nonlinearities in economic dynamics two reasons that led to the dominance of the linear stochastic difference equations approach the first one was the fact that the nonlinear systems seemed incapable of reproducing the statistical aspects of actual economic time series at best such models were able to produce periodic motion1 and an examination of the spectra of economic time series showed the absence of the spikes that characterise periodic data the emphasis on the equilibrium approach to aggregate economic behaviour cf lucas i 986 would make things even more difficult the plethora of stability results for models of infinitely lived agents with perfect foresight turnpike theorems suggested that even the regular fluctuations that had been derived in the literature on endogenous business cycles were incompatible with a theory that had solid microeconomic foundations further this indicated that while nonlinearities could be present the explanations of the fluctuations had to rest solely on the presence of exogenous shocks that working through the equilibrating mechanism would create the observed randomness if such shocks were absent the system would tend to a stationary state the second reason was the empirical success of the models based on linear stochastic difference equations low order autoregressive processes captured some of the features of aggregate time series in turn these processes can in principle result from an economy with complete markets where production is subject to exogenous shocks though the task of confronting these equilibrium models with actual data has not yielded uncontroversial results see the discussion and references in section i there was no obvious gain in the

the nonlinear time series properties of unemployment rates some further evidence the time series properties of unemployment rates for germany japan the uk and the us are re examined evidence of nonlinear structure in the residuals of the most parsimonious linear arma models is reported for all countries except japan modelling this nonlinearity using setar models suggests strong asymmetry in unemployment dynamics and the presence of a possible limit cycle for the uk however residual diagnostics for these models indicate remaining structure alternative tar models conditioned on past growth rates of industrial production yield substantial reductions in residual variance over both linear and setar counterparts iid residuals in all cases other than the us and threshold values at or very near zero clearly identifying the asymmetric behaviour of unemployment during expansionary and contractionary phases of the business cycle

further evidence on the asymmetric behavior of economic time series over the business cycle evidence has recently been presented by salih neftci to support the hypothesis that recessions in economic activity tend to be steeper and more short lived than recoveries in economic activity that evidence however was confined to the behavior of the unemployment rate in the united states in this paper it is shown that when neftci s methods are applied to analyze the behavior of real gross national product investment and productivity in the united states or when they are used to analyze industrial production abroad the asymmetry hypothesis seems to be less compelling

a permanent effect of temporary immigration on economic growth immigration can help to lessen the burden of ageing for the welfare states of most western economies to show this we develop a decomposition framework for gross domestic product gdp per capita which deals with the impact of both ageing and immigration on economic growth using a vector error correction model vecm for the netherlands during 1973 to 2009 we demonstrate the empirical relevance of some crucial interactions between elements of that decomposition the conclusion is that even temporary immigration may help to alleviate the ageing problem through a positive long term contribution to employment wages and gdp per capita as long as the immigrants are able to participate in the labour force in tandem with the native population unfavourable short term effects should be avoided through a gradual phasing in of immigration policies

unskilled migration a burden or a boon for the welfare state as relatively low earners migrants are net beneficiaries of the welfare state therefore in a static setup migration may be resisted by the entire native born population however it is shown that in a dynamic setup with a pension system which is an important pillar of any welfare state migration is beneficial to all income high and low and all age old and young groups when the economy has good access to international capital markets the pro migration feature of the dynamic model is weakened and possibly overturned when the economy does not have good access to such markets in this case to the extent that factor prices are significantly affected by migration because of low substitution between labour and capital low skill native born and possibly also high skill native born may lose

the political economy of international factor mobility we model the endogenous determination of policy towards international factor mobility in a common agency setting domestic interest groups bid for protection from the government and the incumbent politicians maximize a welfare function that depends both on domestic voters welfare and contributions collected we characterize equilibrium policies in the price space and show how the degree of complementarity among inputs determines the outcome we establish a similar result for quotas allowing for partial rent capturing for the strategic environment under consideration we also establish a general equivalence result between tariffs and quotas if capturing is complete d 2004 elsevier b v all rights reserved

food insecurity and public assistance this paper examines if welfare programs reduce the probability that vulnerable households experience food deprivation because of financial constraints although the 1996 welfare reform legislation specifically limited the eligibility of immigrant households to receive assistance many states chose to protect their immigrant populations by offering state funded aid to these groups i exploit these changes in eligibility rules to examine the link between food insecurity and public assistance the evidence indicates that a 10 percentage point cut in the fraction of the population that receives public assistance increases the fraction of food insecure households by about 5 percentage points

