what went wrong the erosion of relative earnings and employment among young black men in the 1980s this paper shows a widening in black white earnings and employment gaps among young men from the mid 1970s through the 1980s earnings gaps increased most among college graduates and in the midwest while gaps in employment population rates grew most among dropouts we attribute the differential widening to shifts in demand for subgroups due to shifting industry and regional employment the falling real minimum wage and deunionization the growing supply of black to white workers that was marked among college graduates and to increased crime among dropouts the different factors affecting subgroups highlight the economic diversity of black americans

immigrant specificity and the relationship between trade and immigration theory and evidence studies routinely document that immigrant employment concentrates in non traded goods sectors and that many immigrants have low inter sectoral mobility we consider these observed characteristics of immigrant employment with regard to the question of how immigration affects a nation s pattern of production and trade we model an economy producing three goods one is non traded domestic labor and capital are domestically mobile but internationally immobile allowing that some new immigrants will become specific to the non traded goods sector the model indicates that the effects of immigration on output and trade depend importantly on the sectoral pattern of employment of both new and existing immigrants empirical investigation in a panel data set of oecd countries supports the model s prediction that immigration raises the output of non traded goods consistent with the model we also find that immigration and trade are complements given its empirical support the model s implications for immigration policy are then discussed

the economics of forced migration abstract this article reviews the economics literature on the impacts of forced migration the literature is divided into two parts impacts on forced migrants and impacts on host communities studies exploring the impact of forced migration due to wwii suggest that the long term impact is often positive the literature for developing countries suggests that there are serious consequences of forced migration for those forced to migrate these consequences range from worse labour market outcomes to less consumption smoothing the impact on host communities seems to be mixed and there are winners and losers the article provides suggestions for future research

immigrant participation in the welfare system this paper presents a systematic analysis of immigrant participation in the us welfare system using the 1970 and 1980 us censuses in contrast to the previous studies the researchers focused on changes in welfare use across immigrant cohorts over time for a single immigrant cohort as it assimilates to the us furthermore it develops a theoretical model of the migration decision that explicitly incorporates the income insurance aspect of the us welfare system the analysis revealed that recent immigrant cohorts use the welfare system more intensively than earlier immigrant waves also the immigrant welfare participation was greater the longer an immigrant household had resided in the us and those characteristics of the immigrants country of origin were important determinants of welfare participation in addition the theoretical model of the migration decision which explicitly incorporated the presence of a welfare system in the destination country and this model could account for some of the ways in which source country characteristics were found to affect immigrant welfare participation

the unemployment experience of male immigrants in england in this paper the unemployment experience of immigrant men in the english labour market is examined using 1993 1994 data from the quarterly labour force survey of the united kingdom hypotheses proposed by chiswick 1982 are investigated for both the claimant count and the ilo measures of unemployment using logistic regression analysis our results show that recent white and nonwhite immigrant men experience much higher levels of unemployment than earlier cohorts for whites this effect is transitory whereas for nonwhites unemployment rates adjust more slowly as the duration of stay increases immigrant unemployment rates also vary considerably with country of birth

skilled immigration and innovation evidence from enrolment fluctuations in us doctoral programmes we study the contribution of foreign science and engineering talent to the creation of new knowledge in the u s economy using panel data on 2300 science and engineering s e departments at 100 large american universities from 1973 to 1998 we use macroeconomic shocks and policy changes in source countries that differentially affect enrollments across fields and universities to isolate exogenous variation in the supply of students at specific departments both foreign and domestic graduate students are central inputs into knowledge creation and the marginal foreign student contributes more to the production of scientific publications and citations a 10 decrease in the foreign share of doctoral students lowers s e research output at u s universities by 5 6 a theoretical model of university admissions and scholarships helps us infer the productivity effects of student quality and econometric results indicate that any visa restrictions limiting entry of highquality foreign students is most costly for u s innovation increased diversity appears to be the primary mechanism by which foreign students improve research outcomes the impact of more restrictive immigration policies depends on how they affect the quality margin and diversity of incoming foreigners

seasonality in dynamic regression models this paper examines the implications of treating seasonality as an unobserved component which changes slowly over time this approach simplifies the specification of dynamic relationships by separating non seasonal from seasonal factors we illustrate this approach using the consumption model of davidson et al 1978 and estimate a stable error correction model between consumption income and prices over the period 1958 92 more generally we argue that autoregressive models are unlikely to successfully model slowly changing seasonality and may confound seasonal effects with the dynamic responses of prime interest our approach can be used in a wide range of cases and we show that there is little loss in efficiency even if seasonality is deterministic

