migration and wages of young men a two period nested logit migration model with selectivity is specified the model is then applied to a sample of young u s male workers from nine different census divisions to study the choices they faced in the first two years after completing full time schooling we find evidence of the existence of unobserved similarities in the divisions within each census region we find that locational choices in one period affect locational choices of individuals in subsequent periods we test for selectivity in division specific wage equations and find little evidence of selectivity in the wage equations of most divisions and evidence of negative selection in the wage equations of two divisions excerpt

geographical mobility and potential wage gain of immigrants within spain ruiz a c geographical mobility and potential wage gain of immigrants within spain regional studies geographical mobility of workers within countries can be a means of equilibrating regional economic disparities within this context a relevant topic is the mobility of foreign workers in the destination country the spanish case is interesting because spain has one of europe s fastest growing immigration rates this paper is aimed first at studying the determinants of interregional geographical mobility of immigrants in spain and second at obtaining consistent estimates of an individual s opportunity wage as a mover or a stayer findings show that an expected wage gain exerts a positive influence on mobility and leads to a better allocation of resources

regional migration in britain an analysis of gross flows using nhs central register data the authors extend the use of a hiring function model whereby job seekers are matched with vacancies to the analysis of regional migration in britain annual data from the national health service central register for 1975 1989 are used to show that unemployment and vacancy rates distance and an index of similarities across regions in industry based employment composition help determine migration flows across regions the hiring function approach offers a consistent way of modelling gross and net flows and helps explain both the high level of gross relative to net flows and the tendency for migration to fall in a recession even when unemployment differentials widen excerpt

the empirical content of the roy model this paper clarifies and extends the classical roy model of self selection and earnings inequality the original roy model based on the assumption that log skills are normally distributed is shown to imply that pursuit of comparative advantage in a free market reduces earnings inequality compared to the earnings distribution that would result if workers were randomly assigned to sectors aggregate log earnings are right skewed even if one sectoral distribution is left skewed most major implications of the log normal roy model survive if differences in skills are log concave however few implications of the model survive if skills are generated from more general distributions we consider the identifiability of the roy model from data on earnings distributions the normal theory version is identifiable without regressors or exclusion restrictions sectoral distributions can be identified knowing only the aggregate earnings distribution for general skill distributions the model is not identified and has no empirical content with sufficient price variation the model can be identified from multimarket data cross sectional variation in regressors can substitute for price variation in restoring empirical content to the roy model

fiscal versus traditional market variables in canadian migration this paper evaluates the hypothesis that the influence of traditional market variables on migration in canada has diminished over time this is attributed to a crowding out process whereby growth of social security type programs has cushioned the effects of say unemployment and thus motivation to migrate for jobs and fiscal policies have exerted unintended effects implications are that market forces that would work naturally to induce migration from low to high income regions and thus equalize earned incomes have been short circuited and that traditional tools of manpower policy for influencing migration such as job creation skill enhancement or wages are less effective currently than they might have been in the past

interprovincial migration and local public goods the objective of this paper is to test whether fiscally induced migration occurs in canada that is whether interprovincial migration flows are influenced by government tax and expenditure policies in order to do so a multinominal logit model of migration is developed in which individuals choose to live in the province where their utility would be highest the model is estimated using aggregate data for the period 1962 81 the results indicate that migration is influenced by provincial government spending trough the magnitude and direction of the effect differs with the type of government spending the implication of these results is that intergovernmental transfer payments and provincial natural resource revenues also have the potential to influence migration flows in canada summary in fre excerpt

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

strategy proof exchange we consider the allocation of goods in exchange economies with a finite number of agents who may have private information about their preferences in such a setting standard allocation rules such as walrasian equilibria or rational expectations equilibria are not compatible with individual incentives we characterize the set of allocation rules which are incentive compatible or in other words the set of strategy proof social choice functions social choice functions which are strategy proof are those which can be obtained from trading according to a finite number of pre specified proportions the number of proportions which can be accommodated is proportional to the number of agents such rules are necessarily inefficient even in the limit as the economy grows

who works for piece rates and why department of agricultural and resource economics i division of agriculture and natural resources l niversity of california at berkeley working paper no 627 who works for piece rates and why by d kate rubin jeffrey m perloff giannini foundation of i gricui turai economics jbi w ty n j 61992 california agricultural experiment station giannini foundation of agricultural economics june 1992

