bargaining over governments in a stochastic environment in this paper i structurally estimate a stochastic bargaining model of government formation in a multiparty parliamentary democracy and i conduct policy experiments to evaluate the effects of changes in the bargaining procedure i show that the model fits well data on the duration of negotiations and government durations in postwar italy also i show that changes in the proposer selection process would not affect either the duration of negotiations or government durations whereas the imposition of a strict deadline would in general reduce the incentives to delay agreement as well as government durations

uniqueness of stationary equilibrium payoffs in the baron ferejohn model abstract we consider a multilateral sequential bargaining model in which the players may differ in their probability of being selected as the proposer and the rate at which they discount future payoffs for games in which agreement requires less than unanimous consent we characterize the set of stationary subgame perfect equilibrium payoffs with this characterization we establish the uniqueness of the equilibrium payoffs for the case where the players have the same discount factor we show that the payoff to a player is nondecreasing in his probability of being selected as the proposer for the case where the players have the same probability of being selected as the proposer we show that the payoff to a player is nondecreasing in his discount factor journal of economic literature classification numbers c72 c78 d70

the effect of immigration along the distribution of wages this paper analyses the effect immigration has on wages of native workers unlike most previous work we estimate wage effects along the distribution of wages we derive a flexible empirical strategy that does not rely on pre allocating immigrants to particular skill groups in our empirical analysis we demonstrate that immigrants downgrade considerably upon arrival as for the effects on native wages we find that immigration depresses wages below the 20th percentile of the wage distribution but leads to slight wage increases in the upper part of the wage distribution the overall wage effect of immigration is slightly positive the positive wage effects we find are although modest too large to be explained by an immigration surplus we suggest alternative explanations based on the idea that immigrants are paid less than the value of what they contribute to production generating therefore a surplus and we assess the magnitude of these effects

standard setting committees consensus governance for shared technology platforms voluntary standard setting organizations ssos use a consensus process to create new compatibility standards practitioners have suggested that ssos are increasingly politicized and perhaps incapable of producing timely standards this article develops a simple model of standard setting committees and tests its predictions using data from the internet engineering task force an sso that produces many of the standards used to run the internet the results show that an observed slowdown in standards production between 1993 and 2003 can be linked to distributional conflicts created by the rapid commercialization of the internet jel c78 l15 l86

the labor market impact of immigration a quasi experiment exploiting immigrant location rules in germany with the fall of the berlin wall ethnic germans living in eastern europe and the former soviet union were given the opportunity to migrate to germany within 15 years 2 8 million individuals had done so upon arrival these immigrants were exogenously allocated to different regions to ensure an even distribution across the country their inflow can therefore be seen as a quasi experiment of immigration i analyze the effect of these inflows on skill specific employment rates and wages the results indicate a displacement effect of 3 1 unemployed workers for every 10 immigrants that find a job but no effect on relative wages

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

testing for liquidity constraints in euler equations with complementary data sources previous tests for liquidity constraints using consumption euler equations have frequently split the sample on the basis of wealth arguing that low wealth consumers are more likely to be constrained we propose alternative tests using different and more direct information on borrowing constraints obtained from the 1983 survey of consumer finances in a first stage we estimate probabilities of being constrained which are then utilized in a second sample the panel study of income dynamics to estimate switching regression models of the euler equation our estimates indicate stronger excess sensitivity associated with the possibility of liquidity constraints than the sample splitting approach

the wage impact of the marielitos a reappraisal this article brings a new perspective to the analysis of the wage effects of the mariel boatlift crisis in which an estimated 125 000 cuban refugees migrated to florida between april and october 1980 the author revisits the question of wage impacts from such a supply shock drawing on the cumulative insights of research on the economic impact of immigration that literature shows that the wage impact must be measured by carefully matching the skills of the immigrants with those of the incumbent workforce given that at least 60 of the marielitos were high school dropouts this article specifically examines the wage impact for this low skill group this analysis overturns the prior finding that the mariel boatlift did not affect miami s wage structure the wage of high school dropouts in miami dropped dramatically by 10 to 30 suggesting an elasticity of wages with respect to the number of workers between 0 5 and 1 5

uniqueness of equilibrium payoffs in the stochastic model of bargaining abstract i provide a sufficient condition for the uniqueness of equilibrium payoffs in a model of stochastic bargaining with unanimity rule and risk averse players my condition s implies condition c of merlo and wilson 1995 and is easy to verify in applications

