has job stability decreased population data from a small open economy we use a population based employer employee dataset to analyze changes in job stability in norway we first present descriptive analyses of tenure and separation rates followed by regression adjusted measures controlling for changes in demographics and the business cycle we see only weak evidence of changes in the tenure rates in particular for the public sector we find a slight increase in short tenures and a decrease in tenures above eight years however we do not find that this tendency towards less stable jobs leads to an increase in the flow to unemployment or out of the labor force

the effective tax rate and the pretax rate of return abstract this paper presents new estimates of the taxes paid on nonfinancial corporate capital on the pretax rate of return to capital and on the effective tax rate the basic time series show that both the pretax rate of return and the effective tax rate have varied substantially in the past quarter century an explicit analysis indicates that after adjusting for different aspects of the business cycle pretax profitability was between one and 1 5 percentage points lower in the 1970s than in the 1960s the rate of profitability in the 1960s was also about one half of a percentage point greater than the profitability in the 7 years of the 1950s after the korean war changes in productivity growth in inflation in relative unit labor costs and in other variables are all associated with changes in profitability none of these variables however can explain the differences in profitability between the 1950s 1960s and 1970s looking at broad decade averages the effective tax rate and the pretax rate of return move in opposite directions lower pretax profits occuring when the tax rate is high there thus appears to have been no tendency for pretax profits to vary in a way that offsets differences in effective tax rates

the relation between tax rates and pre tax returns direct evidence from the 1981 and 1986 tax rate reductions abstract this study documents one effect of the theory of implicit taxes providing evidence that a change in the tax rate results in a change in pre tax returns yield spreads of pairs of treasury bills maturing in the last week of december and the first week of january are examined year ends not affected by rate changes show a significant positive yield spread between these pairs of bills reflecting an upward sloping yield curve however for year ends coinciding with the tax rate reductions of 1981 and 1986 there is a significant negative yield spread between these pairs of bills

what s theoretically novel about emerging market multinationals we review the classic theory of the mne and past attempts to use it to understand the internationalization of firms from emerging markets we offer two criteria to determine whether emnes modify classic theory or not 1 establishing appropriate theoretical reference points and 2 distinguishing between theoretical constructs and empirical variables we suggest that the literature can benefit from moving beyond comparing emnes to dmnes and focusing instead on more fruitful issues specifically emerging markets offer the opportunity to observe the origin of the capabilities of mnes in general and the development of the institutional ecosystem that supports internationalization

intellectual property rights product complexity and the organization of multinational firms this paper studies how the intellectual property right ipr regime in destination countries influences the way multinationals structure the international organization of their production in particular we explore how multinationals divide tasks of dierent complexities across countries with dierent levels of ipr protection the analysis studies the decision of firms between procurement from related parties and outsourcing to independents suppliers at the product level it also breaks down outsourcing into two types by distinguishing whether or not they involve technology sharing between the two parties we combine data from a french firm level survey on the mode choice for each transaction with a newly developed complexity measure at the product level our results confirm that firms are generally reluctant to source highly complex goods from outside firm boundaries by studying the interaction between product complexity and the ipr protection we obtain that i for technology sharing outsourcing iprs promote outsourcing of more complex goods to a destination country by guaranteeing the protection of their technology ii for non technology related outsourcing iprs attract the outsourcing of less complex products that are more prone to reverse engineering and simpler to decodify and imitate

revisiting the employment impact of offshoring abstract the productivity gains due to offshoring may in part accrue to workers this paper estimates the magnitude of these gains and compares it to the magnitude of employment loss due to worker displacement a model based on the production task framework from grossman and rossi hansberg 2008 is used to demonstrate that the effect of offshoring depends on the intensity of use of these tasks and ultimately impacts domestic employment through three channels a direct displacement effect which negatively impacts employment an output effect generated by the productivity gains from offshoring which reorganizes and increases aggregate production in the economy and impacts domestic employment positively and a substitution effect among factors and tasks which has an ambiguous effect using the model s structure as a roadmap and applying it to detailed u s manufacturing sector data over 2001 2007 results from gmm 3sls regressions provide overall support for the structure and predictions of the tasks model of offshoring in particular the economic magnitude of the productivity gains is found to have been important

a behavioral theory of r d expenditures and innovations evidence from shipbuilding i base an integrated model of innovation development and launch on the behavioral theory of the firm this model specifies that research and development expenses are increased when low performance causes problemistic search and when excess resources cause slack search innovations generated by search are launched if low performance gives managers high risk tolerance using data from shipbuilding firms i show that high performance reduces r d intensity and innovation launches and high slack increases r d intensity as predicted

foreign entry cultural barriers and learning this paper examines the longevity of foreign entries hypotheses are developed on the mode start ups vs acquisitions and ownership structure wholly owned vs joint ventures in relation to cultural distance the hypotheses are tested within a framework of organizational learning using data on 225 entries that 13 dutch firms carried out from 1966 onwards results show that the presence of cultural barriers punctuates an organization s learning cultural distance is a prominent factor in foreign entry whenever this involves another firm requiring the firm to engage in double layered acculturation we also identify locational paths of learning the longevity of acquisitions is positively influenced by prior entries of the firm in the same country similarly the longevity of foreign entries in which the firm has a majority stake improves whenever the expanding firm engaged in prior entries in the same country and in other countries in the same cultural block