international asset pricing and portfolio diversification with time varying risk we test the conditional capital asset pricing model capm for the world s eight largest equity markets using a parsimonious generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity garch parameterization our methodology can be applied simultaneously to many assets and at the same time accommodate general dynamics of the conditional moments the evidence supports most of the pricing restrictions of the model but some of the variation in risk adjusted excess returns remains predictable during periods of high interest rates our estimates indicate that although severe market declines are contagious the expected gains from international diversification for a u s investor average 2 11 percent per year and have not significantly declined over the last two decades

threshold effects in the patent growth relationship a pstr approach for 60 developed and developing countries this study analyzes whether there is a threshold effect in the innovation growth relationship using data from the period 2008 2017 we perform an analysis using 60 countries in the whole sample an

immigrant participation in the welfare system this paper presents a systematic analysis of immigrant participation in the us welfare system using the 1970 and 1980 us censuses in contrast to the previous studies the researchers focused on changes in welfare use across immigrant cohorts over time for a single immigrant cohort as it assimilates to the us furthermore it develops a theoretical model of the migration decision that explicitly incorporates the income insurance aspect of the us welfare system the analysis revealed that recent immigrant cohorts use the welfare system more intensively than earlier immigrant waves also the immigrant welfare participation was greater the longer an immigrant household had resided in the us and those characteristics of the immigrants country of origin were important determinants of welfare participation in addition the theoretical model of the migration decision which explicitly incorporated the presence of a welfare system in the destination country and this model could account for some of the ways in which source country characteristics were found to affect immigrant welfare participation

threshold nonlinearities in unemployment rates further evidence for the uk and g3 economies the paper appraises the in sample and out of sample adequacy of linear ar and nonlinear setar models of unemployment rates for germany japan the uk and the us tests are reported for the presence and specification of threshold nonlinearities setar model estimates limiting dynamic properties and residual diagnostics and out of sample forecasting performance in sample threshold non linearities are confirmed to be strongly present for the uk us and germany and more marginally so for japan out of sample excepting japan setar models provide superior onestep ahead forecast on rmse grounds most notably for the us final tests indicate that these models exhibit predictive accuracy in the sense of parameter and residual variance stability implying the potential for exploitation of such nonlinearity in official forecasting

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

asymmetric employment cycles in britain evidence and an explanation search and matching models imply that firms employment adjustment costs depend on the tightness of the labor market giving rise to endogenous or nonlinear dynamics in employment this paper sets this argument out in detail estimating a model simultaneously explaining the long run level of employment and the nonlinear dynamics one of the implications of the estimated model is that asymmetric business cycles occur with the downswing in employment being sharper and deeper than the upswing copyright 1992 by royal economic society

social security and migration with endogenous skill upgrading abstract the aim of the paper is to investigate the joint redistributive effects of migration and pensions and to reassess the sustainability issue raised in the existing economic literature the paper first develops a theoretical framework to analyse the impact of international migration on the labour market the model allows for heterogeneity across native born individuals and for migrants to affect both the wages and the education decision in the recipient country it then explicitly focuses on pensions under alternative migration scenarios the analysis shows that migration causes redistributive effects which increase across group wage inequality however the endogenous educational response by residents partially offsets the redistributive impact of migration while creating additional interest groups migration helps the financial sustainability of the pension scheme but the interaction between migration and pensions causes complex inter and intragenerational redistributive conflicts which are analysed in the paper

liquidity risk return predictability and hedge funds performance an empirical study this article analyzes the effect of liquidity risk on the performance of equity hedge fund portfolios similarly to avramov kosowski naik and teo 2007 2011 we observe that before accounting for the effect of liquidity risk hedge fund portfolios that incor porate predictability in managerial skills generate superior performance this outperfor mance disappears or weakens substantially for most emerging markets event driven and long short hedge fund portfolios once we account for liquidity risk moreover we show that the equity market neutral and long short hedge fund portfolios alphas also entail rents for their service as liquidity providers these results hold under various robustness tests

