education poverty and terrorism is there a causal connection the paper investigates whether there is a connection between poverty or low education and terrorism we review evidence on hate crimes which are closely related to terrorism the occurrence of hate crimes is largely independent of economic conditions we analyze data on support for attacks against israeli targets from public opinion polls conducted in the west bank and gaza strip support for violent attacks does not decrease among those with higher education and higher living standards the core contribution of the paper is a statistical analysis of the determinants of participation in hezbollah militant activities having a living standard above the poverty line or a secondary or higher education is positively associated with participation in hezbollah we also find that israeli jewish settlers who attacked palestinians in the west bank in the early 1980s were overwhelmingly from high paying occupations although our results are tentative and exploratory they suggest that neither poverty nor education has a direct causal impact on terrorism

can falling supply explain the rising return to college for younger men a cohort based analysis although the college high school wage gap for younger u s men has doubled over the past 30 years the gap for older men has remained nearly constant in the united kingdom and canada the college high school wage gap also increased for younger relative to older men using a model with imperfect substitution between similarly educated workers in different age groups we argue that these shifts reflect changes in the relative supply of highly educated workers across age groups the driving force behind these changes is the slowdown in the rate of growth of educational attainment that began with cohorts born in the early 1950s in all three countries

formal schooling and workforce participation in a rapidly developing economy evidence from compulsory junior high school in taiwan abstract using 18 consecutive household surveys this study explores the impact of taiwan s extension of tuition free education from 6 to 9 years upon schooling and labor market outcomes participation sector class of activity and work income i estimate upward shifts relative to preexisting trends of more than 0 4 years of education for males and 0 25 years for females in the first six cohorts affected by compulsory junior high schooling utilizing inter cohort variation within an instrumental variables iv strategy i find larger effects of schooling on females workforce participation and total earnings even controlling for selection

the estimation of wage gains and welfare gains in self selection models the authors modify the basic self sele ction model for the effects ofeducation training unions and other activities on wages by including heterogeneity of rewards to the activity i e diffe rences across individuals in the rate of return to the activity the authors sho w that such heterogeneity creates a new form of selectionbias they provide tes ts for its presence and draw out its implications for the wage and welfare gains to the activity an empirical application provides strong support for such hete rogeneityin one particular training program copyright 1987 by mit press

service sector restrictiveness and economic performance an estimation for the mena region this article aims to assess barriers to service provision in the banking and telecom sectors of four middle east and north africa mena countries and the impact of these barriers on firm performance our methodology involves the computation of aggregate and modal trade restrictiveness indices tris by sector and utilisation of these tris as regressors of firms economic performance our analysis shows that significant regulatory reforms have taken place in the service sectors over the last decade in the mena region but that a broad range of restrictions still remain the most significant change in these service sectors has been the lifting or softening of constraints on foreign equity participation these regulatory reforms however have had varying degrees of impact on market structure depending on the country the sector and the mode moreover service restrictions have had an impact on economic performance in the three studied sectors while a rent creating effect seems to dominate restrictions on banking and fixed telecom sectors a cost inefficiency effect seems to dominate the mobile telecom sector finally we find evidence of interactions between modal restrictions for banking services our results suggest a complementarity between modes 3 and 1 as well as a substitution effect between modes 3 and 4 in the banking sector

the effect of cohort size on earnings growth a reexamination of the evidence this study reexamines the effect of cohort size on earnings growth finis welch finds that individuals in larger cohorts experience depressed earnings conditions on entry into the labor market but that their earnings grow at faster rates than in smaller cohorts thus a large portion of the cohort size effect on earnings dissipates after a few years however using data almost identical to those of welch but estimating less restrictive models it is found here that cohort size not only depresses earnings at entry but also seems to slow down early career earnings growth the evidence suggests that earnings ini larger cohorts do not approach normal levels after at brief period in the labor force rather the negative cohort size effect on earnings appears to worsen with experience

