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

language and the earnings of immigrants several studies most of them employing straightforward regression analysis have concluded that immigrants proficiency in the language of their adopted country is correlated with their productivity as measured by earnings two weaknesses of these studies are potential unobserved heterogeneity which could result in over estimated effects if overall ability is linked with language acquisition and potential measurement error in the language proficiency measures which would probably result in under estimation of language effects the present study which uses panel data for a 10 year period in germany yields evidence that the latter bias tends to be much larger than the former implying that language proficiency is far more important than suggested by the existing literature

trade in intermediates and the colonial pattern of trade this paper builds up a model of trade in intermediate goods and uses it to analyze certain fea tures of the colonial pattern of trade different parts of an interme diate good are traded between two nations and the intermediate good i s then used to make two country specific products the author discuss es the effects of technical progress in different sections of the pro ductive spectrum on factoral terms of trade and allocation of resourc es in each country in a three country two good colonial world it i s shown that immiserization can occur even with given commodity terms of trade copyright 1987 by the review of economic studies limited

asymmetric adjustment costs in simple general equilibrium models abstract this paper demonstrates that the introduction of asymmetric adjustment costs in a simple general equilibrium framework establishes a meaningful link between factor price determination and output determination breaking the analytically convenient dichotomy of the heckscher ohlin samuelson model the possibility of trade between seemingly similar countries that differ in their adjustment technologies is visited

the economics of forced migration abstract this article reviews the economics literature on the impacts of forced migration the literature is divided into two parts impacts on forced migrants and impacts on host communities studies exploring the impact of forced migration due to wwii suggest that the long term impact is often positive the literature for developing countries suggests that there are serious consequences of forced migration for those forced to migrate these consequences range from worse labour market outcomes to less consumption smoothing the impact on host communities seems to be mixed and there are winners and losers the article provides suggestions for future research

factor endowments and the international location of production econometric evidence for the oecd 1970 1985 abstract this paper uses data on manufacturing output and factor endowments for 20 oecd countries from 1970 to 1985 to examine the production side of the factor proportions model under well known conditions there will be a linear rybczynski relationship between sectoral outputs and factor endowments across countries this proposition is investigated using the kalman filter and maximum likelihood techniques to estimate time varying parameter models the results indicate that capital and unskilled labor are sources of comparative advantage for most industries while skilled labor is a source of comparative disadvantage residual analysis shows that the neoclassical model has poor explanatory power

migrants and housing investments theory and evidence from nigeria the dominance of housing may reflect limitations in the menu of investment choices available to migrants in the country of origin in many developing countries individuals face relatively few savings opportunities where productive assets such as land farm assets are associated with high risks and or low rates of return housing investments offer unique advantages in that they are durable highly visible and associated with low risk and monitoring requirements however there are some important drawbacks associated with housing investments in particular where resale and rental markets for housing are not well developed migrants housing assets may be relatively illiquid and irreversible in the next section i provide some background on general patterns of investment behavior among migrants here the evidence on housing investments is discussed for a rich set of migrant sending and receiving countries in section iii i develop the conceptual framework for understanding migrants housing investment decisions section iv provides a description of the data sources section v outlines the empirical strategy in section vi i discuss the empirical findings section vii presents conclusions excerpt