labor market performance as a determinant of migration in a comparison of migrants with nonmigrants both observed and unobservable productivity factors are relevant this paper focuses more on the unobservable factors and their correlation between places of origin and destination a human capital model of migration demonstrates that more productive workers at the origin would choose to migrate only if the correlation between origin and destination factors is strongly positive longitudinal data drawn from the cote d ivoire living standards survey 1985 86 are used to examine the pattern of migration in the light of labor market performance both of wage employees and non farm self employed workers it is found that indeed the more productive workers migrate furthermore the general direction of migration is toward cities the conclusion is therefore that rural areas lose their productive workers and that urban areas may gain in productivity from the geographical shifts in population

how important is selection experimental vs non experimental measures of the income gains from migration measuring the gain in income from migration is complicated by non random selection of migrants from the general population making it difficult to obtain an appropriate comparison group of non migrants this paper uses a migrant lottery to overcome this problem providing an experimental measure of the income gains from migration new zealand allows a quota of tongans to immigrate each year with a lottery to choose among the excess number of applicants a unique survey conducted by the authors in these two countries allows experimental estimates of the income gains from migration by comparing the incomes of migrants to those who applied to migrate but whose names were not drawn in the lottery after allowing for the effect of non compliance among some of those whose names were drawn the authors also conducted a survey of individuals who did not apply for the lottery comparing this non applicant group with the migrants enables assessment of the degree to which non experimental methods can provide an unbiased estimate of the income gains from migration they find evidence of migrants being positively selected in terms of both observed and unobserved skills as a result non experimental methods are found to overstate the gains from migration by 9 to 82 percent a good instrumental variable works best while difference in differences and bias adjusted propensity score matching also perform comparatively well

an econometric analysis of interfirm labour mobility this paper utilizes the survey of work history 1981 data to examine the importance of non random sampling in the context of a model of interfirm labour mobility the paper adopts heckman s two step procedure in order to estimate a three equation model incorporating an individual s mobility status as endogenously determined the main conclusion is that in estimating wage equations it is important to consider the role of job mobility and to correct for the effects of sample selection bias the results generally accord with those reported by osberg et al 1986 in the only previous canadian study of job mobility in a sample selection context

migration regional equilibrium and the estimation of compensating differentials in this study we have developed an improved model of net migration that encompasses both equilibrium and disequilibrium components instrumental variables fixed effects estimates of the model with time series data for 51 areas in the united states over the period 1971 1988 support the importance of both equilibrium and disequilibrium factors in migration excerpt

migratory labor and agriculture farm workers are shown to respond strongly to economic incentives to seasonally migrate for work the economic model is specified with separate earnings structures for migratory and nonmigratory work and a reservation wage for migration is specified to reflect the choice between migratory and nonmigratory work the empirical model adjusts for self selectivity in the sample and demonstrates that domestic farm workers sort themselves into migratory and nonmigratory workers in a manner consistent with the theory of comparative advantage implications for immigration and government employment and training programs are considered

a declining farm workforce analysis of panel data from rural mexico analysis of nationally representative individual level panel data from 1980 to 2010 reveals a significant negative trend in the agricultural labor supply from rural mexico which is the primary source of hired workers for u s farms these findings offer an explanation for the rise over time in u s farm wages concomitants of the agricultural transformation including growth in the non farm economy falling birth rates and an increase in rural education accelerate the transition of rural mexicans out of farm work higher u s farm wages and increased border enforcement slow the transition but the combined impact of these offsetting variables is relatively small a diminishing farm labor supply has far reaching implications for farmers farm labor organizers rural communities and agricultural workers

collusion efficiency and dominant strategies abstract green and laffont proved that no collusion resilient dominant strategy mechanism whose strategies consist of individual valuations guarantees efficiency in multi unit auctions chen and micali bypassed this impossibility by slightly enlarging the strategy spaces yet assuming knowledge of the maximum value a player may have for a copy of the good and the ability of imposing high fines on the players for unrestricted combinatorial auctions efficiency in collusion resilient dominant strategies has remained open with or without the above two assumptions we fully generalize the notion of a collusion resilient dominant strategy mechanism by allowing for arbitrary strategy spaces construct one such mechanism for multi unit auctions without relying on the above two assumptions and prove that no such mechanism exists for unrestricted combinatorial auctions with or without any additional assumptions our results hold when the mechanism does not know who colludes with whom and players in the same coalition can perfectly coordinate their strategies

undominated nash implementation in bounded mechanisms we study implementation in undominated nash equilibrium by bounded mechanisms an undominated nash equilibrium is a nash equilibrium in which no agent uses a weakly dominated strategy a mechanism is bounded if every dominated strategy is dominated by some undominated strategy we identify necessary conditions and sufficient conditions for such implementation these conditions are satisfied in virtually all economic environments and are also satisfied by interesting correspondences from the social choice literature for economic settings we provide a particularly simple implementing mechanism for which the undominated equilibrium outcomes coincide with those obtained from the iterative elimination of weakly dominated strategies

