scale diversity and determinants of labour migration in europe while global migration is increasing internal eu migration flows have only increased slowly this paper contributes to a better understanding of the determinants and scale of european migration it surveys previous historical experiences and empirical findings including the recent eastern enlargements the determinants of migration before and after the 2004 enlargement and in the eu15 and eu10 countries are analysed using individual data on migration intentions in addition perceptions about the size of migration after the enlargement are studied the potential emigrant from both old and new eu member states tends to be young better educated and to live in larger cities people from the eu10 with children are less likely to move after enlargement in comparison to those without family there exists a correlation between individual perceptions about the scale of migration and actual flows better educated and left oriented individuals in the eu15 are less likely to perceive these flows as important

how do migrants from latin america and the caribbean fare in the us labour market this paper discusses the causes of mass migration from latin america and the caribbean lac to the united states in recent decades and how these migrants have fared in us labour markets the evidence shows that lac migrants have higher unemployment rates and substantially lower wages than other immigrants and natives furthermore the relative wages of lac migrants have been declining sharply over the last 25 years the most significant factor explaining the latter is the lower and declining educational attainment of lac migrants relative to other immigrants and natives compounded by the rising rates of return to education in the us

the impact of government size on economic growth a threshold analysis we examine the nature of the relationship between government size and economic growth and identify the optimal level of government size using a large dataset through a novel and very general non linear panel generalized method of moments approach we show that this relationship is statistically significant above and below the optimal level even after splitting our sample to developed and developing countries finally we find an asymmetric impact of government size on economic growth in both developed and developing countries around the estimated threshold

wall street occupations many finance jobs entail the risk of large losses and hard to monitor effort we analyze the equilibrium consequences of these features in a model with optimal dynamic contracting we show that finance jobs feature high compensation up or out promotion and long work hours and are more attractive than other jobs moral hazard problems are exacerbated in booms even though pay increases employees whose talent would be more valuable elsewhere can be lured into finance jobs while the most talented employees might be unable to land these jobs because they are too hard to manage

immigrants and welfare programmes exploring the interactions between immigrant characteristics immigrant welfare dependence and welfare policy the primary purpose of this paper is to provide a review of the papers within the economics literature that have examined the questions of immigrant welfare use and the responsiveness of immigrants to the incentives created by welfare systems while our focus is largely on papers looking at the european case we also draw on studies from the united states in particular on issues where the european literature is thin one set of papers asks whether immigrants who are more likely to use welfare are attracted to more generous welfare states the results from these papers are not clear cut another set of papers asks if immigrants use welfare more intensively than natives and if they assimilate out of or into welfare participation in most cases the unadjusted data show higher use of welfare by immigrants although for some countries for example germany this can be explained by differences in immigrants characteristics yet another set of papers finds that the rate of welfare use by existing migrants can influence the welfare use of newly arrived co nationals we illustrate some of these issues by looking at immigrant welfare use in ireland and the uk immigrants in the uk appear to use welfare more intensively than natives but the opposite appears to be the case in ireland

north american migration returns to skill border effects and mobility costs utilizing a utility maximizing roy type discrete choice model of worker location in canadian provinces and u s states that incorporates returns to skill amenities fixed costs distance langua

media exposure and internal migration evidence from indonesia abstract this paper investigates the impact of television on internal migration in indonesia we exploit the differential introduction of private television throughout the country and the variation in signal reception due to topography to estimate the causal effect of media exposure our estimates reveal important long and short run effects an increase of one standard deviation in the number of private tv channels received in the area of residence as an adolescent reduces future inter provincial migration by 1 7 2 7 percentage points and all migration inter and intra provincial by 3 9 6 8 percentage points short run effects are similar in magnitude we also show that respondents less exposed to private television are more likely to consider themselves among the poorest groups in society as we discuss in a stylized model of migration choice under imperfect information these findings are consistent with indonesian citizens over estimating the net gains from internal migration when access to television is limited

long term consequences of short term precipitation shocks evidence from brazilian migrant households we find that large short term precipitation shocks damage the long term income of households that have permanently migrated from rural to urban areas this outcome is consistent with the behavior of credit constrained rural households who are willing to accept lower long term income in urban areas following the depletion of their productive assets during an adverse shock our empirical evidence suggests that there may be a link between large precipitation shocks in rural areas and urban poverty further exploration is warranted on the mechanisms by which natural disasters cause these long term losses