the role of the family in immigrants labor market activity an evaluation of alternative explanations comment most research on the labor market outcomes of immigrants has studied the behavior of individuals focusing primarily on the wage assimilation process or the excess returns to experience which immigrants obtain in their destination country s labor market e g barry r chiswick 1978 george j borjas 1985 recently however attention has been directed to analyzing immigrant labor market outcomes in a family context an approach which combines information about an individual s own labor market opportunities and the family context in which labor market decisions take place in a previously published paper in this review michael baker and dwayne benjamin 1997 evaluate alternative explanations for the observed labor supply patterns of canadian immigrants in the 1986 1991 period specifically when immigrant husbands arrive in canada they typically work less than comparable natives however immigrant wives work more than natives other things equal with assimilation the labor supply of immigrant husbands eventually catches up to that of natives while immigrant wives labor supply falls relative to comparable natives and is ultimately overtaken by that of natives the authors take these patterns to be most consistent with a family investment model in this scenario upon arrival husbands invest in their human capital while wives work to provide the family with liquidity during this investment period with increased time in canada husbands labor supply increases rapidly due to their growing skills in the canadian labor market while wives labor supply falls off in part because they originally took dead end jobs upon arrival in order to finance their husbands investments in human capital interestingly while most of the findings reported by baker and benjamin are consistent with the family investment model their estimated wage equations are not although they do not comment on this in discussing the appropriateness of the family investment model specifically they find similar rates of wage assimilation for husbands and wives this finding suggests roughly equal propensities to invest in one s own human capital for both groups this is contrary to the family investment hypothesis and does not match their story of dead end jobs for wives and large human capital investments of their husbands an alternative possible explanation for the patterns observed by baker and benjamin involves a simple price model in which the observed labor supply patterns reflect laborsupply responses to each spouse s wages for example the initially high but eventually falling level of wives labor supply relative to comparable natives could be a response to their husbands initially low but rising wages while this reasoning like the family investment model is broadly consistent with the data the authors conclude that the simple price model cannot be the entire explanation since in order to explain the full labor supply patterns of immigrants it would require unrealistically high labor supply elasticities and further that the assimilation patterns noted above remain even when wages of husband and wife are controlled blau school of industrial and labor relations cornell university 265 ives hall ithaca ny 14853 and nber and cesifo kahn school of industrial and labor relations cornell university 264 ives hall ithaca ny 14853 and cesifo moriarty school of industrial and labor relations cornell university ilr graduate student mailboxes ives hall ithaca ny 14853 souza faculdade de economia administracao e contabilidade university of sao paulo avenida professor luciano gualberto 908 cidade universitaria predio fea 1 sao paulo sp 05508 brazil the authors thank three anonymous referees for helpful comments and suggestions portions of this paper were written while blau and kahn were visiting scholars at the russell sage foundation to which they are grateful for research support

social networks and the dynamics of labour market outcomes evidence from refugees resettled in the u s recent theoretical work suggests that social networks may play an important role in the dynamics of employment and wages across groups of individuals this paper provides empirical evidence of job information flows within social networks and the non linear relationship between social network size and labor market outcomes an extended version of the model developed by calvo armengol and jackson 2004 shows that competition can exist between network members for job referrals and investigates the dynamics between the size of a social network the tenure of network members and labor market outcomes the predictions of the model are tested empirically using a unique data set of refugees resettled in the u s from 2001 2005 the empirical strategy exploits the special institutional environment of refugee resettlement i find that a one standard deviation increase in the number of network members who have arrived in the u s one year ago lowers the probability of employment by 4 9 and the average hourly wage by 70 conversely as predicted by the model more tenured network members improve labor market outcomes for recently arrived refugees

the decision to work by married immigrant women using 1980 census data the authors analyze the labor force participation of married immigrant asian women in the united states by country of origin compared with that of married immigrant women from europe and canada the results suggest the existence of a family investment strategy evidence from both across groups and within groups indicates that a womans decision to work is affected by whether she has a husband who invests in skills specific to the u s labor market and also by the extent of that investment such a family response may help offset the low earnings of immigrant men who initially lack skills for which there is a demand in the american labor market excerpt

partial land rights and agricultural outcomes evidence from thailand to disentangle the issue concerning which dimensions of land rights among security tradability and pledgeability affect agricultural outcomes this paper exploits a unique partial land rights entitlement program in thailand that guarantees only security allows a limited access to credit and prohibits any land sale based on an instrumental variables strategy i find that the entitlement increases 1 second rice but not major rice productivity 2 land use intensity and 3 land related investment and leads to 4 better soil quality this suggests that the security dimension alone can play an important role in improving farm activities