winners and losers among a refugee hosting population abstractthe impact of a sudden mass influx of forced migrants on the hosting economy is understudied and not well understood using a household panel data set for the kagera region in tanzania we test the impact of the mass refugee presence on the welfare of the local population our identification strategy exploits variations in the timing of arrival as well as the spatial distribution of rwandese and burundi refugees we find a positive and aggregate effect but households are affected differently depending on their main initial occupation

a comparative analysis of the nativity wealth gap this paper investigates the source of the gap in the relative wealth posi tion of immigrant households residing in australia germany and the united states our results indicate that in germany and the united states wealth difierentials are largely the result of disparity in the educational attainment and demographic composition of the native and immigrant populations while income difierentials are relatively unimportant in understanding the nativity wealth gap in contrast the relatively small wealth gap between australian and foreign born households exists because immigrants to australia do not translate their relative educational and demographic advantage into a wealth advantage on balance our results point to substantial cross national disparity in the economic well being of immigrant and native families which is largely consistent with domestic labor markets and the selection policies used to shape the nature of the immigration ow

the components of the illiquidity premium an empirical analysis of u s stocks 1927 2010 this paper implements a conditional version of the liquidity adjusted capm lcapm the conditional lcapm allows for a time varying decomposition of the total illiquidity premium into a level component and three risk components the estimated average annual total illiquidity premium for us stocks 1927 2010 is 1 74 2 08 which is substantially lower than in most previous studies the contributions from illiquidity level and illiquidity risk are 1 25 1 28 and 0 46 0 83 respectively of the three illiquidity risk components risk related to the hedging of wealth shocks is the most important while commonality risk is the least important the illiquidity premia are clearly time varying with peaks in downturns and crises but with no general tendency to decrease over time the level premium and the risk premium are significantly positively correlated at around 0 35 indicating that in periods of turbulence both illiquidity cost and illiquidity risk premia tend to be high

public pensions and return migration in a median voter framework with pensions and immigration we show that only few unskilled immigrants are allowed into the country because the unskilled native median voter is concerned with negative effects on his or her wage but not with the positive effects to other groups in society when return migration is allowed for the median voter is more willing to accept immigration because he or she can shift some of the burden to future generations

can immigrant employment alleviate the demographic burden the role of union centralization this paper investigates the effect of labor immigration on public pensions when wage setting by a centralized trade union leads to unemployment it is shown that immigration improves the financial soundness of pay as you go pensions if and only if it diminishes total employment this occurs if the absolute value of the elasticity of labor demand exceeds the unemployment rate

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

is the business cycle characterized by deterministic chaos abstract tests are conducted on u s macroeconomic data for the presence of low dimensional deterministic chaos where deterministic chaos is defined as in grandmont s 1985 walras bowley lecture or in brock 1986 the idea is to test for evidence of endogenous instability causing the business cycle low order autoregressions are hard to reject with our methods evidence of chaos is weak but our tests may be too weak to detect it evidence of nonlinearity is present in employment 1950 i to 1983 iv unemployment 1949 i to 1982 iv monthly post war industrial production and pig iron production 1877 1937

bridging trade theory and labour econometrics the effects of international migration this paper surveys current theoretical and empirical research on international migration with a particular emphasis on the links between trade theory and labour empirics

are business cycles asymmetric a correction neftci 1984 proposed a nonparametric test procedure for determining whether business cycles are asymmetric in the sense that contractions are steeper than expansions he found evidence of this type of asymmetry in postwar quarterly u s unemployment variables this comment identifies a probable error in neftci s empirical work that reverses the significance of his results for the unemployment rate and it suggests that this test may have low power and be sensitive to measurement error

the receipt of transfer payments by immigrants to canada using the native born as a benchmark we examine immigrants reliance on canadas social safety net we find that immigrants have lower participation rates in unemployment insurance and social assistance than natives we also find that assimilation leads to greater participation in both these programs more recent immigrant cohorts have higher recipiency rates than their predecessors the results for social assistance contrast with u s evidence that the raw entry participation rates of many immigrant cohorts exceed the native rates finally our analysis of rent subsidies shows that immigrants initially have higher rates of participation which fall with assimilation excerpt

unemployment a survey this paper presents a survey of the economics of unemployment it covers competitive and imperfect competition models the role of different methods of wage determination and explanation of postwar unemployment patterns in the oecd countries copyright 1990 by royal economic society