long run trends in internal migrations in italy a study in panel cointegration with dependent units the objective of this paper is to examine the long run determinants of internal migrations from southern italy in order to accomplish this task the paper develops a bootstrap test for panel cointegration analysis with dependent units monte carlo simulations show that the test based on the continuous path block bootstrap has good power and size properties and is robust to both short and long run dependence across units the empirical analysis points to income in the sending region as a key factor of the decline of migrations with unemployment and income differentials playing only a minor role copyright 2007 john wiley sons ltd

geographic labour mobility and the cost of housing evidence from italy in recent years internal migration in italy has declined markedly notwithstanding the widening of the north south gap in terms of unemployment rates and real income here the extent to which the housing market has contributed to the decline is examined preliminary to this analysis differentials in the cost of housing between the macro areas of the country are estimated using data on the market price of houses located in 96 provincial capitals econometric evidence is provided supporting the view that the north south housing price differential is a notable factor in explaining the falling pattern of mobility the positive impact on migration from the south to the north of a wider gap in the two areas in terms of income and employment prospects has been offset by the housing price differential which has steadily risen at least from the mid 1980s onwards yet a considerable share of the decrease in mobility remains unexplained possibly owing to the heterogeneity in the composition of migration flows

project cost comparison under the clean development mechanism to inform investment selection by industrialized countries this is the first study that comprehensively evaluates and compares the average costs of six types of 4061 registered clean development mechanism cdm projects the projects were conducted from 2005 to 2014 by industrialized countries investing in host countries that had various technology and income levels specifically this study compares the average costs of emission reduction for each type of project projects were used by industrialized countries to achieve specific emission reductions commitments the lowest average cost per ton of reduced emissions found in renewable energy projects fuel switch projects supply side energy efficiency improvements and demand side energy efficiency improvements all of which were effectively reduced emissions by less than 1 million tons in host countries with high technology levels and upper medium income levels the average cost for the other two project types methane reduction and methane avoidance showed that these projects were more effective at reducing emissions by more than 50 million tons in host countries with upper middle technology levels and upper medium income levels these lowest average costs for different project types can guide project selection by industrialized countries seeking the lowest total emission reduction costs selection of cdm project investments by industrialized countries should account not only for the technology and income levels of host countries but also for the amounts by which industrialized countries have committed to reducing their emissions

who moves a logit model analysis of inter provincial migration in canada this paper addresses the topic of inter provincial migration in terms of the basic question who moves panel logit models of the probability that an individual changes his or her province of residence from one year to the next over the 1982 1995 period are estimated using tax based longitudinal data it is found that moving is i inversely related to the home province s population size presumably reflecting local economic conditions and labour market scale effects while language also plays an important role ii more common among residents of smaller cities towns and especially rural areas than those in larger cities iii negatively related to age marriage and the presence of children for both men and women iv positively related to the provincial unemployment rate the individuals receipt of unemployment insurance except entry men having no market income except for entry men and entry women and the receipt of social assistance especially for men v slightly positively related

the relationships between cdm project characteristics and cer market prices this study explores the relationship between key characteristics of clean development mechanism cdm projects and certified emission reduction cer prices using multiple correspondence analysis we show that the cer credit prices are likely to have had a greater influence than regional levels of economic development on the sectors regions and sizes of cdm projects there are comparatively few cdm projects in sub saharan africa less south africa and the small scale forestation projects that are characteristic for the region mainly entered the cdm pipeline when cer credit price levels were high latin america hosts a larger number of projects and the small scale methane biofuel and hydro projects that are typical for this region generally also applied for validation under high cer price levels the large industrial gas and energy efficiency projects typical for the middle east northern africa region appear to have been largely insensitive to cer price levels the large number and variety of projects in asia have applied for registration under a broad range of cer price levels

the impact of immigration on child health experimental evidence from a migration lottery program this paper uses a unique survey designed by the authors to compare migrant children who enter new zealand through a random ballot with children in the home country of tonga whose families were unsuccessful participants in the same ballots the authors find that migration increases height and reduces stunting of infants and toddlers but also increases body mass index bmi and obesity among 3 to 5 years old these impacts are quite large even though the average migrant household has been in new zealand for less than 1 year additional results suggest that these impacts occur because of dietary change rather than direct income effects