data improvement and labor economics the expansion of available data for research has transformed empirical labor economics over the past generation this paper briefly highlights some of the changes and describes a few examples of papers that illustrate the advances it also documents the changing ways data have been used in the journal of labor economics over the past 30 years including a trend toward a higher fraction of papers using any data and among those papers using any data a higher fraction using nonpublic data a higher fraction using international data and more frequent use of multiple data sources finally this paper describes work that came out of the recent princeton data improvement initiative a program that considers and furthers improved data collection

job polarization and task biased technological change evidence from sweden 1975 2005 this paper shows that between 1975 and 2005 sweden exhibited a pattern of job polarization with expansions of the highest and lowest paid jobs compared to middle wage jobs the most popular explan

who is against immigration a cross country investigation of individual attitudes toward immigrants abstract this paper empirically analyzes economic and noneconomic determinants of individual attitudes toward immigrants within and across countries the two survey data sets used covering a wide range of developed and developing countries make it possible to test for interactive effects between individual characteristics and country level attributes in particular theory predicts that the correlation between pro immigration attitudes and individual skill should be related to the skill composition of natives relative to immigrants in the destination country skilled individuals should favor immigration in countries where natives are more skilled than immigrants and oppose it otherwise results based on direct and indirect measures of the relative skill composition are consistent with these predictions noneconomic variables also are correlated with immigration attitudes but they don t alter significantly the labor market results

the end of the month as a preferred habitat a test of operational efficiency in the money market this paper argues that an aggregate preferred habitat for investors exists on or about the last day of the calendar month due to standardizations in the nation s payments system resulting in a concentrated flow of funds on this date thus equilibrium yield discounts are predicted for securities maturing on such dates empirical tests on monthly and daily treasury bill data support the principal hypothesis as well as several ancillary hy potheses the results have implications for treasury debt management for the short term cash and debt management practices of businesses and banks and for the empirical esti mation of daily weekly or monthly return premiums on risky securities

capital gains tax rates and the cost of capital for small business evidence from the ipo market abstract we examine the issue prices of small initial public offerings around the 1993 tax law change that reduced the capital gains tax on qualified small business stock we compare the actual issue price of new stock with a benchmark price that is not affected by the change in capital gains tax we find that after controlling for ipo underpricing the issue prices of qualifying small business stock after the tax rate change are significantly higher than the issue prices before the change a control sample of nonqualifying firms shows no significant difference in issue prices

offshoring of tasks taylorism versus toyotism this paper contributes to the recent debate on trade in tasks drawing on insights from the theory of the firm as well as recent developments in trade theory recent empirical literature suggests that between 20 and 30 per cent of all jobs in key oecd countries could be digitised and offshored this study offers a cluster analysis which documents that offshorable and non offshorable tasks tend to be performed together across occupations therefore when assessing the offshorability of a job one needs to take into account all tasks being performed by the worker and the gains from fragmenting jobs versus the benefits of multi tasked workers taylorism versus toyotism furthermore one needs to distinguish between fragmentation of production and fragmentation of jobs

the value of control in emerging markets when a developed country multinational firm acquires majority control of a firm in an emerging market there is an economically large and statistically significant increase in the acquiring firm s stock price in 1986 2006 developed market acquirers experienced positive and significant abnormal returns of 1 16 on average over a three day event window positive acquirer returns and dollar value gains appear unique to emerging market mergers and acquisitions and are not replicated when the same developed market acquirers take over firms in developed markets the size of the stock price increase is more pronounced a the weaker the contracting environment in the emerging market and b for industries with high asset intangibility the author 2009 published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies all rights reserved for permissions please e mail journals permissions oxfordjournals org oxford university press

offshoring and outsourcing potentials evidence from german micro level data this paper provides two indicators that measure i offshoring potentials cross country geographical relocation and ii outsourcing potentials organisational relocation separately at the level of jobs occupations tasks and industries we use four waves of the bibb baua labour force survey in germany and apply principal component analysis based on a large set of potential determinants of offshoring and outsourcing derived from the literature our results show significant variation across these levels in the determinants of both dimensions we provide a comprehensive empirical classification of the determinants of how easily jobs can be offshored and outsourced this can serve as a basis for further research to investigate the economic effects of job offshoreability

does the welfare state affect individual attitudes toward immigrants evidence across countries abstract this paper analyzes welfare state determinants of individual attitudes toward immigrants within and across countries and their interaction with labor market drivers of preferences we consider two mechanisms through which a redistributive welfare system might adjust as a result of immigration under the first model immigration has a larger impact on high income individuals while under the second one low income individuals are those most affected individual attitudes are consistent with the first welfare state model and with labor market determinants in countries where immigration is unskilled income is negatively correlated with pro immigration preferences while skill is positively correlated with them these relationships are reversed in economies characterized by skilled migration

