explaining us immigration 1971 1998 abstract in this paper we develop and estimate a model to explain variations in immigration to the united states by source country since the early 1970s the explanatory variables include ratios to the united states of source country income and education as well as relative inequality in addition we incorporate the stock of previous immigrants and a variety of variables representing different dimensions of the immigration quotas set by policy we use the results to shed light on the impact of policy by simulating the effects of the key changes in immigration policy since the late 1970s we also examine the factors that influenced the composition of u s immigration by source region over the entire period

how resilient are labour markets to natural disasters the case of the 1998 bangladesh flood abstract natural disasters devastate economies as they impede capital accumulation the resilience of labour markets is crucial for the poor who rely on labour to reduce risk we evaluate how the 1998 flood of the century affected wages in bangladesh we find short term declines in agricultural and non agricultural wages agricultural workers who moved towards non agricultural employment to cope benefitted through a lower percentage reduction in short term wages endowed with human capital salaried workers were unable to mitigate income risk extending the eligibility of credit access or relief programmes may preserve local businesses and their employees in the years following a flood

lobbying by ethnic groups and aid allocation we develop a political economic model of foreign aid allocation each ethnic group in the donor country lobbies the government to allocate more aid to its country of origin and the government accepts political contributions from lobby groups initial per capita income of the recipients and those of the ethnic groups are shown to be important determinants of the solution of the political equilibrium we also examine the effects of changes in the degree of corruption aid fatigue and ethnic composition in the donor country on the allocation of aid

extreme weather and civil war does drought fuel conflict in somalia through livestock price shocks climate change leads to more frequent and more intense droughts in somalia in a global context weather shocks have been found to perpetuate poverty and fuel civil conflict by relating regional and temporal variations in violent conflict outbreaks and drought incidence and severity we show that this causality is also valid for somalia at the local level we find that livestock price shocks drive drought induced conflicts through reducing the opportunity costs of conflict participation our estimation results indicate that a temperature rise of around 3 2 degree celcius corresponding to the median ipcc scenario for eastern africa by the end of the century would lower cattle prices by about 4 percent and in turn increase the number of violent conflict by about 58 percent hence climate change will further aggravate somalia s security challenges and calls for decisive action to strengthen both drought and conflict resilience especially in pastoralist and agropastoralist livelihoods

dynamic analysis of innovation and international transfer of technology through licensing abstract this paper develops a quality ladder type dynamic general equilibrium model with endogenous innovation and technology licensing as a major source of international technology transfer in developing countries examining the dynamic characteristics of the model fully we explore the short and long run effects of both an improvement in the probability of reaching a licensing agreement with a given effort and an increase in the license fee rate the model shows that the former promotes innovation and technology transfers in both the long and short run while the latter discourages them

a gravity model analysis of international migration to north america this study examines the influence of political economic and demographic factors on the size and composition of migration flows to north america a modified gravity model is specified and adjusted to include immigration regulations and characteristics specific to the origin and destination countries for empirical test of the model the time period of study is from 1976 1986 and 70 countries are covered for a total of 1540 observations of migration flows to canada and the usa the results reveal that the population of origin countries and the income of destination countries are two major determinants of migration to north america high population areas of asia and latin america provided a large share of the immigrants domestic restrictions on political and civil freedom in origin countries are found to significantly impair migration to north america

international migration and trade agreements the new role of ptas this paper provides an empirical analysis of the relationship between preferential trade agreements ptas and bilateral migration flows building on the empirical literature on the determinants of migration flows i estimate a modified gravity model to assess the role of ptas and their content on bilateral migration flows using a sample of 29 oecd destination countries over the period 1998 2008 i show a strong positive effect of ptas on bilateral migration flows i find that the content of ptas also matters when visa and asylum and labour market related provisions are included in ptas this further stimulates bilateral migration flows different estimation strategies including instrumental variables are employed to address the potential endogeneity bias problems related to ptas and their content

home biased gravity the role of migrant tastes in international trade abstract immigrants tend to buy products from their home countries as a result the more immigrants of a given ethnicity a country has the more it will tend to import from those immigrants countries of origin this effect of migrant heterogeneity is ignored by the standard gravity literature that assumes homogeneous preferences among resident consumers this paper embeds that observed regularity into a structural gravity model gravity derived from the almost ideal demand system generates bilateral trade shares with three distinct components ethnic composition of the resident population bilateral trade cost and per capita income using international trade and transnational migration data among 40 countries this paper estimates the home bias of each ethnic group in tastes the results show that consumers tastes for products from their country of origin deviate from unbiased levels by 35 percent on average ethnic taste bias is found to explain half of the trade bias counterfactuals suggest that anti immigration policy significantly impedes trade with immigrants countries of origin