the impact of the 1962 repatriates from algeria on the french labor market this paper uses census data to examine the impact on the french labor market of the 900 000 people repatriated from algeria in 1962 repatriates settled in regions culturally and climatically simil

immigration and the family this article studies the role of the family in determining the skill composition and labor market experiences of immigrants in the united states our theoretical framework based on the assumption that family migration decisions maximize household income shows that the family attenuates the selection characterizing the skills of the immigrant population the empirical analysis uses the 1970 and 1980 public use samples of the u s census and reveals that an immigrant s skills and labor market performance are greatly influenced by the composition of the household at the time of migration and by his placement in the immigration chain

immigration search and loss of skill this article develops and estimates an on the job search model of the entry of highly skilled immigrants from the former soviet union into the israeli labor market the estimated parameters of the model together with information on the wages of immigrants from earlier waves imply that on average immigrants can expect lifetime earnings to fall short of the lifetime earnings of comparable natives by 57 of this figure 14 percentage points reflect frictions associated with nonemployment and job distribution mismatch and 43 percentage points reflect the gradual adaptation of imported schooling and experience to the local labor market

the earnings of male immigrants in england evidence from the quarterly lfs in this paper we estimate earnings functions for native born and foreign born white and non white males in the english labour market using data from the quarterly labour force survey our results highlight the importance of distinguishing between native born and foreign born males when investigating the labour market experience of ethnic minorities furthermore the earnings performance amongst white immigrants varies considerably

a comparative analysis of the nativity wealth gap this paper investigates the source of the gap in the relative wealth posi tion of immigrant households residing in australia germany and the united states our results indicate that in germany and the united states wealth difierentials are largely the result of disparity in the educational attainment and demographic composition of the native and immigrant populations while income difierentials are relatively unimportant in understanding the nativity wealth gap in contrast the relatively small wealth gap between australian and foreign born households exists because immigrants to australia do not translate their relative educational and demographic advantage into a wealth advantage on balance our results point to substantial cross national disparity in the economic well being of immigrant and native families which is largely consistent with domestic labor markets and the selection policies used to shape the nature of the immigration ow

marginal welfare measures for discrete choice models abstract this letter deals with the use of discrete choice models for applied welfare analysis an approximate formula is presented for the marginal willingness to pay for a change in the attributes of any of the discrete alternatives which is simple to calculate and has an intuitive interpretation

undocumented immigration and unemployment of u s youth and minority workers econometric evidence we use census based data on the state distribution of the undocumented alien population in analyzing the relationship between that population and unemployment among youth and minority workers in the united states regression results from our two equation models do not support commonly expressed fears that undocumented immigration has caused any substantial increases in joblessness among these presumably vulnerable groups although small amounts of displacement are indicated a sizeable reverse effect is evident undocumented immigrants tend to concentrate in states where labor markets for these marginal groups are most favorable excerpt

regional labor markets and the determinants of wage inequality from 1972 to 1990 the united states experienced the largest increase in wage inequality of any developed country the spread in log wages between the 90th and 10th percentiles of the male wage distribution increased by about 60 points and inequality increased within virtually every demographic or skill category of the labor force see chinhui juhn et al 1993 various explanations have been offered including changes in the relative demand for skill intensive goods international trade immigration of less skilled workers and increased labor force participation of women yet attempts to quantify the relative importance of these factors have not met with much success this leaves skill biased technical change as the residual claimant that rationalizes the data this paper uses regional differences in the evolution of wage inequality to provide new evidence on the determinants of relative wages using a model of factor demand in geographic markets i isolate contributions of i changing skill ratios in the labor force ii increased participation of women iii technical change and iv changes in the industrial composition of labor demand the data indicate that changing skill ratios and women s labor supply have affected the wages of low skilled men in the west the data indicate that increased immigration of less skilled hispanic and asian workers has adversely affected the wages of natives causing a greater increase in inequality there than in any other region of the country i modeling wage inequality in regional markets

social class and income inequality in the united states ownership authority and personal income distribution from 1980 to 2010 this study outlines a theory of social class based on workplace ownership and authority relations and it investigates the link between social class and growth in personal income inequality since the 1980s inequality trends are governed by changes in between class income differences changes in the relative size of different classes and changes in within class income dispersion data from the general social survey are used to investigate each of these changes in turn and to evaluate their impact on growth in inequality at the population level results indicate that between class income differences grew by about 60 since the 1980s and that the relative size of different classes remained fairly stable a formal decomposition analysis indicates that changes in the relative size of different social classes had a small dampening effect and that growth in between class income differences had a large inflationary effect on trends in personal income inequality