occupational transition and country of origin effects in the early stage occupational assimilation of immigrants some evidence from australia we examine the occupational attainment of recent immigrants at 2 years post migration in order to study their early stage assimilation into the labour market in australia human capital endowments and country of origin effects are examined for six occupational groups we also study transitions across occupations from source to host country the empirical approach utilizes the ordered generalized extreme value ogev model which embodies differing utility functions across occupational outcomes as well as accounting for any ordering in these outcomes the results suggest that the transferability of knowledge and skills is affected by cultural and social backgrounds and that non western immigrants are disproportionately channelled into inferior jobs post migration the investigation of the country of origin effect on the skilled migrants occupational transition process is especially apt in the context of skill shortages in many host countries

migrants savings the probability of return migration and migrants performance this paper highlights a difference between migrants and the native born namely a positive probability of return migration the analysis demonstrates that this probability results in migrants saving more than comparable native born this differential may explain why even if all workers are perfectly homogeneous in skills migrants often outperform the native born in the receiving economy excerpt

the effects of cash assistance on refugee outcomes abstract the united states receives tens of thousands of refugees per year many of whom arrive with few resources the federal refugee resettlement program aims to rapidly move refugees into employment and self sufficiency this causes refugees to undergo a search and matching process upon arrival that may be affected by cash assistance generosity this paper exploits variation in cash benefit levels for welfare programs available to refugees after resettlement to identify the effects of welfare generosity on long term labor market outcomes i find that an additional 100 in tanf maximum monthly benefits is associated with a 5 8 increase in wages but no significant change in the probability of employment the effects are the largest among the highly educated

complementarity between import competition and import promotion abstract growth in the import competing output is usually accompanied by a decline in the volume of imports of the product this result may change when we consider intermediate goods we develop a multi sector general equilibrium model to show that larger local output of an intermediate good may also imply larger imports of the same journal of economic literature classification numbers f1 f11 f13

return migration investment in children and intergenerational mobility comparing sons of foreign and native born fathers this paper studies parental investment in education and intergenerational earnings mobility for father son pairs with native and foreign born fathers we illustrate within a simple model that for immigrants investment in their children is related to their return migration probability in our empirical analysis we include a measure for return probabilities based on repeated information about migrants return intentions our results suggest that educational investments in the son are positively associated with a higher probability of a permanent migration of the father we also find that the son s permanent wages are positively associated with the probability of the father s permanent migration

living in limbo economic and social costs for refugees our paper tests the hypothesis that living in limbo could have negative consequences for the socio economic integration of refugees we define limbo as a protracted period when asylum seekers are waiting for the decision concerning their permanent refugee status relying on the french survey of migrants france s longitudinal survey of migrants elipa we measure integration by labour market participation fluency in french finding new french friends and studying to account for the endogeneity of limbo we instrument it with the administrative backlog we find that living longer in limbo during the asylum seeking period slows down future integration of refugees but results differ with respect to gender and educational attainment while having lived longer in limbo slows down most aspects of socio economic integration for refugees with no degree or a high school degree those with a bachelor s degree do not experience negative effects male refugees who had lived longer in limbo have a lower likelihood of being employed and studying in france while similar females make fewer french friends

trends random walks and tests of the permanent income hypothesis abstract recent studies find that consumption is excessively sensitive to income these studies assume that income is stationary around a deterministic trend the data however do not reject the hypothesis that disposable personal income is a random walk with drift if income is indeed a random walk then the standard testing procedure is greatly biased toward finding excess sensitivity moreover if income follows either a more general non stationary process or a borderline stationary process this procedure is also seriously biased

immigrants and human capital investment why do immigrants invest more in human capital than the native born and how do investment patterns vary by type of immigrant summarizing our previous research we approach this question theoretically and empirically excerpt

linear aggregation in cointegrated systems abstract in this paper the problem of aggregation of integrated time series variables is contrasted with the case of aggregation of stationary variables in the integrated case it is seen that a cointegration condition is sufficient for aggregation bias to vanish asymptotically no analogous condition is available in the stationary and ergodic case thus tests for aggregation bias originally designed for stationary data can be misleading when applied to integrated data this may account for overrejection of the null hypothesis of no aggregation bias when the null is true