measuring and explaining cross country immigration policies summary the intensified international migration pressures of the recent decades prompted many developed countries to revise their immigration regulations and increase border controls however the development of these reforms as well as their effectiveness in actually managing immigration flows remain poorly understood the main reason is that migration regulations are hard to quantify which has prevented the construction of a universal measure of migration policy to fill this gap in the literature we construct an indicator of the restrictiveness of immigration entry policy across countries as well as a more comprehensive indicator of migration policy that also accounts for staying requirements and regulations to foster integration specifically we estimate a bayesian state space model to combine all publicly available data sources that are informative on migration policy this methodology allows us to account for measurement errors in the underlying indicators and increases data availability without imputations or other ad hoc manipulations the indexes that we obtain are then used to disentangle the factors determining the toughness of migration regulations our empirical framework accounts for cross country correlation in migration policies and combines elements from the median voter and interest group approach we find strong evidence of spatial correlation in particular in entry restrictiveness yet substantially less in overall immigration policy this suggests that there still remains a substantive national margin in immigration policies in particular in the less visible segments such as staying conditions and integration rights we also find indications of a global trend of increasing restrictiveness in migration entry policy after the financial crisis of 2007 08

migration and foreign aid when it comes to linkages between migration and the global allocation of foreign development assistance the size of the immigrant population from a recipient country residing in a donor country is an important determinant of dyadic aid commitments two complementary hypotheses probe this relationship first donors use foreign aid to achieve their broader immigration goals targeting migrant sending areas to increase development and decrease the demand for entry into the donor country second migrants already residing in the donor country mobilize to lobby for additional aid for their homeland empirical tests on a large sample of country pairs made up of twenty two donors and more than 150 recipients over the period 1993 to 2008 show robust support for these hypotheses

a welfare analysis of global patent protection in a model with endogenous innovation and foreign direct investment abstract this paper constructs a north south quality ladder model in which foreign direct investment fdi is determined by the endogenous location choice of firms and examines analytically how strengthening patent protection in the south affects welfare in the south strengthening patent protection increases the south s welfare by enhancing innovation and fdi but it also allows the firms with patents to charge higher prices for their goods which decreases welfare however the model shows that the former positive welfare effect outweighs the latter negative effect moreover introducing the strictest form of patent protection in the south that is harmonizing patent protection in the south with that in the north may maximize welfare in the south as well as in the north further a similar result can also be obtained in a nonscale effect model

patent protection innovation and technology transfer in a schumpeterian economy abstract this paper analyzes the cross country effects of intellectual property rights ipr protection on the relative wage innovation and technology transfer in a north south quality ladder model with innovative northern r d and adaptive southern r d the degree of ipr protection in two countries differs in terms of patent breadth which determines the markups of northern firms and their southern affiliates respectively in this model stronger ipr protection in the south leads to a permanent decrease in the north south wage gap a temporary increase in the northern innovation rate and a permanent increase in technology transfer by contrast stronger ipr protection in the north leads to a permanent increase in the north south wage gap ambiguous effects on the northern innovation rate and a permanent decrease in technology transfer finally we perform a quantitative analysis by calibrating the model to the us china data and the numerical results support these policy implications in addition to a welfare implication such that strengthening patent protection in one country leads to sizable welfare improvements in both countries

on the sensitivity of mean variance efficient portfolios to changes in asset means some analytical and computational results tbis paper investigates the sensitivity of meanvariance mv efficientportfolios to changes in the means of individual assets when only a budget constraint is imposed on the investment problem the analytical results indicate that an mv efficient portfolio s weights mean and variance can be extremely sensitive to cbanges in asset means when nonnegativity constraints are also imposed on the problem the computational results confirm that a positively weigbted mv efficient portfolio s weigbts are extremely sensitive to cbanges in asset means but the portfolio s returns are not a surprisingly small increase in the mean of just one asset drives balf the securities from the portfolio yet the portfolio s expected return and standard deviation are virtually uncbanged this paper supersedes should investors hold well diversified portfolios financial support from the natural science and engineering research council of canada is gratefully acknowledged we also acknowledge the most capable assistance of ruth cornale simon ng jean marc potier and frederick shen the paper was presented at simon fraser university and the western finance association meetings in san diego we thank the participants especially stephen brown john herzog john heaney ray koopman and bruce lehmann and the editors jon ingersoll and chester spatt for