children of war the long run effects of large scale physical destruction and warfare on children this paper provides causal evidence on the long term consequences of large scale physical destruction on educational attainment health status and labor market outcomes of children i exploit the plausibly exogenous region by cohort variation in the intensity of world war two wwii destruction as a unique quasi experiment i find that exposure to destruction had long lasting detrimental effects on the human capital formation health and labor market outcomes of germans who were at school age during wwii an important channel for the effect of destruction on educational attainment is the destruction of schools whereas malnutrition is partly behind the estimated impact on health

returns to apprenticeship training in austria evidence from failed firms in the german speaking countries little is known about the payoffs to apprenticeship training for the participants ols estimates suggest that the returns are similar to those of other types of schooling however there is considerable heterogeneity in the quality of apprenticeships offered and institutional descriptions suggest that there might be an important element of selection in who obtains an apprenticeship and what type in order to overcome the resulting ability bias we estimate returns to apprenticeship training for apprentices in small austrian firms which cease to operate when a firm fails current apprentices cannot complete their training in this firm since apprentices will be at different stages in their apprenticeship at that time the failure of a firm will manipulate the length of the apprenticeship period completed for some apprentices the time to firm failure can therefore serve as an instrument for the length of the apprenticeship completed both at the original firm and at other firms we find instrumental variables returns which are similar or larger than the ols returns in our sample indicating relatively little selection

much ado about nothing smoking bans and germany s hospitality industry over the past years public smoking bans have been introduced in most european countries unlike elsewhere in germany such bans were introduced at state level at different points in time which provides important intra country regional variation that can be exploited to identify the effects of such bans on the hospitality industry using monthly data from a compulsory survey carried out by the german federal statistical office we study the short run effects that these bans had on establishments sales in contrast to the largely us based literature we find that smoke free policies had a negative yet moderate effect on establishment sales closure rates of businesses in the hospitality industry however were not significantly affected by the introduction of state smoking bans

a war is forever the long run effects of early exposure to world war ii on trust abstract this paper examines the long term effect of conflict on trust by using changes in places and timing of combats during world war ii we focus on the pre school period an important life stage for the formation of trust and an age where war exposure may persist throughout life we find robust evidence that individuals exposed to combats in the first six years of life display lower trust and social engagement well into adulthood in light of the well known relationship between trust and collective action our results lend credence to the theory that violent conflict inhibits well functioning government in long run

the contribution of schooling in development accounting results from a nonparametric upper bound how much would output increase if underdeveloped economies were to increase their levels of schooling we contribute to the development accounting literature by describing a nonparametric upper bound on the increase in output that can be generated by more schooling the advantage of our approach is that the upper bound is valid for any number of schooling levels with arbitrary patterns of substitution complementarity another advantage is that the upper bound is robust to certain forms of endogenous technology response to changes in schooling we also quantify the upper bound for all economies with the necessary data compare our results with the standard development accounting approach and provide an update on the results using the standard approach for a large sample of countries

the effectiveness of anti smoking legislation a review abstract this survey focuses on government efforts to curb the use of undesirable goods notably tobacco products we synthesize the economics literature and examine the effectiveness of government curbs on tobacco consumption through non price controls such as bans on cigarette advertising health warnings and workplace smoking bans and price measures or higher prices through higher taxes this literature review is unique in that we do not merely aim to provide a summary of the literature rather our main focus is to draw conclusions from the literature regarding the effectiveness of alternate policy measures across countries in checking smoking and to provide directions suggestions for extending the scope of government intervention to other tobacco products

democratizing access to higher education in russia the consequences of the unified state exam reform this is the first paper that evaluates the effects of a reform requiring russian universities to make admission decisions based on the results of a national high school exam we show the reform led to a threefold increase in geographic mobility rates among high school graduates from small cities and towns to start college this is robust to different techniques samples and specifications the reform was also accompanied by increases in students expectations to attend university parental transfers and educational expenditures there is no evidence the reform affected parental labor supply divorce and employment outcomes of graduates who did not move