a structural model of government formation in this paper we estimate a bargaining model of government formation in parliamentary democracies we use the estimated structural model to conduct constitutional experiments aimed at evaluating the impact of institutional features of the political environment on the duration of the government formation process the type of coalitions that form and their relative stability

cross country variation in the impact of international migration canada mexico and the united states using data drawn from the canadian mexican and u s censuses we find a numerically comparable and statistically significant inverse relation between immigrant induced shifts in labor supply and wages in each of the three countries a 10 labor supply shift is associated with a 3 4 opposite signed change in wages despite the similarity in the wage response theimpactofmigrationonthewagestructuredifferssignificantlyacrosscountries international migration narrowed wage inequality in canada increased it in the united states and reduced the relative wage of workers at the bottom of the skill distribution in mexico jel j31 j61

female labour supply and on the job search an empirical model estimated using complementary data sets we develop an empirical model of labour supply that is consistent with on the job search and which is identified and estimated by combining two data sets the u k family expenditure survey which contains information on income and expenditure and the u k labour force survey which has data on hours and job search behaviour we provide statistical evidence on the compatibility of the two samples for the purposes of estimating our model we find that search has a direct negative effect on hours of work and we establish a strong positive effect of wages on hours

immigration wage effects by origin we estimate the direct partial wage effects of immigrant induced increases in labor supply using the national skill cell approach with longitudinal records drawn from norwegian administrative registers the results show overall negative but heterogeneous wage effects with larger effects on immigrant wages than on native wages and with native wages more responsive to inflows from nordic countries than from developing countries these patterns are consistent with natives and nordic citizens being close substitutes while natives and immigrants from developing countries are imperfect substitutes estimates are sensitive to accounting for effective immigrant experience selective native participation and variation in demand conditions and native labor supply

split sample instrumental variables estimates of the return to schooling this article reevaluates recent instrumental variables iv estimates of the returns to schooling in light of the fact that two stage least squares is biased in the same direction as ordinary least squares ols even in very large samples we propose a split sample instrumental variables ssiv estimator that is not biased toward ols ssiv uses one half of a sample to estimate parameters of the first stage equation estimated first stage parameters are then used to construct fitted values and second stage parameter estimates in the other half sample ssiv is biased toward 0 but this bias can be corrected the splt sample estimators confirm and reinforce some previous findings on the returns to schooling but fail to confirm others

immigration and housing rents in american cities is there a local economic impact of immigration immigration pushes up rents and housing values in us destination cities the positive association of rent growth and immigrant inflows is pervasive in time series for all metropolitan areas i use instrumental variables based on a shift share of national levels of immigration into metropolitan areas an immigration inflow equal to 1 of a city s population is associated with increases in average rents and housing values of about 1 the results suggest an economic impact that is an order of magnitude bigger than that found in labor markets

the impact of immigration on the structure of wages theory and evidence from britain immigration to the uk particularly among more educated workers has risen appreciably over the past 30 years and as such has raised labor supply however studies of the impact of immigration have failed to find any significant effect on the wages of native born workers in the uk this is potentially puzzling since there is evidence that changes in the supply of educated natives have had significant effects on their wages using a pooled time series of british cross sectional micro data on male wages and employment from the mid 1970s to the mid 2000s this paper offers one possible resolution to this puzzle namely that in the uk natives and foreign born workers are imperfect substitutes we show that immigration has primarily reduced the wages of immigrants and in particular of university educated immigrants with little discernable effect on the wages of the native born

estimating marginal returns to medical care evidence from at risk newborns a key policy question is whether the benefits of additional medical expenditures exceed their costs we propose a new approach for estimating marginal returns to medical spending based on variation in medical inputs generated by diagnostic thresholds specifically we combine regression discontinuity estimates that compare health outcomes and medical treatment provision for newborns on either side of the very low birth weight threshold at 1500 grams first using data on the census of us births in available years from 1983 2002 we find that newborns with birth weights just below 1500 grams have lower one year mortality rates than do newborns with birth weights just above this cutoff even though mortality risk tends to decrease with birth weight one year mortality falls by approximately one percentage point as birth weight crosses 1500 grams from above which is large relative to mean infant mortality of 5 5 just above 1500 grams second using hospital discharge records for births in five states in available years from 1991 2006 we find that newborns with birth weights just below 1500 grams have discontinuously higher charges and frequencies of specific medical inputs hospital costs increase by approximately 4 000 as birth weight crosses 1500 grams from above relative to mean hospital costs of 40 000 just above 1500 grams under an assumption that observed medical spending fully captures the impact of the very low birth weight designation on mortality our estimates suggest that the cost of saving a statistical life of a newborn with birth weight near 1500 grams is on the order of 550 000 in 2006 dollars