aggregate vs disaggregate data analysis a paradox in the estimation of a money demand function of japan under the low interest rate policy we use japanese aggregate and disaggregate money demand data to show that conflicting inferences can arise the aggregate data appears to support the contention that there was no stable money demand function the disaggregate data shows that there was a stable money demand function neither was there any indication of the presence of a liquidity trap possible sources of discrepancy are explored and the diametrically opposite results between the aggregate and disaggregate analysis are attributed to the neglected heterogeneity among micro units we provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a cointegrating relation among aggregate variables when heterogeneous cointegration relations among micro units exist we also conduct simulation analysis to show that when such conditions are violated it is possible to observe stable micro relations but unit root phenomena among macro variables moreover the prediction of aggregate outcomes using aggregate data is less accurate than the prediction based on micro equations and policy evaluation based on aggregate data ignoring heterogeneity in micro units can be grossly misleading copyright 2005 john wiley sons ltd

testing for aggregation bias in linear models this paper discusses alternative methods of testing for aggregation bias and proposes direct tests of the discrepancy of the macroparameters from the average of the corresponding microparameters and derives tests of aggregation bias in the general case where the parameters of interest may possibly be nonlinear functions of the microparameters the paper also develops a durbin hausman type misspecification test of the disaggregate model these tests are then applied to disaggregate and aggregate specifications of employment functions for the u k economy disaggregated by forty industries copyright 1990 by royal economic society

mexican agricultural trade under the gatt expected effects from partially lifting tariff barriers on the mexican agricultural sector are investigated using a restricted profit function rpf approach short run and intermediate run effects of the implementation of gatt minimum tariff provisions on mexican agricultural trade are examined specification tests reveal the appropriateness of the rpf approach that exports should not be aggregated with non traded production into a single output and that the farm sector behaves as an almost price taking profit maximizing firm policy simulations suggest important short run changes in agricultural trade and chemical use and intermediate run changes in agricultural trade labour wage chemical use capital investments and net farm income

the effect of changes in the u s wage structure on recent immigrants earnings abstract since recent immigrants tend to earn less than natives their relative earnings have been adversely affected by an increase in the return to labor market skills over the past three decades using longitudinal social security records matched to cross sections of the sipp and cps i estimate the return to skills rose by 41 between 1980 and 1997 this reduced the relative earnings of immigrants who arrived in the 1980s and early 1990s by 10 to 15 percentage points examining solely the earnings of recent immigrants may lead to an overly pessimistic picture of their actual labor market skills

the probability of return migration migrants work effort and migrants performance abstract this paper demonstrates that differences in earnings between migrants and the native population may reflect differences in incentives rather than differences in characteristics the analysis indicates that in the presence of a positive probability of return migration migrants work effort is higher than that of comparable native born workers this differential may explain why even if all workers are perfectly homogeneous in skills migrants often outperform the native born workers in the receiving economy

assimilation changes in cohort quality and the earnings of immigrants this paper reexamines the empirical basis for two facts that seem to be found in most cross section studies of immigrant earnings 1 the earnings of immigrants grow rapidly as they assimilate into the united states and 2 this rapid growth leads to many immigrants overtaking the earnings of the natives within 10 15 years after immigration using the 1970 and 1980 u s censuses this paper studies the earnings growth experienced by specific immigrant cohorts during the period 1970 80 it is found that within cohort growth is significantly smaller than the growth predicted by cross section regressions for most immigrant groups this differential is consistent with the hypothesis that there has been a secular decline in the quality of immigrants admitted to the united states

immigrant earnings assimilation estimates from longitudinal data analysis of longitudinal data for immigrants presents a more pessimistic portrait of immigrants economic success first the rate of growth of immigrant earnings was overstated in census based studies second the worsening of immigrant earnings for more recent arrival cohorts is deeper than previously suggested against these two negative findings one must keep in mind an important caveat the steeper cohort decline in earnings may be a sign of greater human capital investment by more recent immigrants longitudinal data suggest a strong degree of earnings convergence immigrants who start at lower earnings quickly make up a large part of the deficit relative to their immigrant counterparts

the economics of temporary migrations many migrations are temporary a fact that has often been ignored in the economic literature on migration such omission may be serious in that expected migration temporariness can impart a distinct dynamic element to immigrants economic behavior generating possible consequences for nonmigrants in both home and host countries in this paper we provide a thorough examination of the various aspects of temporary migrations that matter for the analysis of economic phenomena we demonstrate the extent of temporary migrations in population movements we show how temporariness can affect the various economic choices and how better data have improved both the measurement of nonpermanent migrations and the analyses of various aspects of migrant behavior we propose a general theoretical framework for modeling temporary migration decisions based on which we outline the various motives for temporariness while simultaneously reviewing related literature and available data sources we discuss the possible consequences of migration temporariness for nonmigrants in both home and host countries jel f22 f24 j11 j61 k37 o15