schooling externalities technology and productivity theory and evidence from u s states abstract the literature on schooling externalities in u s cities and states is rather mixed positive external effects of average education levels are hardly found while positive externalities from the share of college graduates are more often identified we propose a simple model to reconcile this mixed evidence our model predicts positive externalities from increased college education and negligible external effects from high school education using compulsory attendance child labor laws push driven immigration of highly educated workers and the location of land grant colleges as instruments for schooling attainments we test and confirm the model predictions with data on u s states for the period 1960 2000

why understanding smoking bans is important for estimating their effects california s restaurant smoking bans and restaurant sales i introduction a voluminous literature has sought to quantify the effect of smoking bans typically on the quantity of smoking but also on the performance of affected businesses 1 various time periods have been explored types of bans considered locales examined and specifications employed nonetheless the majority of studies share two common failings first smoking bans of a given type e g a restaurant ban are treated as homogenous when in fact such bans have been enacted at various jurisdictional levels municipality county or state at various times in various orders and in various combinations with other types of smoking bans and with similar bans at other jurisdictional levels second empirical specifications do not adequately control for preexisting trends in the dependent variable as a result many studies arrive at fundamentally wrong conclusions we illustrate these points in an investigation of how california s restaurant smoking bans have affected restaurant sales we analyze the effect of smoking bans on restaurant sales for two reasons first the issue plays a role in the policy debate more than 150 studies many published in refereed journals and others in consulting reports undertaken for municipalities have explored whether smoking bans help or hinder restaurants scollo and lal 2005 yet few of these studies properly account for the effects of preexisting trends or changes in trends for the closely related question of ban endogeneity or for ban heterogeneity second restaurant sales data are very rich well measured available by municipality by quarter and over an extended period therefore we can identify effects that would be obscured by cruder data e g periodic survey responses enabling us to draw lessons applicable to studies of the effect of other types of smoking bans e g workplace bans in other dimensions e g smoking prevalence we investigate 267 california municipalities for which the california state board of equalization provides quarterly taxable restaurant sales 2 we begin by employing naive specifications which treat bans as homogenous and control simplistically for trends representative of those typically estimated in the literature the results of our naive specifications indicate that smoking bans have a large negative effect on restaurant revenues however when we examine municipal and state bans separately we find a positive association between municipal bans and restaurant sales and a negative association between the state ban and restaurant sales finally when we control properly for preexisting trends in the dependent variable we find no substantial evidence of any causal relationship running from either municipal bans or the state ban to restaurant sales thus we reach two main conclusions the first is that california s municipal restaurant smoking bans are endogenous in a critical way restaurant sales growth or something correlated with restaurant sales growth appears to cause restaurant bans not vice versa the second is that because communities are heterogenous one must analyze the effect of a ban taking into account the level at which the ban was enacted pooling data and treating smoking bans as homogenous as many studies do is inappropriate cities that impose bans on themselves are likely to differ systematically from those that have bans forced on them by a higher jurisdiction county or state relatedly analyzing and or instrumenting for smoking bans using state level data again as many studies do may fail to capture the relevant variation when the bans have force at a lower level of jurisdiction e g a municipal ban our analysis although focused on restaurant bans and sales has implications for the more extensive literature on how smoking bans influence smoking behavior most importantly it demonstrates the crucial nature of identifying and controlling for trends in the dependent variable whether restaurant revenue as in our data set or smoking rates

returns to education a further international update and implications this paper updates evidence on the returns to investment in education by adding estimates for new countries and refining existing estimates to bring the total number of country cases to over 60 the new cross country evidence confirms and reinforces earlier patterns namely that returns are highest for primary education the general curricula the education of women and countries with the lowest per capita income the findings have important implications for directing future investment in education which for efficiency and equity purposes should concentrate on these priority areas

testing the heckscher ohlin vanek theory with a natural experiment i use the historical episode of near elimination of commuting from the west bank into israel to test three key predictions of the heckscherohlinvanek model of trade and find strong support for them on the production side i use variation between districts and find that wage changes were not correlated with the size of the shock to the labour force factor price insensitivity and that districts that received larger influx of returning commuters shifted production more towards labour intensive industries rybczynski effect on the consumption side data are consistent with identical homothetic preferences which combined with the production results supports the heckscherohlinvanek theorem on the factor content of trade