long term impacts of droughts on labour markets in developing countries evidence from brazil abstract climate shocks have well documented impacts on the short term welfare of rural households in developing countries we investigate the impact of droughts on brazilian labour markets we find long term rural wage losses beyond the immediate impact of the drought with affected workers taking five years to catch up with their peers findings are robust to model specification the severity of the losses varies with the dependence on agricultural income supporting the notion of diversifying portfolio strategies in rural areas to reduce climate related income risk

the relation between mean variance efficiency and arbitrage pricing the mean standard deviation diagram has proven to be a valuable tool for understanding equilibrium asset pricing theory first introduced by markowitz 1952 1959 and tobin 1958 the diagram helps students and researchers alike to develop intuition about the capital asset pricing model capm its properties are useful for analyzing the conditions under which the market portfolio is mean variance efficient and for linking the location of the market portfolio in the diagram with the validity of the capm in addition its simple geometry seems to be the critical inspiration for roll s 1977 argument that the capm cannot feasibly be tested because the market portfolio is unobservable and because of a mathematical equivalence between the individual return beta linearity relation and the market portfolio s mean variance efficiency p 129 recent research on equilibrium asset pricing both theoretical and empirical has tended to focus on multibeta pricing models especially the arbitrage pricing theory apt this paper will show that the simple intuition derived from the

evidence on the political economy of the urbanization process urbanization and economic development go hand in hand as a country moves from a rural agricultural base to an urban industrial base this paper argues that urbanization per se occurs in response to the basic sector shift out of agriculture and government policies such as price controls and trade protection of industry affect the process only indirectly through their effect on sector composition however urban concentration the extent to which a country s urban resources are concentrated in one or two large cities as opposed to more evenly spread is much more directly affected by policies and politics the paper finds specifically that investments in inter regional infrastructure facilitates urban deconcentration away from primate to hinterland cities as does increasing democratization or increasing fiscal decentralization the findings move beyond establishing basic correlations in the data to trying to quantify causal effects in a panel framework with instrumental variables estimation

multilateral resistance to migration the rate of migration observed between two countries does not depend solely on their relative attractiveness but also on the one of alternative destinations following the trade literature we term the influence exerted by other destinations on bilateral flows as multilateral resistance to migration and we show how it can be accounted for when estimating the determinants of migration rates in the context of a general individual random utility maximization model we propose the use of the common correlated effects estimator pesaran 2006 and apply it to high frequency data on the spanish immigration boom between 1997 and 2009 compared to more restrictive estimation strategies developed in the literature the bias goes in the expected direction we find a smaller effect of gdp per capita and a larger effect of migration policies on bilateral rates

an examination of resampled portfolio efficiency we examined the out of sample performance of using resampled portfolio efficiency an approach proposed in 1998 in international asset allocation strategies for the period january 1983 to may 2000 for most models we used to estimate expected returns using strategies based on resampled portfolio efficiency provided some benefits in terms of improved sharpe ratios and abnormal returns over using traditional mean variance strategies we found little evidence however that active mean variance strategies or resampled efficiency strategies would have generated significantly positive abnormal returns for the time period we considered

incomplete contracts and the product cycle the incomplete nature of contracts governing international transactions limits the extent to which the production process can be fragmented across borders in a dynamic general equilibrium ricardian model of north south trade the incompleteness of international contracts is shown to lead to the emergence of product cycles because of contractual frictions goods are initially manufactured in the north where product development takes place as the good matures and becomes more standardized the manufacturing stage of production is shifted to the south to benefit from lower wages following the property rights approach to the theory of the firm the same force that creates product cycles i e incomplete contracts opens the door to a parallel analysis of the determinants of the mode of organization the model gives rise to a new version of the product cycle in which manufacturing is shifted to the south first within firm boundaries and only at a later stage to independent firms in the south relative to a world with only arm s length transacting allowing for intrafirm production transfer by multinational fi rms is shown to accelerate the shift of production towards the south while having an ambiguous effect on relative wages the model delivers macroeconomic implications that complement the work of krugman 1979 as well as microeconomic implications consistent with the findings of the empirical literature on the product cycle