immigration regional conditions and crime evidence from an allocation policy in germany after the collapse of the soviet union more than 3 million people with german ancestors immigrated to germany under a special law granting immediate citizenship exploiting the exogenous allocation of ethnic german immigrants by german authorities across regions upon arrival we find that immigration significantly increases crime the crime impact of immigration depends strongly on local labor market conditions with strong impacts in regions with high unemployment similarly we find substantially stronger effects in regions with high preexisting crime levels or large shares of foreigners

diverging patterns with endogenous labor migration abstract the standard neoclassical model cannot explain persistent migration flows and lack of cross country convergence when capital and labor are mobile here we present a model where both phenomena may take place assuming increasing returns and perfect capital mobility the driving forces behind labor migration are the size and the composition of the workforce the size of the workforce produces divergence a larger workforce in one country implies higher wages the wage gap induces in migration and this makes the wage gap even larger in this case migration is only beneficial for the labor importing country the evolution in the composition of the workforce due to migration may have opposite effects in one case in migration keeps the wage of skilled workers high enough to induce people to qualify for skilled jobs this improves the composition of labor in the receiving country only and it makes divergence a likely outcome in another case labor migration keeps the relative wage of unskilled workers in the rich country high enough to induce all migrants to take unskilled jobs and reduce the skilled to unskilled ratio in that country then migration is beneficial to the country which was first exporting labor

applied welfare economics with discrete choice models economists have been paying increasing attention to the study of situations in which consumers face a discrete rather than a continuous set of choices such models are potentially very important in evaluating the impact of government programs upon consumer welfare but very little has been said in general regarding the tools of applied welfare economics indiscrete choice situations this paper shows how the conventional methods of applied welfare economics can be modified to handle such cases it focuses on the computation of the excess burden of taxation and the evaluation of quality change the results are applied to stochastic utility models including the popular cases of probit and logit analysis throughout the emphasis is on providing rigorous guidelines for carrying out applied work this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

the changing labor market position of canadian immigrants this paper uses pooled 1971 1981 and 1986 canadian census data to evaluate the extent to which 1 the earnings of canadian immigrants at the time of immigration fall short of the earnings of comparable canadian born individuals and 2 immigrants earnings grow more rapidly over time than those of the canadian born variations in the labour market assimilation of immigrants according to their gender and country of origin are also analysed the results suggest that recent immigrant cohorts have had more difficulty being assimilated into the canadian labour market than earlier ones an apparent consequence of recent changes in canadian immigration policy labour market discrimination against visible minorities and the prolonged recession of the early 1980s summary in fre excerpt

regression toward mediocrity in economic stature this paper provides estimates of the correlation in lifetime earnings between fathers and sons intergenerational data from the national longitudinal survey are used earlier studies conducted for the united states report elasticities of children s earnings with respect to parent s earnings of 0 2 or less suggesting extensive integenerational mobility these estimates however are biased downward by error contaminated measures of lifetime economic status estimates presented in this paper correct for the problem of measurement error and find the intergenerational correlation in income to be on the order of 0 4 this suggests considerably less intergenerational mobility than previously believed jel j62

immigration from poor to wealthy countries experience of the united states the u s experience with immigration from poor countries is examined using the results of two projects carried out by the national bureau of economic research questions considered include what determines the supply of immigrants how such immigrants fare in the u s job market and how this immigration affects the prospects of native born workers annotation

bequest and tax planning evidence from estate tax returns i study bequest and wealth accumulation behavior of the wealthy subject to the estate tax shortly before death the onset of a terminal illness leads to a very significant reduction in the value of estates reported on tax returns fifteen to twenty percent with illness lasting months to years and about five to ten percent in the case of illness reported as lasting days to weeks i provide evidence suggesting that these findings cannot be explained by real shocks to net worth such as medical expenses or lost income but instead reflect deathbed estate planning the results suggest that wealthy individuals actively care about disposition of their estates but that this preference is dominated by the desire to hold on to their wealth while alive

intergenerational income mobility in the united states social scientists and policy analysts have long expressed concern about the extent of intergenerational income mobility in the united states but remarkably little empirical evidence is available the few existing estimates of the intergenerational correlation in income have been biased downward by measurement error unrepresentative samples or both new estimates based on intergenerational data from the panel study of income dynamics imply that the intergenerational correlation in long run income is at least 0 4 indicating dramatically less mobility than suggested by earlier research copyright 1992 by american economic association