schooling and citizenship in a young democracy evidence from postwar germany this paper examines whether schooling has a causal impact on individuals political interest voting turnout democratic values political involvement and political membership using two national representative samples between 1949 and 1969 the number of compulsory years of schooling was increased from eight to nine years in the federal republic of germany gradually over time and across federal states these legislative changes allow one to investigate the causal impact of years of schooling on citizenship in a young democracy years of schooling are found to be positively correlated with a broad range of citizenship outcomes however when exogenous increase in schooling through legislative changes is used there is little evidence of a causal efiect several potential explanations are examined 1 poor or apolitical teaching practices in the post war period 2 shortages of qualifled teachers and adequate teaching material 3 extra curricular civic education and 4 whether civic knowledge might have been acquired prior to the increase in schooling the estimates reject the flrst three explanations whereas ample historical evidence is in favour of the hypothesis that the fundamentals of democracy were learned already earlier in school

impacts of disability on poverty quasi experimental evidence from landmine amputees in cambodia abstract this paper examines the impacts of disability on poverty in rural cambodia i combine a natural experiment and spatial blocking first i focus on amputation among adults due to landmines which is free from measurement errors and the onset of which is an exogenous shock second i conduct an original survey stratified by disability status within villages where people have shared the same local vulnerability to landmine accidents this research design enables matching analysis within small geographic areas treating demographic factors such as household formation and fertility as endogenous this quasi experimental study finds that amputation greatly reduces consumption and income but not subjective well being i e adaptation increasing poverty and augmenting its magnitude disability triggers a vicious circle of reduced work low earnings and limited accumulation of productive assets and social capital this work cum asset channel leads to adverse intergenerational effects on child schooling and child labor

the economic returns to schooling in the west bank and gaza strip the author uses micro data from the labor force surveys conducted in the west bank and the gaza strip during 1981 91 to show that during 1981 87 wage differences between schooling groups fell by well over one half this sharp reduction is associated with large increases in the size of the educated palestinian labor force since the returns to schooling for israeli jews were stable the decline in returns to schooling for palestinians is consistent with the notion that the returns to schooling in the territories were determined largely by the forces of supply and demand in a segmented market for skilled labor copyright 1995 by american economic association

civil conflict and human capital accumulation the long term effects of political violence in peru this paper provides empirical evidence of the persistent effect of exposure to political violence on human capital accumulation i exploit the variation in conflict location and birth cohorts to identify the long and short term effects of the civil war on educational attainment conditional on being exposed to violence the average person accumulates 0 31 less years of education as an adult in the short term the effects are stronger than in the long run these results hold when comparing children within the same household further exposure to violence during early childhood leads to permanent losses i also explore the potential causal mechanisms

the long run educational cost of world war ii an important component of the long run cost of a war is the loss of human capital suffered by school age children who receive less education austrian and german individuals who were 10 years old during the conflict or were more directly involved through their parents received less education than comparable individuals from nonwar countries such as switzerland and sweden we also show that these individuals experienced a sizable earnings loss some 40 years after the war which can be attributed to the educational loss caused by the conflict the implied consequences in terms of gross domestic product loss are calculated

labor market effects of demographic shifts and migration in oecd countries the labor force of each industrial country is being shaped by three forces ageing education and migration drawing on a new database for the oecd countries and a standard analytical framework this paper focuses on the relative and aggregate effects of these three forces on wages across different skill and age groups over 2000 to 2010 the variation in the age and educational structure of the labor force emerges as the dominant influence on wage changes the impact is uniform and egalitarian in almost all countries the changes in the age and skill structure favor the low skilled and hurt the highly skilled across age groups immigration plays a relatively minor role except in a handful of open countries like australia and canada where it accentuates the wage equalizing impact of ageing and education emigration is the only inegalitarian influence especially in ireland and a few eastern european countries which have seen significant outflows of high skilled labor to western european union countries