intellectual property rights and foreign direct investment abstract this paper develops a product cycle model with endogenous innovation imitation and foreign direct investment fdi we use this model to determine how stronger intellectual property rights ipr protection in the south affects innovation imitation and fdi we find that stronger ipr protection keeps multinationals safer from imitation but no more so than northern firms instead the increased difficulty of imitation generates resource wasting and imitation disincentive effects that reduce both fdi and innovation the greater resources absorbed in imitation crowd out fdi reduced fdi then transmits resource scarcity in the south back to the north and consequently contracts innovation

intellectual property rights licensing and innovation in an endogenous product cycle model abstract we develop a dynamic general equilibrium model of the product cycle to study the effects of stronger intellectual property rights iprs in the south on the incentives of firms in the north to innovate and to license advanced technologies innovation and licensing are random processes requiring resources stronger iprs increase the licensor s share of rents and reduce the costs of licensing contracts thus the returns to both licensing and innovation would rise while additional resources would be available for r d in consequence innovation and technology transfer would rise however the effect of stronger iprs on relative wages between regions is ambiguous

trade aid and migrations some basic policy issues the link between trade policy and international migration is explored using data from the united states and europe we conclude that restrictive trade policies in industrialised countries have most likely added to migration pressures we then turn to the broader question of the effects of income growth in the sending countries on the propensity to migrate we argue that in relatively poor countries an increase in income will be associated with higher migration flows for middle income countries however income growth will lead to lower migrations in the medium run therefore the relationship between development levels as measured by gdp per capita and the propensity to migrate follows an inverse u pattern econometric analysis of aggregate migration flows from southern europe provides considerable support for such conjecture excerpt

foreign assistance and emigration accounting for the role of non transferred aid since policymakers increasingly regard foreign aid as a means to manage international flows of migrants it is important to obtain accurate empirical evidence on the complex link between aid and migration recent research has shown that the impact of foreign assistance on migrant flows is highly heterogeneous across aid categories in this paper we focus on a dimension of heterogeneity that has so far not been considered in the literature namely whether or not the delivery of foreign aid is associated with a transfer of resources to the recipient country we show in a first step that non transferred aid is quantitatively important accounting for more than 25 of overall aid given by oecd dac donors in 2016 running separate gravity type regressions for transferred and non transferred aid we then find that transferred aid has a much stronger negative impact on migration than the previously used total aid variable that includes the non transferred component as may be expected non transferred aid itself does not appear to affect migrant flows a high share of non transferred aid would therefore be at odds with the donors stated goal of tackling the root causes of migration

selection and network effects migration flows into oecd countries 1990 2000 abstract this paper presents empirical evidence on immigration flows into the oecd countries during the period 1990 2000 our results indicate that network effects are strong but vary between different groups of welfare states and between countries according to the type of immigration policy being applied network effects seem to be less important in the nordic countries which also seem to attract immigrants from the lowest income level source countries we do not find clear evidence that selection effects measured by migration flows being sensitive to differences in public social expenditures have had a major influence on the observed migration patterns until now this may partly be explained by restrictive migration policies which may have dampened the potential selection effects

product cycles endogenous skill acquisition and wage inequality this paper presents an endogenous product cycle overlapping generations model where the supply of skilled labour is endogenously determined this is used to examine how production shifts through imitation by developing countries affect the do mestic wage differential and supply of skilled labour in developed countries in the model production shifts increase the demand for researchers in developed countries and cause higher relative wages for skilled labour this leads to more individuals acquiring the skills as a consequence the model helps to explain the simultaneous increase in the domes tic wage gap and in the supply of skilled labour observed in developed countries jel classification f16 j31

what do we learn from the weather the new climate economy literature a rapidly growing body of research applies panel methods to examine how temperature precipitation and windstorms influence economic outcomes these studies focus on changes in weather realizations over time within a given spatial area and demonstrate impacts on agricultural output industrial output labor productivity energy demand health conflict and economic growth among other outcomes by harnessing exogenous variation over time within a given spatial unit these studies help credibly identify i the breadth of channels linking weather and the economy ii heterogeneous treatment effects across different types of locations and iii nonlinear effects of weather variables this paper reviews the new literature with two purposes first we summarize recent work providing a guide to its methodologies datasets and findings second we consider applications of the new literature including insights for the damage function within models that seek to assess the potential economic effects of future climate change jel c51 d72 o13 q51 q54