the market for tax benefits evidence from leveraged esops abstract this paper examines the competitiveness of the financial markets with respect to taxes a unique set of interest rates from leveraged esops enables precise measures of the effect of a debt subsidy on prices i find that the market shifts most of the tax benefits to borrowers indicative of an elastic supply curve for lenders lenders are compensated for incremental costs such as reductions in tax rates and barriers to entry evidence is also presented that esop lenders are high taxpaying banks suggesting the existence of a tax clientele

occupations at risk job tasks job security and wages germany similar to other developed countries witnessed a sharp decline in jobs that used to constitute the middle class in the 1970s and 1980s this decline has been associated with the level to which jobs are codifiable there is evidence that codifiable tasks are more prone to technological substitution and outsourcing compared with tacit tasks this article empirically investigates two crucial aspects of the decline in codified jobs first it studies what happened to workers in codified occupations in terms of unemployment occupational change and wages second it revisits the hypothesis that code based technologies are the major driver of this labor market shift we find that job codification is associated with both higher unemployment and higher occupational change it is also associated with wage losses for workers who left routinized jobs we find however little evidence that code based technologies were the driving factor behind these dynamics

an international study of tax effects on government bonds it is shown that coupon bonds alone are not sufficient to span time dated claims on ordinary income capital gains and non taxable wealth in an incomplete bond market where the pure dated claims are not spanned by existing bonds marginal rates of substitution between present consumption and pure dated claims on ordinary income capital gains income and non taxable wealth respectively can differ across bondholders however the relative pricing of coupon bonds in each of these countries is shown to be consistent with the tax status of the major non tax exempt holders of government debt

tax effects in term structure estimation this study is a refinement and an extension of an earlier study by mcculloch of tax effects in the regression equation for term structure estimation this study includes tests for tax effects and heteroskedasticity a reconsideration of the need for an instrumental variable and a search for the capital gains tax rate in addition to the ordinary income tax rate there are two major findings 1 statistically significant taxinduced bias in the non tax adjusted equation and 2 evidence that the capital gains tax is misspecified in the tax adjusted equation it is well known e g see 4 2 pp 727 30 and 25 that the yield curve is an imperfect surrogate for the term structure of interest rates and various methods have been developed to estimate the term structure directly by regressing prices on payments in a sample of default free securities 1 since investors are concerned with the after tax payments on securities it is desirable to incorporate tax effects in term structure estimation mcculloch 22 and schaefer 26 29 have employed different approaches to the tax effect problem mcculloch employed the regression approach and searched for a single tax rate

wage shocks and the technological substitution of low wage jobs we extend the task based empirical framework used in the job polarization literature to analyze the susceptibility of low wage employment to technological substitution we nd that increases in the cost of low wage labor via minimum wage hikes lead to relative employment declines at cognitively routine occupations but not manuallyroutine or non routine low wage occupations this suggests that low wage routine cognitive tasks are susceptible to technological substitution while the short run em

international expansion of emerging market enterprises a springboard perspective in this article we present a springboard perspective to describe the internationalization of emerging market multinational corporations em mnes em mnes use international expansion as a springboard to acquire strategic resources and reduce their institutional and market constraints at home in so doing they overcome their latecomer disadvantage in the global stage via a series of aggressive risk taking measures by aggressively acquiring or buying critical assets from mature mnes to compensate for their competitive weaknesses we discuss unique traits that characterize the international expansion of em mnes and the unique motivations that steer them toward internationalization we further delineate peculiar strategies and activities undertaken by these firms in pursuit of international expansion as well as internal and external forces that might compel or facilitate their propulsion into the global scene we finally explain the risks and remedies associated with this international springboarding strategy and highlight major issues meriting further investigation

revisiting the evidence on trade policy preferences abstract past literature has found evidence that labor market attributes affect individuals trade policy preferences in a manner consistent with theories of international trade this paper shows that with the exception of education the relationships between labor market attributes and trade policy preferences are not robust in us survey data this suggests that either our proxies of labor market attributes are poor or our theories for what drives trade policy preferences need to be revisited

how many jobs can be done at home evaluating the economic impact of social distancing measures taken to arrest the spread of covid 19 raises a fundamental question about the modern economy how many jobs can be performed at home we classify the feasibility of working at home for all occupations and merge this classification with occupational employment counts we find that 37 of jobs in the united states can be performed entirely at home with significant variation across cities and industries these jobs typically pay more than jobs that cannot be done at home and account for 46 of all us wages applying our occupational classification to 85 other countries reveals that lower income economies have a lower share of jobs that can be done at home

individual attitudes towards migration a re examination of the evidence recent economic research has highlighted the importance of labor market and welfarestate mechanisms in the explanation of individual attitudes towards immigration by contrast political scientists argue that attitudes are mostly determined by individual cultural values and beliefs this paper takes a fresh look at this debate and contains the following contributions to the literature first we address the problem that unobserved cultural values and beliefs might be correlated with education a potential source of bias in the estimations second we compile a detailed database on the education levels of immigrants and natives and on the degree of fiscal redistribution in european countries third our econometric estimates rely on a simple structural model taking individual heterogeneity with respect to education explicitly into account the structural model enables us to evaluate quantitatively the importance of the labor market and welfare state channels and of other individual factors such as cultural values and beliefs our results show that the labor market and welfare state mechanisms play a significant role in explaining individual attitudes however the quantitative importance of these two mechanisms turns out to be rather limited compared to other individual factors jel classification f22 j61