the long term educational cost of war evidence from landmine contamination in cambodia abstract the economic impact of war may be visible in the long run and particularly through its impact on human capital this paper uses unique district level data on landmine contamination intensity in cambodia combined with survey data on individuals to evaluate the long run impact of cambodia s 30 years of war 1970 1998 on education levels and earnings these effects are identified using difference in differences dd and instrumental variables iv estimators in the dd framework i exploit two sources of variation in an individual s exposure to the conflict age in 1970 and landmine contamination intensity in the district of residence the iv specification uses the distance to the thai border as an exogenous source of variation in landmine contamination intensity the most conservative result indicates that individuals who were too young to have attended school before the start of the war received on average 0 5 less years of education and immediately after the war there was no visible effect on e

child health and conflict in cote d ivoire we examine the impact of the 2002 07 civil conflict in cote d ivoire on children s health status measured by height for age we use pre and post war survey data coupled with information on the location of violent incidents to capture exposure to the conflict of children born during 1997 2007 our results indicate that children from regions more affected by the conflict suffered significant health setbacks compared with children from less affected regions further household level victimization such as war related economic stress health stress and displacement has a large and negative effect on child health in conflict affected regions

globalization brain drain and development this paper reviews four decades of economics research on the brain drain with a focus on recent contributions and on development issues we first assess the magnitude intensity and determinants of the brain drain showing that brain drain or high skill migration is becoming a dominant pattern of international migration and a major aspect of globalization we then use a stylized growth model to analyze the various channels through which a brain drain affects the sending countries and review the evidence on these channels the recent empirical literature shows that high skill emigration need not deplete a country s human capital stock and can generate positive network externalities three case studies are also considered the african medical brain drain the exodus of european scientists to the united states and the role of the indian diaspora in the development of india s information technology sector we conclude with a discussion of the implications of the analysis for education immigration and international taxation policies in a global context

theory general equilibrium and political economy in development economics i discuss the role of economic theory in empirical work in development economics with special emphasis on general equilibrium and political economy considerations i argue that economic theory plays should play a central role in formulating models estimates of which can be used for counterfactual and policy analysis i discuss why counterfactual analysis based on microdata that ignores general equilibrium and political economy issues may lead to misleading conclusions i illustrate the main arguments using examples from recent work in development economics and political economy

evaluating the labor market effects of compulsory military service we identify the causal effect of compulsory military service on conscripts subsequent labormarket outcomes by exploiting the regression discontinuity design of the military draft in germany during the 1950s unbiased estimates of the effect of military service on lifetime earnings wages and employment are obtained by comparing men born before july 1 1937 the white cohort who were exempted from compulsory military service to men who were born on or shortly after this threshold date and hence faced a positive probability of being drafted we find that the putative earnings advantage and wage premium of those who served in the armed forces vanish when selection effects are taken into account

changes in the returns to education in costa rica abstract i document patterns in the returns to education in costa rica from 1976 to 1992 the most important change during this period was that from the late 1970s to the mid 1980s the return to education fell by about one fourth i construct demand and supply indices within a fixed manpower requirements framework to estimate demand and supply shifts i find a significantly positive relationship between measures of demand for education and a significantly negative relationship between measures of supply for education these findings suggest that calculations based on the returns to education such as the returns to social investments in education must take into account future changes in the returns to education as supply and demand conditions develop

quantifying the microeconomic effects of war using panel data evidence from nepal summary the extensive coverage of household surveys in conflict regions in recent decades has fueled a growing literature on the microeconomic effects of war in this paper we use a unique panel dataset to quantify the impact of the nepalese civil conflict on schooling attainment given longitudinal data we are able to directly estimate unobserved individual heterogeneity and thus address selective wartime displacement despite the widely held view that war is detrimental to human capital formation we find no effect of war intensity on schooling attainment once unobserved individual heterogeneity is accounted for we draw on supplementary data to explain our findings