migrations risks and uncertainty a field experiment in china abstract we report data from the first incentivized artefactual field experiment conducted in china to understand whether chinese migrants differ from non migrants in terms of preferences regarding risk and uncertainty in various contexts we find that compared to non migrants migrants are significantly more likely to enter competitions when they expect competitive entries from others however migrants are not different from non migrants in risk and ambiguity preferences where strategic uncertainty is absent our results suggest that migration may be driven more by a stronger belief in one s chance of succeeding in an uncertain competitive environment than by differences risk attitudes related to state uncertainty

is the relationship between financial development and economic growth monotonic evidence from a sample of middle income countries summary we revisit the relationship between financial development and economic growth in a panel of 52 middle income countries over the 1980 2008 period using pooled mean group estimations in a dynamic heterogeneous panel setting we show that there is an inverted u shaped relationship between finance and growth in the long run in the short run the relationship is insignificant this suggests that too much finance can exert a negative influence on growth in middle income countries the finding of a non monotonic effect of financial development on growth is confirmed by estimating a threshold model

europe s tired poor huddled masses self selection and economic outcomes in the age of mass migration during the age of mass migration 1850 1913 one of the largest migration episodes in history the united states maintained a nearly open border allowing the study of migrant decisions unhindered by entry restrictions we estimate the return to migration while accounting for migrant selection by comparing norway to us migrants with their brothers who stayed in norway in the late nineteenth century we also compare fathers of migrants and nonmigrants by wealth and occupation we find that the return to migration was relatively low 70 percent and that migrants from urban areas were negatively selected from the sending population keep ancient lands your storied pomp cries she with silent lips give me your tired your poor your huddled masses yearning to breathe free the wretched refuse of your teeming shore send these the homeless tempest tost to me i lift my lamp beside the golden door emma lazarus 1883

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

the excess sensitivity of layoffs and quits to demand excessive layoffs in bad times and excessive quits in good times both stem from the same weakness in practical employment arrangements the specific nature of worker firm relations creates a situat

informational barriers to credit for migrants evidence from guatemala abstractdoes being a migrant in a developing country cause an individual to receive less access to credit migrant status can be a useful signal for lenders in settings with weak contract enforcement and in the absence of well developed information markets i investigate this contract enforcement based explanation using data on households that have migrated within guatemala to address reverse causality and omitted variable issues i adopt an instrumental variables approach i identify individuals who are most sensitive to violence or crime and who were born in particularly dangerous locations the interaction of these factors causes these individuals to have a higher propensity to move although such migrants are not less likely to apply for loans from formal sources they are significantly less likely to receive them furthermore weak enforcement of contracts dominates alternative explanations of this result such as moral hazard and adverse selection

the informational structure of migration decision and migrants self selection abstract we analyze the pattern of migrants self selection in unobservables when there is uncertainty about foreign wages negative selection becomes more likely and a greater dispersion of wages at destination no longer suffices to predict that immigrants will outperform natives

the impact of wind farm visibility on property values a spatial difference in differences analysis today s investment decisions in large scale onshore wind projects in germany are no longer determined only by the investment s economic benefit but also by concerns associated to social acceptance despite a mostly positive attitude towards the expansion of wind power local public concerns often stem from the belief that the proximity to large scale wind farms may lead to a decrease in property prices in particular the change in landscape caused by the construction of a wind farm may have an adverse impact on the view from some properties and thus may negatively affect their price to investigate the potential devaluation of properties in germany due to wind farms we use a quasi experimental technique and apply a spatial difference in differences approach to various wind farm sites in the federal state of north rhine westphalia we adopt a quantitative visual impact assessment approach to account for the adverse environmental effects caused by the wind turbines to properly account for spatial dependence and unobserved variables biases we apply augmented spatial econometric models the estimates indicate that the asking price for properties whose view was strongly affected by the construction of wind turbines decreased by about 9 14 in contrast properties with a minor or marginal view on the wind turbines experienced no devaluation

a closer look at the determinants of international migration decomposing cultural distance abstractusing a modified gravity model and three measures of cultural distance we employ the zero inflated negative binomial estimation technique to examine the impact of cultural distance on international migration flows we confirm the finding of prior studies that there exists a negative relationship between composite measures of cultural distance and immigrant flows extending the literature we decompose our composite cultural distance measures into their component dimensions to examine potential variability in the influences of individual dimensions on international migration we find the cultural dimensions that reflect individualism uncertainty avoidance and perceived gender roles are typically more influential in determining immigrant flows than are other cultural dimensions