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

are refugees different from economic immigrants some empirical evidence on the heterogeneity of immigrant groups in the united states this paper analyzes how the implicit difference in time horizons between refugees and economic immigrants affects subsequent human capital investments and wage assimilation the analysis uses the 1980 and 1990 integrated public use samples of the census to study labor market outcomes of immigrants who arrived in the united states from 1975 to 1980 i find that in 1980 refugee immigrants in this cohort earned 6 less and worked 14 fewer hours than economic immigrants both had approximately the same level of english skills the two immigrant groups had made substantial gains by 1990 however refugees had made greater gains in fact the labor market outcomes of refugee immigrants surpassed those of economic immigrants in 1990 refugees from the 1975 1980 arrival cohort earned 20 more worked 4 more hours and improved their english skills by 11 relative to economic immigrants the higher rates of human capital accumulation for refugee immigrants contribute to these findings

immigration from the former soviet union to israel who is coming when abstract average education of new immigrants from the former soviet union in israel declined during the 1990s we suggest that this is because the returns to investment in israeli human capital increase in the amount of imported human capital thus the more educated invest more and therefore have an incentive to spend a longer share of their working life in israel this translates into early migration using data from the 1995 israeli census and the 1995 1998 samples of the israeli labor force survey we test our hypothesis and find that being high skilled initiates early migration only for migrants participating in the labor market

bank loan components and the time varying effects of monetary policy shocks the impulse response function irf of an aggregate variable is time varying if the irfs of its components are different from each other and the relative magnitudes of the components are not constant two conditions likely to be true in practice we model the behaviour of loan components and document that the induced time variation for total loans is substantial which helps to explain why studies describing total loans have had such a hard time finding a robust response of total bank loans to a monetary tightening

are foreign it workers cheaper u s visa policies and compensation of information technology professionals the use of h 1b and other work visas to hire foreign information technology it professionals in the united states has attracted significant controversy and policy debates on one hand hiring high skill foreign it professionals on work visas can be advantageous for u s firms and the overall economy on the other hand high skill immigration can adversely impact the wages of foreign and american it professionals this study uses data on skills and compensation of more than 50 000 it professionals in the united states over the period 2000 2005 to study patterns in compensation of foreign and american it professionals to inform these debates contrary to the popular belief that foreign workers are a cheap source of labor for u s firms we find that after controlling for their human capital attributes foreign it professionals those without u s citizenship and those with h 1b or other work visas earn a salary premium when compared with it professionals with u s citizenship the salary premiums for non u s citizens and for those on work visas fluctuate in response to supply shocks created by the annual caps on new h 1b visas setting lower and fully utilized annual caps results in higher salary premiums for non u s citizens and those with work visas we discuss implications of this study for crafting informed visa and immigration related policies by the u s government for staffing practices of firms and for human capital investments by it professionals

economic consequences of forced displacement abstractover 42 million people worldwide have been forcibly displaced from their communities though little is known about the impact of this movement on livelihoods i use a panel data set and exploit a geographic discontinuity to explore the effects of displacement in uganda i find that displaced households experience a significant initial decrease in consumption two years after households returned home displaced households still lag behind however households in the top quartiles of pre displacement assets have recovered some of their consumption though with significantly reduced education and wealth levels there is likely little or no recovery for the poorest households

choice between disaggregate and aggregate specifications estimated by instrumental variables methods a choice criterion is proposed for discriminating between disaggregate and aggregate models estimated by the instrumental variables method the criterion based on prediction errors represents a generalization of criteria developed in the context of classical regression models the article also derives general tests for aggregation bias in the instrumental variables context the criterion and the tests are applied in an analysis of u k employment demand it is shown that a model disaggregated by 40 industries predicts aggregate employment better than an aggregate model and that significant biases exist in estimates of the long run wage and output elasticities obtained from the aggregate model