decentralized income redistribution and immigration abstract we analyze the welfare and other effects of immigration on a system of jurisdictions with a common labor market mobile capital and redistributive tax transfer policies comparative statics analysis of a model of nash non cooperative equilibria in tax transfer policies shows that the welfare effect of immigration depends on whether immigrants are net fiscal contributors or burdens any one jurisdiction s redistribution and immigration policies generate fiscal externalities for others in the system which a central government can internalize by appropriate taxes and subsidies

voting on low skill immigration under different pension regimes depending on the design of the domestic pension system and thetype of immigrants voters will decide differently onimmigration policy in this paper we investigate the votingoutcome of three groups of heterogeneous voters skilledworkers unskilled workers and retirees under beveridgian orbismarckian pension systems which are either of the fixedcontribution rate or the fixed replacement ratio type we findthat while the use of a beveridge or bismarck system does notchange the results qualitatively the fixed contribution ratevs fixed replacement ratio distinction leads to substantialchanges in the optimal choices of different groups

costly search and recruiting a labor market model with costly search and recruiting is constructed it incorporates many features found in other models and provides new insights into the effects of externalities and transaction costs the model possesses a continuum of equilibria some of which may be pareto ranked with different rates of unemployment despite the multiplicity of equilibria comparative statics results are obtained copyright 1987 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

are economic time series asymmetric over the business cycle it has long been argued that major cyclical variables such as the unemployment rate display an asymmetric behavior over various phases of the business cycle the paper provides a statistical test for this hypothesis using the framework of finite state markov processes i implement a test to see if the behavior of the unemployment rate is characterized by sudden jumps and slower drops it is argued that the framework provided in the paper can also be used to test other sample path properties of economic time series

are national pension systems efficient if labor is im perfectly mobile abstract in this paper we analyze the effects of labor market integration on national unfunded public pension systems that are organized according to a place of residence principle with this principle labor might migrate for purely fiscal reasons thus some kind of coordination becomes necessary we first show that for the case of unrestricted labor mobility the equalization of contributions is necessary and sufficient for efficiency if the pension systems remain decentralized however national decision makers do not in general have an incentive to voluntarily stick to equalized contributions with a segmented labor market where one segment is costlessly mobile whereas the other segment is completely immobile the coordination requirements are far more complicated if migration cannot compensate for differences in national fertilities if it can the efficiency of equalization turns out to be robust finally we show that replacing the principle of residence with the principle of nationality does not eliminate the risk of fiscal externalities

characterizing nonlinearities in business cycles using smooth transition autoregressive models during the past few years investigators have found evidence indicating that various time series representing business cycles such as production and unemployment may be nonlinear in this paper it is assumed that if the time series is nonlinear then it can be adequately described by a smooth transition autoregressive star model the paper describes the application of these models to quarterly logarithmic production indices for 13 countries and europe tests reject linearity for most of these series and estimated star models indicate that the nonlinearity is needed mainly to describe the responses of production to large negative shocks such as oil price shocks

testing nonlinearities in economic growth in the oecd countries an evidence from setar and star models this study estimates the self exciting threshold autoregressive setar and smooth transition autoregressive star models and examines the nonlinear and regime switching dynamics of economic growth for a set of 10 oecd countries the null of linearity in setar model is tested using the recursive polynomial f test of tsay and the bootstrap based supremum average and exponential average lagrange multiplier lm tests of hansen the f test of tsay rejects the null of linearity for all the countries except spain and switzerland the setar model of hansen reinforces the evidence and suggests the rejection of linear model the star model rejects the null of linearity against star nonlinearity for all the countries except denmark and switzerland the sequential f tests for the conditional nulls suggest the lstar nonlinearity for australia belgium france sweden and uk and the estar nonlinearity for canada spain and the usa

immigration globalization and unemployment benefits in developed eu states at a time of mounting concern about how traditional welfare states will react to globalization there has been increasing interest in specifying how global economic forces affect welfare policies in industrialized states building on theories from the political economy and comparative institutional literatures we analyze the influence of an important aspect of globalization the flow of immigration focusing on states in the european union we present a theoretical model that illustrates the interactive relationships between immigration eu labor market integration and domestic institutions our findings highlight how immigration in conjunction with domestic political institutions affects unemployment provisions while labor market integrative forces remain in the background the story of immigration and unemployment compensation in the eu is less about the opening of borders and the market forces of integration and more about the domestic political pressures