the direction of causality between financial development and economic growth abstract this paper employs the geweke decomposition test on pooled data of 109 developing and industrial countries from 1960 to 1994 to examine the direction of causality between financial development and economic growth the paper finds that 1 financial development generally leads to economic growth 2 the granger causality from financial development to economic growth and the granger causality from economic growth to financial development coexist 3 financial deepening contributes more to the causal relationships in the developing countries than in the industrial countries 4 the longer the sampling interval the larger the effect of financial development on economic growth 5 financial deepening propels economic growth through both a more rapid capital accumulation and productivity growth with the latter channel being the strongest

which hedonic models can we trust to recover the marginal willingness to pay for environmental amenities abstract the hedonic property value model is among our foremost tools for evaluating the economic consequences of policies that target the supply of local public goods environmental services and urban amenities we design a theoretically consistent and empirically realistic monte carlo study of whether omitted variables seriously undermine the method s ability to accurately identify economic values our results suggest that large gains in accuracy can be realized by moving from the standard linear specifications for the price function to a more flexible framework that uses a combination of spatial fixed effects quasi experimental identification and temporal controls for housing market adjustment

investment and interruption effects of the us experience on the earnings of return migrants in mexico migration is widely viewed as an investment in human capital however due to the imperfect transferability of skills and knowledge across countries migration trips are also career interruptions especially for return migrants who may meanwhile experience depreciation of home country specific skills this article demonstrates that migration experience increases return migrants earnings in the home country on the condition that the migration stay is sufficiently long and mostly uninterrupted employing the revised human capital earnings function the empirical study shows that only a barely interrupted us experience longer than five years regardless of the legal status of the migration trips predicts higher earnings of male return migrants in mexico than comparable non migrants robust findings emerge controlling for unobserved individual acteristics or using instrumental variables to deal with the self selection and endogeneity short migration stays in the us and frequent traveling provide

the human capital stock a generalized approach this paper presents a new framework for human capital measurement the generalized framework can i substantially amplify the role of human capital in accounting for cross country income dierences and ii reconcile the existing con ict between regression and accounting evidence in assessing the wealth and poverty of nations one natural interpretation emphasizes dierences across economies in the acquisition of advanced knowledge by skilled workers

financial development government ownership of banks and firm innovation abstract using a newly available world bank survey of over 28 000 firms from 46 countries we examine how financial development affects firm innovation around the world we find that while stock market development significantly enhances firm innovation banking sector development has mixed effects we show that the latter result can be explained by different levels of government ownership of banks specifically in countries with lower government ownership of banks banking sector development significantly enhances firm innovation while in countries with higher government ownership of banks banking sector development has no significant or sometimes even significantly negative effects on firm innovation such negative effects are significantly stronger for smaller firms the results are robust to various controls such as firms human capital and ownership structure to estimations using instrumental variable techniques and alternative measures of firm innovation

on the price of land and the value of amenities a house represents not only a bundle of structural characteristics but also a set of location specific characteristics adding locational coordinates and site area to other house characteristics makes it possible to estimate a land rent surface as well as thle hedonic prices attached to local patterns of land use and other neighbourhood characteristics one can then estimate how the value of such location specific characteristics are capitalized into land prices this analysis illustrated with estimates based on data from two british towns has a number of wider implications it generates a more parsimonious method of estimating amenity values it also reveals likely systematic biases produced by conventional hedonic studies which exclude land and location finally it clarifies the conceptual definition of land and suggests that monocentric models can perform well despite recent criticism

financial development and economic growth evidence from panel unit root and cointegration tests abstract in this paper we investigate the long run relationship between financial depth and economic growth trying to utilize the data in the most efficient manner via panel unit root tests and panel cointegration analysis in addition we use threshold cointegration tests and dynamic panel data estimation for a panel based vector error correction model the long run relationship is estimated using fully modified ols for 10 developing countries the empirical results provide clear support for the hypothesis that there is a single equilibrium relation between financial depth growth and ancillary variables and that the only cointegrating relation implies unidirectional causality from financial depth to growth

global talent local careers circular migration of top indian engineers and professionals despite heightened interests from policy makers in the notion of brain circulation the discussion around the issue has remained largely theoretical drawing upon unique data of the alumni of a leading indian university this study examines how migration dynamics unfold within a highly educated population whose emigration is considered as a classic example of brain drain we adopt an integrative framework bringing together macro level push and pull influences and individual level selectivity we find that disparity in economic development between countries drives migration flows in both directions while host country demand has a stronger impact on out migration than on return migration we also detect significant selection effects at the individual level top students are more likely to emigrate and less likely to return in out migration flowing out of the country appear to be the best and the brightest amongst the highly educated talent pool in return migration negative selection is manifested in multiple aspects including ability post migration human capital investment and income we also find that the influences of macro forces vary amongst individuals higher ability individuals appear to be less affected by demand changes the findings have important policy implications for both source countries and receiving countries