do international acquisitions by emerging economy firms create shareholder value the case of indian firms while overseas acquisitions by emerging economy firms are gaining increased attention from the business press our understanding of whether and why this inorganic mode of international expansion creates value to acquirer firms is limited we argue that international acquisitions facilitate internalization of tangible and intangible resources that are both difficult to trade through market transactions and take time to develop internally thus constituting an important strategic lever of value creation for emerging economy firms furthermore the magnitude of value created will be higher when the target firms are located in advanced economic and institutional environments country markets that carry the promise of higher quality of resources and therefore stronger complementarity to the existing capabilities of emerging economy firms an event study of 425 cross border acquisitions by indian firms during 2000 2007 supports our predictions

this job is getting old measuring changes in job opportunities using occupational age structure high and low wage occupations are expanding rapidly relative to middle wage occupations in both the u s and the e u we study the reallocation of workers from middle skill occupations towards the tails of the occupational skill distribution by analyzing changes in age structure within and across occupations because occupations typically expand by hiring young workers and contract by curtailing such hiring we posit that growing occupations will get younger while shrinking occupations will get old after verifying this proposition we apply this observation to local labor markets in the u s to test whether markets that were specialized in middle skilled occupations in 1980 saw a differential movement of both older and younger workers into occupations at the tails of the skill distribution over the subsequent 25 years consistent with aggregate trends employment in initially middle skill intensive labor markets hollowed out between 1980 and 2005 employment losses among non college workers in the middle of the occupational skill distribution were almost entirely countered by employment growth in lower tail occupations for college workers employment losses at the middle were offset in roughly equal measures by gains in the upper and lower tails of the occupational skill distribution but gains at the upper tail were almost entirely limited to young college workers consequently older college workers are increasingly found in lower skill lower paying occupations this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

service offshoring and firm employment abstract major technological advances have recently spurred a new wave of offshoring in services which used to be non tradable should service workers in developed countries worry about their jobs trade theory has given a nuanced answer to this question suggesting that efficiency gains from offshoring may counteract direct job losses which leaves the predicted net effect ambiguous this paper investigates the employment effects of service offshoring in a newly combined and exceptionally detailed panel dataset covering almost the entire universe of german firms service imports over the years 2001 2013 it exploits firm specific export supply shocks by partner countries and service types as an instrumental variable to find that service offshoring has increased firm employment in line with the canonical trade in tasks model the employment gains are greater in firms with higher initial levels of service offshoring

internationalization and firm risk an upstream downstream hypothesis corporate international diversification theory posits that multinational corporations mncs should have lower risk and higher financial leverage than purely domestic corporations dcs we suggest an alternative upstream downstream hypothesis according to which the overall effect of internationalization on the risk and leverage of mncs is expected to vary with home and target market conditions the empirical results are consistent with the suggested hypothesis

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

cross border acquisition abandonment and completion the effect of institutional differences and organizational learning in the international business service industry 1981 2001 based on the concepts of north s 1990 political economy of national institutions and economic behavior we investigate how formal and informal institutional features influence the likelihood that a cross border acquisition deal will be completed as well as the time taken for its completion after announcement additionally we study how past experience with completed acquisition deals moderates the effects of institutional differences we focus on a relatively new context the pre completion stage of acquisition processes we test our hypotheses using data from 2389 announced cross border acquisition deals in the international business service industry 1981 2001 we find that differences in national formal and informal institutions explain part of the variation in the likelihood that an announced cross border acquisition deal will be completed as well as the duration of the deal making in addition organizational learning moderates the effects of institutional distance past experience with completed cross border acquisition deals increases the likelihood of a subsequent deal completion in institutionally closer environments but shortens the deal duration in institutionally distant environments

educated preferences explaining attitudes toward immigration in europe recent studies of individual attitudes toward immigration emphasize concerns about labor market competition as a potent source of anti immigrant senti ment in particular among less educated or less skilled citizens who fear being forced to compete for jobs with low skilled immigrants willing to work for much lower wages we examine new data on attitudes toward immigration available from the 2003 european social survey in contrast to predictions based on conventional argu ments about labor market competition which anticipate that individuals will oppose immigration of workers with similar skills to their own but support immigration of workers with different skill levels we find that people with higher levels of educa tion and occupational skills are more likely to favor immigration regardless of the skill attributes of the immigrants in question across europe higher education and higher skills mean more support for all types of immigrants these relationships are almost identical among individuals in the labor force that is those competing for jobs and those not in the labor force contrary to the conventional wisdom then the connection between the education or skill levels of individuals and views about immigration appears to have very little if anything to do with fears about labor market competition this finding is consistent with extensive economic research show ing that the income and employment effects of immigration in european economies are actually very small we find that a large component of the link between educa tion and attitudes toward immigrants is driven by differences among individuals in cultural values and beliefs more educated respondents are significantly less racist and place greater value on cultural diversity than do their counterparts they are also more likely to believe that immigration generates benefits for the host economy as a whole