manipulation through bribes we consider allocation rules that choose outcomes and transfers based on agents reported valuations of the outcomes a bribing situation exists when one agent could pay another to misreport his valuations resulting in a net gain to both a bribe proof rule eliminates such opportunities we show that under a bribe proof rule each agent s payoff is a continuous function of other agents reported valuations furthermore on connected domains if the set of outcomes is finite or the domain is smoothly connected each agent s payoff is a constant function of other agents reports finally under a domain richness condition a bribe proof rule must be constant the results apply to a broad class of economies journal of economic literature classification numbers c70 d70

a nested logit migration model with selectivity in this paper we specify a multiple choice migration model with selectivity we estimate this model using observations on individuals drawn from the 1971 census of venezuela there are two main innovations in this paper we apply a correction for the presence of selectivity in wage equations in the context of a multiple choice migration model and we apply a less restrictive technique for modelling multiple discrete choices than in previous studies we study the choices of individuals among 23 states of venezuela each individual is observed to have chosen one state so one wage is observable per person our hypothesis is that individuals choose where to locate on the basis of an evaluation of costs and benefits associated with choosing each state we measure the benefits associated with choosing a given state by means of the wage a person could earn in this state since we observe only one wage for each person we have to impute the unobserved wages for the states this person did not choose in order to study the role of wages in migration however it is possible that unobserved factors which affect both an individual s choice of location and his wages may result in sample selection bias if we try to estimate state specific wage equations by ols on the basis of the self selected samples we apply an estimator proposed by lee 1983 to estimate state specific wage equations free from sample selection bias the wage equations permit us to investigate whether individuals who choose particular states earn different wages from observationally identical individuals drawn from the population at random in the context of a developing country where internal migration flows are large evidence on the selectivity of migration will enhance our understanding of an important labor market adjustment mechanism evidence that people who choose particular locations earn more in those locations than would observationally identical individuals drawn at random from the population positive selection will suggest that migration decisions are made according to the principle of comparative advantage in modelling the choice of location we test whether subsets of states are more highly similar to each other than to other states unobserved similarities between states may arise because of similar amenities or economic conditions which are not otherwise explicitly controlled for in the model we implement the

voting with your feet and the quality of life index abstract this paper develops a new technique that uses the utility maximizing migration decisions of rational voters consumers to construct qol rankings we apply our technique to canadian inter provincial migration data for 1970 1990

internal and international migration in mexico 1995 2000 using micro data from mexico and us 2000 population censuses and following a multi choice variant of roy s 1951 model this article pools into one model the determinants of internal and international migration in mexico while paying explicit attention to the potential problem of self selection the results reveal that ignoring multiple destinations in the migration decision might lead to erroneous inferences about the determinants of migration and the type of selection after controlling for wage differences the results suggest that single adult men with low schooling levels tend to migrate to the us while married women and men with higher levels of schooling tend to migrate within mexico we also found that there are strong differences between domestic and international social networks

economics and the well being of canadian children the basic argument of this paper is that as economists we need to pay more attention to how policy affects the well being of children as individuals not just as members of families except with reference to programs explicitly designed for children e g the child tax benefit the issue of how economic policy in general affects the well being of the children themselves is relatively missing in the economics literature though children constitute nearly 25 per cent of the canadian population for example discussions of monetary policy are unlikely to consider the impact of alternative choices for children s well being debates about the merits of labour market mobility do not pay much attention to the impact of mobility on children discussions of optimal tax structures do not look at the issue from the perspective of the child 2

union wage differentials in the public and private sectors a simultaneous equations specification the paper attempts to integrate new approaches to estimating union wage effects with the analysis of public private sector wage differentials estimates of the union differential in both public and private sectors allowing for the endogeneity of union status are presented the hypothesis that the recently measured rents to public sector employment primarily reflect the recent increase in unionization in that sector is examined and receives considerable empirical support there was evidence of positive selection into the union sector especially for private sector workers union status appears to be strongly influenced by the expected wage gain from joining the union sector

wage assimilation of immigrants and internal migrants the role of linguistic distance this paper investigates the wage assimilation of foreign immigrants and internal migrants in italy comparing them with stayers control for the selection in out migration is performed using a new

migration of seasonal agricultural workers nearly half of all seasonal farm workers migrate at least 75 miles in a given year an expected earnings differential from migration weakly induces migration a 10 earnings differential raises the probability of migrating by slightly more than 1 this result indicates that there are substantial costs to migrating and that employers must offer large earnings premia to induce a substantial number of workers to move to their jobs some demographic groups earn substantially higher earnings by migrating these higher earnings from migration are primarily due to higher wages rather than more hours of work