understanding different migrant selection patterns in rural and urban mexico abstract the productive characteristics of migrating individuals emigrant selection affect welfare the empirical estimation of the degree of selection suffers from a lack of complete and nationally representative data this paper uses a dataset that addresses both issues the enet mexican labor survey which identifies emigrants right before they leave and allows a direct comparison to non migrants this dataset presents a relevant dichotomy it shows negative selection for urban mexican emigrants to the united states for the period 2000 2004 together with positive selection in mexican emigration out of rural mexico to the united states in the same period three theories that could explain this dichotomy are tested whereas higher skill prices in mexico than in the us are enough to explain half of the negative selection result in urban mexico its combination with network effects and wealth constraints fully accounts for positive selection in rural mexico

can selective immigration policies reduce migrants quality destination countries can adopt selective immigration policies to improve migrants quality screening potential migrants on the basis of observable characteristics also influences their self selection on unobservables we propose a model that analyzes the effects of selective immigration policies on migrants quality measured by their wages at destination we show that the prevailing pattern of selection on unobservables influences the effect of an increase in selectivity which can reduce migrants quality when migrants are positively self selected on unobservables we also demonstrate that in this case the quality maximizing share of educated migrants declines with the scale of migration

acceptance of wind power development and exposure not in anybody s backyard abstract despite a large stated preference sp literature on wind power externalities few sp studies employ a case control approach to examine whether people s acceptance of new wind power developments and renewable energy initiatives increases or decreases with exposure furthermore the existing studies are inconclusive on this issue in a case control discrete choice experiment we measure the level of acceptance in terms of people s willingness to accept wta for having future land based wind power developments in norway comparing exposed and non exposed people s wta we find that exposure lowers acceptance furthermore exposed people are also unwilling to pay as much to increase general domestic renewable energy production from all sources as non exposed people and thus have lower acceptance for such renewable energy policy initiatives after testing for type of exposure we argue that the inconclusiveness in the literature of how exposure affects acceptance of wind power developments could be due to the fact that impacts considered differ somewhat across studies

the effects of international migration on migrant source households evidence from ethiopian diversity visa lottery migrants about a million people have migrated to the us via the diversity visa dv lottery the dv was instituted by an act of the united states congress to diversify the u s population through a lottery made available to people from countries with historically low rates of immigration to the country in any given year the probability of winning the lottery is less than 1 with millions of people from around the world competing for a maximum of 55 000 immigrant visas that can be obtained through this migration channel using ethiopian dv participants which have consistently made up between 6 and 8 of all dv immigrants i study the causal effects of emigration on the well being of the migrant sending families i infer that migration contributes positively to the welfare of the source families overall migration increases consumer expenditure but has no effect on savings and business ownership of the senders the positive treatment effects do not diminish with duration of emigration migrant men contribute more to the increase in their families standard of living than their female counterparts do while expenditure on food and energy are invariant to the migrants gender the gains in terms of durable ownership access to clean water and sanitation facilities occur almost entirely in families where the emigrants are men i find that dv participants are favorably selected relative to the overall population

return migration human capital accumulation and the brain drain in this paper we present a model that explains migrations as decisions that respond to where human capital can be acquired more efficiently and where the return to human capital is highest the basic framework is a dynamic roy model in which a worker possesses two distinct skills that can be augmented by learning by doing there are different implicit price in different countries and different rates of skill accumulation our analysis contributes to the literature on the selection of immigrants and return migrants by offering a richer framework that may help to accommodate selections of emigrants and return migrants that are not immediately compatible with the one dimensional skill model our analysis has also implications for the debate on brain drain and brain gain in the two skills model presented here return migration can lead to a mitigation of the brain drain or even the creation of a brain gain where those who return bring the home country augmented local skills

international patent protection 1960 2005 abstract this note provides an update to the index of patent protection published in this journal in 1997 the original paper presented the index for 1960 1990 for 110 countries the index has now been updated to 2005 and extended to 122 countries the adoption of stronger patent laws and the composition of patent rights vary across countries by level of economic development

implementation cycles investment and growth we develop a model of intrinsic cycles driven by the decentralized behavior of entrepreneurs and firms making continuous divisible improvements in their productivity we show that when the introduction of productivity improvements is endogenous implementation cycles arise even in the presence of reversible investment and consumption smoothing the implied cyclical equilibrium is unique within its class and shares several features in common with actual business cycles in particular its predictions are qualitatively consistent with the joint behavior of the investment rate and tobin s q during u s recessions