econometric analysis of aggregation in the context of linear prediction models this paper deals with the problem of aggregation where the focus of the analysis is whether to predict aggregate variables using macro or micro equations the grunfeldgriliches prediction criterion for choosing between aggregate and disaggregate equations is generalized to allow for contemporaneous covariances between the disturbances of micro equations and the possibility of different parametric restrictions on the equations of the disaggregate model a new test is proposed of the hypothesis of perfect aggregation which tests the validity of aggregation either through coefficient equality or through the stability over time of the composition of the regressors across the micro units the tools developed in the paper are then applied to employment demand functions for the uk economy disaggregated by 40 industries firstly a set of unrestricted log linear dynamic specifications are estimated for the disaggregate equations and then linear parameter restrictions are imposed as appropriate corresponding unrestricted and restricted aggregate equations are estimated two different levels of aggregation are considered aggregation over the 23 manufacturing industries and aggregation over all 40 industries of the economy in both cases the hypothesis of perfect aggregation is firmly rejected for the manufacturing industries the prediction criterion marginally favors the aggregate equation but over all industries the disaggregated equations are strongly preferred

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

achieving the dream the effect of irca on immigrant youth postsecondary educational access this paper contributes to the existing literature on the effect of legal status on educational access among immigrant youth in the united states the immigration reform and control act irca of 1986 granted amnesty to undocumented immigrants who entered the united states before 1982 using a difference in differences framework i analyze the effect of this large amnesty program on immigrant youth s postsecondary educational access my main finding shows that immigrant youths who were granted amnesty under irca are more likely to enroll in postsecondary education

new evidence on the economic progress of foreign born men in the 1970s and 1980s this study examines the economic progress of foreign born men in the united states europeans entered the united states with relatively high wages and earned wages comparable to natives over their life course japanese korean and chinese men entered with lower wages but quickly caught up with u s born workers mexicans and central americans entered with low wages and the wage gap between themselves and u s born workers has not shrunk disparities in completed years of education and whether education was received in the united states can explain a large share of the differences in the level of wages for immigrants from some countries it is found that more highly educated men assimilate more quickly the rate of economic progress has not improved for more recent arrivals from any country but this is most problematic among mexicans and central americans because of their relatively low rates of wage growth excerpt

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

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

temporary migration human capital and language fluency of migrants this paper investigates human capital investment of immigrants whose duration in the host country is limited either by contract or by their own choice the first part of the paper develops a model which distinguishes between temporary migrations where the return time is exogenous or optimally chosen the analysis has a number of interesting implications for empirical work some of which are explored in the second part of the paper the analysis focuses on language capital and tests the hypothesis that country specific human capital investments are sensitive to the duration in the host country s labour market the results show that the acquisition of language capital is sensitive to the intended duration in the host country

education quality and development accounting this paper measures the role of quality adjusted years of schooling in accounting for cross country output per worker differences while data on years of schooling are readily available data on education quality are not i use the returns to schooling of foreign educated immigrants in the u s to measure the education quality of their birth country immigrants from developed countries earn higher returns than do immigrants from developing countries i show how to incorporate this measure of education quality into an otherwise standard development accounting exercise the main result is that cross country differences in education quality are roughly as important as cross country differences in years of schooling in accounting for output per worker differences raising the total contribution of education from 10 to 20 of output per worker differences copyright 2012 oxford university press

costly adjustment under rational expectations a generalization this note provides a generalization of the standard adjustment cost rational expectations model due to sargent 1978 which in addition to the cost of changing the level of the decision variable also allows for the cost of altering the speed with which decisions are changed it establishes the existence of a unique stable solution for this more general model derives an explicit solution for the underlying decision problem and provides a necessary order condition for identification of the structural parameters the note also contains an application of the model to the determination of employment in the u k coal industry over the 1956 83 period copyright 1991 by mit press