tax induced clientele effects in the market for british government securities abstract this paper develops a new methods for measuring tax effects in bond markets and presents empirical results for british government securities the basic idea is to construct a least cost portfolio which for investors in a given tax bracket dominates a given bond a portfolio is said to dominate a bond if it provides cash flows which are at least as great in every period and has a lower price in effect our method calculates an upper bound on the value of a bond to investors in a given tax bracket the results demonstrate i the existence of clientele effects and ii the absence of an effective tax rate

do capital gain tax rate increases affect individual investors trading decisions abstract this paper examines individual investors short and long term trading reactions to the 1986 tax reform act s tra 86 capital gain tax rate increase consistent with a tax induced trading model we document a december 1986 change in year end trading patterns tra 86 also had long term effects on individual investors trading decisions the results suggest that individual investors were less more willing to sell accrued gain loss stocks after tra 86 our ability to document predicted trading behavior is in part due to our trading metric which captures individual investors selling activity better than the volume based metrics used in prior research

the puzzling price behavior of treasury bills that mature at the turn of calendar months abstract this paper documents the unusual price behavior of treasury bills that mature at the turn of calendar months there is a kink in the yield curve as it crosses calendar months and this kink is most pronounced as the yield curve crosses between calendar years potential seasonality in the spot rate of interest could not explain these results nor could they be explained by the mispricing of either the last bill or first bill in a month the exceptionally large premium on the first bill in a month tended to be earned throughout the lifetime of the bill

outsourcing and the us labour market there is worldwide concern about the vulnerability of the current labour force to displacement by future imported services in the usa some have suggested that as much as one third of the workforce might be vulnerable to such outsourcing however the labour market impacts of this displacement are difficult to assess using purely analytical or statistical approaches in this paper simulation methods are used to understand how sensitive the us economy and labour market are to increases in services imports specifically the scenario examined assumes that the share of imported services in total employment increases from 0 8 per cent to 7 25 per cent over a time horizon in which workers are unable to change occupations in response it is found that all industries increase their use of imported services and their use of the composite input that is comprised of imported services and tradable labour with the exception of legal workers all workers in tradable occupations experience declines in their real wages demand for non tradable occupations labour rises in the industries that expand the most while demand falls in shrinking industries the non tradable occupations that are used intensively in the shrinking industries experience declines in real wages while the real wages rise for workers in non tradable occupations used intensively in the expanding industries

the geography of trade and technology shocks in the united states abstract this paper explores the geographic overlap of trade and technology shocks across local labor markets in the united states regional exposure to technological change as measured by specialization in routine task intensive production and clerical occupations is largely uncorrelated with regional exposure to trade competition from china while the impacts of technology are dispersed throughout the united states the impacts of trade tend to be more geographically concentrated owing in part to the spatial agglomeration of labor intensive manufacturing our findings highlight the feasibility of separately identifying the impacts of recent changes in trade and technology on us regional economies

what drives labor market polarization in advanced countries the role of china and technology this article explores the effects of offshoring technology and chinese import competition on labor market polarization in european countries we find that polarization occurs mostly as a result of polarization within individual industries while the reallocation of employment away from less polarized industries toward more highly polarized industries contributed only about one third of the total change we find that both technological change and chinese net import competition contributed to labor market polarization but that they did so in distinct ways in european manufacturing industries ict adoption explains a third of within industry polarization while chinese net import competition contributed to a much smaller extent the process of between industry polarization is driven by widespread deindustrialization and servitization in developed countries we find that chinese net import competition explains about a fifth of the employment decline in lowly polarized manufacturing industries and was thus an important driver of the reallocation of labor within economies away from lowly polarized manufacturing industries we present tentative evidence that employment grew faster in initially highly polarized service industries moreover these industries appear unaffected by their indirect input output exposure to chinese net import competition while this was not the case for initially lowly polarized service industries while polarization patterns in different european labor markets show considerable heterogeneity labor market institutions seem to be insufficient to explain these cross country differences

transforming disadvantages into advantages developing country mnes in the least developed countries we analyze the advantages and disadvantages of developing country multinational enterprises mnes in comparison with developed country mnes developing country mnes tend to be less competitive than their developed country counterparts partly because they suffer the disadvantage of operating in home countries with underdeveloped institutions we argue that this disadvantage can become an advantage when both types of mne operate in countries with difficult governance conditions because developing country mnes are used to operating in such conditions the empirical analysis shows that although developing country mnes rarely appear among the largest mnes in the world they are more prevalent among the largest foreign firms in the least developed countries ldcs especially in ldcs with poorer regulatory quality and lower control of corruption