group specific effects of interregional mobility on earnings a microdata analysis for germany lehmer f and moller j group specific effects of inter regional mobility on earnings a microdata analysis for germany regional studies the paper analyses the relationship between regional mobility and earnings for different groups of workers using a large panel microdata set the authors find negative earnings differentials of movers in the year before migration and strong evidence for significant wage gains through mobility a decomposition of blinder oaxaca type reveals different group specific rewards effects suggesting a positive post mobility wage differential of movers over the incumbent workforce for some groups irrespective of the region of destination the existence of a general wage growth effect of mobility appears to be robust and cannot be explained by the time invariant part of unobserved heterogeneity lehmer f et moller j l impact sur les revenus la mobilite interregionale des groupes specifiques des groupes sur les revenus une analyse des donnees microeconomiques pour l allemagne

migration human capital accumulation and economic development we study how the possibility of migration changes the composition of human capital in sending countries and how this affects development in our model growth is driven by productivity growth which occurs via imitation or innovation both activities use the same types of skilled labour as input albeit with different intensities heterogenous agents accumulate skills in response to economic incentives migration distorts these incentives and the accumulation of human capital this slows down or even hinders economic development the effect is stronger the farther away the country is from the technological frontier

immigrant earnings age at immigration matters a correlation between age at immigration and earnings is observed in canadian census data the evidence supports three underlying sources of the effect first work expe rience in the source country yields virtually no return in the host country second the return to education varies with age at immigration and finally an acculturation effect is observed for immigrants who are visible minorities or whose mother tongue is not english further it is found that educational attainment and relatedly earnings vary systematically across age at immigration with those arriving around age 15 to 18 obtaining fewer years of education

does the chinese diaspora speed up growth in host countries summary we compiled a new enhanced data set on the population share of overseas chinese covering 147 countries over the period 1970 2010 linking the migration and economic growth literature this article attempts to estimate the impact of the chinese diaspora on economic growth in host countries regression results from both barro type and dynamic panel data models suggest that a country s initial relative endowment with overseas chinese is positively related to subsequent growth results are robust to a number of sensitivity tests the effect is transmitted via increased trade openness enhanced investment and general tfp effects

employer sanctions on hiring illegal labor an experimental analysis of firm compliance abstract the employer sanctions provision of the 1986 immigration reform and control act penalizes employers who knowingly hire unauthorized workers under irca employers are subject to civil and or criminal penalties however given the widespread availability of counterfeit documentation in some cases it becomes difficult to discern the employment eligibility status of some workers using experimental methods this study provides some evidence that marginal increases in employer compliance rates are significantly higher when employers have perfect information on the employment eligibility status of its potential workers than when they do not the experimental results suggest that increases in government spending for employer sanctions enforcement may be more effective if the informational asymmetry faced by employers is solved first a possible solution to this problem may lie in the adoption of tamper proof documentation such as a national identification card

implications of alternate policies on welfare of slum dwellers evidence from pune india abstract in this paper we examine how slum dwellers value location based amenities in most developing country cities residents living in slums have poor quality dwellings and limited access to basic public services and amenities using data from pune india we estimate the residential location choices of slum dwellers which are conditional on housing quality neighborhood amenities and community structure we use these estimates to simulate the impact of alternate interventions on household welfare we find that households derive benefits from housing quality and neighborhood amenities while relocating households to the periphery has adverse consequences for household welfare we show that households could be adequately compensated out of the increased tax revenue accruing from alternative uses of the vacated central land

doctors with borders occupational licensing as an implicit barrier to high skill migration research on the political economy of immigration overlooks the specificity of human capital in skilled occupations and its implications for immigration preferences and policymaking conclusions that skilled americans are unconcerned about labor market competition from skilled migrants build on a simple dichotomy between high and low skill migrants in this article we show that natives turn to occupational licensing regulations as occupation specific protectionist barriers to skilled migrant labor competition in practice high skill natives face labor market competition only from those high skill migrants who share their occupation specific skills licensure regulations ostensibly serve the public interest by certifying competence but they can simultaneously be formidable barriers to entry by skilled migrants from a collective action perspective skilled natives can more easily secure sub national occupation specific policies than influence national immigration policy we exploit the unique structure of the american medical profession that allows us to distinguish between public interest and protectionist motives for migrant physician licensure regulations we show that over the 1973 2010 period states with greater physician control over licensure requirements imposed more stringent requirements for migrant physician licensure and as a consequence received fewer new migrant physicians by our estimates over a third of all us states could reduce their physician shortages by at least 10 percent within 5 years just by equalizing migrant and native licensure requirements this article advances research on the political economy of immigration and highlights an overlooked dimension of international economic integration regulatory rent seeking as a barrier to the cross national mobility of human capital and the public policy implications of such barriers