skill complementarity and the dual economy abstract i propose a new explanation for the large productivity gaps between agriculture and nonagriculture observed in developing countries namely that the elasticity of substitution between skilled and unskilled workers is higher in agriculture than in nonagriculture i estimate the elasticities in a cross country data set and use the results to simulate a simple two sector model in which heterogeneous elasticities of substitution affect relative sectoral productivity levels through the allocation of human capital calibrated to match data from the united states the model predicts sizable agricultural productivity gaps in countries where the share of highly educated workers in the labor force is low

efficiency gains from liberalizing labor mobility in this paper we quantify the effect of a complete liberalization of cross border migration on the world gdp and its distribution across regions we build a general equilibrium model endogenizing bilateral migration and income disparities between and within countries our calibration strategy uses data on effective and potential migration to identify total migration costs and visa costs by education level data on potential migration reveal that the number of people in the world who have a desire to migrate is around 400 million this number is much smaller than that predicted in previous studies and reflects the existence of high incompressible migration costs in our benchmark framework liberalizing migration increases the world gdp by 11 5 12 5 percent in the medium term our robustness analysis reveals that the gains are always limited in the range of 7 0 percent with schooling externalities to 17 9 percent if network effects are accounted for

was weber wrong a human capital theory of protestant economic history max weber attributed the higher economic prosperity of protestant regions to a protestant work ethic we provide an alternative theory protestant economies prospered because instruction in reading the bible generated the human capital crucial to economic prosperity we test the theory using county level data from late nineteenth century prussia exploiting the initial concentric dispersion of the reformation to use distance to wittenberg as an instrument for protestantism we find that protestantism indeed led to higher economic prosperity but also to better education our results are consistent with protestants higher literacy accounting for most of the gap in economic prosperity

the labor market impact of immigration in western germany in the 1990 s in this article we estimate the wage and employment effects of recent immigration in western germany using administrative data for the period 1987 2001 and a labor market equilibrium model we find that the substantial immigration of the 1990s had very little adverse effects on native wages and on their employment levels instead it had a sizeable adverse employment effect on previous immigrants as well as a small adverse effect on their wages these asymmetric results are partly driven by a higher degree of substitution between old and new immigrants in the labor market and in part by the rigidity of wages in less than flexible labor markets in a simple counter factual experiment we show that in a world of perfect wage flexibility and no unemployment insurance the wage bill loss of old immigrants would be much smaller

estimates of ad valorem equivalents of barriers against foreign suppliers of services in eleven services sectors and 103 countries a new database on the barriers faced by foreign suppliers of services has been produced by the world bank data for 103 countries are available on 11 of the most important services sectors in international trade based on these data and building on the methodology and publications supported by the australian productivity commission this paper produces estimates of the ad valorem equivalents of the barriers for all these sectors and countries compared with estimates available in the literature that are based on assessments of country and sector specific barriers to services providers the estimates expand the set of sectors and more than triple the set of countries for which estimates of the ad valorem equivalents of the services barriers are available

returns to schooling and bayesian model averaging a union of two literatures abstract in this paper we review and unite the literatures on returns to schooling and bayesian model averaging we observe that most studies seeking to estimate the returns to education have done so using particular and often different across researchers model specifications given this we review bayesian methods which formally account for uncertainty in the specification of the model itself and apply these techniques to estimate the economic return to a college education the approach described in this paper enables us to determine those model specifications which are most favored by the given data and also enables us to use the predictions obtained from all of the competing regression models to estimate the returns to schooling the reported precision of such estimates also account for the uncertainty inherent in the model specification using u s data from the national longitudinal survey of youth nlsy we also revisit several stylized facts in the returns to education literature and examine if they continue to hold after formally accounting for model uncertainty