searching for the effect of immigration on the labor market we compare two approaches to analyzing the effects of immigration on the labor market and find that the estimated effect of immigration on u s native labor outcomes depends critically on the empirical experiment used area analyses contrast the level or change in immigration by area with the level or change in the outcomes of non immigrant workers factor proportions analyses treat immigrants as a source of increased national supply of workers of the relevant skill the different effects of immigration on native outcomes in the area and factor proportions methodologies appear to result from the diluting effect of native migration flows across regions and failure to take adequate account of other regional labor market conditions in area comparisons excerpt

trade in goods and trade in tasks an integrating framework abstract we introduce a simple but flexible analytical framework in which both trade in goods and trade in tasks arise we use this framework to provide versions of the gains from trade and the famous four ho theorems heckscher ohlin factor price equalisation stolper samuelson and rybczynski that apply to this environment we extend our framework to accommodate monopolistic competition and two way offshoring and to integrate theoretical results of the early offshoring literature

empirical tax research in accounting this paper traces the development of archival microeconomic based empirical income tax research in accounting over the last 15 years the paper details three major areas of research i the coordination of tax and non tax factors ii the effects of taxes on asset prices and iii the taxation of multijurisdictional international and interstate commerce methodological concerns of particular interest to this field also are discussed the paper concludes with a discussion of possible directions for future research r 2001 elsevier science b v all rights reserved jel classification m41 h25 k34 g32 f23

taxes and capital structure evidence from firms response to the tax reform act of 1986 while the theoretical relation between taxes and capital structure has been extensively analyzed the empirical evidence on this issue has thus far been inconclusive one of the main difficulties confronting previous empirical studies of the cross sectional relationship between taxes and leverage was the control of intervening variables the tax reform act of 1986 tra which drastically changed the tax regime provides a unique opportunity to assess the interaction between taxes and leverage decisions in a controlled environment the authors test the relationship between leverage and certain tax related variables for a large sample of companies in the years surrounding the enactment of tra the results support the tax based theories of capital structure the findings indicate that there exists a substitution effect between debt and nondebt tax shields and that both corporate and personal tax rates affect leverage decisions coauthors are dan givoly aharon r ofer and oded sarig article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

do concerns about labor market competition shape attitudes toward immigration new evidence abstract are concerns about labor market competition a powerful source of anti immigrant sentiment several prominent studies have examined survey data on voters and concluded that fears about the negative effects of immigration on wages and employment play a major role generating anti immigrant attitudes we examine new data from a targeted survey of u s employees in 12 different industries in contrast with previous studies the findings indicate that fears about labor market competition do not appear to have substantial effects on attitudes toward immigration and preferences with regard to immigration policy among this large and diverse set of voters

a new linear programming approach to bond portfolio management this paper derives and tests a new linear programming lp approach to bond portfolio management the model elicits possible tax clientele effects in the pricing of u s gov ernment coupon bonds and simultaneously derives the optimal tax specific bond portfolio analytically the model derives these results by exploiting for a given tax bracket the price differential of an after tax stream of cash flows it accomplishes this objective by purchasing at the ask price underprieed bonds for the specific tax bracket while sim ultaneously selling at the bid price overpriced bonds the model requires that the net cash flow inclusive of purchased and sold bonds be nonnegative at all future dates the problem s formulation standardizes the position taken in each bond to a maximum of one unit one of the model s appealing features is the parsimonious number of required calcu lations only one lp program need be run per tax bracket in addition to obtaining an optimally chosen tax specific bond portfolio the model also measures the after tax term structure of spot u s government interest rates for both tax exempt and taxable investors finally the superior monthly holding period rates of return on the optimal taxspecific bond portfolio demonstrate an important property ofthe model s output

a sorted tale of globalization white collar jobs and the rise of service offshoring abstract we study how the rise of unaffiliated trade in services with china and india has impacted u s labour markets the topic has two understudied aspects it deals with service trade most studies deal with manufacturing trade and it examines the historical first of u s workers competing with educated but low wage foreign workers our empirical agenda is made complicated by the endogeneity of service imports and the endogenous sorting of workers across occupations to develop an estimation framework that deals with these we imbed a partial equilibrium model of trade in tasks within a general equilibrium model of occupational choice the model highlights the need to estimate labour market outcomes using changes in the outcomes of individual workers and in particular to distinguish workers who switch up from those who switch down switching down means switching to an occupation that pays less on average than the current occupation we apply these insights to matched cps data for 1996 2007 the cumulative 10 year impact of rising service imports from china and india has been as follows 1 downward occupational switching increased by 7 percentage points from 21 to 28 and upward occupational switching increased by 6 percentage points from 17 to 23 2 transitions to unemployment were imprecisely measured to have increased by half a percentage point potentially raising the white collar unemployment rate from 3 0 to 3 5 3 the earnings average across all white collar workers fell by a small 1 however for the sub population of workers who switched down or became unemployed earnings fell by 15 and 47 respectively 4 service exports had partially offsetting effects on switching and unemployment