job search in thick markets abstract i analyze empirically the effects of urban and industrial agglomeration on both search behavior and the efficiency of matching the analysis is based on a unique panel data set from the italian labor force survey micro data covering 520 randomly drawn local labor market areas 66 of the total over the four quarters of 2002 i compute transition probabilities from non employment to employment by jointly estimating the probability of searching and the probability of finding a job conditional on having searched i then test whether these are affected by market size industrial variety and or industry specialization the main results indicate that market size and industry specialization raise job seekers chances of finding employment conditional on having searched while industrial variety is not significantly different from zero finally the effect of agglomeration on non employed individuals search behavior cannot be significantly distinguished from zero

sequential migration theory and evidence from peru abstract the standard human capital model of labor migration has been successful in explaining several empirical regularities of the migration process however there are a number of empirical facts that have not yet been explained or empirically tested among them that migrants usually perform more than one move in their lifetime return migration accounts for a very important share of total migration rates and there is a high positive correlation between in and out migration rates in the more advantageous regions this paper presents both a simple model explaining these facts and an empirical analysis using data from peru

the impact of wage differentials on choosing to work in agriculture based on a model of industry choice and wage determination a 1 increase in the relative wage in agriculture increases the probability that a nonurban male with no more than a ninth grade education works in agriculture by 3 37 at the sample mean and by 1 3 when averaged over the entire sample a 10 increase in wages may increase the proportion of those males who choose to work in agriculture by nearly a quarter

linking with uncertainty the relationship between eu ets pollution permits and kyoto offsets carbon offsets from the kyoto flexible mechanisms can be used by firms in the eu emissions trading scheme for compliance in lieu of eu allowances making these carbon assets interchangeable we offer an explanation of the price spread using a structural model of the price for certified emissions reductions that combines three features a limit for the use of kyoto offsets within the eu ets a disconnect between the current price of offsets and their marginal cost of production for institutional reasons and uncertainty about future supply and demand of offsets our model expresses the offset price as an average of the eu allowance price and an offset s outside value weighted by the probability of a binding import limit using a monthly series of the united nation s clean development mechanism and joint implementation about offset supply and demand we provide empirical support for our theory of offset price formation counterfactual simulations suggest that the price process is dominated by uncertainty

mobility and the return to education testing a roy model with multiple markets self selected migration presents one potential explanation for why observed returns to a college education in local labor markets vary widely even though u s workers are highly mobile to assess the impact of self selection on estimated returns this paper first develops a roy model of mobility and earnings where workers choose in which of the 50 states plus the district of columbia to live and work available estimation methods are either infeasible for a selection model with so many alternatives or place potentially severe restrictions on earnings and the selection process this paper develops an alternative econometric methodology that combines lee s 1983 parametric maximum order statistic approach to reduce the dimensionality of the error terms with more recent work on semiparametric estimation of selection models e g ahn and powell 1993 the resulting semiparametric correction is easy to implement and can be adapted to a variety of other polychotomous choice problems the empirical work which uses 1990 u s census data confirms the role of comparative advantage in mobility decisions the results suggest that self selection of higher educated individuals to states with higher returns to education generally leads to upward biases in ols estimates of the returns to education in state specific labor markets while the estimated returns to a college education are significantly biased correcting for the bias does not narrow the range of returns across states consistent with the finding that the corrected return to a college education differs across the u s the relative state to state migration flows of college versus high school educated individuals respond strongly to differences in the return to education and amenities across states

measuring internal trade distances a new method applied to estimate provincial border effects in canada in this paper we suggest an improved methodology for comparing the intensity of trade across and within national and provincial boundaries earlier efforts to assess border effects for provinces or for countries without internal trade statistics made fairly arbitrary assumptions about average distances for internal trade flows we improve on earlier efforts by taking more complete account of the distribution of population within each province or country internal distance is estimated as a population weighted average of intra city and intercity distances as well as distances to and within rural areas we find higher estimates of internal distances and hence border effects than found in previous studies

migration intentions in the u k which households want to migrate and which succeed the authors extend their earlier study of the impact of the council housing system on migration in the united kingdom in particular they examine the hypothesis that individuals differ in various unobserved ways and that personal characteristics that result in individuals becoming tenants may also discourage migration data are from the general household survey for 1973 and 1974 and pertain to both migration intentions and past migration the extent to which house tenure and other household characteristics affect the probability that a household embarking on a housing search will be successful in realizing its migration intentions is explored in addition the importance of both individual and aggregate local unemployment in determining migration intentions is discussed