a non cooperative bargaining game with risk averse players and an uncertain finite horizon abstract for an alternating offer bargaining game with an uncertain horizon the equilibrium payoff to a player is greater the less risk averse is he relative to his opponent as the horizon becomes infinite in length the equilibrium partition converges to the nash bargaining solution

attenuation bias in measuring the wage impact of immigration although economic theory predicts an inverse relation between relative wages and immigration induced supply shifts it has been difficult to document such effects the weak evidence may be partly due to sampling error in a commonly used measure of the supply shift the immigrant share of the workforce after controlling for permanent factors that determine wages in specific labor markets little variation remains in the immigrant share we find significant sampling error in this measure of supply shifts in canadian and u s census data correcting for the resulting attenuation bias can substantially increase existing estimates of the wage impact of immigration

the impact of immigration why do studies reach such different results we classify the empirical literature on the wage impact of immigration into three groups where studies in the first two groups estimate different relative effects and studies in the third group estimate the total effect of immigration on wages we interpret the estimates obtained from the different approaches through the lens of the canonical model to demonstrate that they are not comparable we then relax two key assumptions in this literature allowing for inelastic and heterogeneous labor supply elasticities of natives and the downgrading of immigrants downgrading occurs when the position of immigrants in the labor market is systematically lower than the position of natives with the same observed education and experience levels downgrading means that immigrants receive lower returns to the same measured skills than natives when these skills are acquired in their country of origin we show that heterogeneous labor supply elasticities if ignored may complicate the interpretation of wage estimates and particularly the interpretation of relative wage effects moreover downgrading may lead to biased estimates in those approaches that estimate relative effects of immigration but not in approaches that estimate total effects we conclude that empirical models that estimate total effects not only answer important policy questions but are also more robust to alternative assumptions than models that estimate relative effects

native internal migration and the labor market impact of immigration this paper presents a theoretical and empirical study of how immigration influences the joint determination of the wage structure and internal migration behavior for native born workers in local labor markets using data from the 1960 2000 decennial censuses the study shows that immigration is associated with lower in migration rates higher out migration rates and a decline in the growth rate of the native workforce the native migration response attenuates the measured impact of immigration on wages in a local labor market by 40 to 60 per cent depending on whether the labor market is defined at the state or metropolitan area level

the management of countertrade factors influencing success countertrade success was found to be higher for large firms that were experienced in exporting and in countertrade operations could accommodate countertrade takebacks and valued vertical integration exported high value high visibility complex products had a low reputation for quality and had excess capacity success was also higher if the importer valued quality had low technical proficiency was inexperienced in exporting faced barriers in export markets had a high cost of forward contracts foreign exchange constraints and faced a disequilibrium exchange rate

the impact of mass migration on the israeli labor market mass migration from the former soviet union increased the israeli population by 12 in the first half of the 1990s this exodus was precipitated by the lifting of emigration restrictions in an unstable ussr and by the open immigration policy of israel toward soviet jews who faced more restrictive entry policies elsewhere i use this natural experiment to study the impact of immigration on the labor market outcomes of native israelis ols yields significant reductions in wages and small reductions in employment however ols is biased if the distribution of immigrants across occupations in israel was not exogenous to relative wage and employment conditions i instrument for the entry of russians into an occupation in israel using information on their former occupations in the ussr there is a significant positive correlation between the former presence of the immigrants in an occupation in the ussr and their presence in that occupation in israel but the previous occupational choices of russians abroad were independent of israeli wage and employment growth subsequent to their migration iv estimates indicate that immigration did not have an adverse impact on native israeli labor market outcomes

the effect of low skilled immigration on u s prices evidence from cpi data i exploit the large variation across u s cities and through time in the relative size of the low skilled immigrant population to estimate the causal effect of immigration on prices of nontraded goods and services using an instrumental variables strategy i find that at current immigration levels a 10 percent increase in the share of low skilled immigrants in the labor force decreases the price of immigrant intensive services such as housekeeping and gardening by 2 percent wage equations suggest that lower wages are a likely channel through which these effects take place however wage effects are significantly larger for low skilled immigrants than for low skilled natives implying that the two are imperfect substitutes

legislative bargaining with a stochastic surplus and costly recognition abstract merging eraslan and merlo 2002 and yildirim 2007 i examine legislative bargaining with a stochastic surplus and costly recognition i show the uniqueness of the symmetric stationary payoff under monotone hazard rate and an inefficiently early agreement under unanimity