charitable bequests and wealth at death charitable bequests are a major source of income for charities but surprisingly little is known about them we propose a multi stage framework for analysing the bequest decision and examine the evidence for britain provided by new data on estates the novelty of the framework is that it distinguishes between five different steps that lead to a charitable bequest our new data for britain have the advantages of covering the whole population of non trivial estates in contrast to much of the us literature based on the small fraction of the population covered by estate tax returns and of containing fuller information on charitable intent we use this unique data set to explore the relationship with wealth at death of testacy of leaving a charitable bequest and of the form of the bequests

economic evaluation of environmental externalities in china s coal fired power generation abstract serious environmental externalities exist in china s power industry environmental economics theory suggests that the evaluation of environmental externality is the basis of designing an efficient regulation the purposes of this study are 1 to identify chinese respondents preferences for green development of electric power industry and the socio economic characteristics behind them 2 to investigate the different attitudes of the respondents towards pollution and co2 reduction 3 to quantitatively evaluate the environmental cost of china s coal fired power generation based on the method of choice experiments ce and the 411 questionnaires with 2466 data points we found that chinese respondents prefer pm2 5 so2 and nox reduction to co2 reduction and that the environment cost of coal fired power plants in china is 0 30 yuan per kwh in addition we found that the socio economic characteristics of income education gender and environmental awareness have significant impacts on respondents choices these findings indicate that the environmental cost of coal fired power generation is a significant factor that requires great consideration in the formulation of electric power development policies in addition importance should also be attached to the implementation of green power price policy and enhancement of environmental protection awareness

literacy and labour market outcomes self assessment versus test score measures this paper looks at the determinants of literacy and the relation between literacy and labour market outcomes while focusing on comparisons of self assessment versus test score measures of literacy the test score measure performs considerably better than the self assessments when literacy is treated as an outcome variable in terms of the overall fit of the model and the specific coefficient estimates with the self assessments sometimes actually generating wrongly signed parameters the test score measure also performs much better as an explanatory variable in the employment models with the self assessment variable generating significant underestimates of the effects of literacy on the probability of being employed finally the test score is also superior in the income models although the self assessment measure is at least a reasonably good performer in this regard suggesting that the main results reported in much of the existing literature based on such measures should perhaps be taken as good re

accounting for stochastic shadow values of time in discrete choice recreation demand models abstract in this paper a discrete choice recreation demand model that explicitly accounts for a stochastic shadow value of time function is proposed using data from a survey of san diego beach users the stochastic shadow value of time labor supply and beach choice are jointly estimated results from this joint estimation approach are compared with the familiar two step approach that estimates labor supply first and uses predicted values of time in the recreational site choice model the approaches produce markedly different welfare measures with the two step model which does not account for unobserved variability of time values predicting significantly higher values a monte carlo simulation illustrates how ignoring the stochastic nature of shadow value of time in discrete choice recreation demand models can bias model parameters and hence welfare estimates

international migration under asymmetric information international migration under asymmetric information usually differs from international migration under symmetric information and often quite dramatically so and in counterintuitive ways since in real life information is indeed asymmetric it is somewhat surprising that hitherto the study of international migration has by and large proceeded without explicit recognition of the effect of informational asymmetry in this paper we show that when at the lowest skill level migration is desirable i e if the discounted wage differential is positive for the lowest skill level the introduction of asymmetric information results in a reduction of the quality and quantity of international migration or has no effect at all when at the lowest skill level migration is not desirable the discounted differential is not positive at the lowest skill level the introduction of asymmetric information may either result in migration by all or none when under asymmetric information workers can at some cost to themselves report to foreign employers their individual skill thus dissociate themselves from the group effect then provided the cost is small either a u pattern of migration with respect to skill level emerges or migration is uniformly pursued by all though some do and some do not invest in signalling when the source consists of more than 1 poor country it is impossible to predict migration under asymmetric information from a given country without explicitly accounting for changes in the parameters of the other for example a favorable change encouraging less migration taking place in 1 country will through a distinct impact on the overall composition of migration reduce migration from the other country finally allowing employers to discover after a while the true productivity of individual migrant workers we obtain the somewhat surprising result that under a reasonable set of assumptions eventual discovery may increase the quantity and quality of migration and also increase the wage enjoyed by the low quality migrants eventual discovery serves to mitigate the impact of group averaging that deters migration by the high skill workers due to migration of some such workers the prediscovery wage of the low skill workers arises in our case sufficiently to outweigh the effect of the future wage decline due to discovery authors