failure to complete cross border m as to vs from emerging markets while cross border mergers and acquisitions m as involving emerging markets have been increasing in recent years a high percentage collapse before completion this study investigates how the predictors of cross border m a completion involving emerging markets depend upon the direction of global expansion i e investment inbound to a developing market or outbound from a developing market analysis based on 15 years of data from four emerging economies brazil russia india and china from 1995 to 2010 reveals fundamental differences in the predictors of inbound vs outbound m a completion country level factors reflecting differences in political trade and legal environments strongly affect the completion for inbound m as but have a much weaker influence on outbound m as by contrast firm level factors such as past m a experience have a significantly stronger effect on completion for outbound than for inbound m as most interestingly two deal level factors the percentage of stake sought by the acquirer and whether or not the deal is a cash transaction increase the likelihood of completion for inbound but decrease it for outbound m as these findings have important managerial implications for enhancing the success of global expansions

does complexity explain the structure of trade this paper analyzes whether complexity measured by the number of skilled tasks that are performed simultaneously in production explains countries commodity trade structure we modify romalis 2004 model to incorporate differences in complexity across commodities together with differences in average skills across countries and monopolistic competition our model predicts that the share of developed countries in world trade increases with products complexity the empirical tests confirm this prediction moreover in most cases complexity seems to provide a better explanation of countries commodity trade structure than the one offered only by skill intensity

us versus them mass attitudes toward offshore outsourcing economists have argued that outsourcing is another form of international trade however based on a representative national survey of americans conducted in 2007 and 2009 the distribution of preferences on these two issues appears to be quite different this article examines the origins of attitudes toward outsourcing focusing on the extent to which it reflects 1 the economic vulnerabilities of individuals 2 the information they receive about outsourcing including their subjective understanding of what constitutes outsourcing and 3 noneconomic attitudes toward foreign people and foreign countries the findings emphasize the importance of variations in understandings of the term as well as the highly symbolic nature of attitudes toward this issue individuals who believe the us should distance itself from international affairs more generally who are nationalistic or who feel that members of other ethnic and racial groups within the us are less praiseworthy than their own group tend to have particularly hostile reactions to outsourcing the informational cues people receive are also important influences on their understanding of and attitudes toward outsourcing experimental results further emphasize the symbolic nature of attitudes toward outsourcing taken together the results strongly suggest that attitudes are shaped less by the economic consequences of outsourcing than by a sense of us versus them

a meta analytic assessment of the effect of immigration on wages in our increasingly interconnected and open world international migration is becoming an important socio economic phenomenon for many countries since the early 1980s many studies have been undertaken of the impact of immigration on host labour markets borjas 2003 noted that the estimated effect of immigration on the wage of native workers varies widely from study to study and sometimes even within the same study in addition these effects cluster around zero such a small effect is a rather surprising outcome given that in a closed competitive labour market an increase in labour supply may be expected to exert a downward pressure on wages we revisit this issue by applying meta analytic techniques to a set of eighteen papers which altogether generated 348 estimates of the percentage change in the wage of a native worker with respect to a one percentage point increase in the ratio of immigrants over native workers while many studies in our database employ us data estimates are also obtained from germany the netherlands france norway austria israel and australia our analysis shows that results vary across countries and are inter alia related to the type of modelling approach technical issues such as publication bias and quality of the estimates are addressed as well

how many us jobs might be offshorable using detailed information on the nature of work done in over 800 us bureau of labor statistics occupational codes this paper ranks those occupations according to how easy hard it is to offshore the work either physically or electronically using this ranking it is estimated that somewhere between 22 and 29 of all us jobs are or will be potentially offshorable within a decade or two no estimate is made of how many jobs will actually be offshored since the rankings are subjective two alternatives are presented one is entirely objective the other is an independent subjective ranking in general they corroborate the rankings albeit not perfectly it is found that there is little or no correlation between an occupation s offshorability and the skill level of its workers as measured either by educational attainment or wages however it appears that controlling for education the most highly offshorable occupations were already paying significantly lower wages in 2004

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

escape from the usa government debt to gdp ratio country tax competitiveness and us oecd cross border m as statutory tax rates of a country do not reflect a country s true tax competitiveness we propose and show that government debt to gdp ratio govdebt of a country is a better proxy for its tax competitiveness using a comprehensive sample of 1 884 completed cross border acquisition transactions from the u s to other oecd countries we document that the u s target country govdebt difference is significantly and positively related to both deal announcement return and post deal tax saving of the acquirer the govdebt difference is also significantly and positively related to u s target country deal flow the findings remain robust when we control for the potential endogeneity of govdebt difference our findings strongly suggest that tax avoidance is an important driver of u s oecd cross border deal flow and it increases shareholder wealth for u s acquirers

attitudes toward highly skilled and low skilled immigration evidence from a survey experiment past research has emphasized two critical economic concerns that appear to generate anti immigrant sentiment among native citizens concerns about labor market competition and concerns about the fiscal burden on public services we provide direct tests of both models of attitude formation using an original survey experiment embedded in a nationwide u s survey the labor market competition model predicts that natives will be most opposed to immigrants who have skill levels similar to their own we find instead that both low skilled and highly skilled natives strongly prefer highly skilled immigrants over low skilled immigrants and this preference is not decreasing in natives skill levels the fiscal burden model anticipates that rich natives oppose low skilled immigration more than poor natives and that this gap is larger in states with greater fiscal exposure in terms of immigrant access to public services we find instead that rich and poor natives are equally opposed to low skilled immigration in general in states with high fiscal exposure poor rich natives are more less opposed to low skilled immigration than they are elsewhere this indicates that concerns among poor natives about constraints on welfare benefits as a result of immigration are more relevant than concerns among the rich about increased taxes overall the results suggest that economic self interest at least as currently theorized does not explain voter attitudes toward immigration the results are consistent with alternative arguments emphasizing noneconomic concerns associated with ethnocentrism or sociotropic considerations about how the local economy as a whole may be affected by immigration