earnings by language group in quebec in 1980 and emigration from quebec between 1976 and 1981 between 1976 and 1981 many pople moved out of quebec especially anglophones to the extent that a persons decision to stay or to move may be related to earnings prospects earnings comparisons with individuals who lived in quebec in 1981 may suffer from a selection bias this paper analyses emigration from quebec and earnings with a two equation model using a sample of men drawn from the from the 1981 canadian census it is found that a selection bias is indeed present for anglophones and that the returns to learning french may be underestimated when that bias is ignored excerpt

migration and the public sector a survey charney a h 1993 migration and the public sector a survey reg studies 27 3133 326 a review of the existing literature on human migration reveals relatively few studies that explicitly examine the relationships between public policy decisions and human migration flows the surveyed literature includes studies of national policies such as defence spending migration subsidies and intergovernmental transfers as well as sub national policies such as welfare and unemployment benefits state and local taxes education and other public services suggestions for incorporating public sector information into existing migration analysis frameworks and further areas of research are provided charney a h 1993 la migration et le secteur public une etude reg studies 27 313 326 faire la critique de la documentation disponible sur la migration humaine laisse voir que rares sont les etudes traitant explicitement des rapports entre la politique d etat et les flux migratoires la documentation examinee c

who leaves deciphering immigrant self selection from a developing country abstract using a novel data set from a developing country the federated states of micronesia fsm i analyze an emigration flow to the united states that has no legal barriers to entry and contains detailed information on the immigrant at home and in the united states i find that highly educated workers relative to the home country average have the highest likelihood of migrating from the fsm to the united states i also compare the premigration wages for the migrants and an observationally equivalent matched nonmigrant group and find that there is a positive and statistically significant difference between the two groups indicating that immigrants are also positively selected on unobserved characteristics the observed selection is consistent with the relatively large differences in home country and destination skill prices at the highest skill levels information on the immigrants characteristics before migration is central to my analysis of determining the nature of immigrant self selection on

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

costs of certified emission reductions under the clean development mechanism of the kyoto protocol abstract this paper examines the cost structure of certified emission reductions cers through various types of projects under the clean development mechanism cdm of the kyoto protocol using the cdm project data the costs of cers and their variation across technology and over time and space are estimated by applying alternative functional forms and specifications results show that the average cost of cers decreases with the project scale and duration scale and duration effects significantly vary across project types and there is an upward trend in costs the results also show that the distribution of the projects in the cdm portfolio or a given location does not strictly follow the relative cost structure nor does the distribution of the cdm projects in different host countries follow the principle of comparative advantage more than 84 of the cdm portfolio consists of various energy projects with substantially higher costs of cers than afforestation and reforestation industrial and landfill gas reduction and methane avoidance projects which are only 12 of all projects while per unit cost of abatement plays an important role in the bottom up and top down models to evaluate emission reduction potential and analyze policy alternatives the findings contradict the presumption of such models that project investors seek out low cost opportunities at the aggregate level the cost of cer by the projects in asia and europe is similar but higher than those hosted in africa americas and oceania yet more than 83 of the projects in the cdm portfolio are located in asia more than 69 of the projects are in china and india alone china appears to have a comparative advantage i e lowest opportunity cost in energy efficiency projects while india has a comparative advantage in hydro power projects and brazil has a comparative advantage in wind power projects in contrast energy efficiency category accounts for only 8 of the cdm projects in china hydro power accounts for 12 of the projects in india and wind power accounts for 18 of the projects in brazil the results provide a basis for evaluating the incentives that the mechanism offers as a cost effective policy instrument that balances greenhouse gas mitigation across sectors and regions while fulfilling the objective of the convention

collusive dominant strategy truthfulness abstract we show that collusion and wrong beliefs may cause a dramatic efficiency loss in the vickrey mechanism for auctioning a single good in limited supply we thus put forward a new mechanism guaranteeing efficiency in a very adversarial collusion model where the players can partition themselves into arbitrarily many coalitions exchange money with each other and perfectly coordinate their actions our mechanism bypasses classic impossibility results such as those of green and laffont and of schummer by providing the players with a richer set of strategies making it dominant for every coalition c to instruct each of its members to report truthfully not only his own valuation but also his belonging to c our mechanism is coalitionally rational which implies being individually rational for independent players