immigration and wages evidence from construction to identify relative wage impacts of immigration we make use of certification and licensing requirements in the norwegian construction sector that give rise to exogenous variation in immigrant employment shares across trades individual panel data reveal substantially lower wage growth for workers in trades with rising immigrant employment than for other workers selective attrition from the sector masks the causal wage impact unless accounted for by individual fixed effects for low and semi skilled workers effects of new immigration are comparable for natives and older immigrant cohorts consistent with perfect substitutability between native and immigrant labor within trade finally we present evidence that immigration reduces price inflation as price increases over the sample period were significantly lower in activities with growth in the immigrant share than in activities with no or small change in immigrant employment

immigration wages and education a labour market equilibrium structural model recent literature analysing wage effects of immigration assumes labour supply is fixed across education experience cells this article departs from this assumption estimating a labour market equilibrium dynamic discrete choice model on u s micro data for 1967 2007 individuals adjust to immigration by changing education participation and or occupation adjustments are heterogeneous 4 2 26 2 of prime aged native males change their careers of them some switch to white collar careers and increase education by about three years others reduce labour market attachment and reduce education also by about three years these adjustments mitigate initial effects on wages and inequality natives that are more similar to immigrants are the most affected on impact but also have a larger margin to adjust and differentiate adjustments also produce a self selection bias in the estimation of wage effects at the lower tail of the distribution which the model corrects

native competition and low skilled immigrant inflows this paper demonstrates that immigration decisions depend on local labor market conditions by documenting the change in low skilled immigrant inflows in response to supply increases among the us born using pre reform welfare participation rates as an instrument for changes in native labor supply i find that immigrants competing with native entrants systematically prefer cities with smaller supply shocks the extent of the response is substantial for each native woman working due to reform 0 5 fewer female immigrants enter the local labor force these results provide direct evidence that international migration flows tend to equilibrate returns across us local labor markets

is the new immigration really so bad this article reviews the recent evidence on us immigration focusing on two key questions 1 does immigration reduce the labour market opportunities of less skilled natives 2 have immigrants who arrived after the 1965 immigration reform act been successfully assimilated overall evidence that immigrants have harmed the opportunities of less educated natives is scant on the question of assimilation the success of the us born children of immigrants is a key yardstick by this metric post 1965 immigrants are doing reasonably well even children of the least educated immigrant origin groups have closed most of the education gap with the children of natives

the effect of immigration on wages exploiting exogenous variation at the national level this paper estimates the effect of immigration on native wages at the national level taking into account the endogenous allocation of immigrants across skill cells time varying exogenous variation across skill cells for a given country is provided by interactions of push factors distance and skill cell dummies distance mitigates the effect of push factors more severely for less educated and middle experienced because the analysis focuses on the united states and canada i propose a two stage approach sub sample 2sls that estimates the first stage regression with an augmented sample of destination countries and the second stage equation with the restricted sub sample of interest i derive asymptotic results for this estimator and suggest several applications beyond the current one the empirical analysis indicates a substantial bias in estimated ols wage elasticities to immigration sub sample 2sls estimates average 1 2 and are very stable to the use of alternative instruments

the advantageous nature of risk aversion in a three player bargaining game where acceptance of a proposal requires a simple majority abstract in a three player bargaining game in which acceptance of a proposed allocation requires only the approval of a simple majority it is shown that the most least risk averse player receives the highest lowest expected share when the preferences of the players are not too diverse

immigration and inequality immigration is often viewed as a proximate cause of the rising wage gap between highand low skilled workers nevertheless there is controversy over the appropriate theoretical and empirical framework for measuring the presumed effect and over the precise magnitudes involved this paper offers an overview and synthesis of existing knowledge on the relationship between immigration and inequality focusing on evidence from cross city comparisons in the u s while some researchers have claimed that a cross city research design is inherently flawed i argue that the evidence from cross city comparisons is remarkably consistent with recent findings based on aggregate time series data in particular cross city and aggregate time series comparisons provide support for three key conclusions 1 workers with below high school education are perfect substitutes for those with a high school education 2 high school equivalent and college equivalent workers are imperfect substitutes with an elasticity of substitution on the order of 2 3 within education groups immigrants and natives are imperfect substitutes together these results imply that the average impacts of recent immigrant inflows on the relative wages of u s natives are small the effects on overall wage inequality including natives and immigrants are larger reflecting the concentration of immigrants in the tails of the skill distribution and higher residual inequality among immigrants than natives even so immigration accounts for a small share 5 of the increase in u s wage inequality between 1980 and 2000