climate instability urbanisation and international migration abstractthis paper focuses on climate induced migration we construct a simple theoretical model where in a first step climate shocks accelerate the transition from the traditional to the modern sector leading rural workers to move to urban centres within national borders while in a second step downward pressures on wages due to the greater labour supply in cities push people to engage in international migration to test this hypothesis we exploit a rich panel dataset displaying a representative picture of bilateral migration flows and climatic data across 222 countries for the period 1960 2000 findings suggest that in the next few years the climate induced growth rate of migrant stocks might be in a range between 8 6 per cent and 12 8 per cent especially from developing countries where the level of rural employment is more likely to be affected by climatic shocks

the erosion of colonial trade linkages after independence high trade between countries with colonial ties may be explained by government policies that establish preferential access or as a consequence of networks formed through social interactions using bilateral trade data from 1948 to 2003 we examine the eect of independence on post colonial trade the severing of formal colonial relations can lead to an immediate reduction in trade as preferential access is eliminated as well as a gradual reduction corresponding to the deterioration of trading networks our results reveal that independence reduces colonial trade with its colonizer metropole the reduction cumulates over a 30 year period and the disruption is particularly severe for hostile separations we also find that overall colonial trade falls subsequent to independence but to a lesser extent than trade with the metropole

the analytics of performance measurement using a security market line security market line sml analysis while an important tool has never been fully justified from a theoretical standpoint assuming symmetric information and an inefficient index we show that sml analysis can be grossly misleading since in general efficient and inefficient portfolios can plot above and below the sml on a more positive note if sml analysis uses the return on a marketed riskless asset for the zero beta rate efficient portfolios must plot above the sml nonetheless arbitrarily inefficient portfolios also plot above the sml mean variance theory is still the premier theory in finance it continues to survive theoretical criticism and empirical rejection2 and it does so in no small part because of the popularity of using deviations from the security market line sml in performance measurement of portfolio managers and in event studies of the price impact of information the sml is the relationship between risk and return predicted by the mean variance model namely that risk as measured by beta and expected return are linearly related sml analysis interprets deviations in expected return from the sml as abnormal returns above or below what is appropriate or warranted for the amount of risk taken on however in the mean variance model all assets and portfolios lie on the sml ex ante and any ex post deviations from the sml are attributable solely to statistical measurement errors it is for this reason that roll 22 25 has argued that justification for sml analysis must lie outside the original mean variance model the purpose of this paper and its companion paper dybvig and ross 8 is to study whether sml analysis is valid in several plausible theoretical frameworks i e whether theory justifies intuition specifically in this article we examine the validity of using sml analysis when the index portfolio is inefficient in the companion paper we look at performance yale school of management the authors appreciate especially helpful comments from michael brennan gregory conner mike gibbons mark grinblatt jon ingersoll paul pfeiderer and richard roll the first author is grateful for support under the batterymarch fellowship program and the second author is grateful for support from the national science foundation this paper and its campanion paper dybvig and ross 8 evolved from dybvig and ross 7

where on earth is everybody global matrices of bilateral migrant stocks spanning 1960 2000 are presented disaggregated by gender and based primarily on the foreign born definition of migrants more than one thousand census and population register records are combined to construct decennial matrices corresponding to the five census rounds between 1960 and 2000 for the first time a comprehensive picture of bilateral global migration over the second half of the 20th century emerges the data reveal that the global migrant stock increased from 92 million in 1960 to 165 million in 2000 quantitatively migration between developing countries dominates constituting half of all international migration in 2000 when the partition of india and the dissolution of the soviet union are accounted for migration between developing countries is remarkably stable over the period migration from developing to developed countries is the fastest growing component of international migration in both absolute and relative terms the united states has