the economic incorporation of immigrants in 18 western societies origin destination and community effects this article examines differences in labor market participation and unemployment between immigrant groups in different countries the authors argue that two macro designs must be combined to provide a more comprehensive perspective on the economic integration of immigrant groups instead of reliance on observations of multiple origin groups in a single destination or a single origin group in multiple destinations multiple origins in multiple destinations are compared suggesting that the economic status of immigrants may be affected by the country from which they come origin effect the country to which they migrate destination effect and the specific relations between origins and destinations community effect from the human capital theory compositional hypotheses are derived which predict that these macro effects can be attributed to the selection of human capital from discrimination theories contextual hypotheses are deduced which maintain that macro effects can be ascribed to in gro

valuing school quality better transport and lower crime evidence from house prices housing prices within urban areas exhibit highly localized variation that cannot be explained solely by differences in the physical attributes of dwellings we consider the role of local amenities and disamenities in generating price variation within urban areas focusing on three highly policy relevant urban issues transport accessibility school quality and crime our survey of the recent empirical literature highlights what is known and what is not known on these issues and considers the relevance and reliability of this evidence for policy design and evaluation although there are serious empirical challenges we argue that research on housing values based on careful research designs can offer credible estimates of the social value of place specific attributes and amenities

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

a brain gain or a brain drain migration endogenous fertility and human capital formation i introduction it is traditionally argued that openness to international migration within a developing country can cause high skilled workers to emigrate and thereby create a brain drain problem 1 however it has been demonstrated in recent studies that such openness to international migration raises the return on human capital in a developing country which in turn raises the average level of human capital in the source country 2 this article revisits this issue building on the prior studies by examining the impact of migration on economic growth through the role of human capital there are however three features that distinguish this article from the prior works first of all while most of the prior studies on migration have tended to focus solely on static models so as to simplify their analyses we develop a dynamic model of migration within which endogenous growth is generated 3 this dynamic model enables us to study the dynamic behavior of the economy and to separate the short run effects from the long run effects when there are changes in migration policy an endogenous growth model is constructed in this article to allow for the persistent growth of a source country hence we contribute to two strands of the literature international migration and the endogenous growth model we also show that under certain conditions the balanced growth path bgp may exist to the best of our knowledge this is the first article to consider the possibility of the bgp within a migration model second we endogenize the fertility choice within the model it is already widely acknowledged that fertility and education are interdependent decisions for parents indeed becker murphy and tamura 1990 developed a model to examine the way s in which the joint decisions on fertility and education affect economic growth while the linkage between growth and inequality was subsequently explored when differential fertility matters by de la croix and doepke 2003 however the studies on migration have tended to assume a constant population growth rate and have generally not taken into account fertility decisions examples include rodriguez 1975 and mountford 1997 both of which presented dynamic models to study the issues of migration and economic growth in both cases population was taken as an exogenous variable and was assumed to grow at a constant rate in this article we allow parents to make fertility and education decisions and to have an opportunity to migrate to a foreign country internalizing fertility decisions induces a trade off between the quality and the quantity of children when there are changes in migration policy this trade off will then have an effect on economic growth as a result of its direct effect on the accumulation of human capital fertility does matter when considering an economy with heterogeneous agents since it will also affect the structure of the labor force third we include the average costs involved in preparing each migrating child to overcome the various barriers when migrating to foreign countries with different backgrounds languages and cultures a static model with migration costs such as language skills preparation was developed by lien and wang 2005 in which they found that when including such costs the openness to international migration may well create a brain drain since it is quite common for the governments of developing countries to encourage their citizens to migrate to certain foreign countries the inclusion of the costs of migration allows us to study the impact of these policies we develop a migration model within which agents differ from one another based upon their different endowments of human capital considering two alternative scenarios to facilitate our examination of the effects of migration on economic performance in the first scenario we consider the case where the host country cannot differentiate between the abilities of the migrants as a result of asymmetric information between the host country and the migrants

self selection and the earnings of immigrants this paper analyzes the way in which the earnings of the immigrant population may be expected to differ from the earnings of the native population because of the endogeneity of the decision to migrate the empirical study shows that differences in the u s earnings of immigrants with the same measured skills but from different home countries are attributable to variations in political and economic conditions in the countries of origin at the time of migration excerpt