identifying human capital externalities theory with applications the identification of aggregate human capital externalities is still not fully understood the existing mincerian approach confounds positive externalities with wage changes due to a downward sloping demand curve for human capital as a result the mincerian approach yields positive externalities even when wages equal marginal social products we propose an approach that identifies human capital externalities whether or not aggregate demand for human capital slopes downward another advantage of our approach is that it does not require estimates of the individual return to human capital applications to u s cities and states between 1970 and 1990 yield no evidence of significant average schooling externalities copyright 2006 wiley blackwell

policy barriers to international trade in services evidence from a new database surprisingly little is known about policies that affect international trade in services previous analyses have focused on policy commitments made by countries in international agreements but in many cases these commitments do not reflect actual policy this paper describes a new initiative to collect comparable information on trade policies for services from 103 countries across a range of service sectors and relevant modes of service delivery the resulting database reveals interesting policy patterns although public monopolies are now rare and few services markets are completely closed the authors observe numerous second generation restrictions on entry ownership and operations even in instances in which there is little explicit discrimination against foreign providers market access is often unpredictable because the allocation of new licenses remains opaque and highly discretionary in many countries across regions some of the fastest growing countries in asia and the oil rich gulf states have restrictive policies in services whereas some of the poorest countries are remarkably open across sectors professional and transportation services are among the most protected industries in both industrial and developing countries whereas retail telecommunications and even finance tend to be more open

openness to foreign direct investment in services an international comparative analysis this paper quantifies and analyses the extent of restrictions on inward foreign direct investment fdi in the service sector in developed and developing countries services account for an increasing share of global fdi recognition of the economic benefits of fdi clashes with nationalistic economic political and national security concerns about foreign takeover of strategic sectors such as telecommunications finance and transport consequently almost all countries impose restrictions on fdi in services several different types of restrictions are considered limitations on foreign ownership screening or notification procedures management restrictions and operational restrictions these restrictions on fdi are computed at the industry level and then aggregated into a single measure for the service sector as a whole for 23 developed and 50 developing countries notwithstanding the worldwide trend towards liberalisation of restrictions there remain substantial disparities between regions and individual countries in the severity of restrictions on inward fdi in services the lowest restriction scores are in europe and latin america whereas east asia south asia and the middle east have the highest levels of restrictions the evolution over time of fdi restrictions is also presented for developed countries over the period 1981 2005 showing liberalisation in all countries especially since the early 1990s although to varying extents across countries the severity of restrictions also differs considerably by sector with electricity telecommunications transport and finance most restricted the paper also finds a strong negative correlation of restrictiveness with inward stocks of fdi in services suggesting that restrictions impede fdi

the economic incidence of smoking laws although laws restricting smoking in restaurants are becoming commonplace most research has focused on either the health benefits that laws may provide customers and workers or whether laws harm owners but while smoking laws may directly alter profits owners may alter prices output and other business attributes in ways that affect the welfare of customers and workers this study examines whether restaurant and bar owners alter prices entertainment hours of operation and other business attributes in response to local smoking laws substantial support is found for these attribute changes in the wisconsin hospitality industry one implication is that an overall assessment of the desirability of smoking laws should consider economic effects imposed on owners customers and workers as well as health benefits that follow laws

zero returns to compulsory schooling in germany evidence and interpretation abstract we estimate the impact of compulsory schooling on earnings using changes in compulsory schooling laws in west germany after world war ii most estimates in the literature indicate returns in the range of 10 to 15 while our research design is very similar to studies for various other countries we find a zero return we find no evidence that this is due to labor market institutions or the apprenticeship training system in germany the result might be due to the fact that the basic skills most relevant for the labor market are learned earlier in germany than in other countries

migration selectivity and the effects of public programs abstract a model of the spatial distribution of mobile heterogeneous agents is formulated to assess how a price change or program subsidy that is location specific affects the composition of local residents via selective migration and thus biases evaluations of the effectiveness of the program based on its local consequences longitudinal data from colombia are used to test the implications of migration selectivity the findings confirm the existence of selective migration suggesting that local subsidies to human capital attract high income but within income groups low fertility households and those with low human capital endowments these migration patterns are shown to be consistent with the dominance of endowment over tastes heterogeneity in the population under plausible behavioral assumptions