assimilation changes in cohort quality and the earnings of immigrants this paper reexamines the empirical basis for two facts that seem to be found in most cross section studies of immigrant earnings 1 the earnings of immigrants grow rapidly as they assimilate into the united states and 2 this rapid growth leads to many immigrants overtaking the earnings of the natives within 10 15 years after immigration using the 1970 and 1980 u s censuses this paper studies the earnings growth experienced by specific immigrant cohorts during the period 1970 80 it is found that within cohort growth is significantly smaller than the growth predicted by cross section regressions for most immigrant groups this differential is consistent with the hypothesis that there has been a secular decline in the quality of immigrants admitted to the united states

the labor market skills of recent male immigrants evidence from the current population survey using data from special supplements to the current population survey cps the authors track the education and hourly earnings of recent male immigrants to the united states in terms of these measures of labor market skills the cps data suggest that immigrants who came in the late 1980s were more skilled than those who arrived earlier in the decade this pattern represents a break from the steady decline in immigrant skill levels observed in 1940 80 census data despite the encouraging trend over the 1980s however the average skills of recent immigrants remain low by historical standards

putting tasks to the test human capital job tasks and wages using original representative survey data we document that analytical routine and manual job tasks can be measured with high validity vary substantially within and between occupations are significantly related to workers characteristics and are robustly predictive of wage differences between occupations and among workers in the same occupation we offer a conceptual framework that makes explicit the causal links between human capital endowments occupational assignment job tasks and wages which motivate a roy model of the allocation of workers to occupations we offer two simple tests of the model s gross predictions for the relationship between tasks and wages both of which receive qualified empirical support

a note on the effects of taxation on charitable giving over the life cycle and beyond recent changes in the federal budget have sparked debate concerning the substitution of charitable activity for some types of government expenditures the extent to which private replacement is successful depends upon two factors the ability of charities to substitute their services for those reduced by the government and the ability of charities to garner more contributions as income and estate tax rates are reduced this analysis will concentrate only on the latter factor in particular this analysis will deal with the following questions will a reduction in income and estate tax rates have a predictable effect on the level of charitable contributions over the life cycle and the level of charitable bequests if the reduction in tax rates reduces charitable contributions over the life cycle will there be an offsetting rise in charitable bequests that is will the reduction in tax rates affect only the timing of charitable giving this question of timing is particularly important since successful replacement of government programs by charitable activity requires that current contributions rise the literature dealing with the effects of taxation on charitable giving does provide some information concerning these questions for example a number of authors including feldstein and clotfelter 1976 feldstein and taylor 1976 schwartz 1970 and taussig 1967 have measured the impact of the deductibility of charitable contributions under the income tax although the effects of the after tax cost of contributing one minus the marginal tax in the simplest case vary widely the best evidence appears to be given by feldstein and clotfelter 1976 who find that the elasticity of charitable contributions with respect to the after tax cost of giving is around 1 5 feldstein and clotfelter also find that the elasticities of contributions with respect to a measure of permanent income and to net worth are both positive these results imply that reducing income tax rates should result

catching up the educational mobility of migrants and natives children in europe migrants into european countries are often less educated than european natives we analyse whether migrants children are more or less likely than natives children to achieve upward educational mobility across generations and study differences in the factors which contribute to differences in mobility for the two groups we find that migrants descendants are more often upwardly mobile and less often downwardly mobile than their native peers in the majority of countries studied and show that the main factor contributing to these patterns is the education level of parents although a lower parental education means that their children are less likely to access the same amount of human social and financial capital as children of more highly educated parents migrants descendants over the last two generations were able to make significant progress in reducing education gaps with natives