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

relative efficiency self containment and comparative costs of less developed countries international differences in comparative costs can in principle be attributed to three kinds of forces factor proportions economies of scale and relative efficiency to take a specific example the low relative price of certain services in less developed countries might be attributed to the fact that the services in question are not at all intensive in either physical or human capital the factor proportions account that economies of scale are unimportant in these services or that ldcs are relatively efficient in producing these services as compared to their efficiency in producing say manufactured products while it is obvious that differences in relative efficiency can affect comparative costs and trade patterns economists have tended to emphasize the factor proportions theory and economies of scale in their explanations part of the reason for this emphasis is that the relative efficiency explanation is rather empty unless one can come up with explanations for the patterns of relative efficiency the present article attempts to address these issues by looking at some data on relative product prices in a sample of less developed countries ldcs and more developed countries mdcs the data are taken from the purchasing power parities collected by the international comparison project in the course of the research project it was discovered that neither the factor proportions theory nor the economies of scale phenomenon could account for more than a rather small part of the observed variation in relative product prices the research was then directed toward explaining the remaining variation in relative product prices by looking at some product characteristics that were thought to affect relative efficiency there are many characteristics of goods that may be hypothesized to affect the relative efficiency of ldcs compared to mdcs these

are immigrants favorably self selected one of the standard propositions in the migration literature is that migrants tend to be favorably self selected for labor market success that is economic migrants are described as tending on average to be more able ambitious aggressive entrepreneurial or otherwise more favorably selected than similar individuals who choose to remain in their place of origin in recent years there have been challenges to the general proposition of the favorable selectivity of migrants in addressing this issue this paper considers alternative specifications of the migration model that are relevant for the issue of migrant selectivity excerpt

non linear growth effects of financial development does financial integration matter using both macro and industry level data this paper analyses the non linear effects of financial development and international financial integration on economic growth in europe special attention is devoted to modeling threshold effects with respect to the depth of financial markets as a measure of economies absorption capacity results reveal evidence of significant non linear effects with less developed european countries gaining more from financial development in contrast benefits of international financial integration become significant at higher levels of financial development the data show that monetary integration in europe significantly contributed to a higher degree of financial integration entry of new eu members to the european monetary union may thus be the mechanism ensuring a virtuous development circle as the adoption of the euro may allow the development of domestic financial markets and financial integration to go hand in hand

responding to policy change new business models for renewable energy cooperatives barriers perceived by cooperatives members abstract renewable energy cooperatives recs in germany have received considerable attention in recent years their number having risen to nearly a thousand since 2004 this growth has resulted largely from germany s feed in tariff system recent changes in this policy however have made the previous rec business models mostly unprofitable so recs are looking for new business models our study aims at identifying those new models and characterizing the implementation barriers recs face to this end we interviewed rec members and management and observed rec annual general meetings we found three significant barriers first risk aversion on the part of both members and management second concerns about the environmental impacts or the ethics of certain models that while legal are not felt to align with the intentions of lawmakers finally the lack of competencies and time of the mostly unsalaried rec management these barriers could put the future of recs at risk and so threaten the contributions recs make to the german energy transition professionalization partnerships and other strategies can help mitigate this risk if recs are to continue to play an important role in the energy transition policy makers would be wise to consider measures to support their continued growth

land property rights and international migration evidence from mexico abstract in this paper i ask whether there is a relationship between land property rights and international migration in order to identify the impact of property rights i consider a country wide land certification program that took place in mexico in the 1990s my identification strategy exploits the staggered implementation and the households eligibility for the program i find that the program increased the eligible households likelihood of having one or more members abroad by 12 in terms of the number of migrants my coefficient estimates explain 26 of the 1994 1997 increase in migrants from ejido areas and 13 15 of the increase from all of mexico consistent with our theoretical model the impact is strongest for households without a land will this implies that land inheritance issues drive at least part of the effect

does high inequality attract high skilled immigrants this study examines how the sources and levels of income inequality affect how a country attracts and retains high skilled workers with parameter values that yield realistic levels of emigration our model shows that emigration rates increase with education when the returns to education are higher abroad however the relationship between unobservable skills residual wages and emigration can display an inverse u shaped pattern if unobservable skills are composed of both general and country specific skills using data on israeli emigrants before they decide to emigrate we find strong empirical evidence in support of the model s predictions