temporal and spatial aggregation alternative marketing margin models the effects of temporal and spatial data aggregation on the performance of alternative marketing margin models is assessed using monthly quarterly and semiannual fluid milk prices from three u s cities nonnested tests for multivariate and single equation models with serial correlation are used to choose among alternative models at each aggregation level while model choice is affected by temporal and spatial aggregation model choice becomes more difficult as data are temporally or spatially aggregated

money demand in euroland abstract this paper explores the determinants of alternative monetary aggregates in euroland a sample consisting of quarterly data covering the 1980 1 1998 4 period is considered we are interested whether a conventionally defined money demand equation is stable in some aggregates as opposed to others both long run and short run relationships are considered in this paper overall the results indicate that broad narrow money demand in euroland is a stable unstable function of euroland wide income and interest rates

the economic consequences of euro area macro modelling shortcuts should euro area economies be modelled in an aggregate area wide fashion or in a disaggregate multi country one this article tackles that question from both statistical and economic viewpoint from a statistical viewpoint aggregation bias criteria are found to signal that the degree of structural heterogeneity among euro area economies is such that the loss of information entailed by an aggregate modelling approach may be far from trifling from an economic viewpoint we investigate the following issue are those statistically detectable heterogeneities of any practical relevance when it comes to supporting monetary policy decision making to provide an answer to this question we compute simple optimal monetary policy reaction functions on the basis of either an aggregate model or a disaggregate one and compare the associated welfare losses the results suggest that the welfare under performance of an area wide model based rule is not only nonnegligible but also robust with respect to a number of

heterogeneity biases distributional effects and aggregate consumption an empirical analysis using stratified microdata using stratified microdata from the canadian famex 78 86 surveys this paper investigates whether observed heterogeneity in marginal propensities to consume across strata actually hinders the aggregation process despite significant heterogeneity in marginal responses the divergences between aggregate predicted consumption and the predictions from a model that uses average strata responses are found to be small whenever the strata demands are approximatively linear at the mean and the commodity group considered is not a luxury good on the other hand some cross sectional estimates obtained by pooling the strata are shown to be contaminated by unwanted cross moments further the analysis reconciles the fact that while there exists significant heterogeneity in consumer demands the related distributional effects in the aggregate equation have not been found to be important

exploring asymmetric behavior pattern from indian oil products prices using nardl and ghsom approaches abstract the present work endeavors to explore the potential asymmetries in the pricing of oil products in india where prices are not only affected by the crude oil price changes in the international markets but are also subject to government interventions in order to protect domestic consumers from this volatility historically the government of india tried to control the domestic price of petroleum products by cross subsidization and giving subsidies in this paper we analyze the impact of crude oil price on domestic oil prices by applying nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag nardl and growing hierarchical self organizing map ghsom approaches for the period of april 2005 july 2014 the ghsom has been explored through pattern analysis on the asymmetric behavior using similarity measures from the study it can be interpreted that the prices of products left to be determined by the market exhibit a strong asymmetry however pricing of the products that are monitored and controlled by the government do not exhibit any such asymmetry hence the question still remains should the government intervene in pricing petroleum products when monopolistic attitudes of large oil companies are detrimental to the interest of retail consumers

an investigation of the determinants of manufacturing employment in the united kingdom in this paper we present and estimate an adjustment cost model of industry employment which takes explicit account of both expectations and aggregation over different labour types the resulting model is subject to a large number of tests and is a highly robust representation of the data finally forecasts are produced for manufacturing employment up to 1990

the labor market integration of refugees in the united states do entrepreneurs in the network help we investigate whether entrepreneurs in the network of refugees from the same country of origin help refugees enter the labor market by hiring them we analyze the universe of refugee cases without u s ties who were resettled in the united states between 2005 and 2010 we address threats to identification due to refugees sorting into specific labor markets and to strategic placement by resettlement agencies we find that the probability that refugees are employed 90 days after arrival is positively affected by the number of business owners in their network but negatively affected by the number of those who are employees this suggests that network members who are entrepreneurs hire refugees while network members working as employees compete with them which is consistent with refugees complementing the former and substituting for the latter