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

temperature and income reconciling new cross sectional and panel estimates this paper presents novel evidence and analysis of the relationship between temperature and income first using sub national data from 12 countries in the americas we provide new evidence that the negative cross country relationship between temperature and income also exists within countries and even within states second we provide a theoretical framework for reconciling the substantial negative association between temperature and income in the cross section with the even stronger short run effects of temperature estimated by panel models the theoretical framework suggests that half of the negative short term effects of temperature may be offset in the long run through adaptation this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

climatic factors as determinants of international migration we examine environmental change as a potential determinant of international migration we distinguish between unexpected short run factors captured by natural disasters as well as long run climate change and climate variability captured by deviations and volatilities of temperatures and rainfall from and around their long run averages starting from a simple neo classical model we use a panel dataset of bilateral migration flows for the period 1960 2000 that allows us to control for numerous time varying and time invariant factors we find no direct impact of climatic change on international migration across our entire sample these results are robust when conditioning on characteristics of origin countries as well as when further considering migrants returning home and the potential endogeneity of our network variable in contrast there is evidence of indirect effects of environmental factors going through wages we further find strong evidence that natural disasters beget greater flows of migrants to urban environs

migration risk and liquidity constraints in el salvador abstract this article utilizes panel data from el salvador to investigate the use of transnational migration as an ex post risk management strategy i show that adverse agricultural conditions in el salvador increase both migration to the united states and remittances sent back to el salvador i show that in the absence of any agricultural shocks the probability that a household sent members to the united states would have decreased on average by 24 26 i also show that the 2001 earthquakes reduced net migration to the united states a one standard deviation increase in earthquake damage reduced the average probability of northward migration by 37 11 the evidence suggests that the effects of the earthquakes had more to do with households retaining labor at home to cope with the effects of the disaster than with the earthquakes disrupting migration financing

factor movements and commodity trade as complements abstract several models are presented in which factor mobility leads to an increase in the volume of world trade the models share the common characteristic that the basis for trade is something other than differences in relative factor endowments these alternative bases for trade include returns to scale imperfect competition production and factor taxes and differences in production technology taken together the models suggest a more general idea the widely held notion that trade in goods and factors are substitutes is in fact a rather special result which is a general characteristic only of factor proportions models

climate variability and international migration the importance of the agricultural linkage abstract while there is considerable interest in understanding the climate migration relationship particularly in the context of concerns about global climatic change little is known about its underlying mechanisms in the paper we combine a rich panel data on annual bilateral international migration flows with an extensive data on climate variability across the countries to investigate in depth the climate migration link we find a positive and statistically significant relationship between temperature and international outmigration only in the most agriculture dependent countries consistent with the widely documented adverse impact of temperature on agricultural productivity further the temperature migration relationship is nonlinear and resembles the nonlinear temperature yield relationship in addition migration flows to current major destinations are especially temperature sensitive policies to address issues related to climate induced international migration would be more efficient if focused on the agriculture dependent countries and especially people in those countries whose livelihoods depend on agriculture

income maximization and the selection and sorting of international migrants abstract two prominent features of international labor movements are that the more educated are more likely to emigrate positive selection and more educated migrants are more likely to settle in destination countries with high rewards to skill positive sorting using data on emigrant stocks by schooling level and source country in oecd destinations we find that a simple model of income maximization can account for both phenomena results on selection show that migrants for a source destination pair are more educated relative to non migrants the larger is the absolute skill related difference in earnings between the destination country and the source results on sorting indicate that the relative stock of more educated migrants in a destination is increasing in the absolute earnings difference between high and low skilled workers we use our framework to compare alternative specifications of international migration estimate the magnitude of migration costs by source destination pair and assess the contribution of wage differences to how migrants sort themselves across destination countries

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

migration and development dissecting the anatomy of the mobility transition abstract emigration first increases and then decreases as a country experiences economic development this inverted u shaped cross sectional relationship between emigration and development was first hypothesized by zelinsky s theory of the mobility transition although several mechanisms have been proposed to explain the upward segment of the curve the most common being the existence of financial constraints they have not been examined in a systematic way in this paper we propose two decomposition methods to disentangle the main drivers of the mobility transition curve to oecd destination countries our simple decompositions shed light on the role of both microeconomic drivers i e financial incentives and constraints and macroeconomic drivers as well as the skill composition of the population our double decomposition further distinguishes between migration aspirations and realization rates by education level overall we provide consistent evidence that the role of financial constraints while relevant for the poorest countries is limited rather a large fraction of the increasing segment is explained by the skill composition and by macroeconomic drivers i e by factors that do not change in the short run

intellectual property rights and foreign direct investment a welfare analysis abstract this paper examines how intellectual property rights ipr protection affects innovation and foreign direct investment fdi using a north south quality ladder model incorporating the exogenous and costless imitation of technology and subsidy policies for both r d and fdi we show that for the interior steady state to be stable either r d or fdi subsidy rates must be positive our findings also indicate that strengthening ipr protection promotes both innovation and fdi moreover a strengthening of ipr protection can also improve welfare if the initial ipr protection in the south is weak and the r d subsidy rate is not too high