the influence of labour taxes on the migration of skilled workers this paper investigates empirically the role of taxes on labor for the stock of expatriates and the migration flows of skilled workers given the increasing mobility of labour especially of high skilled people and expatriates it is interesting to see to what extent labour income taxes and social security contributions determine migration flows we collect data on personal income tax profiles for 49 economies and the year 2002 in particular we determine the component of labor taxes which is borne by employers and the one that is borne by employees following the oecd s taxing wages approach for the latter we calculate the progressivity of personal income tax rates between the average wage and five times the average wage this may be interpreted as the tax progression which is relevant for well paid workers then we use the personal income tax variables to estimate their effect on bilateral stocks of expatriates into oecd countries and the migration of skilled workers into these countries personal income tax rates turn out to have a robust negative effect on cross border flows of skilled workers in the oecd

the effect of redistribution on migration evidence from the israeli kibbutz this paper tests a key theoretical prediction of public finance that local redistribution induces sorting of the population so that less productive individuals are located in communities with more redistribution specifically i use a longitudinal data set to test whether and to what extent the intensive redistribution practiced by israeli kibbutzim encourages exit of more productive individuals and entry of less productive ones the findings support the theoretical prediction kibbutz leavers are more skilled than both stayers and other rural migrants and they earn higher wages upon exit than observably similar city natives and other migrants in contrast individuals who earn lower wages in the city are more likely to enter a kibbutz but they are not more likely to move to other rural areas these findings also support borjas hypothesis that migrants self selection depends on the difference in returns to skills between the origin and the destination

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

values in the wind a hedonic analysis of wind power facilities the siting of wind facilities is extremely controversial this paper uses data on 11 331 property transactions over nine years in northern new york state to explore the effects of new wind facilities on property values we use a fixed effects framework to control for omitted variables and endogeneity biases we find that nearby wind facilities significantly reduce property values in two of the three counties studied these results indicate that existing compensation to local homeowners communities may not be sufficient to prevent a loss of property values jel q51 q53

international migration imperfect information and brain drain we consider a model of international migration where skills of workers are imperfectly observed by firms in the host country and where information asymmetries are more severe for immigrants than f

equality under threat by the talented evidence from worker managed firms does workplace democracy engender greater pay equality are high ability individuals more likely to quit egalitarian organisational regimes the article revisits this long standing issue by analysing the interplay between compensation structure and quit behaviour in the distinct yet underexplored institutional setting of worker managed firms the analysis is based on novel administrative data sources which allow constructing a simple ordinal measure of the workers ability type the article s key findings are that worker managed firms have a more compressed compensation structure than conventional firms and high ability members are more likely than other members to exit

networks and selection in international migration to spain we offer fresh evidence on the effect of migrant networks on two essential aspects of migration 1 the total scale of migration and 2 the skill composition of migration our analysis is for the remarkable case of spain which experienced a full blown immigration boom from the mid 1990s up to the global financial crisis to accommodate flexible substitution patterns across alternative migrant destinations we use a three level nested multinomial logit model we find a strong positive network effect on the scale of migration and a strong negative effect on the ratio of high skilled to low skilled migrants simplifying restrictions on the structure of cross destination substitutability are rejected by the data jel f22 j61

how immigrants fare across the earnings distribution in australia and the united states this paper investigates determinants of the earnings distribution for native born workers and immigrant workers in two countries the authors using data from the 2000 u s census and 2001 australian census employ a methodology quantile regression that facilitates measurement of the native born immigrant earnings differential and the partial effect of explanatory variables such as schooling and experience at each decile of the earnings distribution they find evidence that schooling and labor market experience had stronger earnings effects at higher deciles the native immigrant earnings gap varied by decile and in particular increased in the united states at higher deciles the results suggest that in the united states minimum wages compressed earnings at low deciles whereas in australia the minimum administered wage system compressed earnings across the entire distribution a pattern of higher earnings for immigrants than for the native born at the lowest earnings decile in australia may reflect favorable selectivity in migration

on the costs of a bank centered financial system evidence from the changing main bank relations in japan we examine the effects of bank firm relationships on firm performance in japan when access to capital markets is limited close bank firm ties increase the availability of capital to borrowing firms but do not lead to higher profitability or growth the cost of capital of firms with close bank ties is higher than that of their peers this indicates that most of the benefits from these relationships are appropriated by the banks finally the slow growth rates of bank clients suggest that banks discourage firms from investing in risky profitable projects however liberalization of financial markets reduces the banks market power the close relationship between manufacturing firms and financial institutions in japan has recently been at the center of the debate on the appropriate financial system for the reforming economies of eastern europe as opposed to the anglo saxon separation of finance and industry long term ties between main banks and their client firms involving bank loans bank equity holding and some bank appointed personnel which are common in japan and germany have often been described as a growth oriented financial system that could serve the needs of developing and reformed economiies better than anonymous capital markets modeled after the arnerican and british financial systems the claim that close ties between investmentoriented banks and industrial firms could help overcome the difficulties of relative backwardness dates back to gerschenkron 1962 who investigates european development rosovsky 1961 applies gerschenkron s framework to the analysis of japanese growth more recently aoki patrick and sheard 1994 hoshi kashyap and loveman 1994 and teranishi 1993 among others portray the close ties between finance and industry in japan as an important factor in the international competitiveness of modern japanese