a response to glazer and rosenthal we are most grateful to glazer and rosenthal for the attention they have paid to our work abreu and matsushima 1992a b c in the process of criticizing our mechanism they have provided an elegant exposition of it which usefully supplements our own efforts the criticisms themselves we feel are misplaced and based on a close reading but narrow interpretation of our results glazer and rosenthal seek to show that in our mechanisms the iterative removal of strictly dominated strategies is or indeed ought to be controversial in terms of conventional decision theory the iterative logic is impeccable when iterative deletion leads to a unique profile that profile is the unique rationalizable profile the unique nash equilibrium and so on of course the logic of iterative dominance entails common knowledge of rationality the theoretical coherence of this assumption has been questioned in the context of backward programming in extensive form games see luce and raiffa 1957 pp 80 81 rosenthal 1981 basu 1988 reny 1992a 1992b bonanno 1991 binmore 1987a 1987b and gul 1989 among others these paradoxes of common knowledge of rationality have been highlighted in stylized examples such as the finitely repeated prisoners dilemma and rosenthal s centipede game which in fact has been a seminal inspiration for this recent literature 2 but our mechanisms are simultaneous there is no opportunity to demonstrate irrationality strategic or otherwise and therefore no scope to rationalize iteratively dominated behavior from a decision theory perspective the glazer and rosenthal critique might therefore be viewed as an elaborate revival of the indefensible claim that players in a one short prisoners dilemma will choose not to confess because they are both better off doing so than by both playing their dominant strategies within the standard game theory paradigm there is really nothing more to be said before turning to issues of bounded rationality we note that the glazer and rosenthal critique is essentially premised on the existence of a countervailing focal point but what is a focal point the notion is notoriously vague and we are aware of no widely accepted definition 3 this is not to deny that in very simple and particular games certain behavior may be focal frequently focalness is identified with a pareto dominating equilibrium and this is the point of view glazer and rosenthal seem to adopt 4 this is implicit in their acknowledgement that when the social choice function does satisfy pareto optimality our objection loses much of its immediate

can carbon pricing support onshore wind power development in china an assessment based on a large sample project dataset abstract there is much discussion about whether the rapid expansion of onshore wind power in china is sustainable given the decrease in feed in tariffs fit it is unclear whether the recently launched nationwide carbon pricing system which will include 1700 power companies can compensate for decreasing fits and possibly provide new incentives for wind power developments this paper investigates the ability of carbon pricing policies to compensate for declining fits in support of onshore wind power investment in china first we constructed a dataset of 2059 onshore wind power projects from china s thirty provinces between 2006 and 2015 to estimate the levelized costs of electricity lcoe this dataset was used to assess the profitability of each wind project for different carbon prices varying levels of fits curtailment rate and discount rate our findings suggest that the carbon price can compensate partially for the revenue loss caused by declining fits as well as improving the profitability of projects however current carbon prices in china s carbon emission trading pilots are not sufficiently high to compensate for the revenue losses especially under the grid parity scenario consequently without fits the sustainable development of onshore wind power in china is uncertain a sensitivity analysis of the effect of the carbon pricing policy demonstrates that in the case of higher investment risk and more serious curtailment the effect of carbon pricing policy on promoting the wind power investment seems to be more significant

the migration of young adults from non metropolitan counties this article examines young adult migration from non metropolitan counties to either different non metropolitan counties or to metropolitan areas the results show that expected gains in initial earnings provide young entrants to the labor force with a marked incentive to migrate from their non metropolitan counties of origin initial earnings gains stem in part from higher returns to schooling in both metropolitan areas and other non metropolitan counties the propensity to migrate is also sensitive to the costs of migration which in turn are correlated with paternal education and the local presence of extended family copyright 2001 oxford university press

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 environment as a factor of production the authors develop a model of environmental resource use in production with an empirical analysis of how electric power companies consume and bank sulfur dioxide pollution permits the model considers emissions fuels and labor as variable inputs with quasi fixed inputs of permits and capital incorporating information from permit markets allows the authors to distinguish between user costs and asset shadow values their findings indicate that firms are holding stocks of pollution permits for reasons other than short term cost savings the results also reveal substantial substitution possibilities between emissions permits stocks and other factors of production the authors speculate that anticipated secondary markets for carbon offset inventories related to the flexibility mechanisms of the kyoto protocol will have similar effects for greenhouse gas emitting firms

fault tolerance in large games abstract a nash equilibrium is an optimal strategy for each player under the assumption that others play according to their respective nash strategies but it provides no guarantees in the presence of irrational players or coalitions of colluding players in fact no such guarantees exist in general however in this paper we show that large games are innately fault tolerant we quantify the ways in which two subclasses of large games continuous games and anonymous games are resilient against byzantine faults i e irrational behavior coalitions and asynchronous play we also show that general large games have some non trivial resilience against faults

introduction to the distribution of earnings and of individual output by a d roy this article summarises the lasting contribution of roy s 1950 fundamental paper roy a d 1950 the distribution of earnings and of individual output economic journal vol 60 239 pp 489 505