the sampling error in estimates of mean variance efficient portfolio weights this paper presents an exact finite sample statistical procedure for testing hypotheses about the weights of mean variance efficient portfolios the estimation and inference procedures on efficient portfolio weights are performed in the same way as for the coefficients in an ols regression ols t and f statistics can be used for tests on efficient weights and when returns are multivariate normal these statistics have exact t and f distributions in a finite sample using 20 years of data on 11 country stock indexes we find that the sampling error in estimates of the weights of a global efficient portfolio is large

trends in rainfall and economic growth in africa a neglected cause of the african growth tragedy abstract we examine the role of rainfall trends in poor growth performance of sub saharan african nations relative to other developing countries using a new cross country panel climatic data set in an empirical economic growth framework our results show that rainfall has been a significant determinant of poor economic growth for african nations but not for other countries depending on the benchmark measure of potential rainfall we estimate that the direct impact under the scenario of no decline in rainfall would have resulted in a reduction of between around 15 and 40 of today s gap in african gdp per capita relative to the rest of the developing world

on the trade growth and welfare effects of intellectual property rights protection to examine how intellectual property rights protection affects trade growth and welfare i develop a two country r d based growth model in which final goods firms in both countries determine the range of imported varieties in the overall use of intermediate inputs i show that strengthening patent protection in either country increases the range of imported varieties of intermediate goods and stimulates economic growth in the country that strengthened patent protection moreover i also show that the nash equilibrium level of patent protection is stronger than the globally optimal level of patent protection i

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

a sectoral analysis of price setting behavior in us manufacturing industries abstract in this paper we estimate new keynesian phillips curves nkpc for u s manufacturing industries defined at the sic two digit level over the period 1959 to 1996 this enables us to measure the extent of nominal inertia across industrial sectors a key innovation in this research is the use of intermediate goods costs rather than labor costs as a measure of marginal costs intermediate goods costs are a more significant element of costs for the firms populating our sample and are not subject to the criticism that wage rates are nonallocative we find that there is statistically significant variability in estimates of price stickiness ranging from eight months to two years we also find that estimates of backward looking price setting behavior vary with some industries characterized by 81 of pricing decisions made in a purely forward looking manner while in others only 52 of pricing decisions are made that way market concentration as captured by the herfindahl hirschman index appears to be

aid and migration substitutes or complements this paper investigates the impact of aid on migration and identifies two channels bilateral aid influences migration by enhancing the information about labor market conditions in the destination country attraction effect total aid correlates with migration through increasing expenditure financing and hence wages in countries of origin push effect we compute the critical level of income above which emigration and income are substitutes which is about us 7 300 per capita in ppp 2000 prices for example brazil or russia we argue that for countries below this threshold there is a trade off between aid and migration policies a tightening of the migration policy is equivalent to a reduction of the level of aid by about 24 a comparison of skilled and unskilled migrations shows that the former are more sensitive to the attraction effect than the latter

international protection of intellectual property we study the incentives that governments have to protect intellectual property in a trading world economy we consider a world economy with ongoing innovation in two countries that differ in market size and in their capacities for innovation after describing the determination of national patent policies in a non cooperative regime of patent protection we ask why is intellectual property better protected in the north than in the south we also study international patent agreements by deriving the properties of an efficient global regime of patent protection and asking whether harmonization of patent policies is necessary or sufficient for global efficiency jel o34 f13 during the 1980 s and early 1990 s the united states and several european countries expressed strong dissatisfaction with what they deemed to be inadequate protection of intellectual property in many developing countries the developed countries made the upgrading of intellectual property rights iprs one of their highest priorities for the uruguay round of trade talks their efforts bore fruit in the agreement on traderelated aspects of intellectual property rights trips which was approved as part of the final act of the uruguay round trips establishes minimum standards of protection for several categories of intellectual property for example in the area of new technology it essentially harmonizes

networks in the modern economy mexican migrants in the u s labor market this paper attempts to identify job networks among mexican migrants in the u s labor market the empirical analysis uses data on migration patterns and labor market outcomes based on a sample of individuals belonging to multiple origin communities in mexico over a long period of time each community s network is measured by the proportion of the sampled individuals who are located at the destination the united states in any year we verify that the same individual is more likely to be employed and to hold a higher paying nonagricultural job when his network is exogenously larger by including individual fixed effects in the employment and occupation regressions and by using rainfall in the origin community as an instrument for the size of the network at the destination

