3), 576–586. Sabirianova, Klara, Svejnar, Jan, Terrell, Katherine, 2007b. Foreign investment, corporate ownership and development: are firms in emerging markets catching up to the world standard? IZA Discussion Paper, No. 1457. Available at SSRN:
In Memoriam / Journal of Comparative Economics 38 (2010) 107–109 Terrell, Terrell, Terrell, Terrell, Terrell,
Katherine, Katherine, Katherine, Katherine, Katherine,
109
1989. An analysis of the wage structure in Guatemala City. Journal of Developing Areas 23, 405–424. 1992a. Female–male earnings differentials and occupational structure. International Labour Review 131 (4), 387–404. 1992b. Productivity of western and domestic capital in Polish industry. Journal of Comparative Economics 16 (3), 494–514. 1993a. Public–private wage differentials in Haiti: do public servants earn a rent? Journal of Development Economics 42 (2), 293–314. 1993b. Technical change and factor bias in Polish industry, 1962–1983. Review of Economics and Statistics 75 (3), 741–747.
Klara Sabirianova Peter Member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Comparative Economics, Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, Georgia State University, United States