immigration wages and compositional amenities economists are often puzzled by the stronger public opposition to immigration than trade since the two policies have symmetric effects on wages unlike trade however immigration changes the composition of the local population imposing potential externalities on natives while previous studies have focused on fiscal spillovers a broader class of externalities arise because people value the compositional amenities associated with the characteristics of their neighbors and co workers in this paper we present a new method for quantifying the relative importance of these amenities in shaping attitudes toward immigration we use data for 21 countries in the 2002 european social survey which included a series of questions on the economic and social impacts of immigration as well as on the desirability of increasing or reducing immigrant inflows we find that individual attitudes toward immigration policy reflect a combination of concerns over conventional economic impacts i e on wages and taxes and compositional amenities with substantially more weight on composition effects most of the difference in attitudes to immigration between more and less educated natives is attributable to heightened concerns over compositional amenities among the less educated

the construct of institutional distance through the lens of different institutional perspectives review analysis and recommendations this paper presents a review and critique of the 20 year old literature on institutional distance which has greatly proliferated we start with a discussion of the three institutional perspectives that have served as a theoretical foundation for this construct organizational institutionalism institutional economics and comparative institutionalism we use this as an organizing framework to describe the different ways in which institutional distance has been conceptualized and measured and to analyze the most common organizational outcomes that have been linked to institutional distance as well as the proposed explanatory mechanisms of those effects we substantiate our qualitative review with a meta analysis which synthesizes the main findings in this area of research building on our review and previous critical work we note key ambiguities in the institutional distance literature related to underlying theoretical perspectives and associated mechanisms distance versus profile effects and measurement we conclude with actionable recommendations for improving institutional distance research

support for free trade self interest sociotropic politics and out group anxiety although it is widely acknowledged that an understanding of mass attitudes about trade is crucial to the political economy of foreign commerce only a handful of studies have addressed this topic these studies have focused largely on testing two models both of which emphasize that trade preferences are shaped by how trade affects an individual s income the factor endowments or heckscher ohlin model posits that these preferences are affected primarily by a person s skills the specific factors or ricardo viner model posits that trade preferences depend on the industry in which a person works we find little support for either of these models using two representative national surveys of americans the only potential exception involves the effects of education initial tests indicate that educational attainment and support for open trade are directly related which is often interpreted as support for the heckscher ohlin model however further analysis reveals that education s effects are less representative of skill than of individuals anxieties about involvement with out groups in their own country and beyond furthermore we find strong evidence that trade attitudes are guided less by material self interest than by perceptions of how the u s economy as a whole is affected by trade

do immigrant inflows lead to native outflows we use 1980 and 1990 census data for 119 larger metropolitan statistical areas to examine the effect of skill group specific immigrant inflows on the location decisions of natives in the same skill group and on the overall distribution of human capital to control for unobserved skill group specific demand factors our models include lagged mobility flows of natives over the 1970 80 period we also estimate instrumental variables models that use the fraction of mexican immigrants in 1970 to predict skill group specific relative immigrant inflows over the 1980s despite wide variation across cities in the size and relative skill composition of immigrant population changes we find no evidence of selective out migration by natives we conclude that immigrant inflows exert a direct effect on the relative skill composition of cities cities that have received relatively unskilled immigrant flows have experienced proportional rises in the size of their unskilled populations this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

tax induced intra year patterns in bonds yields the ratio of the yields on short term tax exempt and taxable bonds exhibits a sawtooth pattern that is consistent with the impacts of tax deferments from dates on which interest payments are received to dates on which the resulting tax payments are paid the effect of the tax deferment at turns of calendar years does not differ appreciably from the effect at the turn of any other tax quarter investors with tax payment schedules that differ from that of the investor that is indifferent between investing in taxable and tax exempt bolnds may benefit from tax related timing strategies for investing in these bonds issuers may benefit from tax related timing strategies for scheduling interest payments

resisting migration wage rigidity and income distribution like any trade activity migration tends to generate gains to all parties involved the migrants as well as the native born population with a mal functioning labour market however migration will exacerbate the imperfections in the market consequently it may lead to losses to the native born population which are typically quite sizeable another economic problem raised by migration is the additional toll imposed on the welfare state income distribution institutions being unable to exclude migrants from the various entitlement programmes and public services the modern welfare state can find migration rather costly these two economic considerations may help explain the resistance to migration despite the pure gains from trade benefits created by it immigration could be more beneficial to the native born population when labour markets are better functioning and the welfare programmes are less comprehensive this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item