international aid from the recipient perspective public or private good input assistance abstractthis article proposes a theoretical model from the recipient perspective that considers what type of assistance a donor country should provide public good assistance or private good assistance we investigate the effects of migration and free riders under both types of assistance we empirically apply this model to the rapidly growing economies and a large official development assistance disbursement for east asia

the impact of foreign aid on migration revisited abstract while policymakers hope to stem migration flows by giving foreign aid existing empirical evidence points in the opposite direction by loosening budget constraints aid tends to encourage people to emigrate in this paper we revisit the aid migration link using a substantially extended and adjusted econometric approach based on a gravity model of international migration in contrast to the previous literature we obtain evidence of a negative relationship between the total aid a country receives and emigration rates this even holds for the poorer part of recipient countries which suggests that the budgetary constraint channel does not play a significant role in shaping migration decisions the most plausible explanation for these contrasting results is that unlike in previous studies we use migrant flows rather than migrant stocks as the dependent variable in substantive terms the limited importance of the budgetary constraint channel might reflect that positive welfare effects of foreign aid tend to manifest themselves in improved public services for the poor rather than higher incomes which is in line with the reorientation of foreign aid towards social sectors under the millennium development goals

aid trade and migration how do bilateral flows interact this paper takes as its point of departure the european commission s position set out in 2005 which laid clear emphasis on aid and trade as tools for controlling immigration we attempt to subject this position to empirical investigation we exploit data on bilateral aid trade and migration flows between developed and developing countries for the period 2000 10 adopting an instrumental variable approach to address the endogeneity issue due to potential simultaneity bias our results establish that increasing aid and trade with developing countries is likely to fail to contain immigration at least in the short run the pattern of results is consistent with the hypothesis that promoting development in migrant sending countries or cooperating with such countries to control migration outflows is not sufficient to lessen immigration increasing visa restrictions and controls at borders is generally controversial still the results imply that policymakers cannot attain their short term immigration goals with the so called smart solutions of aid and trade

stage dependent intellectual property rights inspired by the chinese experience we develop a schumpeterian growth model of distance to frontier in which economic growth in the developing country is driven by domestic innovation as well as imitation and transfer of foreign technologies through foreign direct investment we show that optimal intellectual property rights ipr protection is stage dependent at an early stage of development the country implements weak ipr protection to facilitate imitation at a later stage of development the country implements strong ipr protection to encourage domestic innovation therefore the growth maximizing and welfare maximizing levels of patent strength increase as the country evolves towards the world technology frontier and this dynamic pattern is consistent with the actual evolution of patent strength in china

licensing versus direct investment implications for economic growth we develop a symmetric two country model of foreign direct investment fdi that captures the internalization decision and its implications for both the rate and magnitude of innovations when mode choice licensing versus fdi is fixed a subsidy to multinational production increases the rate but decreases the size of innovations when mode can switch the rate and size of innovations both increase provided the subsidy is not too large although innovation size decreases for industries where firms already were choosing fdi innovation size increases for industries where firms switch from licensing to fdi because multinationals choose larger innovations than licensors 2002 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

the migration response to increasing temperatures climate change especially the warming trend experienced in recent years by several countries could affect agricultural productivity as a consequence the income of rural populations will change and with it the incentives for people to remain in rural areas using data from 115 countries between 1960 and 2000 we analyze the effect of differential warming trends across countries on the probability of either migrating out of the country or from rural to urban areas we find that higher temperatures in middle income economies increased migration rates to urban areas and to other countries in poor countries higher temperatures reduced the probability of migration to cities and to other countries consistently with the presence of severe liquidity constraints in middle income countries migration represents an important margin of adjustment to global warming potentially contributing to structural change and even increasing income per worker such a mechanism however does not seem to work in poor economies

remittances and working poverty abstractthis article shows that the level and the predictability of remittances reduce working poverty in receiving economies through their effects on labour market dynamics it takes advantage of the new cross country dataset ilo kilm 7th edition containing information on the share of individuals working for less than us 2 per day to identify the main impacts the article proposes a novel approach to deal with the endogeneity of remittances and migration in addition the results are robust to the possible error in measuring working poverty to the potential attrition bias and to the presence of various control variables