financial development and innovation led growth is too much finance better abstract we show that the expansion of financial sector may hurt innovative activities and hence the innovation led growth using data on 50 countries over the 1990 2016 period countries with higher level of financial development are found to have a smaller positive or insignificant effect on innovation the marginal effect of innovation on growth is a decreasing function of financial development using a dynamic panel threshold method we re examine the possible non linearity between finance innovation and growth we find that innovation exhibits an insignificant effect on output growth when credit to the private sector exceeds a threshold level of about 60 as a share of gdp these results are not driven by banking crises the long run effect of 2007 2008 financial crisis or the ongoing european sovereign debt crisis

heaven s swing door endogenous skills migration networks and the effectiveness of quality selective immigration policies a growing number of oecd countries are leaning toward the adoption of selective immigration policies which are expected to raise the quality or education level of migrants this view neglects two important dynamic effects the role of migration networks which could reduce the quality of migrants and the responsiveness of education decisions to the prospect of migration we propose a model of self selection into migration with endogenous education choices which predicts that migration networks and the quality of migrants can be positively associated when destination countries adopt sufficiently selective immigration policies empirical evidence presented as background motivation suggests that this is indeed the case

equal employment opportunity across states the eeoc 1979 1989 this study uses unpublished eeoc data from 1979 89 to concentrate on how dwindling resources and policy changes advocated by the eeoc chairs regarding the time and intensity devoted to anti discrimination cases may have yielded regional variation in discrimination outcomes we arrive at two major conclusions first evidence here suggests that the eeoc counteracted potential regional resistance against anti discrimination laws second we argue that the seeming inefficiency of the eeoc during thomas first years as eeoc chair appears to have occurred because he inherited a large pool of low merit cases

an economic model of the brain drain asymmetric information in the labor market is discussed as a major cause of the exodus of foreign trained students from developing countries the authors suggest that employers in the country in which the students have been trained have a more accurate judgment of the true productivity of students than have employers in the students native country an illustrative numerical model is developed and its implications are analyzed annotation

wage structure as implicit insurance on human capital in developed versus underdeveloped countries abstract this paper explores the role of wage structure as implicit insurance on human capital it illustrates how smaller wage differentials in the developed world can be welfare enhancing by acting as implicit insurance while larger wage differentials in underdeveloped countries make investments in human capital riskier in other words with smaller wage differentials the students in a developed country are insured against poor educational outcomes through the existence of well paid alternative employments which are not present in the economy of a less developed country this result arises as multiple equilibria in a general equilibrium model when there are no insurance markets for human capital

on the mechanics of migration decisions skill complementarities and endogenous price differentials abstract why are highly skilled workers more responsive than other workers to productivity differentials when taking migration decisions why do low skilled workers abandon rich regions this paper aims to answer these questions using skill complementarities and endogenous price differentials between rich and poor regions if the skill premium is increasing in the average level of human capital of a location the more skilled the workers are the stronger the economic incentives to migrate to the rich regions become in contrast the low skilled workers have an incentive to migrate to the poor regions to minimize their living costs

labor mobility under asymmetric information with moving and signalling costs abstract information about the true skill level of individual workers may not flow freely across labor markets or between firms and though available to the workers themselves may not be equally available to some employers consequently the level and composition of labor mobility is affected in this paper we derive some results concerning the impact of moving costs in conjunction with informational asymmetry upon the level of labor mobility the skill level of those who move and the effect upon both these variables of costly signalling

explaining the spatial variation in homeownership rates results for german regions lerbs o w and oberst c a explaining the spatial variation in homeownership rates results for german regions regional studies this paper employs cross sectional data on ninety six german regions to investigate the interregional variability of homeownership rates among the explanatory variables the analysis includes important regional housing market indicators as well as regional socio demographic composition urbanization and labour market performance an estimation strategy is chosen which accounts for different forms of spatial dependence between the regional units it is found that regional differences in the relative price of owning versus renting and the affordability of owner occupied housing play a key role in explaining why homeownership rates vary so substantially across the country the results indicate significant neighbourhood effects for several variables