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

patents vs publications and r d three sides of the same coin panel smooth transition regression pstr for oecd and brics countries abstractthe paper aims to define the optimal thresholds of publications and research and development r d expenditure and to investigate their impacts on patenting in oecd and brics countries to

the pricing of systematic liquidity risk empirical evidence from the us stock market abstract in this study we examine whether aggregate market liquidity risk is priced in the us stock market we define a bivariate garch 1 1 in mean specification for the market portfolio excess returns and the changes in the standardized number of shares in the s p 500 index the aggregate market liquidity proxy the findings based on monthly data suggest that systematic liquidity risk is priced in the us over the period january 1973 december 1997 the liquidity premium represents a non negligible negative and time varying component of the total market risk premium whose magnitude is not influenced by the october 87 crash

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

immigration and payg pension systems in the presence of increasing life expectancy abstract according to lacomba and lagos 2010 considering the effect of immigration on pension benefits of native individuals despite immigrants having low average productivity an open borders policy would be always implemented since most of current domestic cohorts gain from immigration in this paper we change the demographic assumptions at the bases of the model of lacomba and lagos 2010 assuming increasing life expectancy over time as a consequence we find that in the presence of pay as you go pension systems there are cases in which an open borders policy would not be implemented and that retirement age and immigrants skill play an important role in determining the effect of immigration on the welfare of native population

threshold nonlinearities in output some international evidence the empirical adequacy of linear ar and nonlinear setar models of trend stationary and difference stationary representations of output for canada germany japan the uk and the us are appraised test results suggest the presence of linear model residual structure of some form for all series and nonlinearities of specifically threshold form in trend stationary data for canada germany japan and the us and difference stationary data for germany japan and the us with the exception of canada estimated threshold nonlinear models imply asymmetric dynamics are able to account for all nonlinear structure in the data on the basis of bds statistics and provide sizeable reductions in residual variance in several cases most notably for germany

immigration and pension benefits in the host country this paper examines the role that low skilled immigration plays in determining pension benefits of the host population with an overlapping generations model which allows identifying which groups of native population are in favour or against immigration we find that despite immigrants having low average productivity an open borders policy would be implemented since most of current domestic cohorts gain from immigration only younger workers might be against immigration since they will coincide with immigrants in their retirement periods moreover we show how a larger immigrant quota would increase the probability of a pareto improvement for the current domestic population

tax burden and migration a political economy theory and evidence abstract the extent of taxation and redistribution policy is generally determined as a political economy equilibrium by a balance between those who gain from higher taxes transfers and those who lose the standard theory of the size of government in a representative democracy links the tax burden to measures of the pre tax income inequality we develop in this paper a theory which encompasses the existing literature and provides a complementary channel linking the tax burden in the presence of migration to the fiscal leakage from native born to the migrants in a stylized model of migration and human capital formation we show somewhat against the conventional wisdom that low skill immigration can lead to a lower tax burden and less redistribution than would be the case with no immigration even though migrants naturally join the pro tax transfer coalition data on 11 european countries over the period 1974 1992 are consistent with the implications of the theory a higher share of low education immigrants in the population leads to a lower tax rate on labor income and less generous social transfers

the natural rate of unemployment reflections on 25 years of the hypothesis 1 introduction rod cross part i the theoretical framework 2 the origins and further development of the natural rate of unemployment edmund phelps 3 the natural rate as new classical macroeconomics james tobin 4 theoretical reflections on the natural rate of unemployment frank hahn 5 of coconuts decomposition and a jackass the genealogy of the natural rate huw dixon part ii adjustment ranges of equilibria and hysteresis 6 the economics of adjustment andrew caplin and john leahy 7 hysteresis and memory in the labour market g c archibald 8 models of the range of equilibria ian mcdonald 9 hysteresis revisited a methodological approach bruno amable jerome henry frederic lordon and richard topol 10 is the natural rate hypothesis consistent with hysteresis rod cross part iii empirical tests and macro models 11 the natural rate hypothesis and its testable implications hashem pesaran and ron smith 12 non linear dependence in unemployment output and inflation empirical evidence for the uk david peel and alan speight 13 prices wages and unemployment in the us economy a traditional model and tests of some alternatives albert ando and flint brayton 14 the natural rate in empirical macroeconomic models simon wren lewis part iv political economy 15 is the natural rate of unemployment a useful concept for europe maria demertzis and andrew hughes hallett 16 the natural rate of unemployment a fundamentalist keynesian view meghnad desai 17 politics and the natural rate hypothesis a historical perspective bernard corry