schooling and labor market consequences of school construction in indonesia evidence from an unusual policy experiment between 1973 and 1978 the indonesian government engaged in one of the largest school construction programs on record combining differences across regions in the number of schools constructed with differences across cohorts induced by the timing of the program suggests that each primary school constructed per 1 000 children led to an average increase of 0 12 to 0 19 years of education as well as a 1 5 to 2 7 percent increase in wages this implies estimates of economic returns to education ranging from 6 8 to 10 6 percent

education and civil conflict in nepal between 1996 and 2006 nepal experienced violent civil conflict as a consequence of a maoist insurgency which many argue also brought about an increase in female empowerment this paper exploits variations in exposure to conflict by birth cohort survey date and district to estimate the impact of the insurgency on education outcomes overall conflict intensity measured by conflict casualties is associated with an increase in female educational attainment whereas abductions by maoists which often targeted school children have the reverse effect male schooling tended to increase more rapidly in areas where the fighting was more intense but the estimates are smaller in magnitude and more sensitive to specification than estimates for females similar results are obtained across different specifications and robustness checks indicate that these findings are not due to selective migration

no smoking at the slot machines the effect of a smoke free law on delaware gaming revenues as communities around the nation consider laws restricting smoking in public places a key political and economic issue that often arises is the effect that such laws have on the sales and profits of particular sectors the gaming industry has been active in opposition to such ordinances citing large prospective losses this article analyses the revenues of three gaming facilities in delaware following the implementation of a smoke free law in december 2002 revenues are found to have declined significantly at each of the three facilities with relative magnitudes of losses corresponding to the availability of alternative gaming venues in the region

the diffusion of computers and the distribution of wages abstract when the costs are decreasing workers adopt technology at the point where the costs equal the increased productivity output per worker increases immediately while productivity benefits increase only gradually if costs continue to fall as a result workers in computer adopting labor market groups experience an immediate fall in wages due to increased supply on the other hand adopting workers experience wage increases with some delay this model explains why increased computer use does not immediately lead to higher wage inequality more specifically the results of the model are shown to be consistent with the question why within group wage inequality among skilled workers as a result of computer technology adoption in the united states increased in the 1970s while between group wage inequality and within group wage inequality among the unskilled did not start to increase until the 1980s the model also predicts that the more compressed german wage structure leads to a lagged diffusion of computer technology along with smaller changes in wage inequality our empirical analysis suggests that this is consistent with the actual developments in germany since the 1980s finally the theoretical predictions seem to be of the right magnitude to explain the empirical quantities observed in the data

long run substitutability between more and less educated workers evidence from u s states 1950 1990 we estimate the aggregate long run elasticity of substitution between more educated workers and less educated workers the slope of the inverse demand curve for more relative to less educated workers at the u s state level our data come from the five 1950 1990 decennial censuses our empirical approach allows for state and time fixed effects and relies on time and state dependent child labor and compulsory school attendance laws as instruments for endogenous changes in the relative supply of more educated workers we find the aggregate long run elasticity of substitution between more and less educated workers to be around 1 5

the labour market effects of immigration and emigration in oecd countries in this paper we quantify the labor market effects of migration flows in oecd countries during the 1990 s based on a new global database on the bilateral stock of migrants by education level we simulate various outcomes using an aggregate model of labor markets parameterized by a range of estimates from the literature we find that immigration had a positive effect on the wages of less educated natives and it increased or left unchanged the average native wages emigration instead had a negative effect on the wages of less educated native workers and increased inequality within countries

education earnings and the canadian g i bill canadian second world war veterans benefited from an extensive educational pro gram similar to the u s g i bill because of differences in military enlistment rates how ever a much lower fraction of quebec men were eligible for these benefits than men from other provinces building on this fact we analyse inter cohort patterns of education and earnings for english speaking men from ontario using french speaking men from quebec as a control group we find that the instrumental variables estimates of the return to school ing are typically as big or bigger than the corresponding ols estimates jel classification j24 i21