labor market discrimination against hispanic and black men h ispanic american men have lower average wage rates than white non hispanics in 1975 the average white non hispanic male wage earner in the united states earned 5 97 an hour mexican men earned 4 31 72 as much as white non hispanics puerto rican men earned 4 52 76 as much and cuban men earned 5 33 89 as much as white non hispanics by way of comparison black men s average wages in 1975 were 4 65 78 of the white male wage several possible reasons for the hispanics lower wages come to mind among them are age and education geographic location immigration language difficulties and discrimination for example as shown in table 1 mexicans and puerto ricans are younger on average than the white non hispanic population and earnings tend to rise with age hispanics have lower average levels of education than white non hispanics and wages are positively associated with education many mexican americans live in the southwest where prices are relatively low moreover hispanics are more likely to be recent immigrants and to lack fluency in english than white non hispanics and so to be at a disadvantage in the labor market in addition there is a widespread belief that hispanics suffer from employment discrimination and cannot obtain the wages that their human capital would command if they were non hispanic whites how much of the wage differentials described above are due to each of these factors and to other inter group differences in wage related characteristics in particular how much impact does labor market discrimination have on the average hispanic man s wage and how does this compare with discrimination against blacks this paper provides answers to these questions a few other efforts have been made to analyze the relative earnings of hispanic and white nonhispanic men using 1960 and 1970 census data fogel 1966 poston and alvirez 1973 poston alvirez and tienda 1976 long 1977 and gwartney and long 1978 we use more recent data from the 1976 survey of income and education this data set enables us to measure wage rates more accurately and to specify the wage function more completely than does the census unlike previous analysts in estimating the wage function we take account of possible selectivity bias due to the distinction between average wage offers and average observed wages thus we hope to obtain a more accurate and up to date measure of labor market discrimination against hispanic men section ii explains the method used to separate the minority white non hispanic wage differential into the portions due to differences in average characteristics and the portion due to differences in unobserved factors and discrimination taking into account the possibility of selectivity bias in the observed wage sample section iii describes the data used in the study and the specification of the wage equation the breakdown of the observed wage differentials into components due to differences in participation in the wage and salary sector local price levels average characteristics and discrimination are presented in section iv section v summarizes our findings and discusses their implications for efforts to improve the economic situation of hispanics in the united states

immigrant earnings relative to what the importance of earnings function specification and comparison points immigrant relative earnings estimates are sensitive to the choice of comparison point and the specification of earnings non sample mean comparisons borjas 1985 understate relative earnings simple earnings specifications linear education quadratic experience overstate relative earnings for both poorly and well educated immigrants specifications which ignore omitted variables understate the relative earnings of poorly educated immigrants and overstate those of well educated ones although measures of assimilation and changes in immigrant quality are insensitive to earnings specification they indicate strong earnings growth for post 1964 immigrants an overall decrease in immigrant quality and an increase in mexican immigrant quality

model selection and misspecification in discrete choice welfare analysis this study extends the work by herriges and kling 1997 to further evaluate the impact of discrete choice modelling techniques on welfare measures particularly we evaluate the performance of the increasingly popular mixed logit model and the computational strategy for deriving discrete choice welfare measures our simulation results show that model misspecification can have profound effects on welfare measures in general the flexible mixed logit model performs relatively well in the presence of misspecification however when the nesting structure can be appropriately identified via statistical tests and a priori knowledge experience the nested logit model provides more reliable welfare measures than the mixed logit model

the economics of immigration this literature review concerns the impact of immigration on the economy of the host country focusing on the experience of the united states the emphasis is on the period from the 1970s to the 1990s the author shows that research earlier in this period generally concluded that the economic effects of immigration were positive but that more recent research on later migrations have generally concluded that immigration may be having an adverse effect on the earnings of native unskilled workers and be placing an increased burden on welfare programs the importance of such economic analysis for the formulation of appropriate migration policies is stressed

the effect of common sources of regression error on benefit estimates discussions of the sources of error in recreation demand analysis are common in the existing literature the most traditional line of thought e g gum and martin considers the error component in predicting the individual s recreation behavior to arise from unmeasured socioeconomic factors others e g hanemann attribute at least some of this error to fundamental randomness in human behavior applied statisticians e g hiett and worrall on the other hand suggest that recall of annual number of recreational trips i e the quantity demanded is subject to substantial error still others e g brown et al have argued that recall of explanatory variables such as travel expenses contains error despite the discussion of potential error sources there is no work which relates the sources of error in the demand relationship with benefit measurement 1 of practical importance in recreational demand estimation is whether error assumptions have an influence on welfare measures since it is for public policy decision purposes that recreational demand estimation is usually undertaken will the estimated consumer surplus derived from demand analysis be independent of the assumed source of the error in the regression the purpose of this paper is to explore how the assumptions about sources of error influence estimates of recreation benefits a discussion of the various sources of error in de

new evidence on the economic progress of foreign born men in the 1970s and 1980s this study examines the economic progress of foreign born men in the united states europeans entered the united states with relatively high wages and earned wages comparable to natives over their life course japanese korean and chinese men entered with lower wages but quickly caught up with u s born workers mexicans and central americans entered with low wages and the wage gap between themselves and u s born workers has not shrunk disparities in completed years of education and whether education was received in the united states can explain a large share of the differences in the level of wages for immigrants from some countries it is found that more highly educated men assimilate more quickly the rate of economic progress has not improved for more recent arrivals from any country but this is most problematic among mexicans and central americans because of their relatively low rates of wage growth excerpt