migration and pension with international capital mobility abstract being relatively low earners migrants are net beneficiaries of the welfare state therefore in a static set up migration may be resisted by the entire native born population however it is shown that in a dynamic set up with a pension system which is an important pillar of any welfare state migration is beneficial to all income high and low and all age old and young groups

who is against a common market this paper develops a theory of the endogenous formation of a common market in a three country two factor political economy model in the status quo home and foreign implement nondiscriminatory policies toward international factor flows in order to maximize the domestic median voter s welfare then the two countries simultaneously hold referenda on a common market initiative leading to the removal of the pre existing policies for factor flows between the member countries while no coordination is imposed on policies vis a vis the rest of the world several interesting results emerge in a common market the returns on factors moving between the members are more likely to increase the larger is the import demand of one country relative to the factor supply of the exporting partner factors that do not relocate are more likely to see their returns decrease when flows are large and import demands are inelastic importantly for the common market to emerge as an equilibrium some factors must continue to experience enhanced protection when the integration process is completed this result highlights the potential tension between social desirability and the political feasibility of the integration process jel f1 f2 p16

rational expectations business cycles in search equilibrium we examine the rational expectations equilibrium paths of the model of search and barter in diamond s aggregate demand management in search equilibrium for some initial positions there are two equilibrium paths converging to different steady states with the high activity path pareto dominating the low activity path with some parameters there is also a continuum of equilibrium paths converging to another steady state moreover there can be cycles that are equilibrium paths even though the environment is stationary

aging pension reform and capital flows a multi country simulation model we present a quantitative analysis of the effects of population aging and pension reform on international capital markets first demographic change alters the time path of aggregate savings within each country second this process may be amplified when a pension reform shifts old age provision towards more pre funding third while the patterns of population aging are similar in most countries timing and initial conditions differ substantially hence to the extent that capital is internationally mobile population aging will induce capital flows between countries all three effects influence the rate of return to capital and interact with the demand for capital in production and with labor supply in order to quantify these effects we develop a computational general equilibrium model we feed this multi country overlapping generations model with detailed long term demographic projections for seven world regions our simulations indicate that capital flows from fast aging regions to the rest of the world will initially be substantial but that trends are reversed when households decumulate savings we also conclude that closed economy models of pension reform miss quantitatively important effects of international capital mobility this version 25 august 2004

the political economy of international trade and factor mobility abstract free trade in goods and factors is efficient when we move away from economic theory and consider the policies actually followed by governments we observe distortions being implemented both on goods and factors trades it is natural then to question the relative merits of the two types of intervention and the normative literature has provided only partial answers we ask then why is the international flow of goods and factors not free and the political economy literature has looked at the two issues only separately in studying the determination of trade policy a theoretical paradigm has emerged focusing on the role of influence driven contributions this approach has also found strong empirical support the literature on the political economy of factor mobility on the other hand is fragmented distortions in labor and capital flows are typically the subject of different studies and only recently a unified framework has been proposed more work has to be done in this area as well as in integrating the political economy of trade and factor movements

the effect of immigration on public finances the impact of immigration on the public finances is an important influence on public opinion this study aims to provide a thorough conceptual survey pointing out the complexities of a full understanding and the relevance of indirect effects and covering both static perspectives and longer run dynamic issues it considers simple accounting approaches which are relatively neglectful of behavioural responses but also tries to bring out the complexities in the nature of the relationship between immigration and the public exchequer that come with more sophisticated modelling of its economic effects

mobility costs frictional unemployment and efficiency with imperfect job information flows it is plausible that the distribution of job offerings becomes more attractive when there are more vacancies and more unemployed with word of mouth communication this condition is derived given this condition steady state equilibrium is not efficient with welfare increased by the introduction of unemployment compensation even though all agents are risk neutral in this way workers become more selective in the jobs they accept

population dynamics and regional social security sustainability in italy bonasia m and de siano r population dynamics and regional social security sustainability in italy regional studies making due allowances for differences in demographics the labour market and internal migration dynamics this study analyses the sustainability of the italian pension balance at a regional level a worsening of the elderly dependency ratio and a decline in birth and employment rates have generated a negative trend particularly for regions in southern italy characterized by early retirement and an increase in migration outflows the suggestion is that a decentralized pension policy is not a pareto efficient solution because it would favour the sustainability of the pension balance in northern regions over those in the south