transaction costs institutional rigidities and the size of the clean development mechanism transaction costs and institutional rigidities will reduce the attractiveness of the kyoto protocol flexibility mechanisms compared to domestic greenhouse gas abatement options the clean development mechanism cdm in particular is likely to entail considerable costs of baseline development project registration verification and certification the activities implemented jointly pilot phase and the prototype carbon fund programme give indications about these costs there is evidence that projects with high implementation costs have high transaction costs as well moreover cdm projects have to be approved by host country institutions and so far only a small share of host countries has been able to set up these institutions several of the larger host countries intend to only approve projects if the market price is above a certain threshold some governments will also levy fees to finance costs of approval bodies we assess these issues using a quantitative model of the kyoto protocol permit market we conclude that while changes in demand from annex b countries remain the crucial factor the size of the cdm will depend to a significant degree on transaction costs and institutional barriers in host countries

career migration self selection and the earnings of married men and women in the netherlands 1981 93 the relationship between career migration and earnings is studied for married men and women in the netherlands the hourly wages of married men and women who made a recent long distance move are found to be higher than those of married men and women who did not move or who moved only over a small distance this earning difference between migrants and non migrants seems to be due completely to the fact that the migrants are a favorable self selected group both with regard to their measured characteristics and with regard to their unmeasured characteristics if this favorable self selection is taken into account the male and female migrants turn out to earn significantly less than their non migrating counterparts for the males this finding suggests that before the move they were in relatively unfavorable labor market situations compared with the non migrants with the same measured and unmeasured characteristics for the females the negative effect of migration merely indicates that most long distance moves are still made for the career of their husband authors

the cost of air pollution abatement using data from the u s census bureau the authors have developed comprehensive estimates of pollution abatement costs by industry sector for several major air pollutants their results provide conservative benchmarks for benefit cost analysis of pollution control strategies in developing countries they also provide striking evidence of inefficiency in u s command and control regulation the cost estimates reflect the experience of about 100 000 u s manufacturing facilities under actual operating conditions they are based on a complete accounting of costs including capital labor energy materials and services so they should be more useful for benefit cost analysis than idealized engineering estimates but they also reflect strict pollution control regulation and input prices which are probably somewhat higher on average than those in developing countries they should be interpreted as conservative estimates for environmental planning in developing countries regulatory options that are judged to have high net benefits using these numbers would probably look even better if local abatement cost data were available the estimates in this paper can provide useful information for pollution charges they can also help make targeted regulation more cost effective with scarce resources for monitoring and enforcement new regulatory institutions in developing countries will want to focus initially on industry sectors that are the main sources of locally dangerous pollutants after those sectors are identified targeted regulation should be informed by sectoral differences in abatement cost the estimates suggest for example that cost effective control of suspended particulate emissions will focus on wood pulping rather than steelmaking when both are major sources of suspended particulates the reason average particulate abatement costs are four times higher in steelmaking

self selection and internal migration in the united states abstract within the conceptual framework of the roy model this paper provides an empirical analysis of internal migration flows using data from the national longitudinal survey of youth the theoretical approach highlights regional differences in the returns to skills regions that pay higher returns to skills attract more skilled workers than regions that pay lower returns our empirical results suggest that interstate differences in the returns to skills are a major determinant of both the size and skill composition of internal migration flows persons whose skills are most mismatched with the reward structure offered by their current state of residence are the persons most likely to leave that state and these persons tend to relocate in states which offer higher rewards for their particular skills

the dynamics of u s internal migration in this paper we have theoretically derived a net migration equation and estimated it using time series data for 51 u s regions over the period 1971 1988 the results indicate that the dynamic response of net migration is stable and is significantly related to stock equilibrium changes induced by amenity differentials relative employment opportunities relative real wages and industry composition excerpt

robustly collusion proof implementation a contract with multiple agents may be susceptible to collusion we show that agents collusion imposes no cost in a large class of circumstances with risk neutral agents including both uncorrelated and correlated types in those circumstances any payoff the principal can attain in the absence of collusion including the second best level can be attained in the presence of collusion in a way robust to many aspects of collusion behavior the collusion proof implementation generalizes to a setting in which only a subset of agents may collude provided that noncollusive agents incentives can be protected via an ex post incentive compatible and ex post individually rational mechanism our collusion proof implementation also sheds light on the extent to which hierarchical delegation of contracts can optimally respond to collusion

an empirical puzzle falling migration and growing unemployment differentials among italian regions abstract we investigate the causes behind the low and falling mobility levels in southern italy we argue that a combination of demographic factors high mobility costs and inefficiencies in the job matching process may account for the fall in interregional migration