immigration and wages evidence from the 1980s this paper presents new evidence on the effects of immigration based on changes in the distributions of wages in 24 major u s cities during the 1980s we concentrate on measuring the effects of immigration at the lower tail of the wage distribution in particular we ask whether recent declines in the real earnings of the least skilled workers in the u s economy are related to immigration our empirical analysis reveals large differences across cities in the relative growth rates of wages for low and high paid workers nevertheless these differences bear little or no relation to the size of immigrant inflows excerpt

immigrant worker assimilation is it a labor market phenomenon the work in this paper contributes to the debate on the economic assimilation of immigrant workers in the u s labor market a model of simultaneous occupational choice and earnings is estimated for foreign born hispanic men foreign born east asian men and for native white men to test the general hypotheses of assimilation an important distinction is made between those who migrated as adults and those who migrated as children the results suggest that the appearance of assimilation may be the outcome of pre labor market experiences of individuals who migrate as children along with changes in u s immigration law that have relaxed skill criteria for entering immigrants

pareto improving immigration in an economy with equilibrium unemployment economists from around the industrialized world demonstrate the strength of both theories about the rise of economic inequality that is it the mechanical consequence of changes in such economic fundamentals as technology and demographic parameters and that it is the contingent consequence country specific and time specific changes in institutions they find that though institutions always play a crucial role in shaping inequality and sometimes preventing it still it creeps in

who did worse a comparison of us and british non white unemployment 1970 1998 us and british unemployment rates for non white males and females are compared over the period 1970 1998 whereas us rates remained fairly steady there was a marked increase in british non white unemployment rates the reasons for this poor performance relative to the good performance of us non whites are explored it is shown that non white unemployment behaves in di erent ways across the two countries for example british rates rise faster in a recession than white rates whereas us rates appear not to follow this british hypercyclical pattern

residential location work location and labor market outcomes of immigrants in israel we develop and estimate a comprehensive dynamic programming dp model for the joint decisions of residential location employment location occupational choices and labor market outcomes we use data on immigrants from the former soviet union fsu we provide an extensive empirical evaluation of policies that have been designed to affect the residential and employment location decisions of the migrant population the results shed new and important light on several issues regarding this group of immigrants we find large regional differences in wages for the white collar workers but only little differences for the blue collar workers a careful examination of a number of policy measures indicate that a direct subsidy in the form of a lump sum transfer is most effective in achieving the government stated goal of inducing people to reside in the northern region of the galilee and southern region of the negev other policies such as rental and wage subsidies can also be quite effective but these are more difficult to administer

canadian immigration policy the effectiveness of the point system and other instruments this paper examines the effects of changes in canadian immigration policy on the occupational composition of immigration we focus on 1967 changes that created a regulatory system including the point system that still forms the framework of canadian immigration policy we find that the point system provides some control over occupational composition but that its effectiveness in fine tuning is limited by the large number of other characteristics it seeks to control we also find that entry class and source country composition of inflow have impacts that have swamped the effects of the point system in the last two decades summary in fre

undocumented mexico u s migration and the returns to households in rural mexico this paper presents estimates of net income gains to a sample of households in rural mexico from sending migrants illegally to the united states correcting for sample selectivity bias and it examines the role of expected income gains in driving illegal mexico u s migration there is no evidence that people who migrate illegally to the united states are above average contributors to household income either as workers in mexico or as mexico u s migrants however other things being equal villagers who are in the best position to contribute to household income as workers in mexico are positively selected not to migrate to the united states

on the wage growth of immigrants israel 1990 2000 this paper develops a descriptive methodology for the analysis of wage growth of immigrants that is based on human capital theory the sources of the wage growth are 1 the rise of the return to imported human capital 2 the impact of accumulated experience in the host country and 3 the mobility up the occupational ladder in the host country the model implies a nonlinear wage function that includes interactions between imported skills and local wage growth using data on native israelis and immigrants from the former soviet union of israel we estimate wage equations jointly for the two groups we find that upon arrival immigrants receive non return for imported skills in the ten years following arrival wages of highly skilled immigrants grow at 8 percent a year rising prices of skills occupational transitions accumulated experience in israel and an economy wide rise in wages account for 3 4 1 1 1 5 and 1 5 percent each in the long run the return for schooling converges to 0 027 substantially below the 0 069 return for natives we do not reject the hypothesis that the return for experience converges to that of natives and that immigrants receive a higher return for their unmeasured skills we find that there is some downgrading in the occupational distribution of immigrants relative to that of natives moreover the average wages of immigrants approach but do not converge to the wages of comparable natives the main reason for this is the low return to their imported skills jel j24 j31 j60