immigration unemployment and pensions this paper examines the impact of immigration on a host country with welfare state arrangements that support both the unemployed and the elderly it is shown that low skilled immigration increases the unemployment rate furthermore it harms the low skilled native population and benefits the high skilled natives and pensioners nevertheless as under competitive labor markets immigration generates an unambiguous gain for the native population as a whole howe er in contrast to the findings under full employment this gain can be dampened by an expansion of the pension system

the use of transfer payments by immigrants this paper uses data from the 1976 survey of income and education to compare the receipt of transfers by families headed by male and female immigrants and those headed by native born americans the average level of transfers is found to be considerably higher among families headed by immigrants but this is almost entirely the result of the higher average age of family members among the immigrant group a reflection of the large inflows of immigrants into the u s during the pre 1924 period when age and other factors are held constant immigrant families are found to be considerably less likely to rely on welfare than native families and their receipts from social insurance programs are found to be only slightly higher

ageing migration and endogenous public pensions abstract this paper analyses migration behaviour of mobile workers in reaction to population ageing we show that the conventional wisdom that a decrease in fertility will lead to a rise in wages and thus to an inflow of immigrants that mitigates the adverse effects of ageing on public pensions may not hold if labour is heterogeneous moreover we demonstrate that if public pensions are endogenous i e if ageing leads the elderly to successfully lobby for higher taxes it may take several generations before a steady state is reached and the initial migration flow may be opposite to the steady state migration

business cycle asymmetry a deeper look this paper distinguishes two types of asymmetry in business cycles deepness and steepness deepness is defined as the characteristic that troughs are further below trend than peaks are above most previous research has focused exclusively on steepness which refers to cycles in which contractions are steeper than expansions a test for deepness is proposed and applied to u s post war quarterly unemployment real gnp and industrial production evidence of deepness is found for unemployment and industrial production while the evidence for real gnp is weaker previous evidence of steepness in unemployment is confirmed

immigrants and welfare programmes exploring the interactions between immigrant characteristics immigrant welfare dependence and welfare policy the primary purpose of this paper is to provide a review of the papers within the economics literature that have examined the questions of immigrant welfare use and the responsiveness of immigrants to the incentives created by welfare systems while our focus is largely on papers looking at the european case we also draw on studies from the united states in particular on issues where the european literature is thin one set of papers asks whether immigrants who are more likely to use welfare are attracted to more generous welfare states the results from these papers are not clear cut another set of papers asks if immigrants use welfare more intensively than natives and if they assimilate out of or into welfare participation in most cases the unadjusted data show higher use of welfare by immigrants although for some countries for example germany this can be explained by differences in immigrants characteristics yet another set of papers finds that the rate of welfare use by existing migrants can influence the welfare use of newly arrived co nationals we illustrate some of these issues by looking at immigrant welfare use in ireland and the uk immigrants in the uk appear to use welfare more intensively than natives but the opposite appears to be the case in ireland

social security and endogenous fertility pensions and child allowances as siamese twins abstract this paper analyses public pensions and child support in a model with endogenous fertility we show that the individual fertility choice may not coincide with the social optimum due to the existence of external effects of children on society as a whole the market outcome without government intervention is efficient however as the externalities exactly cancel out in that case if the government wants to redistribute towards the old it cannot replicate the command optimum by merely applying lump sum transfers but rather needs a child allowance scheme to effectively alter the number of offspring finally we analyse whether a pareto improving social security reform is possible it is shown that merely reducing the payg scheme cannot be pareto improving but the introduction of a child allowance scheme can be

modeling asymmetric comovements of asset returns existing time varying covariance models usually impose strong restrictions on how past shocks affect the forecasted covariance matrix in this article we compare the restrictions imposed by the four most popular multivariate garch models and introduce a set of robust conditional moment tests to detect misspecification we demonstrate that the choice of a multivariate volatility model can lead to substantially different conclusions in any application that involves forecasting dynamic covariance matrices like estimating the optimal hedge ratio or deriving the risk minimizing portfolio we therefore introduce a general model which nests these four models and their natural asymmetric extensions the new model is applied to study the dynamic relation between large and small firm returns article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

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